homegame

Game-Time Decision: A Thanksgiving Day True Story

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:19:00 +0000

It was the smartest play I ever saw a football coach call, and I was the only one who saw him do it.

The first rule of covering a Massachusetts high school Thanksgiving Day game is get there very early if you want the shelter of the press box and, even more important, a decent parking space. This is especially the case when it's a certified Big Game between traditional powerhouses battling for a Super Bowl berth in a game that's been talked about since September (no names will be used in this tale, but if anyone can correctly determine the schools and date, let me know, as I admire knowledge).

I was in the press box at 8 a.m. for the 10:15 kickoff. At the far side of the box, a group of adults were talking in the low, urgent tones that mean a genuine crisis is underway. One of them was the home team coach.

As a professional snoop, I went to Defcon-4, willing myself invisible a la Wade Boggs while subtly, I hoped, moving a seat or two towards the conversation. What was the problem. Quarterback's big brother come back from college and take him out drinking last night? Offensive line flunk a geometry test en masse?

Oh, no, it was much worse than those potential issues. The coach had a choice on his plate that makes 4th and 2 from your own 28 against the Colts seem less difficult than the Jumble puzzle in the paper. The National Anthem had been overbooked. There were two singers for one song -- and both were players' moms. Important players' moms.

Months ago, it seems, some school administrator had contracted the singing of the Star-Spangled Banner before the Thanksgiving Day game to Mom A, who had had some sort of low-level entertainment career in a past life. In the meantime, Mom B had done the honors before all the team's other home games, all of which they'd won in a so-far undefeated season, and, of course, assumed SHE would sing before the year's biggest game. As it became clear during my eavesdropping, so did the team -- but not the administrator.

This is just the sort of inconsequential nonissue that can tie the average Massachusetts suburban community into a bitter knot of bad feeling for, oh, a decade or so. Neither Mom was in on the discussion, but their advocates made it plain they both wanted to sing VERY badly.

Consider the parameters of the coach's call. He was faced with either making a liar out of his immediate superior at the school, or altering a cherished pregame ritual of his team of hyperemotional adolescent males 15 seconds before their (and his) most important game ever. And whichever Mom he picked, the other might tell her important player son that the coach was a jerk at an inopportune moment -- like an hour before kickoff.

It is rare one sees true genius at work. The coach did Solomon one better. He didn't split the baby in half, he made it twins. Within minutes, he proposed the following compromise. Mom B would perform the National Anthem as she had all season. But before that, Mom A would take the microphone and lead the crowd in God Bless America. A double helping of patriotism never hurt any pregame ceremony.

The coach's play call was an elegant solution to his complex problem. But that paled next to his execution of the call. It took this leader of men AND women less than five minutes to sell the plan to both Moms -- and they were all smiles when he finished. Confronted with a "distraction" before the supreme professional moment of his life, our hero with a headset became Knute Rockne and Henry Kissinger rolled into one.

It gives me pleasure still to report that the coach's team won the ensuing game with a "miracle" touchdown on the final play. If virtue isn't going to be rewarded on Thanksgiving, when will it be? My enduring professional regret was that the conventions of daily journalism and the useful rule that you shouldn't embarrass anyone when covering high school sports meant I had to write about the game, not the drama which preceded it.

But now, to not coin a phrase, you know the rest of the story. And I wish the happiest of Thanksgivings to players, coaches and moms from all high schools everywhere. My life, and all life, would be so much duller without you.

The Beautiful Scam

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:02:00 +0000

Here's a stumper. How the hell do you do fix a soccer game, anyway? Try not to score?

The front page of today's "New York Times" tells me that 15 people have been arrested in Germany for fixing a whole bunch of soccer matches, including a few Champions League fixtures (if you're not familiar with the sport, that's fixing the highest level of European competition, roughly akin to a bag job in an NFL playoff game). Authorities hinted darkly at major revelations to come, and I certainly hope they're not teasing us.

Many international soccer players are paid as much or more as U.S. star athletes. But many more are not. The Champions League contains clubs from small Eastern European countries and from the former Soviet Union where all of life is a racket, let alone sports, and where the value of the national currency means a player's salary won't buy lunch outside his native land. So motive and opportunity for fixing is there. Means, however, I just don't get.

In a sport where scores are few and far between, and the percentage of scores that take place entirely by accident is quite high, fixing games would seem to be a high-risk venture. You have the goalkeeper and a linesman on the pad, and some knucklehead turns in the own goal that sends you fleeing to parts unknown one step ahead of the bookies' legbreakers. I really don't see how a fixed soccer match would be a sure thing unless one had all 22 players for both sides and their coaches and the refs in on the fix -- which sounds like it doesn't offer much return on investment.

Apparently I'm wrong, however, at least according to German authorities. The article states that match fixing is a soccer commonplace, because of all the money gambled on the sport. That's where I really step off the train. The entire world must have a serious gambling problem if it's daft enough to bet money on a sport where 0-0 games are the norm. Worse yet, the end of the article (by the way, readers, the best part of most newspaper stories come at the end) reveals that "Asian gambling rings" fix matches involving "part time professionals" in "lower levels of the game."

That is to say, gamblers in Asia are able to get down millions of dollars in bets on semi-pro soccer games. Where have those books been all my life? People in Guangdong province are wagering heavily on Latvian minor leaguers? People bet on games that aren't on TV? And I thought U.S. plungers who stay up to try and get even on Mountain West Conference tilts had issues.

Oddest of all, the news that the world's most popular sport is crooked is only soccer's second-biggest scandal this week. The biggest, and the world's biggest news story, in fact, was the hand ball turned in by French star Thierry Henry which led to the winning goal in a match between France and Ireland to qualify for next year's World Cup.

Hitting the ball with your hand is, of course, soccer's primal sin. Henry did it, and the ref didn't call it. Video replay (which of course soccer doesn't use in officiating) indicated the ref must have been on his cell phone to an Asian gambling ring to have missed the call.

But then, the same thing happened approximately 47 times in the 2009 baseball playoffs, and we don't think umps are crooked -- just incompetent. That would appear to be the case here. FIFA, the sport's ruling body, is ignoring the resulting fuss with a pompous arrogance David Stern can only envy.

Meanwhile, riots continue in Cairo over Egypt's loss to Algeria in ITS World Cup qualifying match. But soccer riots will only be news when one takes place in Chicago.

All in all, it was a great week for one of my primary theories of sports. Soccer has enormous fan appeal as long as you don't have to watch the damn games.

Another, but Shorter, Football Risk-Reward Post

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:31:00 +0000

The following post is not intended as criticism of a trade that took place in September. I defended that trade as beneficial to the Patriots at the time, and I still believe that.

BUT....

Last night in the fourth quarter was the first time this season I found myself thinking, "You know, Richard Seymour would sure come in handy right about now."

Risk Management Is What People in Suits Call Gambling

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:14:00 +0000

The math professors, Internet smart-alecks, and other football quants who are always writing about how the numbers show that coaches should go for it more often on fourth and short now know why coaches mostly don't.

Bill Belichick chose to go for it on fourth and two with the game in the balance last night. The Pats' subsequent failure to convert and the Colts' even-more-subsequent 35-34 victory means that decision was and will continue to be the subject of some talk, especially hereabouts. It being a second-guesser's universe, the call is destined to go down in history as the equivalent of putting one's life savings in a big chuck of Bear, Stearns stock in January, 2008. The nice prudent punt that would have given Peyton Manning the ball needing to go 70 yards in two minutes to win will be held up as an example of why the phrase "conventional wisdom" does contain that last word.

