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)).