Category: Sports

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Pulling the Goalie

As far as I can tell, all the research on pulling the goalie early only compares pulling the goalie with a minute left, or earlier. I haven’t located any research that compares pulling the goalie with not pulling the goalie. Presumably, teams pressing for a tying goal, might actually occasionally score at even strength if they didn’t pull their goalie. But pulling your goalie will result in your opponent scoring about three times as often as it results in your team scoring, and your chances are only about 10% anyway. The trouble is, everybody pulls their goalie, so there’s no benchmark to compare it to. (Except in Russia, apparently, where it’s not done.)  The infamous study that leads to the misconception.

So I am sticking to my theory that it makes just as much sense to pull your goalie right from the start of the game (or any time you have a face off in your opponent’s end) as it does in the last minute.  In other words, it does not make sense.

I wish someone would try it.

And we all know why no one will: because the fundamental equation does not work.

The same logic applies to “no-doubles defense” in baseball.  This idea is simply silly.  There is presumably an optimal location in the outfield for all the fielders during normal play.  This position has been arrived at through years of experience and analysis: where is the ball most likely to be hit.  The goal is to maximize the chance of catching it and making an out.  The essential goal is to stop the other team from advancing a runner to home plate.  If you put the fielders in the wrong place, you might prevent more doubles but you would allow more singles, which will result in more runs being scored.  For eight innings of baseball, everybody agrees with that wisdom.

Suddenly, in the 9th inning (and sometimes sooner), all this analysis and wisdom is out the window and, instead, we move everyone back to make sure that nobody gets a double.  This obviously increases the chances of a hitter getting a single, because you’ve opened up space between the infielders and the outfielders.  And the idea is that decreasing the chances of making an out on a hit that might now be a single is worth the possibility that you will hold the batter to one base, instead of two.   So, you get something like 1.3 singles instead of one double.  So you now have runners on first and third when you might have had two outs instead.

I haven’t seen a good statistical analysis of this idea yet but it really isn’t necessary.  It’s a logical problem.  Is it logical to increase the chances of a hit and reduce the chance of an out in order to reduce the chance that the hit will be a double?  No.  Is it logical to believe that moving the outfielders back from their optimal positions on the field is an advantage in the late innings?  If it is, then why is it not an advantage in the first inning?

Think about it– is there any logical reason why it would not also be an advantage early in the game?  It doesn’t really matter when the other team scores their runs, as long as they score more than you.

What is understandable is this: the manager has to manage.  What else is he going to do in the late innings of a close game?  Get a glove and join the outfielders?

Just listen to the commentators!  I just saw one last night on the issue of pulling the goalie in the last minute.  Mike Babcock, after the Leafs already gave up an empty net goal, making it 4-2 for the Carolina Hurricanes, hesitated to pull the goalie a second time.  One of the “analysts” said, “I wondered, why the hell is he not pulling the goalie!”.

Mike Babcock is certainly smart enough to know that pulling the goalie only marginally increases your chances of tying the game if you are one goal behind.  The chances that you would score 2 goals is ridiculously small.

But it would take a truly remarkable coach to defy commentary like that and do something different.

So for the foreseeable future, we will be stuck with an NHL that refuses to entertain the idea that pulling your goalie is a bad strategy.

Incidentally, last year, Tampa Bay Devil Rays tried the novel approach of having a reliever start the game, pitch an inning or two, and then bring in a “starter”.  I love the fact that somebody has the guts to at least try something different.  How did they do?  Very, very well.

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What Did You Think You Were Getting

This article in NYTimes tells us that a number of gymnasts who worked out with coach and trainer Qi Han at Everest Gymnastics in North Carolina now allege that Mr. Han was abusive.

He absolutely was.  That’s how you do sports in the ultra-competitive U.S.A.  This is accepted as the way you drive young athletes to higher levels of performance.  Did you think your child’s coach was going to offer snacks as a reward?