The second guess is as overwrought as those "damn the torpedoes" equations arguing that teams essentially don't need punters at all. Calls that don't work aren't always bad calls. Math and the in-game human circumstances facing Belichick were on the side of the decision he made. They just didn't justify the size of the bet he made with the call.

It is, in a way, a tribute to the Pats' coach that he ignored the primal reason 999 out of 1000 NFL head coaches would have punted when he did not. Belichick did not start his decision-making process with the question, "What happens if this doesn't work?" Most coaches' strategic choices in all sports are in effect decisions to postpone the decision. Play for time, extend the game and put the burden of winning or losing on the other guy. Playing the percentages means postponing them.

Belichick, to his credit, saw the situation from the positive side of the equation. Faced with the choice of having Tom Brady try to make one play to win, or trying to stop Manning from making five or six plays to keep from losing, he went with his best player as the preferred option.

Belichick forced the issue. THIS will be the play that decides the game. He went all-in with a good hand, with aces, and the Colts defense cracked them. In the World Series of Poker last week, Phil Ivey went all-in with A-K against a guy he perceived correctly had Q-J, and got toasted on the flop. Nobody then said, "Boy, that's the worst call of Ivey's career." They said, "that's gambling." Poker is a game built entirely on percentages, and the smartest people in it know that the ultimate truth about percentages is that they're ratios, not guarantees.

And yet, while I understand Belichick's decision, and it would be satisfyingly contrarian to defend it wholeheartedly, I cannot. Based on the Pats' performance during the game to that point, I believe the coach underrated the viability of the prudent punt. In other words, he dissed his defense more than was warranted.

At that moment, the Colts had had 13 possessions. Four had been shockingly easy, and more relevantly, quick, touchdown drives. But seven had ended in punts, and two in interceptions. Leaving aside how much more difficult game-winning TD drives are than drives for game-winning field goals, the Pats' D already had a better than 67 percent success rate against Manning. I believe Belichick let the memory of Indianapolis' last possession, one of those very quick scores, affect his judgment.

But then, he was there, looking into the eyes and feeling the collective will of the defense. If Belichick truly thought those guys were gassed, I can't argue with that assessment. I would say, however, that a precedent has been set, and not a good one from the Pats' point of view. Game plan meetings for the Jets this week, and for all future Pats' opponents, are going to begin with the statement, "Belichick doesn't believe his defense can stop us when it counts." That's an exaggeration, as Manning does not lead just any NFL offense, but it has a grain or two of truth. The Pats are going to win with offense, and they know it. Imbalanced football teams are easier to prepare for -- and to beat.

Or maybe I'm overthinking this entirely (gosh, it's great the way the Internet has space for equivocation). Perhaps an extraordinarily competitive man got caught up in the frenzy of an extraordinary competition. Maybe Belichick just WANTED to gamble.

After Pickett's Charge, another late-game play call that didn't pan out for the visiting team, three Confederate generals had three different postgame thoughts, all of which can be applied to to Belichick's decision.

Richard Ewell, commander II Corps, said "It took a dozen errors to lose the battle of Gettysburg, and I committed a good many of them."

No one point loss hinges on a single play. Two turnovers in the Colts' end zone and wretched time management (which is on Belichick) were as responsible for the Pats' defeat as the choice to go for it.

James Longstreet, commander I Corps, said of his immediate superior and commanding general, "When the hunt was up, his aggressiveness became overwhelming."

Robert E. Lee, commander Army of Northern Virginia, said "It is all my fault. I thought my men were invincible."

No men are invincible. Not even Hall of Fame quarterbacks. That's why punters have steady jobs.

Not Fooled Again, Just Bored Again

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:15:00 +0000

Some time back, before the market value of their target audience's homes fell by 70 percent of so, concert promoters assembled a few 18-wheelers full of $50 bills and visited a few formerly well-known musicians. Their proposition was simple: A Jefferson Airplane reunion tour.

The idea was promptly rejected by Grace Slick with the immortal words, "What could be more pathetic than a bunch of old farts up on stage playing rock and roll?"

So we can cross Gracie off the list of performers we'll be seeing at future Super Bowl halftime shows. The guys (and they're all guys) who run the NFL are positive EVERYONE wants to see Medicare-eligible rock stars of yesteryear strut their stuff between Doritos commercials.

The Who, or rather, Roger Daltrey, Peter Townshend and two other guys who aren't The Who, will be the halftime act at Super Bowl XLIV next February. Having once, very briefly, been a performing musician, I can't hold this against them. Big star or scuffling minor-league wannabe, work is work. But it's sad anyway. The reason the remnants of one of the greatest bands in rock history are playing this gig is because they're SAFE. The NFL knows that "sex, drugs and rock and roll" has seamlessly degraded into "light beer, rock and roll and NO sex."

Let's face it. "Pictures of Lily" is not going to be on the band's song list at the Super Bowl. The Who will play only their songs used as TV themes and in television commercials. Great songs, each and every one -- but also a shout-out to their audience that "you shouldn't feel bad about your life. These guys sold out, too."

Most of all from the league's perspective, the Who will show no human nipples. Since the Great Wardrobe Malfunction of Super Bowl XXXVIII, (which I missed due to being at the game, hundreds of feet above the field in the press box), the performers listed below have done the Super Bowl halftime show (capsule reviews attached).

Super Bowl XXXIX: Paul McCartney (they're great songs, and he's an old trouper).
Super Bowl XL: The Rolling Stones (sad beyond words).
Super Bowl XLI: Prince (pretty good, actually).
Super Bowl XLII: Tom Petty (meh).
Super Bowl XLIII: Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band (a good, hokey halftime show. He grokked the Super Bowl).

The alert reader will note the most obvious fact about this list. No breasts. All the performers were guys, older guys. No danger of illicit flesh French-frying the brains of America's psychopathic and repressed religious fundamentalist groups. Nothing to divert America from watching more Doritos commercials. He or she will also note that the acts, even Prince, have always had predominately white audiences.

The even more alert reader will add The Who to the list and note that half of the acts selected to perform at our country's biggest sports event are furriners -- Brits to be precise. It was an insult to the history of rock that the Stones did the Super Bowl in Detroit. Berry Gordy should've sued. Holy cow, is Aretha Franklin too sexy for pro football?

I have some sympathy for the NFL here. Super Bowl halftime shows shouldn't be controversial. They're just part of the hoopla of our weirdest national holiday, and the entertainers shouldn't muscle in trying to make themselves the big story. But the law of diminishing returns is going to kick in with a vengeance on the "rock stars of yesteryear" policy before too long.

The years are going to keep getting more yester, and the acts deemed big enough for the Super stage are going to start looking bad and performing worse. That section of the audience too young to recall The Who (or whoever) in its prime will conclude, not without reason, that the NFL is culturally clueless. That section that, like me, is old enough to remember how amazing those acts were in their prime will only get depressed. Might turn us off Doritos for life.

Happily, there's more to popular music than stadium rock. The list of entertainers, young and old, who could do a terrific Super Bowl halftime show is a long one. You want young? Taylor Swift or Beyonce would get the job done and then some. You want old? Merle Haggard could do a Super Bowl show. Or Tony Bennett. There wouldn't be a musician in the world who wouldn't want to be in either of those guys' backup bands for that gig.

He's really old, and performs sitting in a chair these days, and is not in good health. But it would be a tremendous event if B.B. King had 12 minutes of the Super Bowl to play Lucille before the tens of millions of Americans who have never been lucky enough to see him perform.

