Basketball Archives - Page 11 of 13

How Does Overtime Work in Different Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does overtime work in different sports? I’ve been watching more hockey this year and I know that overtime in the playoffs is different from overtime in the regular season. Are other sports like that too?

Thanks,
Sonja

Dear Sonja,

To quote the great Kanye West in honor of his latest album, “like old folks pissing, it all Depends.” Each sport has its own approach to how to proceed with competition if the score is tied after regulation time has expired. Like you say about hockey, even within each sport it can differ depending on whether the game takes place during the regular season or the playoffs. So while it may seem like I’m getting paid by the number of times I write “sometimes” in this post, that’s just the way overtime works.^[1]

In general, extra time formats in sports (overtime) fall into a few buckets:

Sudden Death: the most exciting two words in sports. This format is so dramatically named because the first team to allow their opponent to score loses the game immediately. This adds a heightened layer of tension that’s pretty much unparalleled. Sudden death doesn’t necessarily mean
Sports: hockey, soccer (sometimes), football (sometimes), baseball (kind of), golf (sometimes).
Extra Period: This is essentially when an extra period of time is added and whoever is leading at the end of that extra period wins. It still involves added tension but doesn’t quite have the audience on a knife’s edge, since a single score doesn’t necessarily dictate the outcome.
Sports: basketball (always), baseball (again kind of. In baseball they play a full inning, so essentially the team that has its turn to hit first in the inning is playing Extra Period but the team that hits second can be in a Sudden Death type situation.)
Shootouts: The ultimate Mano a Mano sports showdown. Each team picks its best payers (five in soccer, three in hockey) and each one gets a chance to score on the opposing team’s goalie. Some dismiss it as a gimmick but – for the viewer – there are few things more dramatic than seeing an athlete alone on the field or rink with the weight of the entire game on their shoulders. Of course if the shootout is tied after the allotted players have shot, you get a sudden death shootout, where the first player to miss costs his or her team the game.
Sports: Hockey, soccer (in both cases this assumes you make it through the extra periods with neither team scoring and in the case of hockey that the game is during the regular season)
None: Although increasingly rare, there are some situations in sport where if a game is tied at the end of regular time the two teams shake hands, walk off the field, and neither team wins. It’s a tie! In the old days in soccer two teams that ended the game in a tie would go home, rest up, and play again in a few days in order to get a result.

You may have noticed that we haven’t covered football at all in this post. That’s because football is so absurdly complicated in its overtime rules that it is deserving of its own post. The college football rules are different than the professional ones… which differ from the regular season to the playoffs.

Thanks for your question and look out for a football overtime post soon,
Dean Russell Bell

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Editor’s note. Mister Bell is not being paid at all for this post.↵

What are the Positions in Basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What are the positions in basketball? I’m watching the Spurs and the Heat in the finals tonight and they mentioned that Lebron can guard any position. I’m more of a football fan and so while I’m sure there are positions in basketball, it all looks pretty fluid and interchangeable to me.

Thanks,
Geneva

Dear Geneva,

There are positions in basketball although like you pointed out, they are more fluid than football positions. In a traditional lineup, each of the five players on the court has their own positional label that corresponds to a general set of skills and a set of responsibilities. Basketball is also in the midst of a shift in the language people use to describe the positions. The older way of referring to positions is by name: Point Guard, Shooting Guard, Small Forward, Power Forward, and Center. The new form is just the numbers from one through five. This shift, aside from making things a little more confusing, matches a general shift in the way basketball is played. We’ll start by describing the positions from Point Guard or One to Center or Five and then talk about the general shift in the game. I’m going to describe these positions for men’s basketball but they hold pretty much just the same for women.

Point Guard or One:

The point guard is generally the smallest, quickest guy on the team. Their responsibility is to take the ball down the court and then pass it to their teammates. The point guard will often be the one to call the play the team runs (yes, there are plays like in football but they are generally more flexible) and responsible for clever improvisation when the play doesn’t work quite as it was diagrammed. The point guard is usually not the best scorer on the team and there is a general ethos of the position that says it is the point guard’s job, even if they might be able to score, to defer to their teammates. The point guard is a facilitator.

