Aug 2, 2015 5 min read

Enjoy the Pirates success while you can.

They may have a window that won’t be open for long. They have control over their stars for a few more years, but they don’t have any control over the two richest teams in their division. The St. Louis Cardinals signed a new TV deal with Fox Sports Midwest Thursday and it’s worth a billion dollars.

St. Louis is a smaller TV market than Pittsburgh, but the Cardinals benefit from the huge footprint they put down when they were the only Major League team west of the Mississippi River. Their regional TV network covers parts of 10 states.

The Pirates are surrounded on all sides by teams and will never have the reach the Cardinals have. And the Cardinals will draw 3.4 million fans this season.

Then there are the Chicago Cubs, who will soon be getting $200 million a year from local TV. They started the season with lots of good young players and a payroll lower than the Pirates. They are about to become big spenders again.

And the Pirates got a break when the Astros moved out of their division and into the American League because they also are about to collect on a huge TV deal. They’re already in first place in the American League West thanks to a roster full of good, young players.

• There was quite an outcry from feminists in and out of the media when it was announced the U.S. Women’s Soccer team took home $2 million in prize money last month, while the German men’s team won $35 million in last year’s World Cup and the American team that didn’t make it out of the round of 16 made $8 million.

Of course, there was a politician ready to show his ignorance on the subject and pander to his voters.

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont passed a resolution urging soccer’s corrupt organizing body, FIFA, to immediately end the pay inequities.

Anybody with a brain should know the only way to get equal pay for the women would be to pass an international law requiring people to watch the Women’s World Cup.

The domestic ratings for the U.S. Women’s games were through the roof – the highest-metered record ever for a soccer game on a single network, but world-wide, they were 1/10 of what the men’s games drew.

The Men’s World Cup in 2010 produced $3.7 billion in revenue. The 2011 Women’s World Cup generated $73 million.

Is this complicated?

It’s not sexism or the grass ceiling.

It’s economics.

Shane Ferro of Business Insider is not buying it: “Most of us have been socialized to accept men’s sports as dominant and somehow more interesting.

“The problem is that once society has internalized this falsehood – and let’s face it, it’s a falsehood that’s millennia in the making – it’s not so easy to correct.”

She’s right. It has been millennia in the making.

You know why?

Because men invented sports.

Golf was invented over in Scotland, where the Women’s Open Championship is taking place this weekend.

About 600 years ago, a bunch of guys, on the spot where the Men’s Open Championship was played two weeks ago – Old Course at St. Andrews in Fife Scotland – started it all.

They were bored shepherds in the field, who thought it would be fun try to hit round stones into rabbit holes using their wooden staffs.

For hundreds of years, women, who have always had more common sense than men, couldn’t imagine doing anything so stupid.

What are the chances a woman came up with the idea that feeding Christians to the lions would be a nice way to spend a Summer evening?

I’m not an anthropologist but there must be a good explanation for why every sport was invented by a man and, despite the fact both genders have been on the planet for the same amount of time, women only became really interested in playing them pretty recently.

Where have you been, ladies?

Six hundred years ago, the shepherds’ wives thought their husbands were idiots for spending their time knocking rocks into rabbit holes and, you know what? They were right.

Who knew it would evolve into an activity that would be played, and watched, by millions of people?

Most sports, when reduced to their essence are pretty stupid.

What about two men standing toe-to-toe trying to punch each other unconscious?

How about 22 men running into each other trying to prevent someone from advancing a pig’s bladder across a line drawn in the dirt?

These sports were invented by men, not because they’re superior to women, quite the opposite.

Women had better, more important things to do.

Now, more and more women are demanding men be as interested in watching women play the ridiculous games they invented as they are in watching other men.

With all due respect to Ms. Ferro, we haven’t been socialized to believe men’s sports are more interesting. They just are. Not always. But most of the time. Especially to men.

And instead of being offended by the long history of male dominance in sports, maybe women should take pride in the fact that, throughout the milennia, they have found better things to do with their time.

And remember, it was a man, Genghis Kahn, who thought that polo would be more fun if they used human heads instead of a ball.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter