Breaking the Plane (or, Premature Congratulation)

Memo to Eagles players: it's not a touchdown until you actually cross the goal line, fuckheads! Last night Asante Samuel (pictured here in actual possession of the ball, at the some-number-greater-than-1-yard line) became the *second* Eagles player this year to flip the ball out of his hand at the 1 on his way into the end zone. Fortunately for Samuel and the Eagles, he managed to recover the ball in the end zone for the score. DeSean Jackson wasn't so lucky earlier this year, setting up a short TD run for Brian Westbrook instead of getting the score himself.

I can almost understand Jackson's blunder: it was early in his rookie season, he was about to get his first NFL touchdown, he generally seems to have the temperament of chipmunk on meth, etc. (Don't get me wrong, he's great and I love him; Go Bears!) But Samuel is a (callow, overpaid) veteran who should know better (than to risk screwing up his stats for the inevitable contract re-negosh). I've still never felt good about that signing. Doesn't he still feel like one of the enemy, kind of?

This is the problem with the 2008 Eagles: they're fucking idiots. By all rights they should be at least 10-4 by now (counting one or the other of the early losses to Dallas and NY, both of which they were in position to win on final drives that were humming along and then suddenly stalled, plus the pathetic tie in Cincinnati) and fighting for the division title. Instead they're 8-5-1 and need help to get into the playoffs. The stupidity, in this case, seems to trickle down from the top: Andy Reid still can't manage the clock late in the half (which is to say, he can't manage the clock) and can't resist making stupid play calls on 3rd-and-goal. Every time the team is on the cusp of something good, they shoot themselves in the foot.

Though I guess that's better than shooting yourself in the leg.

ESPN 2 Ruins My Life, Again

Dear ESPN 2,

What is wrong with you? Seriously.

I get home from work at 10, looking forward to watching the U.S.-Guatamala World Cup Qualifier. However, instead of the match, you are showing the tail end of the Ball State football game. Yes, you're right, they're 11-0. I should be awed. And, on a certain level, I am . . . that there is actually a school called Ball State and they have enough students to field a football team.

Anyway, being a saint, I decide to wait things out and eat some hummus. The Qualifier is to come on at the conclusion of the game. Maybe, I've been to harsh, I think; maybe this Ball State game isn't so bad after all. And then: Boom! on the bottom of the screen, you put up the outcome of the soccer match -- the one that I have been waiting to watch and the one that you are set to show in ten minutes.

Are you just incompetent or is this a plot to destroy me?

Your pal,

Dork 3

Live Blogging During MNF!

Is football becoming soccer?

More specifically, is football becoming Italian soccer?

I ask this question because, this season, I've noticed an increase in theatrics by NFL players aimed at tricking refs into assessing 15-yard penalties.

Larry Fitzgerald, I'm looking in your direction.

The NFL's goal-line idiocy

File under: major football problems with obvious solutions that the NFL chooses to ignore.

In the final minutes of today's Vikings-Packers game, Adrian Peterson broke free and managed to make it at least very close to the end zone, or maybe into it, before he got tackled. Either his knee was down before the ball, in his outstretched hands, crossed the goal line, or it wasn't. Clearly, an ideal candidate for a coach's challenge--except that the geniuses at Fox managed to capture the play exclusively from angles that were utterly useless to determine where the ball was when the runner's knee hit the turf. On the bright side, the number of unhelpful shots they were able to display was impressive.

Is there any good reason why the league doesn't just spring for one camera on each goal line, which doesn't ever move, and which is always filming? Wouldn't this be a trivial cost, with the promise to enhance the accuracy of touchdown calls substantially season after season? Will this change once Barack Obama is President?

[h/t my football-watching compatriot this morning, whose point this actually was]

Victory Day Parade

Fellow dorks: Thank you for the pity. It feels almost as good as winning a championship (or so I've been told).



On a related/unrelated note, when did "voters" turn into "fans"? I guess the presidential race has always had the feel of a sporting event in certain respects, but when the election was called in Obama's favor last Tuesday night people in Philly poured into the streets, honking horns, high fiving strangers, and pumping fists in the air. I guess if I was pressed to identify a difference from the World Series celebrations the previous month, I'd have to go with the notable absence of baseball caps . . . well, that and the fact that rather than getting into fights, turning over cars, and urinating on lamp posts, members of the Obama crowd exchanged warm embraces and kind words of congratulations . . . while metaphorically urinating on John McCain's political gravestone.

World Series thoughts

Thanks, Dork 1, for the World Series congratulations. It was no 86-year drought, it's true, but then again there was never any "curse" lore to hang the losing on; they always just sucked. And yes, my fullest pity now shifts to Dork 3, stuck with the most unfortunate Nats/Skins/Caps/Wiz foursome. Maybe you should think about jumping on board with your new hometown teams?

I will leave aside the obvious rants about what's wrong with the MLB postseason (off days, late starts, Fox, etc.), and just single out a few issues:

--Ratings: Many a pixel was blackened over the past two weeks with talk of the abysmal TV ratings for the Phils-Rays series. My take on this? FUCK ALL OF YOU, I HATE YOU. If you care about baseball at all, then you'll watch the World Series no matter who is playing. If you can only get it up to watch the Sox/Yanks/Cubs/Dodgers, then you should probably (a) go back to downloading porn of Ben Affleck/Billy Crystal/John Cusack/Penny Marshall, respectively, directly, or (b) check out NASCAR.

--Weather: Much has been made of the rain-induced two-day suspension of game 5. Setting aside the correct but boring conclusions (viz., that (a) Bud Selig is an idiot and (b) shit happens), some have pounced on this random two-day weather event in this particular city at this particular time as clear evidence that baseball must move the World Series to a neutral site. Even Buster Olney, someone who I didn't previously think of as a total jackass, has now endorsed this. My only question for Buster et al. is why stop there? Seven games is a lot. Why not, at your neutral site, have the World Series decided by a best-of-three? Or a single game? Or a single inning would be even better! You could line up a great undercard and sell a shitload of ads. I mean, who wouldn't watch that inning? I'd sit through 75 repeats of CGI-ed Craig T. Nelson and Christie Brinkley for that shit! I mean, I did already, right? Asshole.

--Announcers: It is my fervent hope that, when the next World Series rolls around, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver find themselves at a neutral site (or maybe an undisclosed location). One example to illustrate what makes McCarver so fucking intolerable: In post-delay game 5, the Rays found themselves in a somewhat tricky strategic position: they wanted to bring Our Lord and Savior David Price into the game right away, but were hesitant to do so because the pitcher's spot was due up fourth in the seventh inning (their first chance to bat upon resumption). Dem's de breaks when you play in an NL park, I'm afraid. McCarver's assessment? "It's almost as if the Rays are being penalized." Then again, I guess I shouldn't expect much from the man who once speculated that a leadoff walk is more likely to result in a multi-run inning than a leadoff home run is. The real question is, what ever happened to Al Leiter? Do you remember when he was in the booth for the postseason like five years ago and was brilliant?

Okay, rant over. I leave you simply with Chase Utley's summation of the Phillies' season, broadcast live and unedited on local TV and radio: "World Fucking Champions!"

The Palin-ization of the NFL

From a Times story noting that the NFL has recently fined a number of players for illegal hits that didn't actually draw in-game penalties:

"Do the after-the-fact fines and suspensions undermine the officials if a penalty was not called? The N.F.L. said that those sanctions did not.