Jason Kidd who just retired and Tony Parker are great examples of players who epitomize the point guard position.

Shooting Guard or Two:

The shooting guard is quite the opposite of the point guard. Roughly the same size as the point guard, the shooting guard distinguishes themselves by… you guessed it… shooting the ball! You won’t see them passing up a chance to shoot for a teammate, these guys know what their job on the court is and they are good at it. You’ll usually see shooting guards running around like crazy, using their teammates as obstacles to give them just enough space apart from the person guarding them so that they can get a pass and shoot before the defender catches up. They are often good at shooting three pointers (from behind the colored arc around the basket) and love to lurk in the corner waiting for a pass.

Reggie Miller and Ray Allen are pure examples of the shooting guard position. Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan are great players who played shooting guard with a style more normally associated with small forwards.

Small Forward or Three:

The small forward is the most acrobatic of the players on the court. Right in the middle in terms of height, these players use their athleticism to score however they possibly can. Their combination of speed, power, and skill allows them the versatility to shoot over their defender or run right by him to get to the basket for a lay-up or a dunk. As small forwards get older and start to lose their raw athletic superiority, they generally shift towards becoming more of a shooting specialist or, if they have the size for it, more like the players in our next position.

Paul Pierce and Joe Johnson are great examples of Small Forwards. Lebron James plays the 3 more often than any other position (he can really play all five) but he is such a unique athlete that he’s probably not a very useful example to study.

Power Forward or Four:

The power forward is traditionally an enormous muscly dude. The scariest person on the court, the power forward is capable of throwing down enormously intimidating dunks but is more likely to specialize in setting mean picks for their smaller teammates and rebounding like crazy after a missed shot. In recent years the trend for power forwards has been to include someone who has the skill and predilection for scoring more traditionally found in a small forward or shooting guard but the height traditionally associated with a power forward.

Karl Malone and Tim Duncan are classic power forwards. Dirk Nowitzki is perhaps the best example of the non-traditional or “stretch” four.

Center or Five:

The center is the tallest guy on the court. There’s a saying in basketball that you “can’t teach height.” What this means is that no matter how skilled a smaller player is, a tall player will always have some advantages over them. As a result, there are a surprising number of centers, even in the NBA, who actually aren’t that good at or interested in basketball. They just happened to be the kind of seven-foot people who aren’t able to resist millions of dollars and a celebrity life. The center has undergone a similar trend to the one in power forwards in the past fifteen years but traditionally sets up on offense and defense as the closest person to the basket. On offense they catch the ball with their back to the basket and use their size to bump their defender until they can turn around and place the ball in the basket.

In terms of epitomizing what a center is like, there’s no one better to look to than Shaquille O’Neil although Bill Walton is another great player synonymous with the center position.

Evolution in Style

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve noticed people referring to the positions more and more by number instead of name. I think that this has come with the change in how the bigger positions are played. As mentioned in the description of power forwards and centers, a lot of recent players have the size traditionally associated with these positions but the skill and inclination to play the game more like a shooting guard or a small forward. As the more descriptive terms became less accurate (power forwards that aren’t exactly powerful… centers that play a whole lot at the edges of the court…) it became more popular to use the numbers from one to five to refer to players.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Why are Sports Teams Changing Names?

Dear Sports Fan,

I read an article the other day that said the Charlotte Bobcats was changing their name to the Charlotte Hornets. What’s up with that? Why are they changing their name?

Thanks,
Tommy

Dear Tommy,

It’s true, the Charlotte area professional basketball team is changing their name from the Bobcats to the Hornets. They are doing this in part because the name, which has a history in the Charlotte area dating back to the Revolutionary War, has recently become available, but it’s also because they haven’t built a very reputable brand for themselves as the Bobcats.

