Closing Big Smoke Signals...

Sadly, I've decided to close this blog and move my sports-specific discussion to my personal blog, Guilty Displeasures. It's proven too difficult to maintain two blogs, (and, y'know, go to work and spend time with my family...) especially when it's proven equally difficult for the other contributors to do the same.

So, if you're reading here and not over there, please feel free to redirect yourself! (And we'll just cross our fingers and hope that this project can work some time in the future...)

Mocking the London Olympics' Opening Ceremonies

The Opening Ceremonies for the 2012 Olympics made all sorts of references to the children's literature that's been produced by British authors: Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, and Harry Potter were all rather prominent. But the book - or series of books, rather - that seemed to dominate the show was never actually referred to by name.

Take the landscape that opens the show, which looks something like this. The center of the stadium is filled with green, rolling fields, featuring a giant hill in the background. Idyllic, pastoral. It's Shire-like, even:

But then, after a bit of a show and speech, (by Kenneth Branagh!) the green burns away, smoking towers rise from the ground, and weary, dirty laborers replace the cheerful farmers-in-repose. It's supposed to dramatize the "progress" of the industrial revolution...

...instead, it looks ominous, even somewhat apocalyptic. I'm thinking less of industry and more of the orcs plundering Isengard. And though you can't really see it in this image, (you'll see it in the one immediately below) they're forging a ring in the center of the pillars.

Do I need to say it? We're looking at the heart of Mount Doom. (You've probably caught on by now, too - the English classic that goes unnamed, probably not even consciously invoked, but nonetheless haunts the ceremony is The Lord of the Rings. Apt, too, when you think about how needlessly expensive and exploitative these kinds of events tend to be!)

But we're not done yet! Because the Olympic flame is eventually raised, and it looks a little something like this.

"The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing."

Oh, yes. I went there.

Seriously, though, there was something vaguely terrifying about the entire process. How anyone could read the transformation of that adorable countryside into so much machinery-scarred Earth and smoke as anything other than a horror story... yeah, that's just confusing.

When 'giving it your all' is giving too much

In an all too predictable scene from last night's Blue Jays game, Brett Lawrie leaped over a guard-rail, Superman-like, to catch a fly ball in Yankee stadium, banging his leg on a smaller railing as he came crashing back to the Earth. (Not that it really matters, but he didn't make the catch.) It doesn't look particularly ugly at first. And then it does with the benefit of a slowed replay and a better angle:


 


To quote the YES network commentators, Lawrie is one of those guys who "gives it their all". And according to Kevin Kaduk with Yahoo Sports, Lawrie "came away with...the respect of those who happened to be watching". But from all the comments I've read, Dirk Hayhurst comes closest to hitting the nail on the head...:

If there is a phone call it will probably be to Gomes. Maybe Hachavarria. Lawrie is a victim of his own intense, all-out play, god bless him.
— Dirk Hayhurst (@TheGarfoose) July 18, 2012

Let's make sure that this is perfectly clear: it isn't a coincidence that Lawrie is both a guy who 'gives it his all' and that he hurt himself, nor should we bemoan how unfortunate it is that such an accident and injury would befall someone who plays so recklessly. (Much less pay him respect for doing so.) It is, in fact, entirely foreseeable, and the injury is the direct result of his overly-intense style of play. And it shouldn't be encouraged.

Because it was also entirely avoidable. What's lacking from the discourse surrounding the injury is any discussion of, frankly, Lawrie's stupidity. Jumping into a concrete camera bay - a concrete camera pit, no less, because it looks like it's recessed from field-level by about 2 feet - is an undeniably stupid thing to do. And we shouldn't lament his accident, praise his vigour, or give him our "respect" when he does things that are unnecessarily dangerous. Instead, we need to hold him accountable, because in hurting himself he also hurts his teammates.

I'll admit that this looks cool, but, seriously,
it's also just completely unnecessary. Photo by the AP.

It's customary, when players are accused of the opposite problem - of playing too lackadaisically, of not running-out a ground ball, not playing hard when the game isn't close - to bench them. (Sometimes, this strategy is misused - like when a player fails to run on a play that's an automatic-out 99% of the time in an 8-0 game. But, sometimes, it makes a lot of sense.) And Lawrie, as a result of his own carelessness, is very likely to miss a game or two. That's maybe something, a de facto suspension, if you will.

But I'm not sure that's good enough. Players get benched for hurting the team because they don't try hard enough - why not bench Lawrie because he hurt the team by trying too hard? (No, seriously.) For his own good, even. Because if someone isn't able to convince him that, occasionally, it's just fine to ease up, he's not going to be long for this sport. And that's bad news for anyone and everyone who's associated with or simply likes the Toronto Blue Jays

Irreverant sports blogging at its best

Over on Tom Tango's The Book blog, he recently posted a couple of links to the mid-season report cards at Lookout Landing, a Seattle Mariners blog. And he did this not because mid-season report cards are particularly informative or interesting - most of them are boring, unnecessary, and usually both - but because these specific report cards are. fucking. hilarious. Tango describes his writing thusly: "His takedowns are done in a good-natured way, not in a mean way.  He’s the baseball equivalent of Larry David.  And that’s a compliment to Larry David."

And he's right - this is amazing sports writing. So amazing, in fact, that I think even a non-fan can appreciate that this stuff is comic gold. Any of us who write about sports and are even occasionally clever or ironic - or just aspire to appearing to be clever - should probably take notes:

"The grades are also subjective, and I came up with them in two minutes, and if you disagree with any of them, you might consider paying less attention to these grades and more attention to your personal relationships which I can only imagine are actively deteriorating."

"[Franklin] Gutierrez came back from a long time off and was pretty good and then he got hit in the head by a pickoff throw that got by one of the most sure-handed first basemen in baseball. I'm not a believer in luck. Not at all, to the point where it actually irritates me when people act as if luck exists, and they either do or don't have it. It's nonsense and I can't stand ever setting foot within a casino. But if I had tickets to watch an archery competition, and I got to my seat, and I noticed Franklin Gutierrez was sitting one seat over, I would probably go home." [Neil: I actually laughed out loud at this one, which is always just a little bit embarrassing.]

"Strictly from a performance perspective, 71 pitchers have batted at least 20 times so far this year, and 20 of them have posted a higher slugging percentage than Munenori Kawasaki. Remember that extra-base hit that he lined? That was the one."

"Iwakuma's nickname is 'Kuma', or 'bear', and like a bear, he spent much of the previous few months hibernating. On the rare occasion he was awoken, he pitched like he was groggy and irritated. It's like the Mariners don't have the first idea how to handle a bear. They learned how to handle a moose."

"When healthy, [Shawn] Kelley's a guy who posts dominant ratios without ever feeling like a dominant pitcher, and for that reason he's probably doomed to a life of being under-appreciated. And a reliever in the major leagues bringing home piles and piles of money. I mean I guess he won't have the worst life."

