Author: Ezra Fischer

The Unwritten Rules of Sports

Dear Sports Fan, 

In relation to the inquiry “Why aren’t the Rules the Rules?“, what is your take on the series of conduct breaches in the recent Angels/Tigers skirmish? Everyone seems to be making a big stink about baseball’s “code of unwritten rules” and how a number of them were violated (and enforced) in the game: lingering at plate after hitting a home run; trash talking; spoiling a no-hitter with a bunt; intentionally pitching a fast ball at the batter’s head (okay that may be a real violation for which the pitcher was suspended). If this is unsportsmanlike conduct, then why aren’t there written rules to prevent such behavior? Why has the Angels/Tigers’ pissing match of retribution been defended by the players and coaches and justified by some MLB commentators after the fact? And if a pitcher is an inning away from a no-hitter, is the opposing team really supposed to just hand him the game?

Thanks,

Andrew Young

 

Dear Andrew,

This is a bit dated now because the game you mention was several weeks ago, but the question, at least in baseball, is always timely. Baseball fans and writers love talking and writing about the unwritten rules of their sport. That’s true for hockey too – both of them have a tradition of self-enforcement of an unwritten “code” which, as Geoffrey Rush would say, are more like “guidelines” anyway. There aren’t written rules about these things because they’re too subjective – ie, how can you tell whether a pitcher definitely threw at a hitter, how can you tell that  a player bunted for a base hit to break up a no-hitter and not just because it was the only way his team could get on base?

That’s where the code comes in.

The code, in both baseball and hockey, has to do with two things: respect for your opponent and, therefore, the game, and policing dangerous play. In the game you reference, the two went hand in hand.

But, as in all things, context matters. You generally shouldn’t bunt to break up a no-hitter, but only if it’s blatant that you’re doing it to break up a no-hitter – ie, if you’re losing by enough that you’d enforce a mercy rule if it were little league, or you haven’t bunted since the first Bush Administration.  If you’re down by three and known as a speedy guy who sometimes actually bunts to get on base, you can usually get away with it.

It’s acceptable to throw at a hitter if the opposing team’s pitcher did the same to one of your teammates – but it’s never ok to throw at the head.

The code is pretty clear that you finish your home run trot in a timely fashion and don’t stand there admiring it, but who’s to say what’s timely? Staring down the pitcher after you hit a home run – as happened in this case – is a clear no-no.

When all of these self-enforcement mechanisms fail, baseball resorts to the ultimate in phony tough guy moments: the bench-clearing brawl. Baseball is different than hockey cause when hockey players brawl, you can tell it’s a brawl. For instance, they actually make physical contact with people. When baseball players brawl, it’s like a swarm of electrons meeting at midfield. They get really really close but 99 percent of the time they move away before there’s any actual contact. If someone actually lands a punch, it’s news – if a 70 year old bench coach is tossed on his ass by a 35 year old athlete it’s a clip that will be replayed for decades.

So while there are some legitimate reasons for these rules to exist – namely, helping people protect their teammates – these unwritten rules are really just another way for athletes, the reporters who cover them and the commentators who commentate on them (who are frequently former athletes) to make clear that they’re a part of a unique  group of people who have their own special rules that other people just can’t understand.

Thanks,
Dean Russell Bell

When Did Kickball Become a Sport?

Dear Sports Fan,

When did kickball become a sport?

Just saying,
Sarah

 

Dear Sarah,

When did Pabst Blue Ribbon become a good beer? When did trucker hats become stylish accoutrement? When did jeans start requiring a surgical procedure to be put on and taken off?

That’s when kickball became a sport. Yes, I’m blaming the hipster for the revolution in kickball. Kickball, as I remember it, was a really fun game you played in elementary school gym class. It has basically similar rules to baseball, except instead of involving the skill and hand-eye coordination required to swing a bat into a small ball, it requires roughly the coordination required by everyday tasks like walking down a steep set of stairs, cooking an omelette, or shaving. Then again, you generally don’t do those things drunk… which is definitely a requirement for kickball, whether it’s a championship game or an early season practice.[1]

My theory is that kickball was one of the more accessible sports to play in fourth grade. It was something that not only the future jocks enjoyed. The future jocks became current jocks and ventured off to play football, basketball, baseball, or soccer. Now in their late twenties and thirties, these current jocks have become over-the-hill jocks but they still enjoy playing the sports that they played when they were on top of the hill. The people who didn’t become jocks never really got into any other sports, but they retained happy memories of playing kickball in gym class.