In 1985 the National Basketball Association decided to add four new teams to its league. Charlotte eventually became the home to one of those four teams and in the fall of 1988 the team started its first season as the Hornets. They played there for fourteen years until 2002 when following what sounds like some really ugly politics between the city of Charlotte and the unsavory owner of the Hornets, the team moved to New Orleans. In one of the great “it’s not you, it’s me… or in this case your horrible owner,” the NBA immediately said that they would locate one of their next expansion teams in Charlotte. This team started in 2004 and became the Charlotte Bobcats. The original team kept its name and its colors when it moved to New Orleans and has played as the New Orleans Hornets for the last five years. This year, the team officially announced that they were going to change their name to the New Orleans Pelicans! (Pelicans have become a symbol of the city since the oil spill in 2010.) This change, of course, meant that the Hornets name was available again and after weeks of rumor, the Charlotte team officially petitioned the league for the name back.

Both of the teams have not won very much in their recent history. The Bobcats (soon to be the Hornets again) have only ever had one season when they won more games than they lost. This was also the one year that they made the playoffs but they did not win a single playoff game. Ouch. The Pelicans (recently the Hornets) have done a little better since moving to New Orleans than their replacement in Charlotte but not by much. They have made the playoffs five times and even won a playoff series once, in 2007-2008. In the past two years though they have won fewer than 30 games out of 82 each season. Both teams are looking to re-brand their team and what better way to do it than with a new name and colors? In Charlotte, the team will be trying to “galvanize our fan base by unifying our loyal Bobcats fans with those who have strong memories of our city’s NBA predecessor.” In New Orleans, the team is “excited to start a new era in Louisiana basketball history.”

One wonders what would happen if all the NBA teams that have moved had done this. Maybe the team in New Orleans would be happy with its old name, the Jazz that now belongs to the team in Utah. The LA Lakers would have to send their name back to Minnesota (the land of ten thousand lakes) who I’m guessing would be happy to shed the name Timberwolves. Philadelphia would be able to choose between their current name, the 76ers or their original name, the Warriors, now used by the team in “Golden State” or Northern California. Memphis would probably be happy to stop confusing people by having a team called the Grizzlies which was originally located in Vancouver.

So where does that leave us? If you ask some animal experts, like this New Orleans radio station did, everything is okay — both animals are well equipped to inspire basketball teams:

Atherton pointed out the pelican’s ability to ward off enemies and intimidate rivals with its sharp beak tooth and aggressive wing flapping. Lemann made a case for the hornet as an excellent mascot, for its fierce, stinging defensive reputation.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What Does "And One" Mean in Basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does the phrase “and one” mean? I hear it a lot during basketball games but I don’t know what it means.

Thanks,
Susan

Dear Susan,

“And one” is a phrase that’s used when someone is fouled while taking a shot in basketball – either a jump-shot (farther away from the basket) or a layup or dunk (right at the basket). If the player makes the basket and the ref calls a foul on the defender who’s guarding them as the shot is being taken, the basket counts AND the player gets to take a single free throw. Hence the and one.Frequently you hear players yell out “and one” when they make a shot and feel that they did so despite being fouled, even if the ref didn’t call the foul – this is the player’s not-so-subtle way of chastising the ref for missing the call. Sometimes a the shooter will even shout “and one” before they know that their shot has gone in. Regardless of whether the foul is called, there won’t be an “and one” foul shot if they don’t make the basket. So shouting “and one” before a shot goes in is a complex emotional feat — being cocky and aggrieved at the same time!Everyone should be able to understand that aggrieved “and one” feeling – just think about being at work and being given a difficult task, and then accomplishing that task even in the face of someone or something unfairly inhibiting you. Say, for example, you’ve been teamed with the office dud – a real nothing burger of a co-worker – and tasked with pitching a prospective client. And say you get the account despite your colleague’s general uselessness – and your boss comes in and congratulates you both on a job well done without mentioning that you succeeded in spite of your dead weight colleague, not because of them – well, then, you too know what it is to shout “AND ONE” plaintively and futilely at the gods.

Word to the wise though — do not actually shout “and one” in a board meeting. That won’t go over well.

Thanks for reading,
Dean Russell Bell

How Long is an NBA Basketball Game?

Dear Sports Fan,

How long is an NBA basketball game? I thought it was an hour long — made up of four fifteen minute quarters — and that I just kept missing the start of the quarter. Now someone tells me it’s four twelve minute quarters. Is that true? Why would a game be forty eight minutes. Seems arbitrary!