Why I boo

At the risk of sounding totally miserable, I wanted to write a few notes about why I choose to boo some teams and athletes. I'm not sure that they're all good reasons, but I'm also not sure that they need to be.

Obnoxious Fans

Yankee fans! I have no idea where this picture is originally from...

For good or ill, this might actually be the number one factor that determines whether I come to hate a sports team. For instance, I can't stand the Yankees largely because of the fans they attract - people who think the team is entitled to a spot in the playoffs, to the best player available at the trade deadline, to the best free agents. And who pretend that the Yankees' ability to do these things with regularity is totally disconnected from political economy, and that it isn't a result of the team's absurd financial privilege. Similarly, I can't stand the teams that tend to attract fair-weather fans, even if it's really through no fault of their own. During the Euro Cup in Toronto, Italy and Portugal attracted droves of obnoxious, drunken jerks for no other reason than the 5 million bars and clubs that have moved into Little Italy and Little Portugal. But do I hold that behaviour against the teams? I sure do.

Favourites

Sad Tiger. Photo from Getty Images.

When I don't particularly care about a sport, I may actually have an interest in seeing the favourite play - if I'm going to watch something that I don't follow, it makes sense to see it played at the highest-level possible. But in most cases, I like to see favourite get bounced in favour of someone that's totally unheralded and/or unexpected. (Okay, so this has just as much to do with my love for the underdog. It still holds, though.) Also? I'm a big fan of watching hubris play out on the faces of professional athletes. (See: Woods, Tiger.)

Bad Owners/Stakeholders

Marlins' owner Jeffrey Loria, perhaps the most reviled man
in Montreal Expos' history. Photo by the Miami Marlins.

It's tough to like the Blue Jays when they're owned by the richest owners in baseball. And it's easy to hate teams when their owners, say, defend the use of Chief Wahoo (The Cleveland "Indians"), blame the fans for the team's lack of success (The Tampa Bay Rays), or manipulate the system and the local government in order to extract the most profit possible, with absolutely no intention of building a good team (The formerly Florida Marlins). Look: it's impossible to enjoy professional sport unless you're willing to accept that a bunch of old guys are becoming absurdly wealthy as a result. But the least we can ask is that they be honest and non-exploitative (well, less exploitative) about it, right?

Religious Right-wingers

Screen shot from C-SPAN, via Esquire.

A lot of people felt sorry for Albert Pujols when he got off to a terrible start this season. Not me. After learning that Pujols and Tony LaRussa attended a rally organized by Glenn Beck in 2010, I actually found myself hoping that his career would meet a swift end. (Of course, Pujols subsequently "explained" that he didn't know anything about the politics that were involved. Right.) Similarly, I instantly dislike anyone who insists that their performance has something to do with God's will, and isn't mostly random. (Because it is mostly random - that's why the L.A. Kings won the Stanley Cup.) And I dislike these sorts of athletes especially because they apply the standard so inconsistently - if, when they win, God wanted them to win, why is it that, when they lose, God never wanted them to lose? If winning is somehow proof that God approves of them, why is it that losing isn't taken to be proof of the opposite - that if God chose to make them losers, then he just doesn't like them very much?

Castor Semenya still has something to prove

Whenever I teach the flimsiness of biological sex definitions to undergraduate students, I approach it via international sport and the repeated failures of "sex-testing". (Well, actually, I start by asking the students explain how we "know" someone is a man or a woman, and then to subsequently explain how they "know" that I am a man.) I won't bore you with a history lesson - you can find some of that here, or a more detailed and interesting account in books written by people like Anne Fausto-Sterling. Suffice it to say, sex-testing has been such a disaster for international sport - from a human rights standpoint, from a PR standpoint, from a scientific standpoint, from a basic fairness standpoint - that the last Olympic venue to sex-test all of its athletes was Atlanta in 1996.

Why? The problem, if you're new to the study of sex and gender, is that there's no universal standard for what makes a woman a woman. According to New Scientist, the Olympics actually uses several experts from several fields, each with their own measures and definitions: "an endocrinologist, a gynaecologist, an internal medicine expert, an expert on gender and a psychologist". Obviously, then, it's not surprising that the system eventually broken down for lack of a single, satisfactory definition.

(International sport doesn't actually care if someone who's competing as a man is a woman, or if a man is a mutant, for that matter. Michael Phelps is an evolutionary wunderkind who would probably fail his sex test if he were a woman, if only because his body deviates so significantly from human norms that those deviations are bound to overlap with stuff we usually associate with sex characteristics. But he's not a woman, so no one cares how his natural ability to not create lactic acid impacts his sex.)

Is he a man? (Or is he a muppet? A muppet of a man?) Photo by Al Bello/Getty.

Now, that's not to say that sex-testing doesn't still happen - it does, and a few Olympic athletes have quietly failed their tests since 1996. But there's no more pretending that a single test (or even a series of tests) can adequately address the variety of sexes offered by human beings.

But that system, and its problems, only really came to light - and blew up - when Caster Semenya became a lightning rod for the discussion in 2009. You might remember her as the World Champion long-distance runner who, it was suspected, might "actually" be a man. Officially, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) was concerned that she might have a "rare medical condition" that gave her an unfair advantage. Nice euphemism.

(Returning to Phelps, again - strangely, no one has ever suggested that his "rare medical condition" is unfair, have they? And furthermore, don't you kinda have to have a "rare condition" of some physical sort or another in order to become an elite athlete in the first place? It's not like Usain Bolt is that fast only because he trains harder than everyone else, y'know?)

Athletics South Africa (ASA) would later admit that they had administered a sex-test without Semenya's knowledge. (And subsequently suppressed the results!) And the IAAF eventually agreed that Semenya's World Championship would stand, but said nothing about whether she would still qualify as a woman for future events. (At least, not until the next World Championship was nearly upon them.) Or, for that matter, what defined "woman" for their purposes.

Caster Semenya in 2010. Photo by Erik van Leeuwen.

Getting back to my gender class, though - recently, and in response to the whole Semenya thing, I've been telling my students that most sports orgs have acknowledged the problems inherent in sex-testing and dropped the tests altogether. And that's kind of true. (There have been allusions to "secret" investigations. Obviously, I can't say much about something that may or may not exist, and that no one is talking about regardless.) But what's happened, and it seems that no one really knew until a few weeks ago, is that sex-testing has reappeared in a new and unexpectedly backward way.

Given that they can't effectively police the borderlands between male and female, this year's Olympics will police one specific element of their bodies: their testosterone levels. From the Toronto Star:

recent rule changes by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body of track and field, state that for a woman to compete, her testosterone must not exceed the male threshold. If it does, she must have surgery or receive hormone therapy prescribed by an expert IAAF medical panel and submit to regular monitoring.