The odds of any of those acts appearing in future Super Bowls range from long to theoretical mathematical concepts. The National Football League IS culturally clueless. I mean, look at Roger Goodell. Is that a man who has ever rocked? Hell, I'll bet he's never even swung.

So I have a backup to the future plan for the halftime show, one I proposed to scoffing league officials over a decade ago.

Bring back the Grambling band.

A Choice Not an Echo, or, The Failure of Media Deregulation

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:50:00 +0000

At approximately 3:30 p.m., the Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti program on WBZ-FM featured Bill Simmons discussing his feud with Glenn Ordway.

A quick flick of the radio to WEEI-AM revealed that at that same moment, Glenn Ordway was discussing his feud with Bill Simmons. Sports talk about sports talk about sports talkers. If "metaidiocy" wasn't a word before this afternoon, it is now.

Ordway and Simmons are highly successful media personalities and have the knack for self-promotion that goes with that territory (that's no knock, it's a necessary skill for their business). Fake feuds have a long and almost honorable history in show business hype. Ordinarily, I'd be inclined to shrug off this pointless war of easily bruised egos as just another day's work by two guys who are hardcore marketers.

But I can't shake the feeling they mean it. Ordway and Simmons have hurt each other's feelings. If true, that's too bad. But why drag innocent sports fans who only want to hear about Jason Varitek's option year into it? It's always the children who suffer in these fights.

Or rather, it's always the children who have them.

World Series, Part 2: The Victors

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:53:00 +0000

Philadelphia sports fans are taught from a very early age to despise all other teams -- and their own, too. So Yankee-hating has always seemed weird to me.

I can understand why Red Sox fans hate the Yanks. They are rivals for the same prize each year. I can see why Mets hate the Yanks. Being a perennial number two in the same racket in the same town can blot the sunshine out of life. Take it from a former Herald employee.

But everyone else? I don't get why fans in someplace like Seattle or Houston would be a professional Yankee-hater. I know those folks have existed since the 1920s, and some of it has to do with our nation's extremely conflicted feelings about money, power, and our largest city, so as an American Studies major I understand. As a sports follower, I don't. You root for teams you play to fail, but if they're not on the schedule, who cares about them?

When it comes to individual Yankees, the hatred makes even less sense. Who could possibly dislike Hideki Matsui, or Jorge Posada, or Mariano Rivera? (Not even the most zealous Sox fans dislike Mo, although they all fear him). It isn't Derek Jeter's fault Tim McCarver likes him so much. A-Rod is the most neurotic superstar of our time, and people razz him mostly because they know it bothers him. That is legitimate fan gamesmanship. It doesn't change the reality of his greatness as a player.

Successful team/athlete hatred exists in all sports (except golf and tennis. Must be a WASP thing). The simplest and best way to see its stupidity is to look at it from the other side of the telescope. Patriots fans complain, and rightly so, about the cardboard cutout stereotype of Bill Belichick held by fans and media from other markets. They should switch to the Red Sox fan side of their brain and examine their A-Rod opinions. It's possible those are caricatures of reality as well.

Pressed to the wall, your Yankee hater will say that his primary objection to the franchise is how it "buys championships." The Yankees commit the cardinal sin of exploiting their inherent economic advantages to win. It's not fair.

No, it's not. It's not fair that New York City has more of the good things of life such as arts, restaurants, centers of learning, etc. than your town just because it's bigger, either. But anyone who complained about that would be regarded as a first-degree crank. Why should sports be different?

(Red Sox fans, who root for a team that is second to none in the ruthless monetizing of that love, should be pelted with rotten fruit if THEY complain about the Yankees spending habits.)

Of all the Yankee-haters, there is no greater poseur than the twit who says he hates the team for socioeconomic reasons; the old "rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel" idea first posited in the Great Depression. It was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now. Let me tell you a story about that.

In the spring and summer of 1987, I had the most unusual sportswriting gig of my life. I was Yankee beat writer for the "Village Voice." At that time, the giant figures of American leftist political journalism who had helped found the Voice were still at the paper, people like Jack Newfield and Nat Hentoff.

And almost all of them were sick Yankees fans!! These men, whom I grew up admiring to the max, sought me out to discuss the Yanks, which was flattering if bizarre. It was also hilarious. This citadel of rebellion against the American status quo rooted for the ballclub that exemplifies the status quo.

Of course, ideology had nothing to do with. The lefty Yankee fans were fans for the same reason almost everyone is -- it's how they were brought up. Which brings me back to my opening paragraph.

I hated seeing the Yankees win the Series. But that hatred had nothing to do with them. The Yankees don't suck. Losing does.

World Series, Part I: The Vanquished

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:56:00 +0000

There's no strength or will here to give the Phillies a hometown boo. They didn't earn one. Sometimes, losing is just a no-fault bummer.

The Phillies had three excellent chances to seize control of the World Series against the Yankees; at the start of Game Two, when they took a 3-0 lead in Game Three, and when they tied up Game Four in the bottom of the eighth. They couldn't take advantage of any of 'em. Playing uphill is no way to beat that opponent.

It is part of the grandeur and misery of postseason baseball that any weakness a team had in the regular season will inevitably reveal itself at the worst possible -- usually fatal -- moment in the playoffs. It even happened to New York, when Joe Girardi's lust for overmanaging cost them a win against the Angels.

The Phillies' weaknesses in 2009 were, in order of appearance, Cole Hamels and Brad Lidge. They each had a shot to be a Series hero, and were goats instead. This is sad, but hardly surprising.

Analyzing my feelings about the Series today, I was surprised at my relative lack of them. Oh, I was disappointed last night, and this morning, but my predominant sentiment was a kind of washed out blur of blah. I think it's baseball overdose. The playoffs are so long, if a fan commits to them, he or she is going to experience far too many highs and lows to keep them all straight. It takes a whole heap of energy to get twisted up over the failure of what one knows damn well is a 10,000 to 1 shot at a comeback. Better to surrender to the void when Hideki Matsui shoves you into it.

Besides, too much sorrow would be an unseemly memorial for the 2009 Phils. Bitching that the defending World Series champion only returned to the Series and couldn't win again is the kind of behavior that ought to get one thrown out of the better class of barrooms. Then there's this: by any rational analysis, the Phillies shouldn't even have made the playoffs in the first place.

Hamels and Lidge were the primary reasons the Phillies won the championship in 2008. They both pretty much sucked all year. Here is a team that could not depend on its number one starter or its closer from Opening Day on. And it made the World Series anyway. SOMEBODY, make that about 23 other somebodies, on the roster must've played his/their asses off.

And so they did, from start to flawed finish (it's hard to hit 11 home runs in six games and lose 4 of them, but the Phillies did). They were an admirable ballclub. I'm glad I spent almost my free time since October 1 admiring them.

S%*#-Stirring: A Primer

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:54:00 +0000

It is one of the duties of a professional opinionizer, in whatever medium, to occasionally piss off their audience. A commentator who fails to have at least a few provocative opinions is not doing his or her job properly, just as a commentator who's never glaringly wrong is also playing it too safe to justify their paycheck.

But journalistic ethics apply to opinions as much they do to the presentation of facts. There's a right and wrong way to send the audience's blood pressure up to 220/140. Boiling it down to a song title, you gotta be sincere.