Thanks,
Sandra

Dear Sandra,

Rest easy, you were not missing the game! An NBA basketball game is forty eight minutes long and made up of four twelve minute quarters. I suppose you’re right that this seems a little arbitrary because the duration of most of the other big sporting events in the country do seem to end on a “ten.” Football is sixty minutes, made up of four fifteen minute quarters. Hockey is also sixty minutes, although it is divided into three twenty minute periods. Soccer is ninety minutes long, divided into two forty five minute halves. Baseball is essentially timeless — no clock is used to determine when the game ends. NBA basketball seems to be an outlier. Basketball is also the only main sport that differs in how long it is between college and professional games. A college basketball game is forty minutes, divided not into quarters but into two twenty minute halves.

So what gives? According to the original rules of basketball written by James Naismuth, “The time shall be two fifteen-minute halves, with five minutes rest between.” Not to get too far off topic, but the invention of basketball is pretty funny. Naismuth became a phys-ed teacher at a YMCA in Springfield Mass in 1891 and soon after invented basketball. Here is the Wikipedia explanation of why:

At Springfield YMCA, Naismith struggled with a rowdy class which was confined to indoor games throughout the harsh New England winter and thus was perpetually short-tempered. Under orders from Dr. Luther Gulick, head of Springfield YMCA Physical Education, Naismith was given 14 days to create an indoor game that would provide an “athletic distraction”: Gulick demanded that it would not take up much room, could help its track athletes to keep in shapeand explicitly emphasized to “make it fair for all players and not too rough.”

By the time the NBA (then the Basketball Association of America) came into being, the college game with its twenty minute halves was well established. The first franchise owners decided to lengthen the game for their league from forty minutes “so as to bring an evening’s entertainment up to the two-hour period owners felt the ticket buyers expected.” Today, the average “real-time” length of an NBA game has crept up to right under two hours and twenty minutes according to the blog Weak Side Awareness.

As for whether or not all this is arbitrary, I can’t say, but in thinking about this, I did notice that the NBA shot clock — a team must shoot the ball and at least hit the rim before this time expires or else the ball is given to the other team — is 24 seconds; another product of twelve!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What Does it Mean to Have a Foul to Give?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve been watching some basketball and towards the end of games the announcer will sometimes say that a team has a “foul to give.” What does that mean?

Thanks,
Doug

Dear Doug,

In the NBA each player can commit five fouls before getting kicked out of the game for good on the sixth. A team cannot get kicked out of a gave for fouling too many times (although Chuck Klosterman wrote a great story about a team winning with only three players left at the end of the game) but there are consequences for fouling a lot. We’ll get to what these consequences are in a second, but first we have to quickly define a few different types of fouls.

An offensive foul is when someone whose team has the ball does something against the rules to a player whose team does not have the ball.
A defensive foul is when someone whose team doesn’t have the ball does something illegal to someone whose team does have the ball.
A shooting foul is a type of defensive foul that happens when someone does something illegal to a player who is in the act of shooting the basketball.
A non-shooting foul is… well, you know, all the other defensive fouls that aren’t shooting ones.

Only defensive fouls count towards the team total. The count of team fouls resets to zero at the start of each quarter. On fouls one through five the player who is fouled will shoot two free-throws only if the foul was a shooting foul. After the fifth foul, from foul six until the end of the quarter, the player who is fouled shoots two free-throws for any defensive foul — no matter if they were shooting or not when fouled. This state of being for a team is called “the bonus.”

Okay — we finally have enough background to answer your question. Having a foul to give means that a team has not yet reached the fifth foul of the quarter. In other words — they can still foul the other team at least once before the other team is in the bonus and will shoot free throws when fouled. At the end of a game or quarter, having a foul to give is particularly useful because a defensive team can use it to disrupt the other team’s plans. If the offensive team has fifteen seconds left, they can set up a nice play to run but the team with a foul to give can wait until there are about three or four seconds left and then give that foul (i.e. foul the player with the ball.) Because the other team is not in the bonus, they will not shoot free-throws, they will just get the ball back and have to pass it in from out of bounds and try to run another play but this time with only a few seconds.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What is a Sweep?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve been following the NBA playoffs and have heard announcers talking about one team sweeping another. What does that mean?