What. The. Fuck. Hormone therapy? "The male threshold"? Who decides what that "threshold" is, anyway? And if we can't define male, how do we even begin to go about defining its threshold level? I'm not sure if this is lunacy or idiocy.

“What’s been going on here, for over 50 years now, has been an attempt to modify and refine the rules so as to be fair but also to be scientifically accurate and appropriate,” says [IAAF endocrinologist Dr. Myron] Genel. “We’ll get it right.”

And as long as they think there's a "right" test out there, somewhere, we can be certain that they'll continue to get it wrong.

One last quote from the Toronto Star article, this one from Bruce Kidd, a Canadian sports policy adviser who links the needs to define "real woman" with some very old politics and opinions:

“It’s still the old patriarchal fear, or doubt, that women can do outstanding athletic performances. If they do, they can’t be real women. It’s that clear, it’s that prejudicial,”

Diving, crying, and the masculinity of international football

During either the last World Cup or the one prior to it, a soccer fan tried to recuperate the game for me on the basis that it valued a different kind of masculinity. He argued that my disdain for diving came from a particular kind of North American masculine ethic that valued 'sucking it up' and 'taking it like a man', where injury needs to be hidden rather than expressed. On that front, he was probably right. As critical as I might be of the self-destructive masochism that underlies the way boys are taught to play sports, I also slip into it very easily - in the last two years, I've finished games in which I've broken a bone in my foot and bruised my ribs. (Not in the same game, mind you.)

The kind of masculinity being performed on the pitch, he suggested, was a much more theatrical one that didn't shy away from being emotive and demonstrative, even hysterical. I'm not exactly convinced, because I'm not sure that's exploiting/celebrating an injury or an opponent's miscue - because, technically, a foul is incurred if a player touches his opponent before touching the ball, but the kind of foul is often dependent on how dramatically the fouled player goes down - is really all that laudable. Or, for that matter, that the kind of demonstration required of a dive is something we want to encourage:

This dive is actually pretty hilarious - not only is he leaping, whilst ostensibly
being tripped, but he did so well before the contact (which didn't happen)
could have happened.. No credit available.

I was reminded of how much dives annoy me during Euro 2012, when a player in one of the closing Group round matches (I think it was during England-Ukraine, but I don't actually remember...) was touched - arguably, he was also lightly pushed - on the shoulder and collapsed in a heap, grimacing and clutching his lower back. Amazingly, this dive was so egregious and shameless that it was also one of the rare instances where the commentators saw fit to criticize its obviousness.

That said, Euro 2012 has also reminded me that some good comes with the bad, and that this freedom to emote also means that players are able to behave in ways like this:

Polish players after their elimination from Euro 2012.
Photo from European Pressphoto Agency.

Unlike nearly every major American team sport, soccer players routinely cry - tears of joy, tears of frustration - after games. And with the possible exception of players who are known to dive - like Cristiano Ronaldo - no one makes a particularly big deal out of it. It's treated as if it's normal and natural. Because, well, it is.

I'm not sure if that's enough to balance my hate for diving. But it's something.

Is the Blue Jays' new draft strategy cause for celebration?

On Monday, Major League Baseball (MLB) held its (oddly in-season) amateur draft. This has become an important annual event for Blue Jays fans, who have had more to cheer for at the draft (because the team has spent buckets of money to purchase talented players other cost-conscious teams have shied away from) than during the rest of the season itself (since the Jays have not spent on the free agents that might have pushed them to contention). Sadly, this year, even this small pleasure has been snatched from us with the revised rules to the MLB draft that limit the amount teams are allowed to spend on players. Or so I thought. In fact, Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopolous seems to have found a sneaky way around these pesky rule changes.

The devilish little fan version of myself masquerading as a Blue Jay perched on my shoulder tells me (chirps to me?) that I should be delighted by the new Blue Jays draft strategy. Has Anthopolous found a new market inefficiency ? Is drafting college seniors and then paying them a fraction of what MLB says they should get for their draft slot--in order to conjure enticingly over-slot offers for high-upside high school seniors--not exactly the sort of wizardry a fan should celebrate? Well, yes... and no.

Alex Anthopoulos. Photo from The Score.

This is why the fan on my shoulder has a distinctly satanic quality: over and over again, fandom produces and legitimises behaviour that would (I hope) otherwise be viewed as unethical. In this case, as it so often does, the fan lens conveniently transforms human, labouring athletes into objects that can be manipulated by a team towards the goal of winning. College seniors who want to play professional baseball have no choice when confronted by a low-ball offer but to accept it (unlike high school players or college juniors, who may reject the offer and re-enter the draft in a subsequent year). This means that they will labour for the team--risking debilitating injury--for an even lower wage than they previously would have received. These are precisely the sort of professional athletes who put the lie to the notion that athletes should not be seen as exploited given their multi-million dollar wages. Most professional athletes will have careers, like these college seniors, which pay little and leave them with damaged bodies.

In a sense, the Blue Jays have found a way to twist a system engineered to improve equity between teams of varying market sizes (previously, big market team paid big bucks to sign high-upside players with later draft picks who fell to them because poorer teams feared being unable to sign those players) into one that is even more inequitable for the players themselves. Top prospects will continue to reap huge signing bonuses, only now, this money will come from the pockets of other players instead of the coffers of mega-corporations. 

Clearly, this is a structural problem with the MLB slotting system more than an insidious product of Anthopolous' imagination. Nevertheless, as a human agent with considerable power, the Blue Jays GM has the ability to treat these young men right. That he won't is little cause for celebration.

Do the LA Kings deserve to be playing for the Stanley Cup?

My biggest pet peeve about the NHL is how they count Over-Time Losses (OTL) as points in the standings. No other major North American sport does this - baseball doesn't award points for going to extra-innings, basketball doesn't for over-time. (It might actually make some sense in the NFL, considering how flukey their over-time can be and how much your chances hinge on the coin-toss, even considering the rule changes that they made last year.) I prefer the simplicity and honesty of just counting wins and losses, and have never really understood arguments to the contrary. If the game only ever resolves in a win or a loss, then that's all you should count.

The 2006 St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series. But if extra-inning losses
counted for a half-win, they wouldn't have even made the playoffs. Photo by Elsa/Getty.

(Some sport leagues - I think that the IIHF does this - count extra-time losses as a single point but deduct those points from a regulation win - which is worth three - so the extra-time win is worth two points, which addresses another one of my pet peeves. Namely, that the NHL has some 2 point games and some 3 point games, and so you need to do some serious math to determine whether a team is even .500. [Note: after looking it up, the break-even point was 91 points, this year.] But while I'm not particularly fond of the standardized 3 point game approach, it's definitely an improvement.)

