Category: Following Sports

What is El Clasico?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is El Clasico? It seems like it’s a big deal!

Thanks,
Evan

 

Dear Evan,

You’re 100% right. El Clasico is a big deal. It’s an extremely big deal.

El Clasico is the name given to any game between Real Madrid Club de Futbol and Barcelona Futbol Club. It’s an explosive mix of regional and cultural rivalry and shockingly talented soccer players that gets ignited a few times a year. To give a sense of the proportions of the game, the March 2014 edition of El Clasico was viewed by an international television audience of 400 million. That’s more than twice the international audience for the Super Bowl, which, just a month before, drew a paltry 167 million viewers. The best players in El Clasico are predictably the best players in the world. According to The Guardian, “for the last 18 years, every winner of the Fifa World Player award, now merged with the Ballon d’Or, has played for Madrid or Barcelona at some stage of their career.” The whole thing, incredible players, gobs of money, tons of viewers around the world, is driven by an intense conflict within Spain that is viewed through a lens of Madrid against Barcelona and specifically, Real Madrid vs. Barcelona.

So, what is the rivalry all about? Barcelona is the center of Catalonian culture. The Catalan are an autonomous community within Spain. Catalan people can trace their culture’s history back to at least the 10th century. They speak a different language from the rest of Spain and close to half in the region would like to secede from Spain all together. When the fascist Francisco Franco came to power in 1939, squeezing the Catalonian culture out of existence was one of his priorities. He banned use of the Catalan language as well as any kind of cultural or political expression of Catalan culture. By no means were the people of Madrid all fascists or supporters of Franco but, Franco was a supporter of Madrid and of Real Madrid specifically. He even went so far as to meddle in which team got to sign the legendary Argentinian player Alfredo di Stefano. Madrid was the center of what Franco thought of as the standard Spanish language and culture, Castillian. Because of this association and history, Barcelona has always seen Madrid as the enemy, and visa-versa, if to a lesser extent. In World Soccer Talk’s article on El Clasico, they express the current situation like this:

Today, Real Madrid, in their all-white uniform, still represents a pure and united Spain. In contrast, FC Barcelona proudly bestows the Catalan flag (the only flag one sees in Catalonia) on their jerseys as a memorial of their continuous struggle for an independent state.

Sometimes, to really understand something like this, you’ve got to go full-on scholarly. Here’s a passage from Duke University’s excellent resource on El Clasico:

Rivalry, which is more than the sum of one team’s players versus another’s, serves to pit one codified regional social identity against another. If there are any tensions between the peoples represented, then the match becomes “ritual sublimation of war, eleven men in shorts are the sword of the neighborhood, the city or the nation.”[vii] And there are plenty of tensions between Barcelona and Madrid, none of which fail to be manifested in their epic rivalry. As Guilianotti explains “the football dyad at club level… [becomes] an exterior site in which ethno-nationalist tensions are symbolized and expressed.” Barcelona, synonymous with Catalonian nationalism, “displays a richer luster in confrontations with Real Madrid (the team of Castile and Franco).”[viii] Notions of Barcelona’s resistance to Castilian authority as well as General Franco are fundamental aspects of their abhorrence of Madrid:

“Twice Castile tried to subjugate the city (and the region), dismantling its institutions and outlawing its language, Catalan. The last attempt, by Franco, ended with his death in 1975.”[ix]

Tensions between the Spanish state, seated in Madrid, Castilian in language and origin, and the desires of many Catalonians for self-governance remain hotly debated political issues, a veritable powder-keg waiting to be ignited upon the soccer pitch.