Thanks,
Don

Dear Don,

When one team wins all of its games against another team in a particular set of games, it is said to have swept the other team. The reason you’re hearing it so much now is that the NBA playoffs are organized into best four out of seven series. For a team to move on to the next round of the playoffs, it must beat its opponent four times within those seven games. If it were a set of three games instead of seven, a team would have to win a majority of two out of the three to win the series. If a team gets to having won a majority of the games in a series by winning consecutive games, they have swept the series.

You’ll hear talk about sweeps most often in sports that organize their games like basketball does. The NHL and MLB playoffs also are organized around seven game series. In the NFL, where the playoffs are single elimination, you may still hear someone talk about a team sweeping a “season series ” against another team. This means the team won all (usually it is just two) games against a particular opponent even if the games were not consecutive.

Being swept is seen as humiliating in professional sports and players are determined not to let it happen to them. It’s actually fairly common though — as of 2009, 18% of NHL playoff series ended in a sweep. In this NBA playoffs so far, there are four teams at risk for being swept: the Celtics by the Knicks,^[1] the Bucks by the Heat, the Lakers by the Spurs, and the Rockets by the Thunder.

If you’re having trouble remembering what a sweep is, here are two possible derivations that might help. One possibility is that the usage comes from the image of using a broom to sweep your opponent out of the way — that opponent put up so little fight that you could use the broom instead of having to pull a mop out or get on your hands and knees to scrub. Another possibility is that this usage shares a derivation with the word sweepstakes — a contest where one party sweeps all of the possible winnings into their lap — the image of one of those miniature shuffleboard sticks that roulette dealers use comes to mind.

Enjoy the playoffs!
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Not anymore, since I started writing this, the Celtics won in overtime to avoid being swept 4-0.↵

What Makes College Basketball Different?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve been watching March Madness and College Basketball looks really different from the NBA Basketball that my sister usually watches. Can you tell me what some of the differences are?

Thanks,
Patricia

Dear Patricia,

One of the reasons why people love college basketball is exactly what you’ve identified — that it is very different from the NBA. The NBA for the most part, is dominated by a single strategy, the pick-and-roll. Critics of the professional game will say that teams just run eighteen variations on the pick and roll from different spots on the floor. I love the college offensive schemes:

Dribble drive – a really quick guy beats his guy off the dribble, but he’s not talented enough to finish, so he kicks it out to someone whose defender is collapsing to contain the drive, except HE’S a 17 percent three point shooter, so he drives, draws more defense, kicks out, etc etc – until the whole offensive side of the court collapses in on itself like a dying star and it’s a mad scrum around the offensive glass (Memphis, Kentucky, kind of Syracuse and Michigan)
Motion – pass around the perimeter, set half-ass, off-ball screens and hope that a defender gets confused, goes the wrong way and leaves someone open for a three-pointer or a back-cut; if the defense is disciplined enough not to make a mistake, wait til 5 seconds are left and pass to your one on one offensive threat and let him take a bad shot (Pitt)
“I have an athletic big guy” – a team lucks into a really really tall/wide guy who’s athletic and can therefore dominate since that’s so rare in college ball, so they just give him the fucking ball (Kind of Miami/Indiana)
Tom Izzo – run, throw the ball up on the glass, go get it and mug anyone who gets in your way (Michigan State)
Wisconsin – motion + tall white coaches sons who can shoot with improbable range (Wisconsin)
Flex – the only offense where success is measured not by the number of points scored but by the number of picks set in a given possession (Gonzaga)
Coach K – one of the few offenses based solely on moral superiority/smugness (Duke)
Zone attack – when facing the 2-3 zone, pass the ball around the perimeter repeatedly and have one player flash into the the “soft spot” (essentially at the foul line, behind the 2 and in front of the 3) – get him the ball, then watch him panic as the entire zone collapses on him and hope he makes the right pass (anyone playing Syracuse)
Transition – RUN!!!!!!! (VCU)
Three point – Whatever happens, shoot three pointers. Miss them, get long rebounds, shoot more three pointers. Pull up in transition, shoot them contested, shoot on the move…just keep shooting. Defender in your face? No worries – step back as far as you need to.