'You can’t humanly catch all the things that might happen, particularly if it’s away from the play,' Ray Anderson, the N.F.L.’s executive vice president for football operations, said. 'It’s no rap on the officials that they might not catch a helmet-to-helmet hit at full speed on the other side of the field.'”

Except that it totally is a rap on the officials. Aren't there like 7 of them, to watch 22 players? Of whom 6 (the offensive line plus the quarterback) literally never get moving fast enough to commit a fine-worthy helmet-to-helmet hit? And aren't such hits hands-down the most noticeable thing that happens on a football field?

Most charitable interpretation: Anderson was slightly misquoted, and was in fact bemoaning the lack of any popularized rap composition addressing the NFL's blatantly self-indicting practice of fining players for doing things that the officials totally missed.

Congratulations, Dork 2

I'm really glad that it finally happened for you. I mean, it was getting a little embarrassing for all of us. Not since 1980? Really?

Now we can focus the full power of our collective pity on Dork 3. Also, the sports teams that he roots for totally suck.

"I'm going to kill your boyfriend" and other great pick up lines . . .

Kansas City Chief Larry Johnson is under investigation for purportedly spitting a drink in a woman's face after she proved uninterested in his advances at a night club on October 10. He also allegedly told her that he was going to kill her boyfriend.

Now, maybe he was simply misunderstood. Maybe, he just sneezed. Or maybe it was a really bad mangotini. I don't want to jump to conclusions . . . but then, yeah, actually, I do.

Larry Johnson should be kicked out of the league. Immediately. No trial. No due process. No nothing.

You see, this is the fourth time in five years he's been accused of assaulting women.

Call me "old fashioned" but this suggests to me that Larry Johnson is a "bad guy."

Of course, I'm not the NFL.

Usually, they like to wait and see if problems "work themselves out."

Just ask Pacman Jones: you don't really start to get in trouble until you reach the double digits in incidents with the police.

Commitment to Eczema

Scariest moment of the NFL season so far: Tom Brady's knee? Anquan Boldin's neck? No: Al Davis's face, hands down. That was a frightening press conference. He needs to get back to his seat at the organ underneath the Coliseum, stat.

"You know how to whistle, don't you?"

After Ed Hochuli's destruction of the San Diego Chargers yesterday (the steroids that Hochuli takes to have the world's most enormous set of forearms appear to have finally taken their toll), Mike Shanahan spoke out against the naysayers who said that Denver had caught a lucky break:

"This was the best crew that we have had in the last 20 crews I have graded. . . . They did a heck of a job. Every game that you see that is within a point or a field goal over the last couple years, it may be a call or a non-call that wasn't right, but that is the nature of this game. You have to find a way to win. . . . We still had the ball at third-and-10 and had to get it into the end zone. Third-and-10 and then fourth-and-4. We still had to make a two-point conversion. . . . It wasn't like somebody gave us the touchdown. You have to go out there and still get it done."

As much as I like Mike Shanahan (I don't), this is idiotic. It's like when I used to play basketball as a kid with my brother and he'd knock me over with his fist and then dribble in for a layup: the fact that he still had to take a shot didn't somehow magically erase everything that led up to the basket. The initial foul despoiled everything that followed.

Mike Shanahan and my brother are cheaters.

And I'm telling.

The Two Americas

Why do the Chinese hate Michael Phelps and love Kobe Bryant?


The current theory is that the NBA is big in China and swimming is, well, not (although it should be noted that Mao loved the water and, despite pleas from his doctors, would go for dips in China's less-than-inviting rivers to show off his manatee-esque physique, see photo at left).


This sounds convincing, but I think the real story has to do with what Michael Phelps and Kobe Bryant stand for. Kobe Bryant embodies the America the Chinese government can tolerate: corporate America. Corporate America is not threatening to the Communist Party. Not only is corporate America willing to play by whatever rules the Party tells it (as long as it is allowed to make money), corporate America also shares a common approach to the public: appear to serve their interests while manipulating them to your ends. Phelps stands for the other America: individualism writ large. His accomplishments suggest that one man matters, that one person can accomplish amazing things on his own. That is a message that terrifies the Communist leadership. And, worse still, it’s clear that Phelps isn't just doing it for the money. If Phelps achieves the impossible and wins eight gold medals he gets a million dollars from Speedo. A million dollars? Is Dr. Evil running the outfit? Kobe Bryant makes a million dollars by waking up in the morning.

If you needed more evidence that The New Yorker was a commie rag. . .

From Hendrik Hertzberg's blog:

"I love baseball, but I’m not an anyone fan. As a kid I loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. . . When Walter O’Malley betrayed Brooklyn and all that is good and holy it was my greatest childhood trauma. . . Since then I have had intimacy issues with baseball teams. I allowed myself to like the Red Sox when I lived in Boston and in theory I like the Cubs."

Excuse me? "[N]ot an anyone fan"? What does that even mean? "[I]ntimacy issues"? THERE ARE NO "INTIMACY ISSUES" IN BASEBALL. There's being a baseball fan and having a team, or not being a baseball fan and not having a team. Plausibly, once you have a team, you can "in theory" like a team from the opposite league, particularly if you happen to live in the city they play in. Short of that, however, to say that you "love baseball" but you're "not an anyone fan" is like saying that you "are exclusively heterosexual" but you "do have sex with men."

News Flash: Urgent Update!

In response to my consideration of capital punishment for corrupt refs, lawyers for Mr. Donaghy forwarded the accompanying photograph.

I'm pretty sure that it depicts Donaghy teaching his daughters how to strangle a puppy.

What's that Foul Odor?

This morning, Tim Donaghy, the former N.B.A. referee who came clean (or as clean as someone made entirely of horse manure and guano can come) concerning his betting on games he officiated, was given a sentence of 15 months in the slammer.

Call me a law-and-order Republican (or Nancy), but 15 months? Does that come with the poolside view or the ocean view? I'm sorry but that's ridiculous. Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines you get beaten with a tire iron continuously for 47 years just for knowing someone who once had a friend who saw a movie in which a character was depicted doing crack.

At the very least, this guy has soured a national pastime. And on this front, it's worth noting that until the Supreme Court recently stepped up to the plate, we were holding guys indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay for simply failing to wear a flag pin when entering a mosque.

However, Donaghy's actions go beyond soiling professional basketball. What is the actual cost to society of a fixed game? Just ask the city of Sacramento, which was robbed of a Western Conference Championship in 2002 when the Lakers were gifted 27 free throws in the fourth quarter of Game 6. Let's start with the Sacramento dads who, infuriated by the biased officiating, turned their anger on their wives and children. Domestic violence costs a lot: among other things (like, um, causing immense physical and emotional suffering), it takes up police, hospital, and social service resources. Then there were the other Kings fans who lashed out in self-destructive ways, punching cinderblock walls and breaking their hands or getting fall-down drunk, driving home, and crashing their cars. Others turned their disappointment and upset outward, committing vandalism and various assaults. And still others moped around for days in a funk, unable to focus on their jobs and important responsibilities. In addition, I'm going to go ahead and posit that a few suicides may have been sparked by the illegitimate Lakers win. It is difficult to accept, but cheating refs cost lives, property, and productivity.