Whether you like the extra point or not, Tyler Dellow points out that the OTL point produces some really annoying effects, most of which you would think the NHL would not be too keen to encourage:

• This past season, 29 of 30 teams played more defensively (as defined by their share of total shots taken, known as a Fenwick score) when staked to a one or two goal lead to start the 3rd period. And the defensive-shell is a terribly boring strategy to witness.
• In those games, the 3rd period ended tied more than 50% more often than random distribution would normally predict. This time, we see that both teams play more defensively in the final 10 minutes of a tie-game, which, again, is boring.
• Bad teams benefit disproportionately from the extra OTL point. So, it increases the chances that a poor team will make the playoffs or win their division over a stronger team.

That said, amazingly, the OTL rarely factors in to the process of determining who makes the playoffs. It often affects where teams are seeded, but somehow the 8 teams with the most wins in the conference nearly always manage to be the 8 teams that make the playoffs. And considering that it would usually only affect the last seed, who is usually eliminated in the first round, again, it's not a big deal. But this year, it factored in a big way.

Sure, this guy has a lot to do with why the L.A. Kings are in the Finals.
But so do the NHL's rules. Photo by Stephen Dunn/Getty.

Not only were the L.A. Kings the 8th seed in the standings, but there were two teams with better win-loss records that didn't make the playoffs because L.A. had more Over-Time Losses.

Rank

Team

Div

G  W

L OTL GF GA PTS

8	Los Angeles Kings	PA	82	40	27	15		194	179	95
8.5
9	Calgary Flames	NW	82	37	29	16		202	226	90
10	Dallas Stars	PA	82	42	35	5		211	222	89
11	Colorado Avalanche	NW	82	41	35	6		208	220	88

Both Dallas and Colorado won more games than L.A. So, by my reckoning of "fairness", the team that currently leads the Stanley Cup Finals two games to none - the team that is likely to win the Stanley Cup - shouldn't have even qualified for the playoffs! (There's a caveat, here, though. Dellow's research indicates that teams play for the tie, presumably because of the promise of that guaranteed point. If that guarantee were removed, then many fewer games would have gone to overtime, and it's possible that L.A. would have won some of them in regulation, as a result.)

There's a kooky twist to this story, though, which is that, somehow, the NHL playoff format managed to make a mistake that - by chance, not design - produced a better result. You can see from that tiny selection of the final standings that, based on goal-differential, the Kings probably are a better team than either the Stars or Avalanche - they outscored their opponents by 30 more goals than Dallas or Colorado. As I recall, a Win (in terms of Wins Above Replacement) is equivalent to five goals or so, so that means that L.A. is "actually" six wins better than those teams - a huge margin, especially considering that they posted more wins than L.A. So, the win-loss record might not show that, but it's pretty clear - L.A. was definitely an above-average team and the other two were not.

In fact, if you look at the full standings you can see that the Kings' success is not quite as surprising at might have initially seemed. They had the 6th best goal differential in the West (only a couple of goals behind San Jose) and 11th best in the NHL. (New Jersey, their Cup Final opponents? 9th best.) Not a great team - and it's still a huge surprise that they bumped off both Vancouver and St. Louis, who had much better teams - but not a bad team either.

Ironically, then, the L.A. Kings probably weren't good enough to make the playoffs, but they're certainly good enough to play in them.

Errors in baseball: fix them, or just end them

We're in the fourth inning of today's Blue Jays game, and already there have been four difficult scoring-decisions that have perhaps all been called incorrectly:

1. 2nd inning: A fly ball to CF is misplayed by a lightly-jogging Colby Rasmus, landing in front and slightly behind him. But he doesn't touch it until after it bounces once. It's called a hit.
2. 3rd inning: A short-hopping line-drive - an absolute screamer- is hit directly at shortstop Mike Aviles. He misplays it and it hits his throwing hand. He recovers in time to make a throw to 2B, but it's too late to get the runner. It's called an error.
3. 4th inning: A fliner is hit off the wall in RF. Jose Bautista plays it on the rebound, quickly double-pumps and throws to 2B. The throw isn't in time and the ball lands directly in front of Yunel Escobar, who misses it completely. Neither the 3B, Brett Lawrie, or the P, Kyle Drabek, is correctly positioned to back-up the throw and it goes past both of them, allowing the batter to advance to 3B. The throw is called an error, which means that the error is given to Bautista.
4. 4th inning: A bouncing come-backer is hit to the pitcher. He jumps and knocks it down with his glove, causing it to bounce directly in front of him. He reaches out to bare-hand the ball after the first bounce, but this time it bounces off of his hand and rolls away. It's called an error.

Of the three calls, the only one that I would have definitely made myself is #2. It doesn't matter how hard the ball is hit or if it skips slightly to one side or another off the short-hop - if it's hit directly at you, then the expectation is that you must field it. [Update: Ha! In the 5th inning, they changed the ruling on this one to a base-hit. Hilarious that they would change the only one that I was confident they had gotten right.]

I can't make a call on #4 without seeing where the other fielders were positioned. If the shortstop is in position to field the ball, provided that the pitcher doesn't touch it, then it's an error; if it was likely to go up the middle, then the leaping pitcher probably shouldn't be given an error.

#3 is a bit of a strange one. The throw wasn't ideal, but Escobar erred in staying on the bag when the batter was going to be safe. He probably should have conceded the base and taken two steps forward to play the throw in the air. Likewise, the advance to 3B doesn't happen if either Lawrie or Drabek are covering the throw, so they've also erred. (Amazingly, then, the error was given to the one player who did the best job on the play.) There's an argument to be made, here, for one of two things: breaking with convention and somehow giving an error to all three of Escobar, Lawrie, and Drabek, or giving an error to the team but not to a particular player.

#1 is just dumb. The convention, again, is that it's not an error if an outfielder misses a fly ball, provided that he doesn't touch it until after it bounces. Regardless of why, though, Rasmus overran the ball and needs to be penalized for that. (Again, hilariously, he would've received an error if he had overrun it by a smaller margin and managed to just touch a small part of the ball. Like I said, dumb.)

An old photo of Rasmus dropping the ball for the Cardinals. Timeless.
Photoshopped by (or, at least, posted to) StL Cardinal Baseball.

But back to example #3. I've seen the team error suggested before, and it makes perfect sense, here, where the fault lies with at least three players, maybe four, and the error doesn't happen if only one of them does his job properly. The rules don't allow for that recognition, which is a shame - but it's also something that could be easily corrected, if anyone cared.

Or, conversely, they could just do away with the errors, and these attendant headaches, altogether. All there really good for is determining which runs are earned or not, anyway, and entire articles have been written about why ERA is misleading (because it even deems some HR unearned, which is madness and because ERA makes groundball pitchers look better than they are, to name just two reasons) and Reached-On-Error isn't random, but a repeatable skill at inducing errors by fielders (as demonstrated by the career-ROE leaders, whom tend to hit groundballs and are really fast runners).

Not that I expect either of those things to happen, of course.

