Duty to Disclose?

Does good sportsmanship require that you inform the referee when he gets a critical call wrong that works in your favor?

Crystal Palace's Neil Warnock thinks so.

In the 34th minute of the Saturday match with Bristol City, Palace striker Freddie Sears shot the ball into the net, but the refs totally (and completely inexplicably) missed it!

Just based on the body language of the players directly after the score, I don't really understand how the refs could botch the call . . . but they did.

Interestingly, Warnock seemed more angry at his opposing number for failing to fess up than at the four officials . . .

Watch here.

Memo to ESPN

I've got an idea. I'd like to try something as an experiment in maximizing sports-viewing pleasure. We can call it "ESPN Au Naturel."

The concept is to get rid of announcers altogether on this channel. Instead, let's invest in some technology to better capture the sounds of actually being at the stadium or arena. I want to hear the shouts of the players and the roar of the crowd.

It all came to me during a glitch in the feed of the World Football Challenge match between Chelsea and A.C. Milan when, for a good three minutes, Alexi Lalas disappeared. Those were wonderful minutes.

As an alternative, you could just fire Alexi Lalas.

Nails in the Coffin

Lenny Dykstra has filed for bankruptcy.

Whether this comes as a surprise is hard to say. Before March 24, 2008, the notoriously foul-mouthed, tobacco-stained former outfielder may have seemed, had any of us paused to consider the matter, a likely candidate for post-career financial distress. That date, however, saw the publication of a certain New Yorker profile piece that, to all but the most avid Dykstra followers, likely came off as about as astonishing as would be, say, a revelation that Sarah Palin had secretly published several well-regarded scholarly works on Proust: Dykstra, it turned out, had in the years since his playing career ended become a magnate. A magnate of what was a little unclear, or at least is hard to recall--but definitely a capitalist success, owing to something having to do with car washes, or day-trading, or lifestyle magazines, or maybe all of the above.

He had bought Wayne Gretzky's four-house, seven-acre property in Thousand Oaks. He wore fancy hotel robes and ordered room service. He wrote a column about investing strategies for Jim Cramer's monthly newsletter. As Ben McGrath wrote in the piece (titled "Nails Never Fails"), "[i]t takes some getting used to, the idea that Nails, of all people, could end up serving as an exemplar of the transition from professional athletics to respectable civilian life."

And yet, it seems, the "exemple" that Nails represented was that of the quintessential mid-2000s era gazillionaire-for-nothing. The most revealing line in the profile, in retrospect: Dykstra at one point "was wearing a maroon baseball cap that advertised the insurance company A.I.G., his intended partner in the Players Club annuity program." At least Nails' venture didn't get bailout money.

There are definitely some things that make no sense but that are nevertheless true. Nails' apparent life success seems, however, not to have been one of those. After all that laudatory attention, Lenny Dykstra was a human credit default swap.

This Goes Out to a Very Special Guy . . .

"You know, a lot of people sacrificed in order for me to make it to the podium today, but one person stands out above all the rest. One person's tireless efforts helped ensure my victory this afternoon: Me."

I've always wished that an athlete would make that speech because I have to believe most of them are secretly thinking it. And now one finally has!

After winning a stage victory today in the Tour de France, Thomas Voeckler of France explained to the crowd, "I dedicate this victory to myself." Okay, so *technically* he followed it up by also dedicating the victory to his son and his wife, but notably Voeckler's first dedication went out to his #1 guy: Thomas Voeckler.

It's possible that his wife may have moved up in the standings if only she'd been there: as Voeckler explained, she "actually didn't see me win as she was returning home in a plane."

You know who would never even think about missing Thomas Voeckler racing in the Tour de France?

Thomas Voeckler.

That man is a prince.

Memo to NBC

Dear NBC,

What the fuck is wrong with you? It's 2009. When Andy "everything bad about the USA" Roddick and Andy "posterboy for UK dental care" Murray are playing in the Wimbledon semifinals on the day that everyone in the US has off to celebrate our thrashing of the Redcoats in the memorable '76 season--which is to say, probably the only tennis event of the year (decade?) that will be of any interest to most of us--YOU DO NOT NOT SHOW THE MATCH LIVE. You just don't do that.