I was on a collegiate hockey team in the Chicago area back in 1974.  We were coached by a Canadian history professor in a very relaxed, undisciplined manner.  It was decided– by somebody– that we would bring in a “real” coach for one practice, a Mr. Dave Vandenberg.  He immediately took to yelling and screaming abusively at us, trying to get us to play better.  I thought he was an idiot then, and I think so now.   I’m sure we would have played better had he hung around and coached us every day, but I just didn’t care that much.  Sports is trivial.  It is unimportant.  If you think it’s a way to bring glory to yourself, to make money, and become famous, then you get what you deserve.

Let’s make it clear.  Everest Gymnastics advertised itself to parents as an intensive training institution that could help young gymnasts improve their performances.  Do you know what kind of training we’re talking about, in ultra-competitive America?  Would it surprise you to find that coaches of any serious athletic discipline tend to be pricks?  That they shout at athletes and belittle them, and ridicule them, and mock them when they feel they are not making enough effort?

I have never been a fan of that school of thought that believes that there is something admirable in pushing athletes to perform better by screaming at them.  Why?  Why should I care if they perform better?  Is it worth it?  What’s the point?  To beat some other athletes whose coaches yell and scream at them?

You send your child to Everest Gymnastics just so he or she can have fun.  The children taking training from Qi Han are probably being pushed by their parents to achieve, achieve, achieve.  To be better than the competition.  This kind of coaching requires a lot of time and money.  Parents are up early, up late, driving here, driving there– if they have several children, they find themselves spending a lot of time and money trying to turn their children in to star athletes.  Medals.  Success. Maybe the Olympics.  Maybe the NFL.  Money and fame.

Are any of these parents under the delusion that these coaches are going to be nice to their children?  Sweet, and encouraging?

Are these coaching methods a secret?  The parents didn’t know what was going on?  Suddenly one day they went, “oh my god!  Coach Han is yelling at my daughter!”

[whohit]What Did You Think You Were Getting[/whohit]

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Luck

A gentleman on Reddit– and everywhere else– posted that the New England Patriots, down 21-3 at one point, came back and won, proving that you should never give up, no matter how unlikely your success seems.

Kind of illogical really.  Everyone’s excited precisely because this kind of turnaround is incredibly rare.  It doesn’t actually “prove” you should never give up.  In the normal sense of “proof”, it only proves that there will be anomalies and there is always a dim hope that you will be one of them.  Would you want to make life decisions based on these odds?  I will quit my current job because there is a .4% chance I will get a better one?  I will break up with this lovely girl because there is 1.3% chance I can find a better one, who will also love me?  I will vote for this politician because he will prevent a terrorist attack in my home town, even though there was only ever a .002% chance of that occurring?

Don’t ignore the fact that there is a harm in obsessively following a course of action that has a only a microscopic chance of success.  The most obvious harm is the waste of time spent by someone who has virtually no chance of success.  Think of the hours and hours spent by marginal talents on trying to compete with far more talented athletes for a position on the varsity team.  Imagine all of that time spent enhancing other skills that were far more likely to provide real rewards, like learning a trade, or taking courses, or even reading worthwhile literature, or volunteering at a homeless shelter or a food bank, or at church or school, or your neighborhood.  But there is also the harm of repetitively absorbing failure and subservience and inferiority.  It is not for no reason that we sometimes tell people to stop subjecting themselves to inevitable failure and learn to accept things the way they are.

There is another aspect to this: without the thousands and millions of wannabes, there would be no competitors, no infrastructure, no pool of adversaries that allow the top talents to eventually cash in on a mind boggling scale.  Go to the Little League games, the skating and gymnastics competitions, the track and field events: before anyone gets to the big public crowd, most of your audience consists of parents or friends or relatives or classmates of your competitors.  Without them, you would have been nothing.  Without them, no coaches or infrastructure, or training equipment, or fields or gyms or rinks.  And without all those weaker competitors, there would be no competition.  Yet there are almost no real rewards for those weaker competitors.

Unless they learn to accept the con job offered by the sports establishment: keep trying.  Never give up.  Work hard, and some day you too can win.  It isn’t true.  Without the gifts, you will never win.

You get to be used.