Fast-forward 20 years or so and these people are looking for a good way to get a little exercise, meet people, and socialize with friends. Voila — kickball comes back into the mix and it becomes a sport!

One last note on hipsterism and kickball — I think that the relationship has something to do with irony. Irony is “the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.” Many of the former non-jocks grew to feel alienated by and some amount of dislike towards sports and the ‘go-all-out’ mentality that abounds in sports cultures. Playing a game like kickball provides a layer of opposite language to shield the players from what they are doing. Kickball players go all out, but because it is in the context of a sport that’s normally associated with a pre-sport obsessed time in people’s lives, going-all-out is permissible in a way that it wouldn’t be within the culture of the players if the sport being played was a more standard sport.

Confused? Angered? My good friend and attentive Dear Sports Fan reader Theodore Gicas (the Gicasaurus) may be able to shed some more light on the kickball scene. He’s been a member of several championship kickball teams! Write a letter to the editor Ted — we’ll publish it!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Hey, if you want to play drunk you have to practice drunk! And yes, kickball teams have been known to hold practices!↵

Why is Everyone Still Focused on Tiger Woods?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why is everyone still focused on Tiger Woods when it’s clear he’s washed up, past his prime and old news all at once?

Thanks,
Darren

 

Dear Darren,

When I was in college the model UN club sneakily threw the best parties. They had the biggest budget of all the clubs and somehow, when their conferences were done, they always had enough money left over to buy a ridiculous amount of booze. When you’re a freshman or sophomore, that’s all you need.

The problem was the stigma of going to a model UN party. Even if they have the best booze, everyone thinks the model UN is populated by nerds and misfits and no one who’s NOT in model UN would ever want it getting around that they were seen at one of their parties. Unless, that is, model UN has one girl in it who is so incredibly attractive that she gives you a reason – a reason your buddies will buy – to go to their parties.

The PGA tour is the model UN party, without the booze. Unless you’re a die-hard golfer watching your ordinary, run-of-the-mill PGA tournament is a lot like standing around three college students arguing about the impact of a European-based missile shield on Russia’s nuclear deterrent capability: painful. PGA tour golfers were a pretty sleepy, uniform lot. Even the exciting ones were still nerds, and you can count on one hand the number of golfers who have more charisma than your average accountant. In fact, that’s a fun game for trivia night: print off pictures of PGA tour golfers, print off pictures from some accounting firm’s website and play “Professional Golfer or Professional accountant?” If anyone in your group does better than 50-50, they’re watching too much golf, and you and your friends will probably ridicule them for it.

Tiger Woods was the hot girl who showed up to the PGA Tour party and made it ok for sports fans – and non-fans – to watch golf.[1] For one thing, he looked like an athlete: he clearly worked out, you know, like athletes do. For another, he had charisma. World class charisma? Maybe not – but remember, we’re putting him next to 300 guys  with the charisma of people who do taxes for a living. He carried himself with what white people learned was called swagger, and we all ate up the fist pumps and the screams, and him running after his putt to make sure it knew where it was supposed to go. He had the showmanship thing down.

And, maybe most importantly, he was appointment-viewing. You never knew what Tiger was going to do, but chances are if you watched him long enough in his prime he’d do something incredible. Even if he didn’t, he had that aura about him that made you want to keep watching. And he won over and over and over, with the kind of single-minded determination we all admire in people who climb to the top of their professions.[2] At his peak he intimidated everyone around him and even the mere whisper of his name on Sunday would make other golfers fall apart.

Turns out, that kind of domination by an exciting, compelling figure – unlike, say Roger Federer, who dominated tennis in a similar way but never quite matched Tiger on the charisma scale – was great for golf. More people watched on TV, which meant the PGA tour made more money, which meant purses were bigger, which attracted more talent.