Then there is the matter of the economic benefits of winning a Conference Championship (and, likely, the eventual NBA Championship) that were stolen from Sacramento. It's not just t-shirt and hat sales that were lost, but new season ticket sales and general increases in local business that accompany a championship season.

In short, fixing games as a ref is not a victimless crime. It's serious business, which makes Donaghy's sentence an embarrassment. I'm not saying that I'd favor the death penalty here; I'm just saying that if a state decided to enact it for "nefarious reffing," I think it would pass muster under the 8th Amendment.

Chamberlain Seeks Appeasement; Jews Skeptical

"'It's a 2-0 count and the game's one-nothing,' Chamberlain said. 'I'm not trying to do anything ... [He] doesn't want that pitch there and I don't want to throw that pitch there.'"

Thus spake Yankees phenom Joba Chamberlain, doing his best Roger-Clemens-under-oath impression, after this happened:



Which took place about three weeks after Chamberlain threw behind the most important Jew in the Red Sox organization this side of Theo Epstein.

Which went down less than a year after Chamberlain got suspended for throwing two fastballs over Youkilis's head in the same at-bat:



[Highlight of that video: the clip of Josh Beckett apparently warning Chamberlain that he risks "flunking Kant" if he continues acting on maxims that one could not will to be universal law.]

Here's an interesting statistic: In the 102 and 1/3 innings Chamberlain has pitched in his major league career, he has hit a batter three times. Juxtapose that factoid with the four throws above/behind Youkilis since August 2007, and it makes you wonder: is there anyone on the planet besides Jerry Remy who wouldn't think that Chamberlain had the proverbial mens rea on Friday? And if not, what is the league's prosecutorial arm waiting for--an NSA wiretap into Chamberlain's brain capturing his inner monologue?

MLB: Soft on crime. MLB: Nanny state. MLB = Michael Dukakis?

Favre on Ice

Now that the Green Bay Packers have officially told Brett Favre to go fuck himself, one wonders what the future Hall-of-Famer's next move will be. What exactly are Favre's options for further humiliating himself?

There have been reports that Favre might end up with the Jets. Appealingly degrading though this would be, I have an even better suggestion: Favre should play in Canada. The CFL, with its focus on passing, rough-riding, and multiples of 11, would be perfect for Brett's wide-open, country-boy, let's-crank-it-up-to-11 playing style. Plus, there's already a team with practically the exact same uniform as the Packers: the Edmonton Eskimos (see above). After the first couple of blows to the head, Favre would probably just think he was back on the frozen tundra, throwing to the guys in green and gold. Also, Edmonton is not exactly lacking in frozen tundra.

Think it over, Brett. I think this could make a lot of sense. Plus, I hear they have cheap prescription drugs up there.

More Baseball Arbitrariness in the News

As has been widely reported, today is the 25th anniversary of the George Brett pine tar incident. Sadly, the hilarious freak-out footage seems to have been removed from YouTube. There's nothing quite like an enraged man wearing powder blue.

This week also saw the passing of Jerome Holtzman, the inventor of the "save" statistic. Thank you, Mr. Holtzman, for spurring a generation of idiot managers to avoid using their best relief pitcher in the 8th inning of a close game when the heart of the other team's lineup is due to bat. At least now I know that "wins" almost invariably means "subset of total blown saves" on a closer's stat sheet.

The systemic bias in favor of check-swing strikes

While Jon Miller and Joe Morgan have undoubtedly inspired more suffering than intellectual stimulation during their time on Sunday Night Baseball, they made one pretty good point during yesterday's Red Sox-Angels game: the prevailing regime for evaluating check-swings is systematically biased in favor of strike calls.

The home plate umpire makes an initial call. If he says swing: no appeal available. But if he says no swing: appeal available. The result: false negative calls are occasionally caught and overturned (erroneously or not) while false positive calls always remain in place.

Is there any persuasive reason for this? Do efficiency concerns counsel in favor of granting in catchers a right of appeal that batters would use less judiciously or deservedly? Is accuracy instead the operative value--in which case the idea would be that home plate umpires simply render fewer erroneous false positive than false negative decisions (perhaps deliberately so, in light of their knowledge that only a non-swing call, or non-call, can result in a second opinion)? Is there some other explanation?

To be sure, the phenomenon of the one-way-appealable call appears elsewhere in sport. In the NFL, for example, a disputed fumble ruled a fumble on the field is subject to instant replay review, but the same play initially ruled down-by-contact is unreviewable. In that case, however, there's a good resason for the asymmetry: players stop playing when they hear the whistle that accompanies a down-by-contact call, and so any subsequent activity during the play might reasonable be viewed as tainted or less legitimate. At first glance, at least, it's hard to see a similarly compelling justification for baseball's check-swing appellate regime. Am I missing something?

Counterpoint: Changing the Home Run Derby Rules = Wicked Un-American

In a recent post to the influential "Dorks on Sports" weblog, Dork 2 suggests that the rules of Major League Baseball's Home Run Derby are characterized by "arbitrariness" and "caprice." His/her/its argument: whatever bass-ackward, multi-round, non-aggregating tallying method MLB employs is a suboptimal system for determining the event's "winner" if a player can hit way more home runs than his opponent and still lose.

What Dork 2 fails to appreciate, however, is that similar logic would condemn the very lifeblood of the American democratic process: the Electoral College, which our Constitution's framers brilliantly devised in order to ensure that the person whom most voters want to be President won't always win. What next, Dork 2: a "National Popular Vote" movement for the Home Run Derby? Then maybe we nationalize our oil companies?

Naughty Hot Young Thing! 18-Year-Old Amateur Wants To Break All The Rules!

Yes, Brandon Jennings, formerly of Oak Hill Academy (a well known math and science magnet school . . . er, basketball mill) is trying to sidestep the NBA's age rules by heading to Europe to play for Pallacanestro Virtus Roma, which is either an Italian basketball team or something you see in the architectural tour of Quirinale.

He was going to go play for the University of Arizona, but then came to his senses. By all accounts it was a tough choice: (1) Political Science 101 and being yelled at by someone named Lute or (2) a multi-million dollar contract and sex with models from Milan.

I have to say, it's never made much sense to me to force people to go to college for a year. A quick review of the internets will reveal that we let our 18-year-olds do pretty crazy things. How is playing professional basketball in the NBA right out of high school so much more corrupting than taping yourself having sex with three guys for money or blowing up an Iraqi with a hand grenade? Only David Stern knows.

All-Star Underpants (or, the Commissioner's New Underpants)

So many memories from the All-Star festivities at Yankee Stadium this week: Chase Utley cursing the New York crowd... Billy Wagner blowing a late lead, including giving up an uncontested steal of second base (which is not easy for a left-handed pitcher)... George Steinbrenner getting a true totalitarian strongman's entrance, complete with nighttime sunglasses, weeping, man kisses, and, we can only hope, a diaper. Truly an event to remember. And thanks again to Bud Selig for making the All-Star Game "matter" again. I think they should play 15 innings every year! If we can't ruin the arm of every decent pitcher in both leagues in a single night, then the terrorists have already won.

Special mention, however, must go to the Home Run Derby. In the midst of all this newfound All-Star making-sense and mattering, the Home Run Derby stands as a bulwark of arbitrariness and rulebook caprice. So, Josh Hamilton sets a new record by hitting like 80 home runs, overcoming his drug-addiction demons once and for all on the grandest possible stage, and he... loses 5-3 to Justin Morneau? WTF? Justin Morneau couldn't carry Josh Hamilton's bent spoon and zippo! What exactly is the purpose of the multiple rounds, anyway? Forgive me, but it seems like the Home Run Derby is a pretty fucking simple concept. This is ripe for commissorial intervention.