 

[whohit]Luck and the New England Patriots[/whohit]

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Humility

I’ve never cared much for the braying exuberance with which most athletes now celebrate their goals or hits or victories.  I didn’t like Bautista’s bat flip.  I don’t like football (real football) players acting like they just raised someone from the dead every time they score a goal.  Why?  Simple: humility is a good thing.   You are not that great.  You performed an exceptional athletic feat: that’s all.  It’s just a physical ability.  It gives pleasure to your fans but not to the fans of the other 30 teams.  You achieved the ability to perform this feat by focusing all of your energy and passion into an extremely limited range of physical activity thereby depriving you of the opportunity to develop your mind, or your other physical skills.  It is not that great.

In American cities, in the South especially, football heroes– even at the high school level– are treated like gods.  They get the best seats in the local restaurants and never have to wait in line.  They get all the love.  They are treated like Disney Princesses: entitled, privileged, spoiled.  They are Disney Princesses.

I get arguments about this.  The bat flip was wonderful.  It was so much fun. Why shouldn’t he celebrate a great moment in sports?

Well, let’s turn it around.  How about if someone reads and understands a difficult book on economics?  How would you feel if he jumped up and down and screamed and shook his fist and yelled, “I know how capital accumulates!  I’m smarter than you!”?  You would despise him for his arrogance.   How about if he ridiculed one of your favorite movies, like “Shawshank Redemption”, as mediocre, unimaginative, and uninteresting, and recommended, instead “The White Ribbon”?  You asshole!  What if he looked at you with a slight sneer and said, “Really?  Neil Diamond?  You like Neil Diamond?”

Imagine.  In those Southern American cities: here’s a student with an A average: he gets the best table.  He gets the girls.  Strange people recognize him and slap him on the back.  You’ve made us all proud: you are smart.  You are a Princess.

You athletes will just have to wait your turn.

 

[whohit]Humility[/whohit]

 

 

 

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Free Enterprise for You Losers

Congress has introduced a bill which will remove certain provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act from application to minor league ball players.  Are you kidding me?

You might ask yourself, if you are a patriotic, law-abiding, constitution-loving American citizen, why is the government rigging the system in favor of the owners of baseball teams?

If you haven’t stopped laughing yet, let’s put the words out there: because they asked them to.  And it has nothing whatsoever to do with donations or lobbyists or anything of the sort.  No, the “Save America’s Pastimes Act”– I am not making this up! — is all about preserving part of our national character, and providing fun for the whole family.

Of course it’s a sop to owners!  Of course the purpose is to increase profits for owners and reduce earnings for players!  Of course it’s an expansion of the rights and privileges of the ownership class at the expense of labour.

And why shouldn’t the government step in to ensure that gullible young men who honestly believe they will win the lottery some day and play in the major leagues (90 % of them won’t) can be exploited by billionaire team owners who already get taxpayer subsidized stadiums from equally gullible tax-payers?  Why shouldn’t they have a hand in the exploitation of young athletes who would do anything for a chance at a professional career?

The moral objection to taking taxpayers money for personal gain only applies to poor people mainly because they lack the vocabulary.  Instead of saying, I need some money to feed my kids and pay my rent because I’m broke and I don’t have a job, you must learn to say, “I wish to invest in the future of our nation and lay the groundwork for a thriving culture of aspiration so that our young people can fulfill their dreams.”

And here is $10,000 for your re-election campaign.  And we’ll call it the “Save America’s Pastimes Act”.

If one of your representatives supported this bill, I hope you vote against him in the next election, if only for this reason: the astounding cynicism of the title of the bill.

[whohit]Free Enterprise for Losers[/whohit]

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It’s Fun to Stay at the NCAA

It’s rather quaint the way university administrators and NCAA officials declare just how wonderful and pure is the devotion of their students to athletics. They play for the love of the sport; they aspire to greatness. They want to improve themselves. They want to be true to their school. They want to learn about leadership and team-building and self-sacrifice and self-denial and goal-setting and how to give everything you’ve got, for a higher purpose.