Tape delay might have been, like, acceptable for the 1980 Olympics or something, back when "securitized" mortgages meant home loans protected by the A-Team and there was no internet. In the world we actually live in, however, you can't get in an elevator or buy a cup of coffee or check the result of a major tennis match on espn.com without seeing the results of a major tennis match.

I hate you, NBC.

Sincerely,

Dork 1

PS Can we also do something about the intro to Sunday Night Football? Seriously, could you just not find anyone to look more uncomfortable than Faith Hill "dancing" while she lip-synchs that vaguely-"Dream On"-ish-rip-off?

Naturalization

In my last blog entry, I referred to Pau Gasol as Paul Gasol. That was totally deliberate.

My friend Mark Krikorian (of the Center for Immigration Studies) and I both believe that foreigners with un-American names should not be allowed to commit their "pronunciation terrorism" upon unsuspecting patriots. Thus, I changed "Pau" to the more acceptable "Paul."

Here are a couple of gems from Krikorian's blog:

"Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent’s simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to. [...]"

"[O]ne of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that’s not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be."

Also, Dikembe Mutombo will hereinafter be referred to as Dick Monroe.

In Defense of . . .

Dork 2 I commend you on your last post, which was definitely the dorkiest in recent memory. It serves as a nice reminder of the gaping hole in sports coverage that this blog fills. When is the last time that you saw an article on “grammatical prescriptivism” on ESPN.com?

On an unrelated note, I am currently visiting the greater Los Angeles area and I was just at a sports bar watching the end of overtime in Game 4. It was a rowdy scene—with a couple of revelers already handcuffed on the curb—but everyone was in high spirits. After Ko-Bry tossed the ball out of bounds, the crowd suddenly broke into a chant: “Defense! Defense! Defense!”

Maybe, I just don’t really like the Lakers, but I am hereby calling for an end to this crap.

First off, Paul Gasol can’t hear you. You’re in a bar in Long Beach and he’s playing in Orlando. So to whom are you talking? If you’re at the game, okay, I’ll let it slide, but otherwise shut up.

Second, chanting “Defense!” while watching basketball is like cheering “Swing!” watching Tiger Woods. Granted sometimes, during halftime, when I’m sitting in my house I just like to yell “Halftime! Halftime! Halftime!” at the screen. It really gets me fired up. In fact, once I was so psyched that I extracted myself from the couch and made nachos during a commercial break.

A Plea for Sanity

The Kobe-vs-LeBron finals that never was---the overhyped-by-the-sports-media, desperately-hoped-for-by-the-NBA, fetishistically-envisioned-by-those-who-flatter-themselves-to-think-that-they-are-witnessing-history matchup that was basically a foregone conclusion all season long (I mean, Lakers-Celtics happened last year in the same situation, right?)---has, most improbably, brought our long national nightmare of grammatical prescriptivism to the fore.

I'm talking, of course, about subject-verb agreement with the Orlando Magic. Media outlets all over the country, undeterred by the otherwise exceptionless generalization in American sporting grammar that teams control singular agreement when referred to by their city name (Boston is trailing at the half) and plural agreement when referred to by their team name (seriously, why are the Celtics such a bunch of pussies?), have been tripping all over themselves writing ugly, awkward, and, yes, ungrammatical sentences like "Just in time, the Magic goes back to basics." No one, I think, would dispute that the English noun magic controls singular agreement, though perhaps the NYT has some interest in demonstrating to the American public that it recognizes this workmanlike, if mundane, point of grammar. But of course it's not magic, nor any contextually salient amount of same that could be referred to as the magic, that won game 3. It's the Orlando Magic, the basketball team, and basketball teams are plural, regardless of whether or not they have stupid names based on singular mass nouns. To use singular verb agreement here is to succumb to the same type of braindead prescriptivism that led ESPN to briefly force all of its anchors and commentators to use the form RBI as both singular and plural (like moose), leading to a period of broadcasting idiocy in which you would hear that Pujols had four RBI last night, and so on (I mean, why not RsBI, then?).

Like so many other ills in American life, the scourge of singular team names can be traced to the state of Florida, with the entry into their respective leagues of the Magic and the NHL's Tampa Bay Lightning in the late '80s and early '90s (see also: Miami Heat). This subsequently led to an explosion of silly singular names throughout American sports, though the fact that MLB and the NFL have so far avoided the naming malaise (the Devil Rays notwithstanding; Florida again), combined with the fact that the bulk of the singulars are found in the perpetually-below-the-radar MLS, has conspired to keep the agreement issue largely out of the public eye.

