The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

WE are an island nation. Marine resources and the sea that surrounds us are critical to our economic prosperity and sense of who we are. It is natural that periodically, maritime issues crop up abroad that should and do concern us. Two recent developments in the US are thus of interest. They concern longline fishing and protections for the queen conch. We’ll look at them in that order.

Longline fishing has been in the American news recently. Longline fishing was outlawed here in 1993 in response to outrageous, deleterious and predatory practices by foreign fishing fleets in our territorial waters. In tough economic times, most recently about four years ago, the notion of restoring and taxing some degree of longline fishing was floated. Should we be bracing for a new longline proposal?

In 2018, the Bahamas National Trust echoed the views of many in condemning longline fishing. “The BNT is aware that there are persons advocating for the amendment of Bahamas fishery legislation to allow for longline fishing. This practice is known around the world to have devastating effects on marine resources. Longlining has been responsible for the decimation of fisheries around the globe, resulting in huge amounts of waste, as sharks, marine mammals, seabirds, sea turtles, other non-targeted fish and juveniles end up on the line,” the Trust said.

Can we expect longline fishing to enter the public discourse again?

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has certainly been talking about it. At the September UN General Assembly, and this month on a visit to Peru, he said: “Consider just for a minute illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. According to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, one in five fish on the market come from illicit fishing – one in five fish on the market! That translates to losses of between $10 and $23 billion a year to lawful fishing industries in the Atlantic region. That harms coastal communities that rely on sustainable fish stocks for their income, for food. It fuels corruption. It threatens the health and biodiversity of our oceans. It’s something that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. We’re working to try to deal with that, to get ahead of it.”

This bears watching.

As does a current initiative from the US National Marine Fisheries Service, which is responsible for the management, conservation, and protection of living marine resources within about 200 miles of the US coast. The NMFS is a division of the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

On September 7, NMFS announced a proposed rule to list the queen conch as a threatened species under the American Endangered Species Act (ESA). Public comment period ends November 7. Here’s what they said: “We have completed a comprehensive status review for the queen conch (Aliger gigas). After considering the status review report, and after taking into account efforts being made to protect the species, we have determined that the queen conch is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout its range. Therefore, we propose to list the queen conch as a threatened species under the ESA. Any protective regulations determined to be necessary and advisable for the conservation of the queen conch under ESA would be proposed in a subsequent Federal Register announcement. We solicit information to assist this listing determination, the development of proposed protective regulations, and designation of critical habitat within US jurisdiction.”

This proposal is for US territorial waters, but it could well affect us, too. We should all keep a close watch on these developments. As Blinken said, it’s good to get ahead of issues that are being discussed elsewhere but have the potential to have a major impact here.

LOOKING AT MLB’S CHANGES

MAJOR League Baseball’s playoffs were expanded this year to include six teams from each league. While MLB piously insisted that this would keep more fans engaged in the 162-game, six-month long regular season which spans April through September, the real reason was television revenue. Money from TV contracts drives most decisions in pro sports, and has long infected big-time collegiate American sports like football and basketball as well.

So we have had four series, each longer than the one before, in both the American and National Leagues, all set to lead up to the World Series. Baseball did do away with the single game elimination game which most observers saw as just a bad idea anyway.

We have now reached the Final Four stage of this year’s baseball postseason. In the American League, the Houston Astros and New York Yankees began their best of seven series in Houston. Since these two finished the regular season with the best two records in the AL, they were drawn automatically into the second round. In that round, the Astros swept away the Seattle Mariners in three straight games, but that 3-0 record belies a really tough slog that obliged Houston to claw back from a seven-run deficit in the opening game and to endure 17 scoreless innings on the road before finally winning baseball’s longest-ever scoreless playoff game to finally triumph.

Seattle had defeated the Toronto Blue Jays in the first, three-game playoff round in which all the games were played in the home ball park of the higher-seeded team.

The Yankees, who won seven fewer games than Houston in the regular season, edged past the newly renamed Cleveland Guardians, finally reaching the AL championship round with a fairly routine 5-1 victory on Tuesday in the Bronx. It wasn’t easy for the Yankees, though, as their lack of dependable arms in the bullpen and spotty defence lead to defeats at the hands of baseball’s youngest team. On Tuesday, New York’s payroll, four times as large as Cleveland’s, prevailed as sluggers Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge hit home runs and the Yankees got a second straight strong pitching start.

In its first-round series, the Guardians, who were known for over a century as the Indians, swept away the Tampa Bay Rays by scores of 2-1 and 1-0 in tight, well-balanced games. Both teams do a lot with perpetually low payrolls. It was fortuitous that both games were played in Cleveland, as Hurricane was ravaging Southwest Florida at the same time.

Now the Yankees and Astros, whose payrolls rank seventh and sixth in baseball, face each other. The Astros haven’t missed the playoffs since the year before they won the World Series in 2017 and were implicated in a tawdry sign-stealing scandal that cost them the jobs of their manager and some front office personnel. The team has nevertheless been carefully constructed to contend every year.

Houston is a superior team, has more key players healthy and should advance to this year’s World Series.

Their opponents from the National League will be either the San Diego Padres or the Philadelphia Phillies, who own the second and third biggest payrolls in baseball. The Padres had the tougher path to their league title series, as they faced the New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers in the first two rounds. The Mets have baseball’s largest payroll and the Dodgers are a contemporary powerhouse. But San Diego, a wild-card team that traded for baseball’s newest superstar Juan Soto at the end of July, managed to prevail.

The Phillies are no strangers to headline-grabbing player moves, having signed the sport’s previous transcendent superstar, Bryce Harper, three years ago. Philadelphia also had a tough route through the early playoff rounds, facing two of baseball’s most consistently successful franchises in the St. Louis Cardinals and the defending champion Atlanta Braves. Both triumphs surprised most observers but the Phils are overdue for some postseason success. Now they’re a step away from the Series.

Philadelphia vs San Diego is tough to forecast, with the Padres opening as modest betting favorites in Las Vegas. In the series opener on Tuesday, the Phillies rode two early home runs, one by Harper, to a 2-0 victory. There were only four hits in the game. It says here that Philadelphia will build on that win and win its Series ticket. The Phillies haven’t been to the playoffs since 2011, and if they reach the World Series they will be heavy underdogs against either the Yankees or Houston.

That just means a bigger potential payoff if you place a bet on Philadelphia’s Cinderellas to win it all.