Joey Bats follow-up: It looks like the time to worry is over

A month ago, I blogged about Jose Bautista's awful April, and asked what went wrong and whether it was reasonable to expect a rebound. You can click on the link for the full details, but I concluded with this reasonably optimistic sentence: "For what it's worth, this looks to me like a problem with discipline and patience - something that Bautista has been shown to have in spades."

May Bautista will smash April Bautista. Or wants to fly like an eagle.
Photo by Jim Mone/AP

It's probably a bit unfair and not entirely telling to compare April and May in order to see whether I was right - I'm comparing one rather small sample to another, after all - but let's look anyway. So, how did Bautista fare in May as compared to April?

	Month	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	ISO	BABIP	BB%	K%	wOBA	wRC+
2011	---	655	0.302	0.447	0.608	0.306	0.309	20.2%	16.9%	0.441	181
2012	April	103	0.181	0.320	0.313	0.133	0.171	15.5%	11.7%	0.288	78
2012	May	120	0.257	0.342	0.552	0.295	0.247	10.8%	20.0%	0.382	143

It's not even close, actually. In April, Bautista was a replacement-level hitter; in May, he was a star. His 143 wRC+ makes him the 35th best hitter in MLB over the course of that month, and on the season he's a respectable 60th out of 160 qualified batters. Interestingly, too, his numbers in May are right around what was being predicted for him by the major forecasting systems in 2011, following his first monster year in 2010.

So, the power has come back - Bautista belted 9 homers in May, tying him with Edwin Encarnacion for 8th most - as you can see from his Isolated Power number being almost exactly what it was in 2011. And his BABIP is much closer to what it was in 2010, which accounts for why the batting average is around his career mark and not his 2011 number.

There are still two worrisome numbers, though - his walk-rate, while still good, has absolutely cratered. But Bautista hasn't walked as little as he did in May since his second season in MLB, which makes me think it's a bit of a fluke. And his K-rate has risen to above career-average territory, which is all the more surprising because it has been around 17% for the last two years. But, really, that's only a difference of 4 strike-outs over the course of a month.

	Month	PA	GB/FB	LD%	GB%	FB%	IFFB%	HR%
2011	---	655	0.79	16.0%	36.9%	47.0%	15.2%	22.5%
2012	April	103	0.88	15.1%	39.7%	45.2%	21.2%	9.1%
2012	May	120	0.76	18.3%	35.4%	46.3%	21.1%	23.7%

The higher May BABIP seems to be a result of more line-drives; the fact that it's still rather low, though, would seem to be explained by the fact that he's still hitting infield flies at an alarming rate. Last time, I suggested that the problem, here, might be that he's not quite getting around fast enough on high fastballs. That might still be a problem - though less of one, obviously, because the home run-rate is back to last year's level.

	Month	PA	FB	SL	CB	wFB
2011	---	655	50.3%	17.6%	11.3%	30.7
2012	April	103	59.6%	15.5%	6.9%	-0.7
2012	May	120	49.2%	15.3%	10.1%	3.4

Here's where we start to find an explanation for these numbers, too. Bautista is seeing fewer fastballs, but hitting them much better than he was before. (Not nearly as well as the last two years, mind you, but back into 'excellent fastball hitter' territory.) He's also seeing more curveballs, cutters, and change-ups. This has me wondering if the pitch-selection in April suffered from some sort of selection-bias - if the Jays were simply seeing a lot of pitchers who through a lot of fastballs. Because you would think that Bautista's struggles in April, and the recent development of batting Encarnacion behind him, would lead to more fastballs, not fewer.

	Month	PA	Con%	Zone%	O-Sw%	Z-Sw%	Swing%	O-Con%	Z-Con%
2011	---	655	79.3%	44.4%	21.2%	57.9%	37.5%	64.2%	86.3%
2012	April	103	80.4%	47.4%	25.3%	54.7%	39.3%	77.2%	82.0%
2012	May	120	83.2%	39.8%	26.0%	55.6%	37.8%	71.6%	90.5%

And now we're back to the zone and contact numbers - which, I'll remind everyone, stabilize a lot faster than any of the other stats we've looked at.

Amazingly, while Bautista is striking out twice as much and walking much less than in April, he's also seeing fewer pitches in the strike-zone and swinging less often - he's back near his norm from the last two years, actually. And his contact rate has actually gone up. Those are really strange numbers to see in combination, and I can only assume that he's seen a really abnormal number of called third-strikes.

The O-Swing number have, unfortunately, not changed a bit. And the Z-Swing number has barely changed. So, while pitchers have clearly approached him differently in May, Bautista hasn't actually changed his approach. The difference, though, seems to be in his contact-rates - he's missing more often on outside pitches (which is a good thing) and making contact more often on strikes (which is also a good thing). What's unclear, though, is whether those contact rates are the result of April's bad luck regressing to the mean or the result of Bautista doing something differently.

So, the end result is this: in May, pitchers returned to pitching Bautista like they did last year, and they've paid for it. Bautista continues to swing much like he did in April, but both his O- and Z-Contact rates have swung dramatically in his favour.

On the plus-side: Given his history - and the fact that May aligns far better with his 2010-11 numbers than does April - it would seem to me that the May Bautista is the one we'd expect to see the rest of the way.

On the minus-side: His swing and contact profile, while improved, still look markedly different from 2010-11. (Well, they look somewhat like 2010, but not much like 2011.) It's looking increasingly likely that that Bautista won't re-emerge.

Reacting to 'While the Men Watch'

I meant to talk about this a long time ago - and now it's really late - but I'm also sure that lots of people haven't seen this.

So, CBC's Hockey Night in Canada has teamed up with While the Men Watch, an "online broadcast" meant to be listened to as an alternative to the regular (ie. "men's") hockey commentary. And, yes, it's schtick and it's tongue-in-cheek. As the site explains, "Lena and Jules...follow their 'boyfriends of the game', interview special guests, and analyze the road to the Stanley Cup in a whole new way." The 'About' page on their site also describes their webcast as "Sex in the City meets ESPN."

Lena Sutherland and Jules Mancuso.
Although I don't actually know which is which. From their website.

I don't actually find this objectionable. No, seriously, it's cool that someone is doing something like this. Standard sports commentary is generally bad, and I think it's great that people are creating - and  successfully - alternatives to it. Something kitschy and comic and a little absurd? Something playful, that pokes fun at how seriously we take sports? Sounds great.

What sucks, of course, is how it's being marketed, both by the CBC and by the women themselves: as a show "for women", and opposed to what "the men watch". That kind of dualistic framing - all the men onside with the boring, standard broadcast and traditional sports discourse; all the women onside with this gently mocking one - is unhelpful and more than a little insulting. The implication that women must not like sports and don't want to watch it or discuss it on the same terms as men? (Or that men, themselves, must all enjoy sports in only this way?) That's dumb and displays a shocking lack of awareness of their audience, not to mention a lack of respect for the women who are already a part of it. And CBC's pandering to non-fans at the expense - and to the injury - of existing female fans? Well, that could just as easily leave them with no fans.