That kind of sentiment is for saps, of course, and the administrators and coaches and NCAA officials know it. If they claim otherwise, let’s make it simple for them.  Prove that you believe in the values you insist your students must believe in:  you now work for nothing. You are volunteers. You get no money, no limos, no first-class flights, no 4-star hotel suites, no dinners at the top restaurants. You too can express your purity and join in this ethereal expression of scholastic piety.

Don’t be too quick to dismiss the idea. I mean, it is not likely at all that it’s going to happen, but not because it makes sense to do it the way we do it now. It will not happen because of simple, unencumbered ruthless human greed. There is no body or institution or person who is in a position to prevent the NCAA from  perpetuating their positions of privilege indefinitely. There is a symbiotic relationship between college administrators, sponsors, coaches, and politicians, and they will all circle the wagons and roll out the big guns if anyone threatens the status quo.

The athletes, as you know, are pure and devoted and selfless. They play for nothing. In fact, if they do accept money or gifts, they can be fined and suspended and expelled. But their coaches are among the highest paid state employees in the nation. The head of the NCAA famously drives a Porsche and lives in luxury.

What’s my problem with NCAA sports in America? Nothing. Just drop the pretense and make it what it really is: a professional league. And pay your players and provide them with decent insurance and other benefits, and cut out all the bullshit. Strip all of the Universities and Colleges of all the professional sports– let them go back to amateur athletics organized purely, solely, and exclusively by and for amateurs.

And athletic scholarships should be terminated, period. The entire idea is stupid. What is an institution of higher learning doing paying for people to come play football or basketball or to swim for them? Who says they should? Who says it wouldn’t be a better world if Universities went back to the business of education?

Let’s get rid of the vampires and pimps. And let’s have a string of institutions that are actually dedicated to higher learning: to producing smart people of strong character. Let’s value them on the basis of how good they are at doing that. And let’s put cost controls on them so that the incredibly obscene rise in tuition costs (fueled by perverse application of federal student loan guarantees) stops.

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School is Football

The Story

It is really depressing to read this story in the New York Times about two impoverished Philadelphia high schools who were rivals at football and who were forced to merge because of declining enrollments and public debt. The New York Times, who should know better, thinks this is a feel-good story because the two schools together produced a football team that could win.

It is not unusual at all to see articles in the U.S. press about how important it is to have schools and universities and colleges so that there can be football. The Times notes that the coach of the football team mentioned academics once. And the writer keeps trying to insist that the football success has some bearing on other apple-pie issues like school violence, attendance, and just how wonderful these poor, mostly black kids can now feel about themselves.

Personally, I think the schools in the U.S., at all levels, should give up the academics entirely and do the only thing they are really good at: exploiting children for adult gratification. It’s the coaches and parents, who turn out in droves for the matches, who are driving this process, living their own competitive ambitions through their children, and their children who pay– the football players at King now have to do year-round weight training. Isn’t that great? Wow! What self-discipline and ambition and drive! Oh– and maybe he’ll do his homework too, but who the what cares?

Doesn’t the New York Times care about the academic performance of this school? Of course it does. Then why this exuberant account of the success of big bad dudes crashing into each other? What does that have to do with the mission of a school, with the students’ social lives, with poverty, with inadequate funding for the arts, with math and english and science and music and drama and poetry and history and philosophy?

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Method Umpires

Method-actors can be very annoying, especially to the other members of a movie crew, or even the other actors. You don’t matter, Laurence Olivier. You don’t matter sound-guy. You don’t matter director. I must commune with my inner-self, draw on my child-hood memories and experiences, and connect my personal emotional life to the artistic representation of this character’s inner life. Stand back and wait. I’ll let you know when I’m ready. You philistines really have no business deciding when I need to get in front of a camera.

Angel Hernandez had the opportunity to review High Definition footage of a double off the wall Wednesday, May 8th, in a game between Oakland and Cleveland. It was quickly evident to millions of viewers that the ball was not a double: it struck a pipe railing above the yellow stripe that demarcates the field of play, therefore it was a home run. Hernandez however, for reasons that no one has been able to explain, called it a double.