The problem is, at some point the hot girl leaves the model UN party,[3] and then it’s just a bunch of unpopular kids who may have good booze. That’s the future the PGA is staring in the face: declining viewership, a wealth of talented but boring players and no clear number one. One only has to watch the current crop of players awkwardly emulate Tiger’s fist pumps to realize showmanship doesn’t come naturally to everyone.

That’s why – no matter his sins – virtually everyone knows that a Tiger resurgence would be the best thing for the game, and why you’ll hear people talking about it for a long time to come.

Dean Russell Bell

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Actually he slept with the hot girl(s) but that’s a different story.↵
  2. The same kind of determination we say will inspire us to do better and achieve more, until we go to work the next day and remember that our jobs are boring and that we don’t have some great emptiness inside us that can only be filled up by unparalleled greatness and achievement. And sleeping with lots of women.↵
  3. She’s tired of Tiger hitting on her. And here, the analogous worlds collide and the entire analogy starts to crumble.↵

Why Do People Like Football?

Dear Sports Fan,

Am I allowed to ask the question: why do people like football?  That is my most pressing sports question.  Perhaps a better way to phrase it is: what are ten reasons to like football?  (Or even just five reasons would be great.)

Thanks,
Linnea

— — —

Dear Linnea,

You are allowed to ask this question!

  1. Violence — Okay, I’m not afraid to say it, I enjoy the violence of football. These guys hit each other really hard and when they do, bodies go flying all over the place. My enjoyment has become increasingly guilty as information about the long-term effects of hitting on football players has become more available. Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece really had me questioning whether I could watch football… for about two days until the next game came on.
  2. Gambling — I don’t bet on football games but lots and lots and lots of people do and it has driven the popularity of the sport in lots of subtle ways. For instance, you often hear about teams issuing injury reports to the league office and media. They have to do this a few times a week during the season as sanctioned by league rules. Why? Well… it’s a good bet that it has something to do with bookies needing accurate and timely information about injured players to set gambling lines.
  3. Fantasy Football — A subset of gambling, fantasy football has taken off in the last five years in a crazy way. Around twenty million people now play fantasy football, there’s a half hour television show on ESPN dedicated to fantasy football owners and our own blog has already had a fantasy football post!
  4. The Football — The football is an foot-long oblong piece of hard to pick up. There’s just nothing better than watching a combined few thousand pounds of athletic men completely determined to grab the football completely and utterly fail in the attempt. When this happens, it’s appropriate to just shake your head and say, “The Football.”
  5. Technicalities — By the logic of this reason, it’s just a matter of luck that following the NFL and not the Congress is the most popular thing to do in our country. Because one of the things that makes football so compelling is its bizarre technicalities. John Madden, the famous coach and broadcaster, played off of this when writing his first book, “When One Knee Equals Two Feet.” Often the rules are so technical and obscure that the players, coaches, refs, and announcers seem not to know them.
  6. Tactics — Unlike most other sports, where I really don’t completely understand what effect a coach can have on a game, in football the coaches make a real difference. This is mostly because the game keeps stopping all the time. Also there are little speakers in the quarterback’s (and one defensive player’s) helmet that coaches can talk into during the stoppages. All this makes the players moderately secondary and puts the viewer on a more even playing field compared to other sports. At least in football, you can scream at the television about a play knowing that at least one of the key factors in the play ALSO can’t run fast, hit hard, throw accurately, or catch worth a damn.
  7. Peer Pressure — Everybody else likes football. It won’t last forever, but for now football is the American past-time.
  8. Sitting on the Couch — There’s really nothing better than sitting down on the couch on Sunday knowing that you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything for the rest of the day. The mid-afternoon football induced slumber is also a glorious feature of the sport.
  9. Sitting at the Bar — Okay, maybe one thing can rival sitting on the couch all day. Sitting at the bar all-day!! Bars take football Sundays really seriously. I’ve been to places that label the televisions with the games they will be showing so that people showing up early can choose strategic spots where they can see the games they’re most interested in! There’s a great energy to a bar full of excited, focused fans. Also, umm… football bar-food is glorious.
  10.  Athleticism  — Yeah… it’s also fun to watch people push the boundaries of human performance. Football players regularly do things that are simply physically unavailable to the rest of us. 350 pound men should not be able to run faster than I can. People shouldn’t be able catch a ball while being assaulted and batteried. Throwing a ball 50 yards while jumping backwards doesn’t seem normal, but it sure is fun to watch it happen.
These are some of my reasons. What are yours for liking or not liking football?
Thanks for the question,
Ezra

Why is Soccer so Liberal?