Commentators have to believe in their comments. The opinion being expressed must be an honest expression of belief. It's EASY to make people mad, especially sports fans. Making up ideas to do so is wrong on a number of levels, not least the most basic moral level. People who get a charge out of irritating others are jackasses nobody wants to be around. There are commentators who do exactly that, not just in sports, and some of them are rich and famous, too. I wouldn't be them for all their riches. It's not my idea of fun, or life.

Upon review, the two columns I wrote at the Herald that angered the most people stand up to that test. When I wrote in 1991 that the Celtics, were they to avoid a long period of failure, needed to break up their team by trading Larry Bird, I acknowledged this would never happen. That's fair. And I believed with all my heart they had to break up the '80s team or face a decade in the wilderness. Older and in some ways more aware, I have a better understanding of how impossible that was for the team's management. History, however, has partially absolved me.

Now where I was flat wrong. In the latter stages of the 2003 NFL season, I posited that the Patriots needed to end their long winning streak in the regular season, because otherwise they would do so in the playoffs, as it was impossible for any team in our time to win 15 straight games. Boy, people hated that one! I was surprised, actually.

The Pats made me eat my belief and more power to 'em (although I looked dangerously close to being right in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XXXVIII). But while I was wrong, I wasn't dissembling. My opinion, as stated, reflected my true beliefs and interpretation of the facts at the time. That's honest provocation. Dumb maybe, but fair to the angered audience.

Since I kicked the snot out of him last week, it gives me pleasure to come to the defense of my former colleague Tony Massarotti this morning. Tony wrote a column for Boston.com that has pissed off Boston fans more than I ever did. He stated that Red Sox fans should root for the Yankees in the World Series. A New York title would shame Sox management out of complacency and spur on the franchise to new heights of free-spending genius in the offseason.

From my vantage point, Tony is about as wrong as he can be in his underlying charge against the Sox. I saw no evidence of organizational torpor in the 2009 season. The acquisition of Victor Martinez is enough evidence to find a directed verdict of "not guilty." The problems the Sox had this year were not exactly of their own making. In the regular season, the Yankees were better than they were. In the playoffs, the Angels were considerably better than the Sox. As they say at West Point, the enemy has a vote.

But I listened carefully to Tony's defense of his opinion this week during his and Michael Felger's radio show (well, I did for 15 minutes stuck in traffic on 128 one afternoon. Then I put in a Smokey Robinson CD). He meant it. His defense of his misbegotten opinion rang completely true, mainly because it got more coherent and detailed the more he was challenged. People who just throw an opinion out there haven't usually put enough thought into the idea to defend it by any means except repeating it.

Massarotti's audience should feel free to disagree with him as vigorously as they wish. I just did. But as a reforming s@#!-stirrer, I advise the audience that Mazz stirred in accordance with the standards of that odd profession.

Bye Week Self-Scouting

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:20:00 +0000

NFL players and coaches love the bye week, for understandable if quite different reasons (time off vs. more time to plan and fret). Writers, at least in my time, were more ambivalent. On the one hand, there's less hanging around football stadiums. On the other, just because nothing's happening with your team doesn't mean you get to stop writing about it.

Astute and compassionate readers should not complain if the Patriots' articles in their daily papers seem like pretty thin gruel today, tomorrow, and Monday. It actually is quite a literary accomplishment to make stone soup taste as good as thin gruel.

Bloggers, especially lazy ones like me, have the option of simply ignoring football during the bye week. But I guess those years of listening to Bill Belichick and other workaholic coaches made more of an impact on me than I'm sure they suspected. As dutifully as any first-year assistant to the assistant quality control coach, yours truly will use the bye to go over game tapes (past posts) and see where I stand.

Since it is me doing this, the review process will not be a lengthy one.

Before the 2009 NFL season began, I forecast its outcome in the following descending order of probability: 1. Patriots win Super Bowl. 2. Steelers win Super Bowl. 3. Some NFC team wins Super Bowl in big upset. How has roughly the first half of the season affected that prediction.

Short answer: Hardly at all -- yet.

Both the Patriots and Steelers are 5-2, and their losses may be attributed to natural phenomena. In Pittsburgh's case, it was the loss of Troy Polamalu to an injury. He's back, and we may regard the Steelers' win over the Vikings as more indicative of their status than their losses to the Bears and Bengals.

The Pats played VERY poorly on offense in the second half of their road losses to the Jets and Broncos. This almost certainly was due to the natural and expected adjustment process Tom Brady faced returning after missing an entire season with an injury. Coming back from much less injury down time threw Peyton Manning off for about half a season in 2008. He seems to have bounced back nicely. Anyone who doesn't think Brady has is on the same path is the kind of person I like to find when gambling.

No, the only possible reasons I find to doubt my forecast have nothing to do with the teams I named in it. So far, the Colts have been a much better team than I expected. The Saints have been much, much, much better.

By a happy coincidence, the Patriots will play both teams in the near future, on the road yet. Unless New England loses both games by 17 points or so, I abide by my predictions with serene confidence.

OK, almost serene.

I Contain Multitudes -- Very Silly Multitudes

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:23:00 +0000

Gosh, I love America. Just this afternoon, going to a well-known retail chain to buy a leaf-blower, I saw the following Christmas ornament for sale -- an inflatable Santa doll the size of a pony. No biggie, huh? Check this. Santa had somehow bumped Jimmie Johnson and was waving maniacally from behind the wheel of the number 48 Hendricks Brothers Lowe's Chevrolet.

I'd get one, but I don't want the sudden deaths of the entire membership of the Lexington Historical Society on my conscience.

But wait, it gets better! I turn on ESPN and there's a segment on one of their features shows on Ron Artest's new life as a member of the Lakers. You'll be happy to know that since he's arrived in LA, Ron has decided to become involved in mentoring -- as a mentor.

Hanging out here and there, Ron has struck up an acquaintance with a younger celebrity in need of guidance. He's taken Lindsay Lohan under his wing, giving her the benefit of his experience in how to bounce back from the occasional life mistake.

What happens when SportsCenter meets TMZ. Probably America's Most Wanted.

We'll Fill Those $5000 seats next season on Bat Day!

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:19:00 +0000

The perfect gift for the Yankee fan who lives in the imagination of Yankee-haters everywhere is now available.

For the 2009 World Series, Steuben Crystal has created replica baseball bats of the finest crystal, artistically engraved with the Yankee logo. Price: A mere $9500.

Steuben has bats engraved with the Phillies logo, too, but I don't imagine they'll sell too well once Philly fans discover it is VERY hard to turn Steuben crystal into a jagged-edge weapon with which to settle sports arguments.

The Human Rain Delay in a Nice Suit

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:03:00 +0000

If the commissioner of baseball did not exist, the Onion would have had to invent him.

After yet another blown call by an ump in Game Five of the ALCS last Thursday night, Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports reported that Bud Selig remains adamantly and unalterably opposed to the use instant replay because, and I assume this is a direct quote, "baseball is a game that can't stand interminable delays."

Bud, as nice a guy as you'd ever want to watch a game with, is not high on self-awareness. The fifth game of the ALCS took place after a day off following game four inserted in the schedule by major league baseball, that is, by commissioner Bud Selig. The World Series will start on Wednesday, October 28 and end sometime in November due to decisions made by himself as well. And lest we forget, Selig's main contribution to the 2008 playoffs was to invent the 50 hour rain delay during Game Five of the World Series.