Also, Dan Uggla: does that guy suck or what?

Housekeeping Note

Dorks: in an effort to increase our page views, I suggest that we begin adding the keyword label "underpants" to all of our posts. I got the idea from a friend who mentioned that his Flickr pictures of his two-year-old son get way more hits when they have words like "bathtime" and "underpants" associated with them than when they don't. And his son isn't even that hot.

Play on sabbath, get burned

Undisputed statistic of the week, from ESPN's blurb on the Red Sox' win over the Orioles today:

"Baltimore lost for the sixth time in seven games, and dropped its 14th straight Sunday game. The major league record for consecutive losses on a specific day is 21 -- the 1939 St. Louis Browns and 1890 Pittsburgh Innocents both did it on Tuesdays."

Which begs the question: if they were so Innocent, then why did God hate them so much? Seriously though, if the US devoted a tenth the manpower to foreign intelligence gathering that ESPN does to digging up meaningless statistics, we'd probably be fighting, like, way fewer wars right now.

Does Wisconsin Make You Stupid?

So, I hate to break up the fascinating discussion of English soccer by-laws and dead southern politicians and other deeply interesting (and totally relevant!) material that's been posted to the blog this week, but I have a new proposal related to actual American sports that I think you might find interesting:

Instead of having home-field advantage in the World Series determined by the winner of the All-Star Game (thanks Bud!), it should be determined by whether or not Brett Favre intends to come out of retirement at the moment the game ends. Year in and year out, this would make for a far less predictable, and thus much fairer, outcome than what we have under the current system.

Alternatively, any foul ball that strikes and kills Selig during the game automatically results in home-field advantage for the batter's league.

One more media watch digression

CNN on the bill granting retroactive immunity to telcos that just passed the Senate:

"The controversy over President Bush's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program also prompted calls for change in the FISA law. The so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) was ordered by the president after the 9/11 attacks. It allowed for spying on the communications between U.S. residents and people overseas if it was believed one of the parties was linked to terrorism. Telephone carriers now face lawsuits for assisting the government in eavesdropping on suspected terrorists after 9/11."

Almost. Except the reason the telcos wanted immunity in the first place was that they weren't just turning over information about suspected terrorists. Instead, AT&T siphoned off all electronic data that went through its Folsom Street plant in San Francisco to a room packed with advanced computer equipment and accessible only to representatives of the National Security Agency. We know this because an AT&T whistleblower has said so in a sworn declaration, uncontested in several years of litigation, that is the basis for the ongoing lawsuit Hepting v. AT&T (which itself is the principal basis for the telcos' expensive campaign to have their liability retroactively extinguished).

More succinctly: the story would be right if CNN replaced "assisting the government in eavesdropping on suspected terrorists after 9/11" with "assisting the government in collecting information on any American whose communications happened to be routed through AT&T's San Francisco operating plant." Probably just a typo.

Reward and Punishment

In direct contrast to the recent experience of Dork 1 and the other blessed Bostonians, the sun does not shine on the sports teams that I like. Somehow my support seems to turn promising draft picks into arrogant washups, strong arms into dust, and golden franchises into dynasties of disappointment.

Since childhood I have tried to wait it out. I've bided my time. I've been patient as ticket prices have increased and losses have mounted. But what has it gotten me? A lifetime of spoiled Sundays. A bitter taste in my mouth.

Enough is enough.

As a supporter of countless mediocre and poor sports teams over the years, I am hereby proposing the adoption of a "relegation" mechanism in American professional sports.

It is common in European leagues for teams to be transferred between division at the end of the season: the top teams in each echelon are called up to the next-highest division, while the worst teams are dropped to the lower division. In English football, for example, the bottom three teams in the Premiership are relegated each year, while the top two teams in the Football League Championship (the next level down) are automatically promoted with the next four vying for the third spot through a set of playoffs. This continues down through the Football Leagues One and Two, the Conference National, and the Conferences North and South.

This system accomplishes three things. First, it makes the end of the year exciting for everyone, including those who have suffered through a season of defeats. Given serious loss of revenue, exposure, and players, those at the bottom have everything to play for. Second, having teams coming up from the lower divisions adds excitement to the season with real underdogs fighting for the title. Third, if my no-good teams were relegated, at least they wouldn't be on TV so much, which would save me valuable time where I might take up a hobby, such a horticulture or backgammon.

Yes, it would be difficult to implement a new system at this point, but hockey and baseball, at least, already have minor leagues, and we could start with them. Getting "called up to the big leagues" could take on a whole new meaning.

Obstructionist to the end

Yes, this post is related to the topics typically treated in this forum only to the extent that trashing the New York Times is a sport in itself--but an item in this morning's business section pretty well raises journalistic incompetence to world-class competitive levels.

In a three-page investigative report on Congress's general failure over the last 25 years to do anything that might have softened the blow of currently high oil prices, the paper of record notes that one opportunity for reform was thwarted in 1990 when Senators Carl Levin and Jesse Helms teamed up to block legislation offering higher fuel efficiency standards. After three paragraphs describing the episode, the article proclaims, damningly: "Mr. Levin and Mr. Helms didn't return calls for comment."

Clearly, they are dodging journalists' hard-hitting questions because they are embarrassed about and have no defensible explanation for their obstructionist tactics. Or Jesse Helms died two days ago. Definitely one or the other.

[The online version appends a correction. The print version survives, as further evidence that the Times hasn't yet entirely mastered the death/life distinction.]

MLB = Nanny State, Revisited

First base coaches, now batting practice. In the wake of the freak accident that Chipper Jones suffered during a pregame warm-up last month (video footage worthy of the Zapruder family reproduced above), at least one team has decided that it will not be complacent any longer: the Los Angeles Dodgers now all wear batting helmets during BP. I know this because I watched them take BP this evening, and they were all wearing batting helmets.

[In a related story, the Giants have a pregame contest where they invite three fans onto the field to try to catch fly balls shot out of a pitching machine--and the fans also all wear batting helmets. To catch fly balls.]

The good news: Mothers' League Baseball has not yet stepped in to require that first basemen wear catchers' masks during between-inning infield ground-ball tossing, even despite the black eye Kevin Youkilis recently sustained in the course of that treacherous activity. The bad news: the scourge of over-reaction to a high-profile but extremely improbable incident has struck again. Because the people who run baseball are idiots.

Sometime in the relatively near future, there's going to be another weird accident involving someone unpredictably getting injured on a baseball field in some bizarre way. Like, a line drive is going to hit a pitcher warming up in one of those bullpens that are right on the field in foul territory. Or a groundskeeper is going to have his eyeballs burst when a soprano national anthem singer gets to "la-and of the freeee" and the frequency of the high note pierces the film of his irises. Can we just agree now that in the aftermath of that episode, whatever it is, we're going to acknowledge that it will never, in a hundred years, happen again, that it was a risk worth bearing, and that we're not going to make relief pitchers warm up in riot gear and the grounds crew wear safety goggles?

