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.