What Selig MEANT to say, of course, was "baseball can't stand delays that television doesn't order us to make." The fact that even distinguished veteran umpires like Tim McClelland are simply melting down in a bizarre mass slump is not a problem, so it doesn't a solution, even if that solution is simple, readily available, and would create far fewer delays than the postseason custom of sending pitching coaches to the mound every time a runner reaches base.

Baseball is perfect. That is baseball's official position on itself and has been so since before Bud Selig was born. All major sports are arrogant, but give the NFL and NASCAR credit. They're willing to tinker with their rules, rightly or wrongly, in the belief that even their splendid selves are capable of self-improvement. Hell, the membership of Augusta National is more capable of looking itself in the mirror than is major league baseball -- at least so far as putting on the Masters is concerned.

All baseball commissioners get paid the big bucks to be front men for the sport's sublimely stupid faith that when it comes to sweating in funny costumes, it is the Chosen One. Bud's JOB is to make an ass of himself in public. Knowing that, I always feel somewhat ambivalent when I ridicule Selig.

Not enough to stop doing it, though.

Hey, You Kids! Get Off of the Queen's Lawn!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:18:00 +0000

All three of my former colleagues who inspired this post are younger than I am. Two of them are much younger. That makes it especially distressing to note that the Patriots' game in London has turned Tony Massarotti, Michael Felger, and Dan Shaughnessy into narrow, crabby, provincial old farts.

Tony and Michael spent a considerable amount of time this week fretting that the Pats' road trip to London was somehow a "distraction" and that deviation from the sacred "routine" would affect the team's chances of beating the mighty Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This idea was so absurd I listened more carefully than is my wont, hoping to detect the telltale signs of talk show shtick. But no, my old teammates appeared to be sincere, Felger especially so. To hear him tell it, the Pats were sailing to the game across the Atlantic in a replica of the Mayflower crewed by themselves. Sadly, this leaves me no choice but to mock them.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that the only way the Pats could lose against the Bucs would be if they HAD flown to Tampa for the game by mistake. Let's focus on the differences between playing an NFL road game in that city or playing one in London.

Difference the first: Travel. Pats plane left Thursday night and arrived Friday am London time rather than leaving Saturday afternoon to allow time to adjust for jet lag. Plane flight was four hours longer.

Difference the second: Pats practiced at a British cricket grounds Friday and had a press conference that was well-attended by British media. Ordinarily, they would have practiced at Gillette yesterday, and the fewest reporters of the week would have been there. That's why Friday is the very best day to talk to an NFL player or coach if you're a journalist. Real difference: nil, as the Brits say.

Difference the third: Scenery is different looking out the windows of the buses that transport the team from airport to commercial chain American hotel to practices and the stadium.

That's it. To worry that the Pats' preparations were hampered this week is to ignore just how regimented and overmanaged any NFL road trip is, be it to Buffalo or Bangalore. It is a seamless web of meetings in windowless rooms and carefully preordered meals in other windowless rooms. It is, except for the thrilling chaos of the game itself, a cosmically boring experience. NFL players are instructed to cherish routine. But they'd be less than human if a little change of pace in their work schedule didn't seem at least a little refreshing.

Not to be outdone in the "time has passed them by" sweepstakes, Dan Shaughnessy's column in this morning's Globe was a straightforward attack on the very idea of playing a pro football game outside the boundaries of the U.S.A. The whole experience struck Dan as, well, wrong somehow, cheating American football fans of some ineffable part of the television watching experience. British sports teams would never play games in the U.S.

(Of course, they do. British big-time soccer teams like Manchester United play sellout exhibition tours in the U.S. almost every summer. The World Cup sold out Foxboro Stadium. Doesn't Dan remember? 1994 isn't so long ago.)

Shaughnessy did not find any British sports fans or media on whom to test his hypothesis. The quotes in his story were from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, taken from a press conference Goodell gave at his (doubtless more expensive) hotel. Given one of the world's great cities to explore, he stuck to routine with the zealous devotion of a special teams coach.

Back home in my family room, the sports roundup broadcast of British cable network Sky Sports, a rough equivalent to ESPN, was being shown on Fox Soccer Channel. It gave a slightly different perspective. First, while the Liverpool-Man U game Sunday was Topic A, the Pats-Bucs game was a strong Topic B. In the professional news judgment of that organization, there is considerable British public interest in the NFL. Maybe it's just novelty interest, but over centuries of show business history, novelty acts have made a great deal of money -- a point Goodell failed to drive home to Shaughnessy.

More interestingly, there were extensive sound bites from Patriots players. A number of them had said they thought the trip was a chore -- before they left home. On the grounds of the Oval, guys like Tom Brady and Jarod Mayo were cheerfully making the most of the experience. Mayo even went so far as to discuss the Liverpool-ManU game with a reporter.

In other words, if ordered to have a unique career experience, here were Patriots' players sensibly concluding that they might as well experience it for all it's worth. That is how grown-ups, as opposed to old farts, deal with life's vicissitudes.

I should also point out that Shaughnessy's attitude is box-office poison for his employer, an organization that's not in the best of health. Many Globe readers have never been and maybe never will get to London. To them, there is an element of vicarious adventure in the Pats' road trip that a business-minded journalists, make that any journalist with a lick of sense, ought to have run with.

The proper attitude of a reporter on a free trip to a foreign locale ought to be, "Hey, readers (viewers, listeners), let me do my best to make you feel you're sharing this experience with me." People follow the news, in part, to get a feel for the parts of the world they may never see first-hand. It is a privilege and a responsibility to be their vicarious representative. Griping about the duty is unseemly. Griping in public is abhorrent.

I could go on, but why bother? I mean, really, what is there to say about people who appear to prefer a trip to Tampa than one to London? That's just hopeless.

Dr. Samuel Johnson said more than three centuries ago that "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." We've got some very, very tired sports commentators in this town. They were tired of London before they got there. Some were tired of London without even going.

The Company You Keep

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:51:00 +0000

One consolation of being a Philadelphia sports fan is its lack of trendiness. Nobody roots for my teams except people who grew up doing so and none of 'em are ever going to write long books or make PBS documentaries about the experience.

Or so I thought. Much to my dismay, I forgot other people, some of whom went on to fame and fortune in the wide world outside the Delaware Valley, grew up there too.

So on behalf of Phillies fans everywhere, I apologize for Chris Matthews. He's from Philly. Anfd, of course, he has ADD and cable news personality brain damage, so ordinarily I wouldn't mention anything he said.

But Matthews was badgering poor (probably not poor) Charles Blow of the New York Times, who in a fire-your-agent moment in time has become a "Hardball" semi-regular, about how "you New Yorkers!" had better get ready for our Phils. Blow, who was probably appearing in a studio in someplace like Greensboro, North Carolina, was at a loss for words.

I am not. Anyone who SAYS they are a Philadelphia sports fan who assumes success is a liar. A REAL Philly fan knows that triumph is the mask disaster wears before you get kicked in the junk.

That Chris Matthews is a fraud is hardly stop-press news. Hey, he's got issues. But for him to intrude into a serious matter like the National League Championship Series will cost me sleep. The Powers That Be measure bandwagons by the least among the persons they carry.

A Thought on the Language of Baseball

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:15:00 +0000

When announcers describe a team as "patient" I tend to translate that adjective into the phrase "I don't watch to watch these guys." The Yankees are a splendid team. Watching them in postseason is like watching someone smother the sport to death with a pillow.

It Ends in the Fall -- If Only

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:52:00 +0000

Yours truly attended one of the first of baseball's "I can't believe they played today" playoff games as a fan in October, 1977. It was the fourth game of the 1977 National League championship series between the Phillies and Dodgers at the old Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. It was an elimination game, since in those dear dead days, the first of TWO postseason series was best three-of-five.