Err Apparent

So Sports Illustrated has a story this week about the challenges facing Aaron Rodgers, successor to Brett Favre as the Packers' quarterback (pictured at right, scalping Phish tickets, with Favre indicating the size of the doobie they are going to smoke during YEM). The article dwells on the difficulties faced by players who replace hall-of-fame, Superbowl-winning, living-legend quarterbacks. Shockingly, it turns out that they are usually not as good as their predecessors.

SI goes for the too-much-pressure, fans-expecting-the-world-of-you explanation for these follow-up quarterbacks' collective failure, pointing to the miserable results of those who followed Unitas, Namath, Staubach, Bradshaw, and Marino (with the notable exception of Steve Young, who won a Superbowl as Joe Montana's successor in San Francisco).

But allow me to suggest another explanation: quarterbacks who follow living-legend types tend not to be as good as the actual living-legend types because EXTREMELY FEW HUMAN BEINGS ARE LIVING-LEGEND-CALIBER QUARTERBACKS. This includes almost everyone who is actually good enough to play quarterback in the NFL. True, the schlubs who followed the greats listed above were pretty sucky. But if you put a picture of every NFL quarterback from the past 40 years on a wall and threw six darts against the wall, chances are you would hit at least five equally sucky quarterbacks. Maybe, if you were lucky, you would hit a Steve Young one time. But probably you wouldn't.

So, I can understand that running an article whose central thesis is "it's extremely unlikely that any quarterback picked at random (say, Aaron Rodgers) will be anywhere near as good as Brett Favre" won't sell a lot of copies of Sports Illustrated. And I wish Rodgers the best (go Bears!). But it doesn't change the fact that, like so many stories in the sports media, this one is peddling a bullshit psychological explanation for what is simply a statistical near-certainty.

Rebuttal

Dork 3: I do not dispute that the world is full of effete, likely terrorist-sympathizing soccer fans, all of whom have demonstrably poor taste in leisure activity. My point, instead, was that this is AMERICA, where the likelihood of a telephone conversationalist inadvertently disclosing the score of some arcane match between the Gstaad Aperitifs and the Toulouse Fighting Dandies is about as high as Dennis Kucinich landing the Obama VP slot. Which is to say that it could happen--but first you'd see a massive outpouring of leftist elves taking to the streets and demanding political representation, so you'd be on notice.

Thank you, however, for noting the elegance of my broach.

"Me and Bobby McGee"

Like many of you out there, I've always wondered why Kristoffer "Kris" Kristofferson never had a professional baseball career. I mean, the guy appeared in Sports Illustrated for his exploits in track and field, football, and rugby while attending Pomona College. He earned a Blue for boxing at Oxford while on a Rhodes Scholarship. He was a helicopter pilot in the Army, an English Professor, and dabbled in singing and acting. A Dodgers uniform really would have helped round out the picture.

Finally, I have an answer as a result of the kind people over at the Situationist pointing me to Robin Turner's recent article on names in Wales Online, excerpted below:

[R]esearch into names at America’s Yale University conducted by Joseph Simmons, assistant professor of marketing, indicates that people subconsciously make decisions based on their names.

In a paper titled Moniker Maladies: When Names Sabotage Success, he says someone called Sandy is, for instance, more likely to buy a Saturn (a type of car), move to San Diego, and marry someone called Sandler.

A person called Richard, he argues, is more likely to buy a Renault, move to Richmond, and marry Ricarda. He said,”This phenomenon is called the name letter effect (NLE), and appears to be an unconscious effect.”

In America, baseball strikeouts are represented by a K and he found batters with K initials struck out more often than others.

Similarly, he discovered C or D initialled students tended to have lower exam results than A or B initialled students.

Mr Simmons says future parents should consider the name-letter effect but shouldn’t panic. He told a conference in the US, “I will be the first to admit that the effects that we have observed are quite small, and so there’s no need to panic if you recently named your child Christine or Diana.”

Sure, the effects are quite small so maybe Kris's nonexistent baseball career had more to do with genetics than his name -- maybe he just didn't have the right DNA for success. Unfortunately, we may never know: Kris's siblings are named Karen Kristofferson Kirschenbauer and Kraigher Kristofferson, and neither ever played in the majors.

A Retort

While I applaud Dork 1 for ceasing to hide behind the cloak of anonymity provided by the Internets and finally including a picture of herself (quite a fetching broach, by the way), I must contest the characterization of a Euro 2008 semifinal match as a “non-major” sporting event. In fact, Euro 2008 is the third largest sporting event in the world (after the World Cup and Summer Olympic Games). The truth is that a lot of people like soccer: the 2006 World Cup in Germany had a total cumulative television audience of 26.29 billion, with 715.1 million viewers tuning in to watch the final between Italy and France. Dork 1, I know it would require rescheduling your midday handball game, but my soccer brethren and I extend an invitation to you to join with us to watch the Euro 2008 final tomorrow (it should be a cracker). I don’t want to force your hand, but I might remind you that isolationist policies with respect to events in Europe led directly to Hitler’s rise.

Point of decorum

In the age of TiVo, it is acceptable to answer your phone and immediately ask your caller not to tell you the score of a major sporting event that has concluded but that you have not yet had time to watch. A soccer game does not, however, qualify as a "major sporting event"--so requests not to divulge a score thereof are unnecessary and, frankly, moronic. I'm looking at you, Dork 3.

Party On, Shawn

Little known fact:
In 2002, pitching for the Colorado Purple Jesuses, Shawn Chacon hit .257. That's 4 points higher than David Bell's career average with Philadelphia. Thanks, Ed Wade.

Special Ed

Astros pitcher Shawn Chacon inadvertently achieved folk-hero status in Philadelphia this week when, during a verbal altercation with Houston GM Ed Wade over his pending demotion to the bullpen, he grabbed Wade by the neck and threw him to the ground. Wade (pictured at right, using The Force to crush the proverbial windpipe of Philadelphia baseball) was the Phillies' general manager from 1998 to 2005, during which time he presided over the following atrocities:

1. Trading Curt Schilling to Arizona for a four-player package headlined by Travis Lee.

2. Committing $17 million over four years to David Bell.

3. Granting full no-trade clauses to Bobby Abreu and Pat Burrell, thereby ensuring that they could be dealt only for lousy terms (Abreu) or not at all (Burrell).

4. Jose Mesa.

I could go on. Wade has continued to work his magic in Houston, trading for Miguel Tejada one day before he was implicated in the Mitchell Report and getting his pocket picked by (of all people) new Phillies GM Pat Gillick in the Brad Lidge deal. As for Chacon, it remains to be seen whether this is the end for him, or whether he will rise, Sprewell-like, from the ashes of management-choking infamy. In the meantime, his agent should really give WIP a call: Philadelphia sports radio is nothing if not ready to embrace a daily call-in show about choking Ed Wade.

Hankball

After Yankees pitcher Chien-Ming Wang's recent foot injury, sustained while running the bases in an interleague game in Houston, team co-president and Jabba the Hutt look-alike Hank Steinbrenner (pictured at right, shortly after swallowing a whole fish) chose to blame the situation on the National League's failure to adopt the designated-hitter rule, saying:

"The National League needs to join the 21st century. They need to grow up and join the 21st century.... I don't like that, and it's about time they address it. That was a rule from the 1800s."