Enjoy the Final Four games tonight,
Dean Russell Bell

Are Predictable Sports More Popular?

Dear Sports Fan,

Are more predictable sports more popular than unpredictable sports?

Thanks,
Tyrone

Dear Tyrone,

Great question! I’m not sure what the answer is, or if there even is a clear correlation between popularity and predictability, but it’s something I’ve often thought about it. Let’s explore this together!

The four major sports in the United States are Football, Basketball, Hockey, and Baseball. In two of those sports, Football and Basketball, college competition is close in popularity to the professional leagues, so we will include those in our discussion. The first thing to do is establish the order in which these sports are popular. I have my own favorites, but television ratings should provide a pretty good guide to the true popularity of the sports. There’s a good post on this at www.spottedratings.com which looks at the relative ratings of the championships of the six sports leagues. In order, they are:

Popularity (Television Ratings)
1. NFL Football
2. NBA Basketball
3. College Basketball
4. College Football
5. Major League Baseball
6. National Hockey League^[1]

Now we come to the more interesting piece of this which is to attempt to rank these in order of predictability. There are two main factors that play into this — the format of the playoffs and the elements of the sport itself. The key difference in format is between single elimination^[2] and a playoff series.^[3] As you might imagine, the playoff series creates much more predictable results because it allows a better team to have an off night and still end up the champion.

Single Elimination
NFL Football
College Basketball
College Football

Playoff Series
NBA Basketball
Major League Baseball
National Hockey League

It’s a bit harder to figure out how the elements of each sport affect their predictability. I’m sure there are thousands of factors that effect this, but let’s just chose one to think about — the average score. High scoring games would seem to be more predictable by the same logic that playoff series are — they make it less likely that a single bad moment, a single mistake, or a single moment of unusual brilliance will change the eventual result.

Scoring (from high to low)
NBA Basketball
College Basketball^[4]
College Football
NFL Football
Major League Baseball
NHL Hockey

If we combine these two factors^[5] we end up with the sports in this order.

Predictability (format, scoring)
NBA Basketball (+3,+3) 6
Major League Baseball (+3,-2) 1
National Hockey League (+3, -3) 0
College Basketball (-3,+2) -1
College Football (-3, +1) -2
NFL Football (-3, -1) -4

This model, because of its simplicity, doesn’t quite match up with my instincts about the sports. For instance, my gut tells me that College Football is actually significantly more predictable than College Basketball, there’s a reason the College Basketball tournament is called “March Madness,” but I think it’s mostly correct. For evidence of the overall directional correctness, consider that there have been twelve different NFL champions in the last twenty years but only eight in the last twenty years of the NBA. The NFL engenders clichés like “any given Sunday” to express its unpredictable nature, whereas the NBA is known for its dynastic teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers^[6] and Michael Jordan who won six championships with the Chicago Bulls during eight years in the 1990s.

I’m still not sure if there is any clear connection between predictability and popularity, but it at least seems obvious that unpredictability is not harmful to a sport’s popularity. So when you hear silly stories about how horrible it is that College Football doesn’t have a playoff like College Basketball does, and people like Barack Obama get involved, just make sure they don’t use “getting the best team to be the champion” as a rationale. Not only is a single elimination playoff notoriously unpredictable, but many of the most popular sports have the least predictable results!

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

It’s figuratively physically painful for me to see hockey at the bottom of this list since it has clearly the best playoffs of any sport. It is worth mentioning that some of its finals games are televised on a mildly obscure cable channel with a relatively smaller distribution.↵
if your team loses a single game, it’s out↵
like you played rock-paper-scissors as a kid, this is best x out of y where x = y/2 + 1↵
The college game is eight minutes shorter and has a longer shot clock which allows a team to hold the ball longer before being forced to take a shot.↵
Let’s do give a sport +3/-3 for format and +3 to -3 for scoring to get a ranking from 1-6 overall↵
These two teams alone have won 33 of 65 NBA championships.↵

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