It was 45 and raining at game time that Saturday night. It was 45 and pouring by the game's end. The Phils lost a snoozer as mercilessly dull as all games were Tommy John (the LA pitcher) was on his game. I remember two things about the tilt. My brother, who got us the tickets through the law firm for which he then a young associate, gave our back row sheltered tickets to two of the firm's senior partners and shoved us ten rows down into the rain, and by the third inning, I didn't care who won. I only wanted it to be over, even if the Phils, for whom I cared much more than I do now, were beaten.

In 2009, all of America feels the same way about playoff baseball. As a nation, we don't care who is champion of our national pastime as long as it stops passing the damn time before Thanksgiving. Did I watch last night's Yankees-Angels game to the bitter end? Hell, no! Would I have accepted a free ticket to sit in the cold and rain to watch it person. Hell no times one trillion!!!

The forecast for tonight's Phils-Dodgers game is for more cold, more rain, and more sleep deprivation. I'm hoping with all my might the score is something like 7-2 in the fourth inning -- whoever's got the seven.

As noted, baseball's insistence on dragging its postseason into conditions not fit for competition is an old, old story. It's insistence on dragging the postseason into the holiday season is newer, but stems from the same root principle -- people at home watching TV are warm and dry, so who cares about anybody else?

Funny thing though. Every year the ratings for the World Series seem to go down. Ratings for the first round of the playoffs, on the other hand, went up this year. Maybe we're a land of Mr. and Mrs. EARLY Octobers. Or, far more likely, people start off interested, and the time commitment required to watch a month's worth of late night baseball causes more and more of them to look outside at the turning leaves and decide it's football season.

If your team isn't in it, watching postseason baseball makes no sense. It's a decision stay to near or past midnight on work/school nights to watch pitching changes and stale and stupid crowd reaction shots from TV directors utterly lacking in creativity. TBS cameras can't follow fly balls, but they can sure catch pretty girls and cute children looking tense. Why bother? Mr. Nielsen says many don't.

Asking baseball not to be greedy is like asking water not to be wet. All I ask is that greed not be stupid. A sport where fewer and fewer people bother to watch its championship competition is a sport with long-term problems relating to growth. This is particularly true if the reason they're not watching are all the compromises to the competitive integrity and viability of your game as a live spectator sport you made to attract larger TV audiences in the first place.

Perhaps a Past Life Should Stay Where It Was

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:42:00 +0000

Made a pretty good ass of myself watching the Phillies-Rockies game last night. Yelling at a television set for the transgressions of ballplayers thousands of miles away is not healthy behavior. It is fan behavior, a form of watching sports I once thought I couldn't revisit.

Nor should I revisit it. The Phillies were the first team I ever rooted for as a small child, and yours truly became a loudly, proudly, belligerently twisted, bitter Philadelphia fan. It's not a good way to live.

But then, watching the 2009 Phillies is not life-extending behavior, either -- not if you care about the outcome of their games. That goes for the other team's fans, too. During the agonizing eighth and ninth innings, when TBS showed the inevitable crowd between-pitch suffering close-ups, my reaction was pure empathy. Those poor devils were as strung out as myself, and they were freezing outdoors while at least I was warm.

It is one of baseball's singularities that it is the sport that produces both the most dismally tedious and excruciatingly exciting games. The Phillies are designed for torture. No wonder they have an old-school, no-pulse manager like Charlie Manuel. A dynamic leader of men like Tony LaRussa would've been straitjacket material by Mother's Day with this team.

My wife, Alice, is a casual sports fan who doesn't much care for baseball. Too slow, she says. You can imagine her reactions to playoff baseball, where pace of play would earn a two-stroke penalty on the PGA Tour. She came to sit on the sofa with me during last night's game to watch my antics and laugh at them. By the ninth, she was watching every pitch, or rather, listening and not watching every pitch. She had a blanket over her head, unable to bear the suspense.

Statistics tell part of the story. The Phillies lead baseball in come-from behind victories. The unspoken subset of that stat is that they are often behind. The Phillies also lead baseball in blown ninth-inning leads. That stat doesn't need a subset, except maybe that Brad Lidge, who closed out the Phils' two wins in Denver, lost the closer's job in September for blowing all those leads and possessing an ERA near 8. He got the job back through a Manuel hunch -- namely, "I got nobody else."

The Phillies have a set of hitters who perform with tremendous poise under maximum stress and a set of relief pitchers who have no poise and nearly no ability under maximum stress. Their games are never over until the last man is out, and he almost never is.

Everything I know about baseball and my sportswriting self tell me that such a club is doomed and deserves that doom. And yet, I feel a depth of affection for the team of my childhood that I didn't during their world championship run last season. Don't get me wrong. That was a great experience. But it all happened a little too quickly to achieve full emotional impact. One day, I was hoping they'd beat the Mets in the NL East, the next they were World Champs.

Nothing happens quickly to the 2009 Phils, or nothing has yet, anyway. I find their struggles more engrossing and endearing than the relatively easy path the 2008 bunch took to its title. It may be that in the final analysis, it is the pain teams inflict on their fans that provides the cement in their emotional bonds. You'd think a Philadelphian who lived through 1964 wouldn't be very tolerant of a ballclub possessing an uncanny gift for blowing leads, but here we are.

I will admit, however, that when Lidge got the final strikeout last night, my first reaction was "There might be two more rounds of this. Should I REALLY be happy?"

I will also admit that for one of the very few times in my life, I'm damn glad there's no games on TV tonight.

Short Series = Short Epitaph

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:16:00 +0000

Probably well over 90 percent of baseball observers, if asked to provide the main reasons the Red Sox might emerge as world champions before the playoffs started, would have provided the some form of the following list:

1. Jon Lester
2. Josh Beckett
3. Jonathan Papelbon

The losing pitchers in the Angels' sweep of their division series with the Sox were:

1. Jon Lester
2. Josh Beckett
3. Jonathan Papelbon

That's not to blame those three pitchers. Anything but. Papelbon failed in spectacular fashion, but closing is a zero-sum activity. Mariano Rivera, the best ever at the job, owns of some its most historic failures. Lester and Beckett pitched, as the old saying goes, just well enough to lose. They couldn't compensate for their teammates' inability to reach base.

The point is, the Angels took on the Red Sox' acknowledged strengths, the top of the starting rotation and the bullpen, and neutralized them. They trumped every ace the Sox had. That is not an individual accomplishment. That is one team turning in a dominant performance over another.

In the second week of October, 2009, the Angels were a far superior team than the Red Sox in three consecutive games. There's nothing to second-guess or argue about the result. Getting whupped' is a profoundly simple experience.

People who care about the Red Sox have every right to feel disappointed and sorrowful today. But they can't complain. They shouldn't, at least.

Today's Cause of Death of the Newspaper Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:29:00 +0000

The lead story in the Boston Sunday Globe, which is the closest thing that organization has to a money-making entity is that jaywalking is a common practice among the city's pedestrians. Honest.

We look forward to next week's knock-your-socks-off expose "Winter in New England Expected to Long, Unpleasant!"

There is no business model that can save a company which creates a product for which there is no use. Here we have a NEWSpaper which ignores that the root word of "news" is "new." The Globe presented as the most important fact affecting the lives of its customers something which they already knew, and which they have known for as long as they lived in the Boston area.