Hank's heart is clearly in the right place here. His team just lost its best pitcher, probably for the season, and he's pissed off. What do you do when you're pissed off, and things look bleak, and you don't know what to do, because you have no actual skills, because you inherited your job from your similarly callow and bitchy father, and even if you did know what to do, you wouldn't have any good options anyway? You start blaming other people. Or, better yet, other institutions, or arbitrary forces of nature. Why is the Yankees' pitching staff decimated? It's the National League's fault! Why are Ian Kennedy and Phil Hughes getting run into the ground before they have a chance to fully develop? It's a liberal media conspiracy! (We never hear any of the good news about them...) Why are the Tampa Bay Rays legitimate contenders for the AL East crown? Sunspots!!!

Frankly, I'm with the Hankster on this one. Baseball without the designated hitter is totally 1800s (er, totally pre-1973; but Hank is a busy and important man; he doesn't have time to worry about the rules of scalar implicature). And there are plenty of things that pitchers did in the 1800s that they don't do anymore. Like take used balls home to eat. But while we're saving pitchers from the many perils that surround them, why stop at the designated hitter? Stand on principle, Hank! Pitchers are supposed to pitch, and that's it. Too many pitchers get injured covering first base on ground balls hit to the right side of the infield. We clearly need a designated fielder to stand behind the pitcher and take over his duties as soon as the ball leaves his hand. There should also be someone who can act out the pitcher's emotions and frustrations for him after the game, so as to prevent those all-too-avoidable hand-meets-wall incidents.

Save the pitchers! Write to your team's front office and tell them to support the Hankball reforms! More on this as it develops.

Skynet's Revenge

Okay. So I'm watching the NBA Finals and the camera is scanning around the Staples Center to find celebrities and I'm fine with this. I've accepted the fact that I'm not sitting court side any time soon in a championship series: I'm not Jack Nicholson or Sly Stalone or Eddie Murphy. These are superior beings and they get to sit closer to greatness. That's only fair. And the other seats taken up by filthy rich producers? I'm okay with that, too: I'm not sure what producers do, but they get a free pass because I'm embarrassed to ask.

However, I draw the line with tin cans watching sports: Wall-E get the hell out. Seriously, I know ABC, as part of the Walt Disney Company, is trying to do a little "product promotion," but is nothing sacred? A robot sitting in the stands in Game 3?

That said, I am looking forward to Game 4. I hear Pepsi has kicked out Magic's orphans and a couple of leukemia victims from the Make-A-Wish foundation to make room for ten vending machines in the second row.

The best part is that, in the third quarter, KG has agreed to catch an alley-ooped soda and dunk it in Gasol's face. The orphans are going to love that back at the shelter.

Maybe he can digitally alter the Giants' record

So Bill Neukom is the San Francisco Giants' new managing general partner. Interesting.

Press accounts have highlighted many of Neukom's impressive titles, including President of the American Bar Association (current) and General Counsel of Microsoft (former). They have by and large failed to note, however, the conduct of the litigation team that he led in the 1999 federal antitrust suit against his old corporation.

The following is not disputed: Neukom and the Microsoft defense presented a video that they claimed showed a few dudes making some modifications to Windows in the span of ten minutes or so--but that actually consisted of several videos, which had taken many hours to make, spliced together. David Boies figured this out, and, um, embarrassed a Microsoft executive on the stand. Neukom's quoted response at the time: "We make very good software, but we didn't make a very good videotape."

The presiding judge in the case, Thomas Penfield Jackson, was--in keeping with his approach to the bulk of the trial--mainly just confused. By contrast, Howard Shelanski, former chief economist to the FCC and UC Berkeley antitrust professor, has said of the episode: "I'd have thrown the whole legal team in prison."

Best case for the Giants: Neukom digitally alters Barry Zito's contract, thereby un-fucking-over the team for the next five to seven years.

Mystery Dutchman

This commercial playing on Fox Soccer Channel is one of the best sports ads that I've seen. Turns out it was directed by Guy Richie (with cameos by just about every Nike footballer/coach out there).



Imagine that the Big Swoosh will do its best to convince Mr. Madonna to do a reprise with some American sports.

Paying to Win

In the blood sport that is the democratic primary, where low blows and cheap shots are all part of the game, it would be naïve to think that there are actually any rules of fair play, but I was still a bit surprised this week to hear talk of Obama potentially agreeing to assume Hillary's campaign debt in exchange for her dropping out of the race. Paying off a competitor to throw the match just doesn't seem kosher. But then maybe it's all about context? Even in professional sports, the business of "incentivizing" behavior is not cut-and-dry. Black Sox type dealings are clearly verboten, but what about paying another team in your league to win?

There are many times at the end of seasons, where Team A, which has little to play for, comes up against Team B, which has everything in the world at stake. In these situations, is there anything wrong with Team C, which is battling with Team B for a playoff spot or a regular season championship, offering a bit of "encouragement" to Team A to fight as hard as they can?

In Spain’s La Liga, there was much talk at the close of last season that exactly such “incentivizing” was going on. The Catalan press first announced that Real Madrid had offered a hefty sum to Getafe players to beat Barcelona and to Zargoza players to beat Sevilla in order to secure the title for the Bernabeau faithful. Madrid journalists then shot back that Barcelona had offered Deportivo players money to beat Real Madrid. Adding fuel to the fire, the Real Madrid president, Ramon Calderon, announced on the radio that he “didn’t see any problem” with paying bonuses to other teams’ players, as long as it was for winning.

My personal feeling is that this kind of scheming should be left to the fantasy leagues and has no place on the soccer pitch, the basketball court, or anywhere else. That said, I’m not trying to win an election this fall. If I was, maybe I’d see things differently. Anyway, Senator McCain, if you're reading this post, I know you talk a good game about “ethics” and “campaign finance” but if you actually want the keys to the Oval Office come January, maybe you should think about getting into the Hillary bribery action. The fact is, the longer she’s in the race, the better it is for you. Why leave that to chance? The best part is she might actually say yes. After all, unlike Obama's deal, with you she gets to have her cake and eat it to: no more debt and the opportunity to stick around until the convention.

Who's Canadian Now? (or, the Absolution of Ron Hextall, part I)

As you are doubtless unaware, the Philadelphia Flyers recently defeated the Montreal Canadiens in the second round of the NHL playoffs. You are doubtless further unaware that this was the first playoff meeting between these two teams since 1989, when they met in the Wales Conference finals, with the Flyers losing in six games. That series ended in the melee shown above, when, with the Flyers down two goals in the final minutes of play, goalie Ron Hextall charged out of the net in order to kick the bejesus out of the Canadiens' Chris Chelios. Chelios had been targeted by the Flyers ever since game 1 of the series, when he had incapacitated Flyers forward Brian Propp with a blow to the temple that left Propp unconscious and bloodied on the ice (and for which Chelios failed to receive even a minor penalty, despite having had his elbow up). You can see that hit here (warning: not for the faint of heart).

As you can tell from the video above, the Philadelphia crowd went nuts with delight when Hextall went after Chelios. Between that incident, his various other brawls and slashings, and the multiple goals he scored during his career as a goalie, Hextall has achieved something like folk hero status in Philadelphia. So it's fitting that, in the first Philly-Montreal playoff series since then, the Flyers brought the hammer down hard on the Habs. Making things even more interesting is the fact that, though Hextall has long since retired, Chelios is not only still playing, but his team (Detroit) is still in the playoffs. So it's possible that, in addition to avenging their '89 loss to the Canadiens this year, the Flyers could meet the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup finals and have a chance to take down Chelios and finally free Ron Hextall's hockey spirit from hockey purgatory (which I think is not far from Nashville). Stay tuned (if you can find the games on TV, that is).

