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.