And, I should add, it makes me not want to listen to this particular webcast. Which is a shame, because this is exactly the kind of thing that sports needs to see more of. (Well, more of the model they're following, that is. Maybe not more of this particular brand.)

"The Catch", 2012 edition

Some moments in sport defy description and render analysis redundant, if not totally unnecessary. For instance, this.

100% not photoshopped. Photo by Bill Wanger/The Daily News

If you want to see the video, which is equally impressive, you can find it at the end of this article.

Leafs should "take a lesson"? Which one is that, now?

Sometimes, I just hate sports writing. If you're going to write a headline that says a team needs to "take a lesson" from their peers - and, granted, Dave Feschuk wrote the article but probably didn't write the headline - then there should probably be a clear and intelligible lesson to be taken somewhere in the story. And it shouldn't be one that's contrary to observed results.

Ostensibly, this is a story about how teams in the Stanley Cup playoffs will sacrifice their body to block shots with reckless abandon. And - again, ostensibly - this is a good thing because it's all defense-first teams among the final four, and none of the league's top ten goal-scoring teams made that same list of four. (Let's ignore, of course, the fact that the teams with the 1st and 4th best defense from the regular season are not among those final four, either. And that one of them didn't even make it past the first round.) Of course, the quantitative sports-analyst in me would like some kind of evidence of increased shot-blocking - it seems to me that every round of every playoff, at least since I began paying attention ten years ago, is filled with shot-blocking. But, hey, it's a story and not quite aspiring to be a full analysis, so I can let that slide. He says that shot-blocking would appear to be key to success, and who am I to argue?

Hockey's most exciting play - the blocked-shot! Photo by Mike Segar/Reuters

But, wait. Some of the data that Feschuk does report seems to be at odds with his own story, because 8 of the top 11 teams in shot-blocking during the regular season didn't even make the playoffs. So, there goes that theory that it's all about defense. Or that it's all about shot-blocking, anyway. So, what "lesson" are the Leafs supposed to take from this? Because if your hook is that flimsy, you should probably look for another hook.

It seems that Feschuk went for the shot-blocking angle, at least in part, because his source for every quote in the piece is from Dave Poulin, the Maple Leafs' VP of Hockey Operations. And Poulin, at least in this conversation, really wants to talk about shot-blocking. (Well, a lot of people want to talk about it, probably because we don't have more players punching each other in the face and whatnot.)

Yep, shot-blocking wasn't invented only this year. Though, admittedly,
I'm a bit freaked out by the lack of a helmet. Photo by Ian Lindsay.

But why not challenge Poulin on the veracity of his argument, or on some of the other slightly nonsensical stuff that he has to say? (If only to make it a better story?) Here's a quote with holes so big that if it were featured on Hole in the Wall, you'd beat it every time.

“If you took the first round of the playoffs and compared it to the first half of the season, it’s totally different hockey,” Poulin said. “You’re almost thinking, ‘Do we have to have a team (designed) for the regular season, and a totally different team built for the playoffs?’ It was that dramatically different.”

The answer to his question, of course, is a resounding "no". I don't how a person employed as a VP of Hockey Operations could even ask that. (Except, I guess, if he were doing it rhetorically. Or if he were playing devil's advocate. But he's not. He's being totally sincere.) In spite of the fact that the Vancouver Canucks, the regular season's best team, were knocked out in the first round and the St. Louis Blues in the second, these playoffs still feature two division-winners and the best team from the Eastern Conference. And a number one seed gets knocked out in the first round every other year, on average. It's really not that weird.

And let's look at recent history - while only two of the past 10 Cup winners have also been the NHL's best team in the regular season, another three were the second-seed and only one of those 10 teams (last year's Bruins) weren't among the top four teams in their own conference. (The other four were fourth-seeds, but in the NHL's seeding system that typically means that they also had the second- or third-best record in the conference.) The correlation is pretty clear, I think - you need to be one of the best regular-season teams in order to have a decent shot at the Cup.

Not that you'd know that if you read this story in the Toronto Star, though. Argh.

Live-Blogging the Blue Jays Broadcast: Game 42

[I'm starting this one a bit late, and missed most of the first inning!]

 
1st inning

Pat: "Batters are hitting over .500 against [Dillon Gee] when they swing at the first pitch."

There are all sorts of problems with this statement. First, Pat means to say that they're hitting over .500 when they put it play or hit it out of the park. That number doesn't account for instances where the batter misses or fouls the ball off. Also, only 15 at bats vs. Gee have been resolved on the first pitch. That's hardly evidence of, well, anything.


2nd inning

Buck: "The Mets, by starting the runner, stay out of the double-play."

One of my pet peeves about Buck and Pat is how they never critique the decision to hit-and-run. The problem with hit-and-run is that it's often a bad idea - it forces the batter to swing at pitches that he wouldn't otherwise swing at, and to take slapping contact-swings rather than full, proper ones. (It's tough to prove, mind you, but the general consensus is that it's a toss-up, at best. And that the degree to which it is a good idea depends, substantially, on the quality of the base-runner.)

Buck: "[Henderson Alvarez]'s a little rushed. He's always quick to the plate."

Alvarez has been averaging more than 20 seconds between pitches this year. That's above average, but only by a second or two. (Among starting pitchers, he's almost exactly average.)

Buck: "I think there are more good teams in the American League than in the National League right now."

I'm not sure that's an "I think" situation - you can pretty easily prove it. Buck went on to talk about win-loss records, which makes no sense - prior to Interleague play, which began on Friday, the leagues had only played amongst themselves, so the overall record in each league would be .500.

Buck: [after Gee throws a first-pitch breaking ball] "Gee picked up that the Blue Jays are looking to ambush on the first pitch."

That's probably a good read. He just watched a rookie hit a liner off a first-pitch fastball, so it's reasonable for him to assume that they're looking for it. (Also, his fastball is terrible. So, the Jays should look for it.)


3rd inning

Buck: [in reference to a chart that shows the Blue Jays have the best starters' ERA in the AL] "We mentioned how well the starting pitching has been playing. ... The Blue Jays also have 19 starter wins. They're tied with Texas for second."

The weird thing, first, is that they're graphic shows a 3.33 ERA for starters, while Fangraphs says 3.16. Dunno what accounts for that difference. 

But this is an interesting topic, because those same pitchers - who have the best ERA in the AL and 4th best in the Majors - have posted a very bad FIP: at 4.49, it's 11th in the AL 26th overall. (SIERA says 24th; tERA says 25th/) So, that's a huge disagreement between ERA and the advanced metrics. Usually, the numbers are quite close - only one other team has a 1.00 difference, and the numbers are quite close for most teams - which implies that the Jays' fielding has been exceptional (which is another interesting argument), that their pitchers are amazing with runners on base (which has been shown to be very rare for individual pitchers, much less a whole team), or that they've been very, very lucky. My guess? When all the metrics say this starting staff if below-average and should have an ERA over 4.00, we're probably going to see a regression to that range over the rest of the season.