Dear Sports Fan,

Can sports be liberal or conservative? Why does soccer seem so liberal?

Curious,
Nicholas

 

Dear Nicholas,

What an interesting question. Sports definitely carry political overtones that vary from time to time and culture to culture. For instance, I spent a semester in Cape Town, South Africa during college. Although things are slowly changing, the political/racial meanings of sport set during Apartheid were still present. Football (soccer) is a black sport in South Africa while Rugby is an Afrikaans sport.[1] Cricket is also wildly popular although more so among the White/Coloured (it’s a technical term) population than among Black people. It’s all very complicated.

In the United States soccer is one of the more interestingly politically loaded sports. See this tongue-in-cheek article from Deadspin.com entitled “Soccer: The Liberal Plot to Destroy America.” Sure, NASCAR has a cartoonish identification with Southern conservatives, and golf is tight with the political party of the rich… but why is soccer seen as a liberal sport? There are two main reasons — one historical and one current.

Soccer as we know it in this country — with the youth leagues and the screaming parents on the sidelines and the “2-4-6-8 who do we appreciate?” —  began in the late 60s and early 70s as part of the counter-cultural revolution. Football was too tightly associated with the traditional drink beer, marching band, date the cheerleader, join the marines and go to war life for pot-smoking, Vietnam war protesting, Woodstock going hippies. Soccer was an ideal sport to coalesce around because right at that time Johan Cruijff was ascending to his place as one of the best players of all time. He also happened to be making himself into a counter-cultural idol due to his unique style and radical (and out-spoken) ideas.

Although it’s been 40+ years, I think this explains much of the non-violent, everyone wins, liberal stereotypes about soccer. There’s another thing, something that’s even more true now than it was in the 70s. The best soccer in the world is not played in the United States. If you want to watch the best soccer in the world, you have to watch the English Premier League,[2] the Spanish La Liga, or wait around for the big international tournaments like the World Cup or the European Championships. This is a big difference from Football (okay the rest of the world just doesn’t care) or Basketball, Hockey, or Baseball where the best players in the world come to our league to perform. Insofar as liberals are associated with a greater internationalism and conservatives are associated with isolationist tendencies, then it makes sense that being a soccer fan is seen as a liberal thing to do.

What’s funny about this (and this is far too large of a topic to cover here, so I’ll just nod towards it) is that soccer leagues in other countries are far more capitalist than our leagues. Players are not traded, they are “sold.” If a team does not do well it can be thrown out of the league and relegated to a lower league. Compare that to an NFL team like the Detroit Lions that has not had a winning season since 2000. Not only does it get to keep playing in the NFL, but they receive gobs of money from the other teams in the form of revenue sharing of television, merchandising, and ticket money.

One last bonus factoid that you can use at cocktail parties: in the late 1800s when football and baseball were in their infancy, football, the more physical sport, was played by the upper classes, and baseball was a lower class sport. Why? Well — if you had to work in a factory or a farm you certainly were not about to risk breaking bones playing football. Leave that foolishness to rich college boys!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Which is why it was so meaningful for Nelson Mandela to embrace the team during the 1995 Rugby World cup. I think this is the plot of that movie with the 5-10, 160 pound Matt Damon playing a 6-3 238 pound rugby player… I haven’t seen it.↵
  2. Which starts their season today!↵

Why Are People Obsessing About Fantasy Football Now?

Dear Sports Fan,

We’re more than a month away from the start of the NFL season, so why are the fans in my life obsessively reading about fantasy football now?

Thanks,
Yolanda

 

Dear Yolanda,

You’re absolutely right! While the first pre-season football game is tomorrow, the regular season does not start until after Labor day weekend. You’re also right that we fantasy football “owners” are starting to get into full-on research mode. There’s a few reasons for that, but first a quick refresher course on fantasy football.