But now the Magic are on the NBA's grandest stage, with a river of proverbial ink being spilled about their every move. So, at the risk of sounding like a scone-munching, soccer-obsessed limey like Dork 3, I implore the American sports media to yield to their baser grammatical instincts and use plural agreement with the Magic. We needn't go as far as the Brits themselves and use it for teams referred to by their city name (Manchester are now running aimlessly about the pitch); that just sounds barmy. But if I have to hear one more comment about how the Magic is really shooting well tonight, I might just have to go watch hockey or something.

Common Sense

You know that old story about how it's better to play at home; how the crowd is the sixth man; how the cheering helps put you over the top?

Well, it doesn't apply if you are the U.S. Soccer Men's National Team. In the crucial 2010 World Cup Qualifier yesterday the crowd of 55,624 at Soldier Field was made up of 60% Honduras supporters.

This is embarrassing. And probably goes some distance towards explaining why the U.S. has yet to become a serious football contender.

Where are the American football fans? Where are the people who love this country? Who bleed red, white, and blue? Where is Glenn Beck?

Seriously, Mr. Beck, instead of putting your efforts into tea bagging, how about you lend a hand to something that isn’t totally lame and asinine.

You think America is number one? Put your money where your mouth is.

Wally Szczerbiak I Salute You

LeBron has been so good lately that he has to score from half court or do a 720 jam for me to even raise an eyebrow. That is why, for the remaining minutes of this game 6 between the Cavs and the Magic, I am turning my attention to Wally.

Wally just did something truly amazing. No, it wasn't the wide-open air ball that he launched up. That was pretty terrible. It was what he did next. With the crowd laughing in his face and Orlando players heckling him, he stepped up and swished the exact same shot.

When you are a pretty-boy roll player -- when you are the Anna Kournikova of the NBA -- to release that shot takes balls.

You Must Always Turn the Dial to 11

There is a rule in the English Premier League that forces a manager to play his strongest team for every game.

Sir Alex Ferguson thinks that it is outdated and, given Manchester United's Champions League Final with Barcelona on Wednesday, he plans to disregard it tomorrow in his team's match up against lowly Hull City.

At first blush, the regulation seems pretty ridiculous (and, well, downright un-American), but I actually think it has some appeal. Why should some teams have to play the best team at their best and some teams get to play the best team at their worst simply based on the arbitrariness of the official schedule?

What About the Losers?

Dear President Obama,

I'm a mediocre player on a mediocre team. Please invite me to the White House.

Your pal,

James Harrison

. . . .

Okay, so, actually, Harrison is a pretty good player on a very good team. However, I think I've pretty much summed up his feelings.

As SI reports,

Last week, Harrison told Pittsburgh's WTAE television station he won't accompany his teammates on their Thursday visit to the White House to meet President Barack Obama. "This is how I feel -- if you want to see the Pittsburgh Steelers, invite us when we don't win the Super Bowl," Harrison said. "As far as I'm concerned, [Obama] would've invited Arizona if they had won."

In related news, Harrison demanded that the NFL stop handing out Super Bowl rings only to teams that actually win the Super Bowl.

Reggie Miller, Exit Stage Left

During the NBA Playoffs, it has become clear to me that America needs to get an injunction barring Reggie Miller from acting. Seriously, those "Reggie's mailbag" ads are killing me.

How can great basketball players (and vaguely competent announcers) be such horrendous actors?

I, hereby, propose a list of current and former NBA players. I'll get things going:

Allowed to Act

1. Kareem Abdul Jabbar (Airplane)
2. Ray Allen (He Got Game)
3. Dwight Howard (T-Mobile commercial -- for some reason, the scream he makes when his videogame character pulls his hamstring really does me in)

Barred from Acting

1. Michael Jordan (Haynes commercials)
2. Shaq (Kazaam)
3. Reggie Miller

"I think we should take a break"

In the wake of Manny's suspension, I'd like to throw something out there. Please hear me out. I think this could be the best thing for us; I really do. We've had a good run together, but we've hit some hard times. Our relationship is important and I think to save it, our best hope is to take "a break."