Not only wouldn't I pay to read such a story on the Internet, I wouldn't, and didn't read it for free. My time isn't worth much, but it's worth something.

You Are Listening Live! to People You Wish Were Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:28:00 +0000

Here's a sentence I'm sure is an original thought. Listening, or rather, being driven to infuriated distraction by Chip Caray last night reminded me of a girl I used to know.

I say "girl" because my memory is from when I was just out of college, back in the exciting term of Richard Nixon's presidency. She was my neighbor in a small town a long, long way from Boston. I had a tremendous, moon calf crush on this young woman, who was beautiful and kindly. Nothing significant came of this attraction, and that was my own fault. I was paralyzed with ambivalence and guilt that had nothing to do with either of us.

The girl's father was a famous national television sportscaster. And even as I yearned for her, I couldn't get one thought out of the back of my head.

"What am I doing? I've called this girl's dad every dirty name in the book on an almost weekly basis for years. What if we watch a game together?"

So I failed to pledge my troth. My diffidence was more proof that perhaps the strongest emotion shared by all sports fans, more powerful than the love of the home team, is a visceral hatred of national TV announcers. Some of them deserve it, some don't, but they all draw our scorn and rage. I am sure that when Graham McNamee broadcast the 1924 World Series on the radio, the first national broadcast ever, Americans did not pause to ponder the miracle of 20th century communication technology creating a shared cultural experience. They cussed McNamee for getting a ball and strike count wrong.

Broadcasts of games the woman's father called are shown on ESPN Classic and other cable sports networks, and, as you'd expect, he comes off like a combination of Edward R. Murrow and Grantland Rice compared to the broadcasters of our time. But boy did I hate him back in the '60s. So did every other fan in Wilmington, Delaware. And when I went away to Wesleyan University, sports fans hated him there, too.

How pathological is this sentiment? Very. After I became a sportswriter, I met and spent time with many of the national broadcasters who do the most games and therefore are the most reviled by their fellow citizens. They were also, to a man, the nicest guys you'd want to meet. To cite just a few examples, there couldn't be better company to share before and after a game than Joe Buck, Tim McCarver, Brent Musberger, Dick Vitale and Paul Maguire. Jim Nantz and I were not meant to run in the same social circles, but he is a pleasant and gracious man.

So now I'm a TV fan again. You'd think my experience of knowing these men, and of knowing that theirs is a demanding craft, harder than daily journalism (there's no copy desk in the broadcast booth), would have taught me to see their work in a new light. You'd be wrong. They still drive me crazy when they're on the air. Obviously, this has nothing to do with their abilities or lack of same. What I (and all other fans) bring to the experience of watching and listening to national games is the root factor.

The hatred for national TV and radio guys becomes harder to understand when it is contrasted to the way in which fans treat local play by play and color guys. Those chaps, if they survive the treacherous world of broadcasting business for more than a season or two, become icons-beloved civic figures more revered in their communities than any athlete. Ernie Harwell in Detroit, Gil and Gino right here in Boston, the list includes at least one announcer in every city with major sports franchises.

And that love has as little to do with the broadcasters' actual abilities as does the hatred for the national guys. Vin Scully is an institution in Los Angeles on a par with the Hollywood sign, hamburgers, and the beach. On his infrequent (these days) appearances on national games, there's a growing groundswell of complaints Scully talks too much. This is like saying Matisse painted too much. It's not a rational aesthetic judgment, but a knee-jerk expression of the primal dislike of any national telecast.

My theory as to what drives the hatred is simple. Tip O'Neill was wrong. It's not all politics that's local-it's all sports. Local announcers are perceived as fellow humans sharing the same experience of following the home team. This breeds affection, particularly if the home team has stunk on ice for a decade or four. Patriots' fans are prepared to cut Gil and Gino a great deal of slack because they respect the way those two (really wonderful) men slogged to Foxboro Stadium all those years to broadcast games for a team whose most celebrated moments and involved lawyers and accountants instead of blocking and tackling.

National broadcasters, by contrast, are seen as interlopers. They are giving a fresh perspective to our sports-watching experience, and we don't want one. Because they have to do the best they can to make both teams in a game equally important in the broadcast, the national announcers present a hint of a truth fans don't and shouldn't want to recognize. Every team is somebody's home team. They're all the same guys out on the field/court/ice, just wearing different colored underwear.

That insight is what I call the Tree of the Knowledge of the Lack of Good and Evil. Once it hits you, you're never the same fan again. Sportswriters all began life as fans, but their jobs force to accept the value-neutral nature of games. That, at bottom, is why fans and sportswriters often don't understand each other. They exist in different realities.

That goes triple for national broadcasters. They don't even have the comfort of communicating with a local audience. They are trapped in the TV assumption, which isn't inaccurate, that the larger one's audience, the lower its collective level of information on the subject at hand. Some director or producer tells McCarver that research indicates that x percent of the Fox audience doesn't know that Derek Jeter is a good player. That may not excuse McCarver's babble about the Yankee shortstop, which makes my crush from yesteryear look like nothing, but it should make it more understandable, and hence forgivable.

As a follower of sports I'm a spiritual hybrid. Part of my soul is fan, part is sportswriter, and I move between their two realities -- belonging to both, belonging to neither. You'd think that'd make me a better TV watcher, much more tolerant of the foibles of the talented, extremely well-paid, even more extremely unloved individuals who broadcast what I watch. It should, but it doesn't. The pathologies we learn early stay with us forever.

Then again, not everything in life is just in your head. A jury of the saints in heaven would tell me Chip Caray sucks.

Equal Justice Under Arthroscopy

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:02:00 +0000

Ravens offensive tackle Jared Gaither left the second quarter of yesterday's game with the Patriots on a stretcher. For all anyone knew, he'd been crippled for keeps (fortunately, he was not seriously injured). Gaither was the victim of an accidental collision with his quarterback Joe Flacco, the kind of coincidental mayhem that in my experience creates the overwhelming majority of football's mos frightening and catastrophic injuries -- an unavoidable accident. The refs stopped the clock until Gaither was carted off.

Somewhat later in the quarter, Ravens linebacker Tyrell Suggs stumbled into Tom Brady in a sidelong brush of Brady's knee. In a supermarket aisle, the contact would have drawn an "excuse me" from both parties. Here, it drew a yellow flag from the officials and a 15-yard roughing the passer penalty, one of three such calls in the game (two on the Ravens, one on the Pats' Mike Wright) that appeared to pose no threat to the signal caller's health whatsoever, being close to the common man's definition of "incidental contact" as can be imagined.

Those two paragraphs are why all football players past and present who aren't quarterbacks detest the NFL rules relating to the passer's personal safety. In both the narrowest sense of football legality and on a more cosmic moral level, those rules are unjust. They may be necessary, but they stick in the craw. They are a violation of football's essence.

Sports have rules for two purposes. One is to insure fair competition, the other to protect the participant's safety. As far as purpose one goes, the quarterback protection rules are part of a 40 year trend in which football's laws have been consistently altered to PREVENT fair competition. They are designed to give the offense a competitive advantage over the defense whenever possible. That's contemptible. It shades America's leading sport over towards the WWE corner of the sports-entertainment-celebrity industrial complex.

As a group, defensive players tend to be aggressive by temperament. People who hit other people first for a living aren't always big on authority. They hate the rules, and who can blame them?