Fantasy football is a game where real people bet real money on fake teams. These fake teams successes and failures are based on how the real people on their fake teams do in their real life jobs playing (real) football. Fantasy largely works as a compelling game because of its tie to the NFL which is itself extremely popular but also because it is a closed system where, although there is a large amount of luck involved, the time, work, and decisions that you put into it can have a real effect on how well something that you (and you alone) are responsible for does. It’s as close to owning a small business as many of us get.

Sometime before the NFL regular season begins, hundreds of thousands of people will gather in rooms with their laptops for their fantasy drafts. At the draft, people take turns either selecting or bidding on players for their teams. Once the season begins, owners can trade players with other owners, and not infrequently there are real players who were not initially selected in the fantasy draft that become useful to fantasy teams during the year. For the most part though, the players you get in the draft will make the difference between a successful year and an unsuccessful one. As an owner, you also have to live with these guys… for 16 weeks, you’re going to be more interested in watching them play than other players. You’re going to stress about their injuries. You will be covetous of their playing time. You will celebrate their touchdowns and bemoan their fumbles.

You can probably tell how important it is to get the right guys on your team but you might still be wondering what we could possibly be doing now… research! That’s right — the meat-head football fans are spending hours nose deep in books (well, websites mostly) reading about coaching changes, player movement, and other news about NFL teams. We’re reading thousands of words of opinion written by “fantasy football experts” who try to predict and project how players will do this year. We’re synthesizing all these projections into our own. We’ve got players divided up into tiers by position. We’re totally insane! To give you a glimpse of the far reaches of fantasy football minutia, I dare you to check out this forum conversation about how an obscure ruling on the way team statisticians assign and count tackles could effect the point production of real linebackers on your fake football team. For those too scared to click on the link, here is a direct quote from johnnyboy8102:

I have been watching the play by play in real time since 2001 and I have seen certain stadiums do the solo/assist method and others do the Assist/Assist method.

I can tell within the 1st few plays of a game which way the stat crew is going to go. The heavy assist teams (Washington and New England in particular) have been doing the assist/assist method. It is deciphered by a comma or a semicolon between the tackling players names. A comma gives a solo to the 1st player and an assist to the 2nd. While the semicolon gives assists to both players.

Not all of us quite approach the level of madness/expertise of johnnyboy8102 and his compatriots… but we may be closer than you would think…

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

How are Batting Averages Calculated?

Dear Sports Fan,

Can someone explain to me how batting averages are calculated, and what the .000 etc. means?

Thanks,
Dot Dot Dot

 

Dear Dot Dot Dot,

Batting averages in baseball somehow manage to be deceptively simple and deceptively complicated at the same time. We will start with the simple and then move to the complicated.

Batting averages look weird — they usually range from around .200 to .375 but don’t be fooled, it’s just a percentage expressed with one decimal point. So, the odd looking .200 is 20.0% and .375 is 37.5%.

But!

Things get more complicated when we start reasoning about what exactly the batting average percentage is made up of.

  • Batting average = the number of hits / the number of at bats
  • Hits = when the batter safely reaches first base after hitting the ball into fair territory, without the benefit of an error or a fielder’s choice
  • Fair territory = you know, between the lines from home to first and home to third which extend out to infinity
  • Error = when someone official sitting in the stands decides that a fielder has messed up in such a way that allowed the runner to advance when they normally wouldn’t
  • Fielder’s choice = When the fielder gets to catch the ball either in his glove or his hat![1]
  • At bat = every time a person comes to the plate except when he gets a walk, is hit by a pitch, hits a sacrifice, is awarded first base due to interference or obstruction, the inning ends while he is still trying to get a hit — likely due to a base runner being thrown out, or he is replaced by another hitter.
  • Walk = the opposite of “three strikes and you’re out,” this is “four balls and you’re on”
  • Hit by a pitch = hit by a pitch — you get to advance to first base if this happens
  • Sacrifice = this is by itself complicated, but basically a hit is a sacrifice if you intentionally hit the ball where you’re likely to be out, but it helps one of your teammates who is already on base, advance from first to second, second to third, or third to home.
  • Interference or obstruction = the catcher can’t tickle the batter while he is trying to bat
  • Inning ends probably due to someone getting thrown out = if someone tries to steal a base when their team already has two outs in the inning and they fail, then the inning will be over
  • Replaced by another hitter = when the coach decided this guy is not going to get it done and replaces him in the middle of an at bat[2]