What do I propose? Next season, let's encourage players to do whatever they want to their bodies. If you want to drink human growth hormone shakes at every meal, be our guest. If you want to shoot heroin into your penis before each game (Cal Ripken, Jr., I'm looking in your direction), go ahead. If you want to cut off your left arm and sew it on the end of your right arm, that sounds great (leverage!).

At the end of the season, we can decide (through some sort of national poll) whether baseball turned out to be better or worse.

The Merits of Giving Up: Celtics v. Magic

8:30 left in the third quarter of Game 1. Your team is down by 28 points. You just finished a seven game series, with four overtime games. Do you concede, pull your starters, and rest the team for Game 2?

I’d say yes.

Down by 28, could the Celtics have won this game?

Maybe, but you use up a whole lot of energy on something which is extremely, extremely unlikely.

If you pull the starters, you write off the game and come out rested, with a clean slate, in Game 2. Losing by 5 is still losing and getting oh-so-close is emotionally draining.

A lot of people would say fighting back improves Boston’s chances for Game 2; I’d say it hurts them.

Of course, as my high school basketball coach would tell you, I'm a quitter.

No-Brainer

Upon Curt Schilling's announcement of his retirement a few weeks ago, the first question everyone in the sports media began asking---well, maybe the second question, after "will he finally fucking shut up now?"---was whether Schilling will end up in the Hall of Fame. Apart from the basic absurdity of reading baseball writers, the very people who will decide the issue five years hence, openly speculate about this, it is absurd that there should be any question in the first place. If Curt Schilling---loudmouth, narcissist, bad teammate, political neanderthal, all-around asshole---isn't a Hall of Famer, then there's no point in having a Hall of Fame.

To wit: Let's start with the obvious: Schilling is the most dominant and successful postseason pitcher of the last 20 years. He was a number 1 or 2 starter on three World Series winners; it might easily have been four, if his complete-game shutout in game 5 of the '93 series hadn't been made irrelevant by Mitch Williams's loserdom and Jim Fregosi's idiocy in games 4 and 6 (distributively, not merely respectively).

Moving on to regular-season criteria: Schilling has the best career strikeout-to-walk ratio of any pitcher since 1900, at 4.38. He was an innings-eater who reached 300 strikeouts three times ('97, '98, '02) and threw 7 or more complete games seven times in his career (83 in all). These are lightweight numbers compared with, say, the 1970s, when pitchers routinely threw 25 or 30 complete games a season, but they're incredibly strong for the pitch-count era: a pitcher has thrown as many as 10 complete games exactly once this decade (C.C. Sabathia, 2008).

Haters will counter that Schilling never won a Cy Young, and that his career won-lost record (216-146) is at best borderline for the Hall. The Cy Young argument is flimsy: Schilling's best individual seasons happened to coincide with absolutely insane ones from Pedro Martinez (NL, '97), Randy Johnson (NL, '01, '02), and Johan Santana (AL, '04). Wins and losses, ever a shitty and misleadingly defined category for starting pitchers, are skewed in large part because Schilling played half of his career for the 1990s Phillies, who were unrelentingly bad every year except one. Excluding the World Series team of 1993, the Phillies' best record while Schilling was a starter came in 1999, when they went 77-85. To get an idea of the general awfulness and lack of run support that contributed to Schilling's underwhelming '90s W-L, consider 1998, the year in which Schilling had 15 wins *and 15 complete games* (and 300 strikeouts, while the team went 75-87; this was also the year, let's recall, that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were assaulting National League pitchers with their ambiguously gay synthetic forearms). To be sure, pitchers have had seasons in which they were able to rise above the muck around them---Steve Carlton went 27-10 (with 30 CG) for the 1972 Phillies, who won just 59 games---but wins and losses usually obscure as much as they illuminate a pitcher's actual performance.

Schilling will always be remembered for the bloody sock game, and rightly so, but I fear that in early 2014 we'll be hearing a lot about how it was that game, "that courageous performance," that secured his place in the Hall of Fame. Horseshit. Schilling should be in on the strength of his regular-season record, not to mention his pre-2004 postseasons. Any baseball writer who thinks that Schilling's enshrinement is historically contingent on Dave Roberts stealing second base should be thrown out of the guild. And then they could join Schilling in the Asshole Hall of Fame.

The Pirates

Okay, so this is not exactly "sports" . . . but it does involve strategy and pirates.