A final curiosity: the Flyers-Canadiens series this year received a particularly large amount of attention in Canada, because Montreal was the last Canadian team left in the playoffs. But as mentioned here, there are actually more Canadian Flyers than Canadian Canadiens this year.

Jason Stark's best friend

I had forgotten that Doug Glanville (University of Pennsylvania '92) replaced Lenny Dykstra (Mets '86, B.A. Cocaine) in center field.

Say one were to make a list of possible post-retirement activities. A list with jobs like "car wash entrepreneur," "youth league trainer," and "investment guru" and "NY Times columnist." And say one were to sort said list into two columns. One under this man's picture...


And one under this man's:


Would the results be hard to predict?

The Own-Goal

In sports, there are many ways to become a goat.

You can let a grounder run through your legs in the 10th inning in Game 6 of the World Series.

You can throw an interception in the red zone at the end of the fourth quarter.

You can call a timeout when you have none left resulting in a technical foul.

Still, I wonder if there is any individual blunder in a team sport worse than the own-goal in soccer.

In yesterday's Champion's League semifinal, Liverpool had seemingly sealed up a critical victory at home in the first leg of the match up on Dirk Kuyt's first-half strike; it was four minutes into stoppage time and both teams seemed set to head to the locker rooms. However, when a last-second ball was crossed into the box, Liverpool substitute defender John Arne Riise made a critical miscalculation, electing to head the ball away instead of clearing it with his foot. With goalkeeper José Reina standing helplessly by, the ball careened into the back of the net. It was a shocking result and one that left Riise lying inconsolable, face down, on the pitch.

After the game, teammates tried to downplay the error in the press, but they seemed to struggle to find convincing words. At the end of the day, Riise's mistake was pretty damn important.

The own-goal in soccer is the worst individual blunder in team sports for a number of reasons. First, shooting into your own net directly harms your team; when you commit a boneheaded foul in basketball the opposing player still has to sink the shots; when you throw an interception, you or your teammates still have a chance to run the person down before they get in the end zone. In soccer, it's lights out. Second, soccer is extremely low scoring so each goal matters much more than in sports like baseball or hockey. The two sides are often only separated by a single goal. Third, own-goals are hard to blame on anyone but the shooting player. In football, by contrast, it's possible that a receiver didn't run the right route or that the blocking was poor so you got hit right as you released the ball.

With the second leg at Stamford Bridge still to come, Liverpool is certainly not out of it, but whether their Norwegian left-back can recover emotionally in time to assist his team is an open question.

Sasser vs. Teufel

Interesting piece in Slate this week about the disproportionate number of major league baseball players born in August as opposed to July. The reason, it seems, is that the birthday cut-off for youth baseball leagues around the country for the last half-century has been Aug. 1, meaning that kids born in August are the oldest in their leagues and have an advantage in skill development, attention from coaches, etc., over their July-born pipsqueak counterparts, an advantage that stays with them for the rest of their lives. The Slate author's contention is that, while this advantage can be neutralized by pure skill --- i.e., Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds are so naturally good that their being born in July was never able to hurt them --- it shows up most prominently when we look at the less talented major leaguers (Juan Pierre being the August-born poster scrub for the Slate piece).

With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to compile lists of players who most clearly disconfirm and confirm the hypothesis: (i) guys born in July who suck but still made it to the majors, vs. (ii) guys born in August who suck and who, by hypothesis, only made it because they started out their lives beating up on kids a year younger than them. As in the Slate piece, I've limited myself to players born in the U.S. after 1950. Names are listed alphabetically.

Judge for yourselves:

(i) Lamest major leaguers born in July: Mike Bordick, Ozzie Canseco, Danny Heep, Kirt Manwaring, Jody Reed, David Segui, Ed Sprague, Tim Teufel

(ii) Lamest major leaguers born in August: Mark Bellhorn, Sid Bream, Scott Brosius, De Wayne Buice, Marlon Byrd, Don Carman, Matt Clement, Craig Counsell, Joe Cowley, Bubba Crosby, Kevin Elster, Sal Fasano, Gary Gaetti, Doug Glanville, Jason Grimsley, Von Hayes, Ron Karkovice, Mike Maddux, Pat Mahomes, Mike Maroth, Gary Matthews Jr., Oddibe McDowell, Eric Milton, Mackey Sasser, B. J. Surhoff, Jeff Weaver

(iii) Honorable mention: Rance Mulliniks (born in January, but still)

These lists emphatically support the August advantage hypothesis. For every Tim Teufel who somehow shook off the July curse, there are three or four Mackey Sassers who rode their August birthdays to where their natural talents couldn't otherwise have taken them. If you notice a preponderance of players on these lists who were active in the mid to late 80's and/or at some point played for the Phillies, congratulations, you have successfully identified the extremely scientific criteria according to which this study was conducted.

Don't agree? Make your own damn list: baseball-reference.com

Preventing bench-clearing brawls: A comparative analysis

So Kyle Farnsworth didn't get tossed for throwing behind Manny Ramirez's neck following Ramirez's two home runs in tonight's Red Sox-Yankees game. When the two teams meet again in July, someone will almost certainly retaliate, and a fight may well break out. Which raises a (semi-)interesting question: what's with the totally distinct prevailing approaches to punishing bench-clearing brawls in baseball, basketball, and hockey?

In the NBA, if you come off the bench to join a fight, you're definitely getting suspended. In the NHL, you can pretty much pound someone into paralysis if you're on the ice, but it's more or less frowned upon to come off the bench to do it (regardless of whether you're going onto the playing surface or, um, into the crowd--see supra Terry O'Reilly in his playing days).

In baseball, though, dugouts and bullpens emptying is essentially a rite of summer. And no one gets suspended for coming onto the field specifically to fight unless things get, like, really out of hand.

Resolved: it is because we are racist/anti-Canadian that we fear bench-clearing brawls in basketball and hockey, but not baseball. Discuss.

"The Pace of the Game"

Actual quote from Chip Caray, the TBS play-by-play announcer who called the Cubs-Phillies game this afternoon, on the "pace" of baseball: "It's not like football, where there are natural interruptions between each and every play." Yes, Chip. Why, just look at the players above, enjoying the pulsating, uninterrupted pace of baseball.

Justifying strategic errors: The "mootness" defense

With two outs and runners on second and third in the sixth inning of yesterday's Red Sox-Yankees game, Joe Girardi and Mike Mussina chose to pitch to Manny Ramirez rather than walk him and face Kevin Youkilis. Ramirez doubled on the first pitch, giving Boston a lead it would not relinquish.

Mussina is quoted in the Times this morning saying, "Whatever the strategy was, I didn’t make a good pitch. . . If Youkilis had been up there, he probably would have done the same thing if I’d thrown the same pitch.”

That may be true. But it doesn't obviate the fact that the Yankees made a glaring strategic error. It is clearly the case that throwing an ephus pitch to either Ramirez with two on, or Youkilis with the bases loaded, would be a bad decision. But, on the assumption that Mussina would genuinely have been trying to get out of the inning regardless of who he was pitching to, the fact that he happened to leave a fastball belt-high to the batter he did face does nothing to change the underlying calculus: playing the odds, you're likely to do better pitching to "the Greek [sic] God of walks" and maybe having him tie the game on a base-on-balls than to a red-hot Manny Ramirez, who had homered in his previous at-bat and is in a contract year.