Got that? Right, so this really does seem needlessly complicated. And the problem is that the complication masks something really important. Batting average is a crappy measure! Check this out. According to batting average, these players are all exactly the same over 10 at bats:

  • Player A: two home runs, one triple, seven strike-outs
  • Player B: three singles, seven strike-outs
  • Player C: three singles, three walks, four strike-outs

All three players would have a batting average of .300 but you tell me which you would want on your team! Player B is obviously worse than A or C. It’s a close match between A and C for me — A is certainly a more powerful guy, but C managed to at least get to first base six out of 10 times at the plate. That’s remarkable! Since the 1970s there has been a slow but increasingly accepted revolution against batting average and many of the other traditional statistics led by the guys at SABR — the Society For American Baseball Research. They and their intellectual descendants have sought to replace the old stats with new, more meaningful ones with really silly abbreviations like: BABIP, DIPS, OPS, VORP, WAR, and the always important LIPS.

Those are a story for another time… until then, we’ll leave you with this:

Adios,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. This is not true↵
  2. Or like, if the batter gets injured… possibly from laughing too hard because of the catcher’s tickling.↵

Is There Any Skill in Boxing?

Dear Sports Fan,

Is boxing really about skill? I mean it kinda seems like they just pound on one another until one of them breaks. Is it more about talent/training/etc or more about whose skull is thickest (and can thus take more hits)?

Been wondering,
Thick Skull

 

Dear Thick Skull,

They call boxing the “sweet science.” They call economics the “dismal science.” I don’t know who “they” are, but they’re right. What happens in the ring can often appear to be a glorified street fight, and at times there may be two brawlers going toe to toe, too tired to do anything other than trade huge punches and see who has the bigger heart.

But watch a good boxer against a lesser boxer, and you’ll see that it’s not just the thickness of someone’s skull that makes a boxer better: it’s their ability to hit without getting hit back.

That’s partly training – the work the most successful boxers do would probably kill normal people – and it’s partly plain old-fashioned nerve. Somehow the boxer has turned off evolution’s “don’t get hit switch,” or at least dialed it down so that it doesn’t prevent him (or her) from inflicting some damage of their own. Some of it is good – biology: some guys are simply faster and quicker and, yes, some guys are less or more prone to getting knocked out depending on the structure of their skull.

But the rest of it is good old-fashioned strategy and tactics – the science part. Boxers in the early rounds often look tentative and paw at each other like blind puppies. What they’re actually doing is getting a read on how their opponent will react to different things. If I throw three jabs (short, quick punches with the lead hand), and each time I do my opponent moves his head the same way to avoid the blow, then I know just where his head will be after I throw a jab in the future – making for an easy follow-up. If I see that my opponent drops his left hand whenever he throws a punch with his right, leaving his face or body unprotected, I’ll file that away and plan a nice counter-punch sometime later in the fight.

Boxers study footage of their opponents’ previous fights to look for weaknesses; they come into a fight with a game plan; they adjust the game plan according to what they’re seeing; and they work for months to get their bodies trained to not only endure but thrive as they absorb a ridiculous amount of punishment.

It’s a brutal sport, no doubt – but if you watch enough, and pay close enough attention, you’ll see that it’s not two guys locked in a cage flailing away at each other.  It’s two scientists in a lab trying to answer man’s most basic, primitive question: how the hell do I hit this guy in the face without letting him hit me back?

That’s much more exciting than economics.

Thanks for the question,
Dean Russell Bell

Do Home Teams Wear White? Why?

Dear Sports Fan,

Speaking of my teams colors. can you explain the color choices and jersey choices that teams have.  I know there are home jerseys and away jerseys.  What are third jerseys?  What about when two teams play at home (Gians v. jets)?

Thanks,
Pat

 

Dear Pat,

This is something I’ve been wondering about for years! I swear that when I was a kid the home team used to wear white. Now they seem to wear their team color and the road team usually wears white. Arghh — it’s been driving me crazy! Thanks to your question, I did a little research and I think that I can explain it.

