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.