More seriously, narrowing the areas of a quarterback's body which can be hit by a defender down to the space of Angel Hernandez's strike zone is an offense against football's moral contract. It's a dangerous game, and accepting and coping with the risk of grievous bodily harm is part of the toll men pay to play the sport. It's one of the most important ways they measure each other as teammates-as men. Risk is the emotional glue that bonds football players long after they've retired with their permanent limps, post-concussion syndromes, and incipient heart conditions that are risk's residue.

If YOU or a teammate can go to the hospital due to a collision with a quarterback and there's no foul involved, but YOU or a teammate can draw a major penalty for accidental, incidental contact with a quarterback's body, then the message is clear. Your sport values that quarterback's life more than your own. He draws the most rewards from the sport while running the fewest risks, and every time an unforeseen risk takes place, and a QB goes down, there's a new rule making the risk illegal. It's business. It stinks. And you'd have to be a pretty saintly individual not to develop a resentment of the rules, the rulemakers, and quarterbacks, even your own.

Then again, without the rules, or some rules anyway quarterbacks would run unacceptable risks. A passer is unable to fulfill the boxing instruction to protect himself at all times. The defenseless are those who most need the law's protection under any system of rules -- from sports to international fisheries law.

A middle way suggests itself. Extend the rules governing roughing the kicker to roughing the passer, and mandate lesser five yard with no automatic first down to collisions judged accidental and of minor import. Yeah, it'd make the refs have to exercise more good judgment, leading to more controversies. Too bad. It'd also give every working stiff of a down lineman something approaching an even break.

An even break. Isn't that the first principle of sports? Of law?

It's Possible I Watched a Little Too Much Football Yesterday Afternoon

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:06:00 +0000

Football player's faces look very different when they're wearing their helmets. That's about the only reasonable interpretation of what will follow in this post that does not involve its author having seriously hallucinated -- and without pharmaceutical assistance, either.

Midway through the Notre Dame-Washington game on NBC, which naturally included many close-ups of Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen, I began to get a deja vu flash, Clausen's face, square jaw, large eyes, and determined visage, reminded me of something. I'd seen that face, somewhere.

Four or five close-ups later, it struck me. Clausen looked like 1940s actor Pat O'Brien. Or rather, he looked like a young guy delivering a creditable impression of O'Brien, whose most famous role, of course, was the title role in "The Knute Rockne Story," the hokey, ridiculous, delightful film on the life of Notre Dame's legendary coach of the 1920s.

Football coma induced by access to HD broadcasting and the remote control may have been responsible for this impression. Or maybe I was right, and Clausen did look a little like O'Brien. I'll have to tune in to Notre Dame's next game and check.

But if I see another Irish player in the huddle who looks like Ronald Reagan, I may have to start getting outside more this season.

Olympiclandia

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:20:00 +0000

The first thing to understand about the International Olympic Committee is that it regards itself as, and in many ways is, a sovereign political entity, a country with no permanent address that borrows a part of some other nation's land mass once every two years. Whether it's the President of the U.S. or the President of Mali pitching their country as an Olympic host site cuts no ice with the IOC. In their heads, the committee outranks them all.

It's beyond arrogance. It's a kind of blissful insularity, quite similar to the attitude most Americans have towards the world outside our borders. So we shouldn't be too shocked if we're hoisted on that particular petard every so often. The IOC has calendars. By the time of the 2016 Olympics, every single elected leader who lobbied for a city to be the site of those games (Japan, the U.S, and Brazil sent pols, Spain sent its King, which is much more the IOC's speed) will either be out of office or, in the best case for Barack Obama, a lame duck. Why care what they think?

The second thing to understand about the IOC is that its members are really, really, really into sports. They may be pompous, clueless, and more of a few of them may be corrupt, but bigger sports fans you won't meet -- anywhere ever. That's why the best way to understand why Rio de Janeiro will host the 2016 Games and not Chicago is to consider the question from the point of view of the average fan, which I assume anyone reading this is.

OK, fan, make the following mind experiment. Imagine that you are being asked to select a location for attending a three-week festival of more sports than it's possible to watch located in one of the world's great cities. You will live in luxury and convenience Queen Elizabeth might envy during the festival, all at someone else's expense. All you have to do is choose between Chicago and Rio.

I daresay a wide majority of American fans would pick Rio. Nothing against Chicago, anybody who's visited there loves the place, me included, but you know, there are a lot more opportunities in life to visit Chicago than there are to get to Rio. I can testify from personal (incredibly lucky) experience that being in a great place you'd never get to see otherwise is about the best part of the Olympics. A track meet is just a track meet, after all.

I'm willing to bet a considerable sum that the above reasoning is what swung the IOC vote to Rio away from its more developed (i.e. organized and safe) rivals for the 2016 Games. Rio sounded like more fun, so it got the event.

As a sports fan, I have difficulty arguing with a sports organization that chooses fun as its top priority.

Employee Appreciation in Action, Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Gee) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:02:00 +0000

Football fans always want their team to go for it on fourth and short. The only people who want it more are the team's offensive linemen.

The desire for recognition is a universal human trait. Fourth and short is the only play in the game where offensive linemen get to be the center of attention. Even the most fantasy league and Madden '10-besotted follower of football knows that on fourth and short, success hinges on the ability of the offensive behemoths to best the defensive behemoths in the stylized hand-to-hand combat for 18 inches of real estate that is the sport's essence. The increasing importance of passing has only heightened the linemen's fondness for going for it. At last, a chance to stop being a damned counterpuncher. We hit first!!

Given their druthers, coaches would go for it on fourth and short almost every time. Coaches are products of the game's culture, which celebrates risk-taking. They believe in accepting and confronting challenges as directly as possible (whether that's by nature or nurture is an issue for another post). They believe, as Bill Parcells said, "you always ought to be able to get one lousy yard."

But coaches also believe in their paychecks, and the costs of failing on fourth and short are very high. This has created a rough risk management mathematical model which states that teams are more likely to go for it the further away they are from their own goal line without reaching their field goal kicker's comfort zone.

So what are we to make of Bill Belichick's decision yesterday to have the Pats go for it yesterday from the New England 24, leading the Falcons by a one-possession margin of 16-10? In both reputation and fact Belichick is a dispassionate and careful risk manager, aware of football's situational probabilities out to the eighth numeral to the right of the decimal point. What possessed the coach to risk a failure that had an excellent shot at losing a lead, and perhaps a game?

My former colleague Tony Massarotti posited that Belichick was asserting leadership of a wayward offense. This is surely erroneous. It's only in politics where telling people to do something they're dying to do anyway counts as leadership.

Football's a simple game, although making it so can be a complex matter. Trying to read Belichick's mind shouldn't make us overthink the situation. Belichick decided to risk going for it on 4th and and short just outside his own red zone because in his judgment, there was no risk involved. The offensive line had already made the call for him.

The way I saw it, Belichick was delivering a pep talk in one phrase of playbook jargon gibberish. He was speaking directly to his offensive line and bragging on them in the process. Here's one man's translation of Belichick's decision, as heard by the behemoths in question.

"Men, you are kicking some serious ass out there today! I love it! Go out and show the whole world how you're doing it. Go out and show the Falcons they're not stopping us in this game!"

As noted, human beings like recognition. The Pats offensive line continued to kick ass, on the fourth and one and thereafter, and New England beat a talented team going away. How could it not? The Pats have flaws, but they also have soul, and no team with a soul could fail after any coach, let alone the reticent Belichick, made such a public expression of his faith in them -- one where the consequences of failure were his, not theirs.

Faith moves mountains, it is said. Dunno about that, but we have clinical evidence it can move defensive tackles back a few steps.