Where's that Stanford education now, Moose? [Go Bears!]

The Sound and the Fury

I don't have any kids yet, but I've already started a list of 5th grade science projects for them.

It's never too early to be a great dad.

Project number one is on heckling: Does booing result in players or teams playing worse?

The conventional wisdom seems to be that booing is a bad thing -- bad for individual performance, bad for teams, and bad for society. Sports commentators regularly complain about how destructive it is for fans to boo their home teams and the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association actually went as far as trying to ban booing at high school games in the state last year. But where is the science to back it up? Might booing actually make certain players better? Might it improve team dynamics? Might booing be brought into the classroom or workplace to ameliorate lagging American competitiveness in the global economy?

Here are l'il Billy's hypotheses:

1. Booing by home fans tends to make players perform worse than they would otherwise.

* Donovan McNabb's mother has asked that he not be included in the sample.

** It is possible that booing by home fans may, however, have a positive effect on teams by forcing management to fire poor coaches, trade dud players, or spend more money on bringing in stars.

2. Booing by opposing fans tends to make poor players perform even worse.

* If you suck, you know it and it just hurts when people point it out.

3. Booing by opposing fans tends to make superstar players perform even better.

* Some players seem to actually feed off the hate (ala the slime in Ghostbusters). Manchester United's Ronaldo's pouty perfection often seems at its apex when the stands are bellowing their disgust.

Needless to say, a National Science Foundation grant is probably in order: it takes some serious cash to get Tim Thomas, Derek Jeter, and a Bunsen burner in the same room.

He still can't vote or own a firearm, though, right?

Does it make you a bad person if you feel like maybe it's too soon?

Restraint of Trades

Speaking of "egregious basic structural failings," here's a question: now that Kevin McHale's favor to Danny Ainge last summer has led the Celtics to the most dramatic single-season turnaround in professional basketball history, can we get some, like, Congressional hearings on the pervasive anticompetitive conduct that plagues the NBA (see also the Knicks' deliberately running their franchise into the ground by keeping Isaiah Thomas on the payroll long after it was clear that, he, too was acting in only the Celtics' best interest)? Or is it just the sports/war-on-drugs combo that inspires Henry Waxman to conduct House investigations? Talk about the corporatization of the American legal system: for whatever reason, collusion among General Managers just doesn't seem to raise hackles like needles in buttocks these days. . .

Fouling While Ahead

Interesting observation by Robert Weintraub in Slate today: Memphis, up by 3 with seconds to go in regulation, should have committed a foul to send Kansas to the line to shoot two. We all know what happened instead:



Why isn't this a standard strategy? Maybe because it's kind of counterintuitive and has only limited applicability? At the end of a game, it's always the losing team that starts fouling to stop the clock (a strategy prompted by an egregious basic structural failing in the game of basketball that makes this idiotic tactic the only sensible one under the circumstances). The thought of the winning team fouling in the closing seconds seems absurd. Moreover, it usually just doesn't make sense: if you're up by less than 3, then by fouling, you give the other team the chance to tie the game or take the lead; if you're up by more than 3, then it's at least a two-possession game and you win no matter what.

But if you're up by exactly 3, then the logic of fouling in the final seconds becomes unassailable: you send the other team to the line to shoot (at most) two shots, meaning that even if they make both free throws, you're still up by 1, and you have the ball back. In the more likely scenario where, if the other team makes the first shot, it will then intentionally miss the second one, they still have to get the rebound and get another shot up to tie (or win), which is difficult with so little time left. Most importantly, though, by fouling when up by 3, you take away the other team's ability to tie the game with a back-breaking 3-pointer that sends it into overtime and tramples your soul in the process (see above).

Though maybe a better strategy is just to make your own damn free throws!

Update: Bill Simmons agrees (see his point #2).

Closer encounter

Kudos to former Red Sox great Lee Smith for his thoughtful op-ed in the Sunday Times on a North Carolina art gallery housed in a neuroscience hospital dedicated to displaying the works of its mentally ill patients. Who needs Lenny Dykstra for advice on the productive use of the years after you've hung up the cleats!

Land of the Free, Home of the . . .

It happens more than I'd like to admit: I'm drunk; I'm at a pub; I'm sitting next to a Welsh person; they proceed to tell me that American football players are delicate flowers for playing with pads. I usually respond by mumbling something about the force of impact being significantly less in rugby where the angles of contact are different and, well, padding really only addresses truly devastating hits and, er, you have to factor in field conditions in North America, and . . . Anyway, inevitably, I end up losing the argument, which brings me to the matter of helmets.

MLB, do me a favor and don't make things worse.

Helmets for coaches? Helmets for coaches in a sport where everyone stands in place until the ball is hit?

Maybe you missed it, but there's a sport they've been playing in Ireland for the last 700 or so years that's like baseball except you can shoulder check the guy who's about to swing at the ball or, if you so please, swing your bat for it at the same time. It's called hurling. Helmets are optional. Let me repeat: in a sport in which you can literally be clubbed in the head with a bat or be hit with a ball traveling at over 90 miles an hour from a distance of a foot, you get to elect whether you wear headgear or not.

Don't mind me. I'll just be having my pint over here in the corner by myself.

On the need for pass interference reform

Every year, a couple of NFL games are effectively won and lost by virtue of questionable pass interference calls that dramatically change field position. That doesn't have to happen. There is a straightforward solution to this problem:

There should be two grades of pass interference penalty, just like there have historically (until this coming season) been two grades of face-mask.

A non-stupid pass-interference regime would look like this: for borderline, "the defensive back was really just trying to make a play" calls, the punishment should be 15 yards and an automatic first down; spot-of-the-foul penalties (on passes longer than 15 yards) should be reserved for egregious, "he knew he was getting beat and took the receiver down" cases.

The point is not to broaden officials' range of discretion; it is rather to cabin that discretion, forcing back judges [?] to assign more precise designations among violations that currently go undifferentiated--but that are, normatively, dissimilarly deserving of harsh punishment.

Who's with me on this one?

Further to Big Batting Helmet

If MLB wants to project the appearance of caring about its base coaches' safety, while also making the huge giveaway to Big Batting Helmet that is obviously behind this whole episode, then the clear choice is to revive not the early-90s John Olerud chapeau, but the late-80s Terry Steinbach faceplate.

Improving safety and hiding Larry Bowa's face from public view: a platform we can all get behind.

MLB = Nanny State?

Larry Bowa just might have a point. Then-Judge, now Justice Breyer famously noticed in 1993 that (as Sidney Shapiro describes the argument) "[t]here is a 'vicious cycle'. . . composed of public pressure for protection against risks, which is based on significant misperceptions about the degree of risk that people actually face, and a regulatory system that responds by erring on the side of safety and adopting the public's risk agenda of the moment." [1] Not that turning base coaches into John Olerud look-alikes isn't entertaining, but. . . like, seriously, in the history of baseball, have there been any major base-coach casualties other than the well-publicized one in the minor leagues last year? And didn't that guy kind of get hit in the neck, not the head?

Bud Selig: clearly in the pocket of Big Batting-Helmet.

[1] "Pragmatic Administrative Law," 2005 Issues in Legal Scholarship, Article 1 at 13 (citing Stephen Breyer, Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation (1993)).