Honestly, in this day and age it makes sense. With the exception of local high school sports and such, which can be covered by a student intern, it doesn't really make sense for most daily newspaper to have any extensive pro sports coverage. Coverage of every major sport is thoroughly covered by sports media outlets and often the leagues themselves. We really don't need a generic write up of every baseball game from the times, post etc. It consumes resources that can be better focused on other news and human interest stories that don't have extensive industry coverage like sports.
I read WSJ regularly (I'm from MA so I don't have much purpose for the NYT or Post) and they for the most part just have Jason Gay doing the frequent columns regarding unique, wierd or otherwise interesting quirks in the sports world. It's easily consumable and often worth reading for the broad audience, often regardless of their sporting interest.
The days of breaking out the sports page for box scores, recaps and rumors are long gone. People get that primarily from social media and sports outlets long before a paper goes into publication. It just seems like the one section that can very easily be removed without devaluing the outlet to most of its consumers. Even better in this case where they can simply syndicate content from a leading outlet (even though the Athletic is a shell of it's former self, it's still a leader)