4th inning

Buck: "Nick Markakis and Adam Jones have been doing a great job."

Markakis - .258/.335/.440, for a 118 wRC+ - has been better than I thought, though not especially "great". That's basically how he's compared to league-average through his entire career, which is "good" but nothing amazing. (Considering, especially, that the most common assessment of Markakis is that he's failed to live up to his potential.) Impossible to argue with his observation about Adam Jones, though.

Buck: "[Kelly Johnson]'s predominately a pull-hitter."

But the graphic they showed seemed to be saying the opposite - less than 40% of his balls-in-play were pulled, which is equal to the number of hits to center. Actually, I have no idea what that graphic was actually showing - it showed 36 balls in play, but Johnson has put more than 100 balls in play. Weird. I can only guess that it was actually fly balls plus non-fly home runs. (Assuming that three of those homers were classified as line-drive and not flies.) That actually makes it seem like he's even less of a pull-hitter, then, since hitters tend to pull in the air and put balls on the ground when they push.


5th inning


Buck: "What makes Wright such a good hitter?"
Pat: "...A good RBI-man."

Good RBI-man means that he always hits 3rd in the line-up, where even an average hitter is virtually a lock for 90 RBI if he plays every day. That said, Wright fell well short of 90 in 2009, and would have only had roughly that many RBI last year, if your project to fill the time he was injured. (To be fair, though, the Mets were absolutely terrible on offense in 2009. But Buck and Pat don't talk about how important "opportunity" is to racking up RBI. As everyone who reads about RBI would know, RBI are almost entirely a product of a) the quality of the hitter, regardless, and b) how many base-runners you have.)


Hmm... Buck and Pat just don't seem to be saying anything, anymore. Probably, in part, this is because the Jays are losing 6-2 and don't seem to be doing much on offense. I may just graciously bow-out right now and promise to stick with it next time...

The logic of baseball suspension length, or lack thereof

First, a disclaimer: This blog is not going to turn into the Brett Lawrie Blog, Sometimes Covering Other Topics. (Even though, right now, it might seem that is!)

Second, an additional disclaimer: I have been harshly critical of Lawrie in the two posts that I've devoted almost entirely to him. I'm not certain that I would like him much in conversation, but I actually do really enjoy watching him play. He's exciting to watch, in part because he's already a good player and in part because he's always putting in maximum effort. The enthusiasm he displays in every moment is, I think, unparalleled in baseball, and you can feel it rubbing off on the rest of the team. And the series of handshakes that he's designed with each of his teammates are ridiculous, but in a good way.

But, the guy who seems to pull off something like every second game...

...is the same guy who did this a couple days ago.

Understandably, he was suspended. Because as much as we all want, to put it euphemistically, to lose our shit when a call doesn't go our way - and, in fact, it was two consecutive blown calls that led to Lawrie's "Hulk Smash!" explosion - it was a terrible idea. (I know that the Pitch F/X data that's been circulating suggests that the pitch barely missed an inch high, but their range makes no sense. I can't imagine any umpire calling a pitch that's more than 3 and a half feet high a strike, much less against a 6 foot tall hitter who's a half foot shorter in his stance.)

The culture of the game is to blame, too, of course. Players and umpires are all but encouraged to get in each other's faces and scream. The system by which umpires are evaluated and made accountable for their mistakes are entirely opaque. And it should be very easy to develop a program that can call balls and strikes with better accuracy. Baseball has made no effort to address any of those things.

So, what I wanted to look at is where the punishment - four games - fits in relation to other suspensions, across various sports. In part, I want to see whether there's a consistent logic applied within baseball and across various sports; in part, and assuming that there is some consistency, I want to see if Lawrie's punishment fits it. Following from this starting point, then, I pulled together this list.

• 1 game (<1% of season) - Bobby Bonilla, 2001 (slapping another player)
• 2 games (1%) - Milton Bradley, 2009 (bumping an umpire)
• 2 games (1%) - Marlon Anderson, 2007 (throwing helmet toward home plate)
• 2 games (1%) - Lance Berkamn, 2007 (throwing equipment on field)
• 2 games (1%) - Roberto Alomar, 2005 (throwing glove in direction of umpire)
• 3 games (2%) - Jonathan Papelbon, 2011 (bumping an umpire)
• 3 games (2%) - Burke Badenhop, 2009 (hitting Orlando Hudson with a pitch, after a warning)
• 3 games (2%) - Albert Belle, 1993 (charging the mound after being hit by pitch)
• 4 games (2.5%) - Brett Lawrie, 2012
• 4 games (2.5%) - Moises Alou, 1995 (participating in bench-clearing brawl)
• 5 games (3%) - Cole Hamels, 2012 (hitting Bryce Harper with a pitch)
• 5 games (3%) - Yadier Molina, 2011 (bumping an umpire, with incidental spit)
• 5 games (3%) - Josh Beckett, 2009 (intentionally throwing near Bobby Abreu's head)
• 5 games (3% ) - Roberto Alomar, 1996 (intentionally spitting on umpire) 
• 50 games (35%) - Delmon Young [International League], 2006 (throwing bat at umpire)
• Banned for life - Jose Offerman [Dominican Winter League], 2010 (punching umpire in face)

The first thing that's made clear, here, is that baseball treats violence (and the threat of violence) against players and umpires differently. Charging the mound with your fist cocked is given the same punishment as bumping the beak of your hat against the umpires forehead. The distinction makes sense, though; you need to allow for the possibility that things will get heated between opponents, but you can't allow players to think they can intimidate the officials. (I've also heard the legal argument - of "assumed risk" - that says baseball players concede implicitly that the job is potentially violent and injurious, while umpires do not.)

Jose Offerman charging the mound in a AAA game. He hit the catcher
in the head and give him a career-ending concussion. Is that "assumed risk"?
No photo credit available.

Second, baseball has been all over the place with the lengths of its suspensions. There are three different suspension lengths for three different umpire-bumping incidents, and Yadier Molina's bump-and-spit combo (where I'm probably being generous with "incidental" spit) got the exact same length as Alomar's unmistakably intentional spit 15 years ago. There should probably be some sort of standard here, but there clearly isn't. About the only thing that they can agree on is that pitchers should get about five games if they admit, or are proven, to have hit a batter intentionally. But this has less to do with how the infraction compares to other forms of violence than it does to the fact that starting pitchers only play once every five days.

And here are the comparisons to some recent rulings in other sports leagues.