Hernandez is a method umpire. After the game, he prepared for his role as defender of the ineffable perfection of umpires by drawing upon his arrogant inner ego and connecting it with his artistic representation of immutable authority: I am the umpire. I am never wrong. When the media asked him about the call, he refused to allow anyone to record his answer. Then he refused to provide an answer. He was so deep into his role, that his other personality, that of a rational human being, had been completely submerged by the time the media had tucked away their microphones.

By the Way

David Ortiz, at 37, is hitting better than last year or the year before.

Honest– it’s the winter conditioning program. Really.

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Cheating

So why is it that Lance Armstrong is vilified for cheating at cycling but the news that Beyonce lip-synched at the inauguration provokes nothing more than a shrug?

Lance Armstrong used blood-doping and drugs to make it seem like he was a better cyclist than he really was. Beyonce used pre-recorded vocals to make her sound like a better singer than she really was
Lance Armstrong is probably not as good a cyclist as he looked. Beyonce is not as good a singer as she sounded. At least, not live. “Most people don’t care”. Okay, then let’s not keep a secret any more. Tell us before hand that you are not really going to sing. Tell us before-hand that you are going to dope. We’ll let you know if we want to watch.
Everybody does it. I just want a level playing field. You can’t expect me to sing and dance at the same time
Lance Armstrong not cheating is even more boring than Lance Armstrong cheating. He really doesn’t have any personality apart from his athleticism. A lot of elite athletes are like that. They have spent their entire lives consumed with refining their athletic skills. They don’t have a minute for politics or religion or literature or activism or charity. (The charities are almost always vanity projects handled by staff). That’s why the best commentators in sports are never the elite athletes (like Armstrong, or Gretzky, or Carl Crawford, or Lindsey Vonn, or Roberto Alomar, and so on). The journeyman players are always more interesting. Beyonce has never sung anything really interesting anyway. She is a diva, just as Lance Armstrong is a diva: it’s all about me. Look at me sing. Did you see it? Look at me! I’m a star.
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The Effete Olympics

I have not been a fan of the Olympics for many years, though I love a good sporting contest, and have to admit to being a fan of the Blue Jays.

When the Summer Olympics are in this hemisphere, they are usually in the U.S., and the jingoism of the home side is hard to take. When they are in Europe or Asia, there is tape delay, which results in this bizarre parade of edited events. Obviously, the networks believe that most people do not have the patience to actually watch a sporting event from beginning to end if it has already ended– with all the little delays and formalities and suspense– so they package everything into a facile narrative without much colour or real suspense.

Here’s the winner. Now an interview with her parents who have, with the assistance of a consultant, prepared a “narrative” to sell you about this athlete, which will then be packaged and resold by Nike and Gatorade.

NBC, by the way, cut away from the portion of the opening ceremonies that honored the victims of Britain’s own 9/11, the subway bombings, because, rightly or not, they didn’t think American audiences would care. This is either a ringing condemnation of Americans or of NBC or both. It was an emblematic decision, a defining moment of gracelessness, ignorance, and narcissism.

The CTV commentators at the rowing and gymnastics are appalling. There is not even the slightest pretense of anything other than a bellicose ranting for the home side. And all rather gay, to be truthful. They all talk like nagging, proud, invested parents, always referring to the athletes by their first names, and offering unsolicited advice about how to compete– as if, after training for fifteen years, there was something their coaches forgot. You really need to get a life of your own.

Why are the empty seats so offensive? Because everyone knows how the Olympics works. City officials, other government officials, politicians, washed-up athletes, and various other parasites pick your pockets to pay for this extravaganza and then reward themselves with the choicest seats: the empty seats that I’m looking at right now are in the front row of the soccer stadium where Canada is playing Great Britain. Lovely. They didn’t even bother to show up– there will be lots and lots more freebies to indulge in later.

There is a compelling drama in every really great sports narrative but not necessarily a good narrative in every drama.   No matter– the broadcasters will invent one where none exists: the athlete overcoming tremendous odds with hard work and determination (they never credit talent because you can’t buy or sell talent), the self-sacrificing parents (when most of them appear to inordinately invested in their children– literally and emotionally), the shock of failure, the bullshit of Kerri Strug or the inelegant thunky bullying impostiture of Mary Lou Retton.