Here’s what I think happened. When I was a kid, the two primary sports in my life were soccer (which I played maniacally until my knees fell off) and hockey (which I started watching maniacally in 1993-94. In both of these cases, it was customary for the home team to wear white and the away team to wear a more colorful uniform. On my traveling team we wore white at home and when we drove to Manalapan or Hopewell we wore our sweet orange unis that looked like the Princeton University ones with a little pretentious crest. In the NHL it was the same way. My favorite team, the Penguins, wore their white and gold uniforms at home and their black and gold ones on the road whether I was watching them on my fuzzy little television or playing as them in the classic computer game NHL 93 on my fuzzy little computer screen. The other major sports in the U.S., Football, Basketball, and Baseball were present in my life, but off to the edge somewhere. I’m not sure I made note of their color systems. Since then, these sports (except for Baseball) have become a bigger part of my life while soccer has retreated into the distance (with my knees.) As this happened, the NHL decided to switch (in 2003) from Home = white to Home = color. Anyway, this is how it stands now:

  • Football — Home = Color
  • Hockey — Home = Color
  • Baseball — Home = White
  • Basketball — Home = White

It’s a little confusing, but there are arguments/explanations for both systems. For example — the road team wears darker colors because once upon a time they might not have had access to laundry between games and the darker colors hid the stains better. Or — home teams wear light jerseys because dark jerseys attract the sun which is a competitive disadvantage. Or — (and this is where your third jersey explanation comes in) the road teams wear white so that the home team can use its third jersey. A third jersey is usually another colored jersey that is either futuristic or a throw-back to a previous color scheme/design that a team will wear strategically to sell more merchandise to its fans. Some sports have requirements about when or how much teams can use this third jersey.

Back in my (old)hockey/soccer days I always thought the color scheme came down to a question of identification. Everyone knows who the home team is because it’s the home team! So it’s okay for them to wear white. The color of the road team helps the home fans to know who they are playing against. Later in my football/(new)hockey days I thought it was a subjugation thing — the home team gets to peacock around in its finest colored plumage while the road team is forced to look just like everyone else in white. When there are two “home teams” like in the case of Jets v. Giants or Lakers v. Clippers, the league will designate one of the teams as “home” and one as “away.” Jersey colors, season tickets, and other stuff follows from that.

What really bugs me is that home teams during the NHL playoffs will often do a “white-out” where all their fans get free white t-shirts. This is supposed to be intimidating? To a road team that’s wearing white? Arhg!!!

In case this hasn’t been enough dorky conversation about team colors, check out these guys at ColorWerx™ (formerly The Society for Sports Uniforms Research.™) Whoa!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

The Pirate Coach

Before Mike Leach was summarily dismissed from his job as coach of the Texas Tech football team for forcing a concussed player to hang out in a closet he was one of the lucky few avant-garde outliers profiled by Michael Lewis in the New York Times. Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and Moneyball writes about people who redefine[1] a profession by looking at it in an unconventional way. While he’s doing it, Lewis explains stuff about sports, the economy, fatherhood, etc. better than anyone I’ve ever read. Leach certainly fits the bill of the unconventional “genius”:

It was then that I looked over and noticed Bennie Wylie standing uneasily next to Mike Leach. Wylie is Texas Tech’s strength and conditioning coach. Leach hired him three years ago from the Dallas Cowboys to prepare football players to run more than they had ever run on a football field. Just after he moved to Lubbock, Wylie learned that this job might be less a job than a calling. The thought struck him when he was driving and spotted, in the distance, a sloppily dressed middle-aged man in-line skating down the center of the road. The guy was rocking back and forth in the middle of what in Lubbock passes for a busy street; cars were whizzing past at 30 m.p.h. in both directions. There was no skating lane; truth to tell, there wasn’t a lot of in-line skating going on in Lubbock. As Wylie drew closer, he thought to himself, That lunatic looks a little like Coach. As he pulled alongside the lunatic, he realized, It is Coach. Later, Leach explained that he had decided to take up in-line skating, and he’d calculated that the middle of that particular road was Lubbock’s flattest, smoothest surface and so the obvious place to start. “To Mike, everything he does makes sense,” Wylie says. “It just takes a while to see how it all fits together. But if you were a fly on his shoulder for six months, you’d laugh your eyeballs out.”

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Or who should redefine it but despite their wild success become Cassandra-esque outcasts. Leach is on his way to this fate.↵