• 20 games (24% of the season) - rulebook suspension for intentionally tripping a referee [NHL]
  
• 25 games (30% of the season*) - Raffi Torres [NHL], 2012 (blindside check to Marian Hossa w/head contact)
  
• 15 games (39% of the season) - Dani Benitez [La Liga], 2012 (throwing water bottle at referee)

* the NHL's playoffs, like the NBA's, are so long and include so many teams that it's probably not fair to assign a percentage

The soccer suspension is completely out of whack with anything else that I've ever seen. It's actually maybe the nearest to the Lawrie incident, insofar as both throws seemed to be expressive of frustration and not an intent to injure. On the other hand, Benitez was trying to hit a referee, while Lawrie threw his helmet with such force that the possibility of accidental injury was greater (though still small). But that length is just nutty. And I've included the Raffi Torres incident in order to illustrate, again, the difference in punishments when we're talking players vs. officials. And while the NHL isn't anywhere near La Liga, when it comes to punishing players who lash out at referees, I think it's fair to say that they both take is a lot more serious than baseball does.

I don't have any solid conclusion to end with. Even though baseball's punishments appear to have no strict system of application, they're all so short (mostly between two and five games) that it's difficult to argue that Lawrie's suspension is surprising or inconsistent with past practice. The real question, though, might be whether baseball's practice is a good one, because Lawrie's actions would certainly earn him a longer suspension in either the NHL or La Liga. But that's something that all of baseball would need to start thinking about.

Round Table #1: Josh Beckett's back-injury and golf

[Context: Two weeks ago, Josh Beckett was scratched from a start due to back-tightness. Last week, it was revealed that he subsequently went golfing. In his own defense, Beckett explained that he often golfs on off-days and it's never been an issue before. For those keeping track, Beckett was also the reputed "leader" of the group of Red Sox at the center of last season's drinking-beer-in-the-clubhouse-during-games controversy.]

Photo by Jeff Haynes, Reuters

Derek:

Insofar as Beckett's pursuit of (drinking and) golf interferes with his job, it is assuredly a problem.  I mean, if golf (and/or alcohol) interfered with my job, I'd be fired and Beckett makes far more money (for a far less meaningful 'job').

That said, proving that his baseball troubles stem from disinterest and/or distraction is another matter entirely.  Thus, the converse also holds: insofar as they are not interfering with his ability to do his job, the public outcry is potentially unfair.  More often than not claims of disinterested play seem to come about in bi-directional fashion (see Yunel Escobar).  That is, teams with rules/standards/practices that don't connect well with a given player's demeanour (much like management disconnect from staff in many workplaces) fails to generate a substantial return on investment.  Often when struggles arrive, press, fans, managers grasp at straws:  Beckett is struggling at baseball while golfing a lot, therefore golf must be the problem.

However, Josh has every right to golf and perhaps we should simply stop at the first clause ("Beckett is struggling at baseball.")  Golf, alcohol, personal problems aside, when most players struggle to this degree changes are made (trades, demotions, placed in bullpen or on DL, etc) but it seems to me that placing the blame on Beckett's non-baseball activities does little to resolve the problem.

Photo by Jim Rogash, Getty

 
Nathan:

It is tempting to unite with Boston fans and media in indicting Josh Beckett for playing golf during the season, particularly on the heels of last year's chicken and beer fiasco. After all, pro athletes like Beckett make a relative fortune playing a game many of us pay to play in our leisure time. Tempting as it might be, however, it isn't fair.

The disciplinary structure of high performance sport instructs athletes to understand their bodies as machines. That is, it encourages a dualistic approach that separates the mind from the body and positions the latter as inferior and thus subordinate to the former. This is an instrumental approach to the body that makes it possible to treat it as a weapon in violent sports that can inflict harm on the other, and, slightly more benignly, as a tool to be manipulated by the mind in others like baseball. Part and parcel of this dualism is the notion that the body must be cared for like a machine--it must be fed, watered, and conditioned to achieve optimal performance. Like a machine, however, it also means that the body is disposable. It is a means to and end, and that end is ultimately more important than the costs accrued to achieve it. Thus, the athlete is exhorted to destroy the body in the quest to win for the team, and for the fans who vicariously find meaning through the team.

So, why this abstract meditation on the culture of high performance sport? What does it have to do with Beckett? My case is that athletes like Beckett should be encouraged not to see their bodies in such instrumental terms. By playing golf, Beckett reveals a more playful understanding of his body. His lack of concern over how to optimize its performance suggests that he has not been entirely socialized into this damaging culture. While this may mean he suffers injury in the short term, it may also mean that he is less willing to subject it to extreme forms of harm over the long haul. It also models for other, younger, aspiring players that there are different ways to approach sport. Like, for instance, as if it was just a game.

No credit found for this one, unfortunately!

Neil:

I'm a big fan of Dirk Hayhurst - relief pitcher (former Blue Jay!), blogger, memoirist, and fantastic Tweeter - and, in thinking about Beckett, I'm going to draw a bit of inspiration from his own ruminations on this topic.

A career-minor leaguer, Hayhurst has made a whole 25 appearances at the big-league level, (and, barring a miracle, won't make another) and is unapologetically honest when it comes to talking about the stresses and pressures that come with being a pro athlete. So, when Hayhurst is asked to either tell kids that they should 'play for the fun/love of it', or is criticized by fans/parents/coaches because his writing is too serious and shows that he doesn't just 'play for the fun/love of it', he inevitably disappoints them. Because, for Hayhurst, it isn't particularly fun - it's his job, (both the baseball and the writing that it inspires) he has responsibilities to his team and the fans, and it's how he feeds his family. But he also talks about the moment where pros admit to 'not caring anymore', and by this he doesn't mean that they stop playing hard - he means that they accept that their careers will eventually end and they need to have something more going on in their life.

So, where am I going with this? I can't help but feel that some of the animosity has to do with the bizarre expectation that athletes must be 100% committed to their sport, every single moment of every single day, at least during the season. We have this weird expectation of pro athletes that suggests that proper "discipline" or "focus" requires complete devotion, if not unhealthy obsession. But playing other games, showing interest in other things? This is good. Beckett needs to be doing these things for himself, owes it to himself to live a balanced life and develop a wide range of skills and interests, because his baseball career will be over before the end of the decade.

But the baseball job? Like Hayhurst says, Beckett isn't just doing that for himself. And to the extent that golf could easily lead to an injury that affects his ability to pitch, it's a bad idea. (It's possible that Beckett has a technically sound golf swing and that his swing coach and doctor are in agreement that the muscles he uses in his swing are not the same muscles that he injured pitching. But I find that kind of forethought very unlikely.) It has nothing to do with optics, (although, certainly, it does look bad) and everything to do with living up to the responsibility he has to others - his family, his teammates, the people of Boston. (And, I begrudgingly admit, to the guys who directly employ him. They do, after all, owe him another $45 million, give or take a couple million bucks.)