After Navy snipers killed three pirates today who were holding an American ship captain hostage, the New York Times reported on the response from the pirate contingent:

Abdullahi Lami, one of the pirates holding the Greek ship anchored in the Somali town of Gaan said: "Every country will be treated the way it treats us. In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying," he told The Associated Press. "We will retaliate (for) the killings of our men."

Jamac Habeb, a 30-year-old self-proclaimed pirate, told The Associated Press from one of Somalia's piracy hubs, Eyl, that: "From now on, if we capture foreign ships and their respective countries try to attack us, we will kill them (the hostages)."

"Now they became our number one enemy," Habeb said of U.S. forces.

Okay, so at first glance, Abdullahi and Jamac, this seems like the right move: express your anger; make a terroristic threat. However, if you want to continue your lucrative business -- and from what I can tell, you are not in this for the "politics" -- this is a terrible blunder.

The reason that you have been allowed to get away with pirating is that you are seen as "psuedo" bad guys -- most of the time you don't kill anyone, so nations are willing to negotiate with you. If your new policy is kill everyone any time you capture an American crew, guess what the response will be?

They don't call a boat a "destroyer" because it pays ransoms and sits idly by.

March Badness

I have a newfound appreciation for spring training. As the 2009 World Baseball Classic gets underway and Japan prances in holding its gaudy victor's belt high (no, wait, that's the other WBC; nice acronym, Bud), the quotidian banalities of the Grapefruit League seem riveting by comparison. Jamie Moyer pitched three scoreless innings? Awesome. Some random dude you've never heard of hit two doubles? Wow.

March is the extended wake-up cycle of the baseball fan. It's the time when we are jolted briefly out of unconsciousness by the alarm of pitchers and catchers reporting and then just as quickly hit the proverbial snooze button, and hit it a few more times, every few weeks or so, until we're finally fully woken up by New Pitcher's strained shoulder, or Expensive Outfielder's tweaked hammy, or Opening Day, or the NBA Finals. It's the time of year when the baseball news is like a grotesque dream, reality-like but subtly and distinctly wrong: the Phillies play the Blue Jays, the Mets play the Tigers, somebody scores 18 runs, everybody's wearing the wrong shirts.

And now we have a "classic" new tournament added to the mix. Setting aside the rather fluid notion of nationality espoused by the WBC's directors (A-Rod is Dominican? can we get Mark Teixeira on the Basque squad?), this is exactly the sort of thing that actual baseball fans are constitutionally unable to enjoy. No one wants important baseball stuff happening while they're asleep (World Series schedulers take note). Moreover, the US team is in an impossible situation. When you are universally expected to win---when you have to suffer the jingoistic harangues of bitchy octogenarians before ever setting foot on the field---then actual victory will be met with indifference, and losing with cynical resignation and/or a perverse wallowing in the faded glory of America's post-imperial decline. America is already enough like the Yankees; the last thing we need is the WBC to turn a lazy analogy into boring reality.

Polls are Stupid: Why it's a drag to be a Hoya . . . (also Oscar de la Hoya in drag)

You heard it here first.

Last week Georgetown was ranked No. 12 in the ESPN/USA Today Coaches Poll and Syracuse was ranked No. 8.

This week Georgetown fell to No. 14 and Syracuse remained at No. 8.

What happened in the intervening week?

Well, Georgetown trampled Syracuse 88-74. Then Georgetown lost to No. 2 Duke at Duke 76-67, and Syracuse beat then No. 13 Notre Dame at home.

Yes, it's true that Georgetown lost to Notre Dame earlier in the season 73-67, but that was playing at Notre Dame, the location of the longest current home winning streak in college basketball. Playing Notre Dame at home and playing Notre Dame on the road are fundamentally different things. In Big East play this season, the Fighting Irish are 3-0 at the Joyce Center and 0-3 away from home.

In any case, I really don't understand the math here. If you are the No. 12 team in the country, you should lose to both the No. 8 team and the No. 2 team. If you beat one of those teams then you should move up in the rankings. If you are the No. 8 team, you should beat the No. 12 and No. 13 teams in the country. If you lose to one of them you should move down in the rankings.

If they had my phone number, I'm sure the folks at ESPN would lecture me on how they are taking into account a whole bunch of "intangibles" that explain the discrepancy. I'm skeptical.

People who waste their time writing about sports just aren't that smart.