This year’s game will be played on Saturday, October 25, at noon ET on beIN SPORTS. The headliners for Real Madrid are best player in the world candidate 1A, Cristiano Ronaldo, Columbian break-out star from the World Cup, James Rodriguez, and German Toni Kroos, who many said was the best player for the German team that won the World Cup. Barcelona will roll out a lineup featuring best player in the world candidate 1B, Lionel Messi, Brazilian wunderkind, Neymar, as well as Barcelona legends Xavi and Iniesta. Just to add a little spice to an already eye-popping mix, Uruguayan striker/cannibal Luis Suarez will be eligible to play in his first game since the World Cup biting incident. If you decide to watch, you’ll be joining almost half a billion of your fellow humans in doing so.

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Sports Forecast for Friday, October 24

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on:

In today’s segment, I covered:

  • an early tennis match between Simona Halep and Ana Ivanovic on ESPN3 starting at 7:45
  • a relatively uninteresting Major League Soccer game between the Houston Dynamo and Chicago Fire on NBCSN at 8 p.m
  • three college football games between the South Florida Bulls and the Cincinnati Bearcats on ESPN2 at 7 p.m, BYU and Boise State on ESPN at 9 p.m., and Oregon and California on Fox Sports 1 at 10 p.m.
  • a hockey matchup of hungry teams between the Edmonton Oilers and Carolina Hurricanes on regional cable at 9:30 p.m.
  • finally, there’s Game Three of the World Series between the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants at 8 p.m. on Fox

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link.

Music by Jesse Fischer.

Friday, October 24

  1. Anything you can do…: The San Diego Chargers are a really good football team. Nothing about losing 35-32 to the Denver Broncos last night makes me think differently and that’s what’s so remarkable about the Denver Broncos right now. They look like they are playing football on another level. Everyone else is playing checkers while they’re playing chess. Everyone else is strolling around while they’re racewalking. It’s pretty impressive.
    Line: The Denver Broncos are just playing on a whole nother level right now.
  2. Fallen Giant: The Boston Bruins have struggled to start the season. They lost last night, 3-2 to the New York Islanders, to fall to 4-5 on the year but the bigger loss was that of their 6’9″ captain, Zdeno Chara. Chara damaged some ligaments in his knee (no more specific information is available) and is said to be out for 4-6 weeks.
    Line: A slow start is not all that worrying but losing Chara for any sustained time is.
  3. Huskies put up a fight: The college football game between the 1-5 Connecticut Huskies and the 5-1 East Carolina Pirates was not expected to be close. Vegas had the Pirates as a 28 point favorite. The Connecticut Huskies looked ready to upset their opponents when they scored 14 points in the third quarter to tie the game. The East Carolina Pirates fought back in the fourth quarter and scored the final 10 points of the game to win 31 to 21.
    Line: Connecticut made it closer than people though but in the end, the Pirates’ class showed.

Do Not Watch This Game 10.25.14 Weekend Edition

For sports fans, the weekend is a cornucopia of wonderful games to watch. This is particularly true in the fall with its traditional pattern of College Football on Saturday and NFL Football on Sunday and Monday. As the parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend of a sports fan, this can be a challenge. It must be true that some games are more important to watch than others but it’s hard to know which is which. As a sports fan, the power of habit and hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars get in the way of remembering to take a break from sports and do something with your parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend. To aid all of us in this, and just because it’s fun, I’m going to write a weekly post highlighting a single game that is ideal for skipping. Use this to help tell yourself or someone else: “Do not watch this game!”

Monday, 8:30 p.m. ET, NFL Football, Dallas Cowboys vs. Washington Redskins. It’s on ESPN but do not watch this game!

This is the perfect weekend to take Monday off. For the first time ever, this Sunday’s slate of football games is going to start at 9:30 a.m. ET. That’s right! The game between the Atlanta Falcons and the Detroit Lions is one of three this year in London and as part of its ongoing experiment in England, the NFL decided to start the game at a more normal football time. By football, I mean both soccer and American football. This will put the game up directly against English Premier League soccer games and in an early afternoon slot more familiar to football in the United States. The upshot of this is that, if you’re living with a die-hard football fan, Sunday could be a real marathon of football.

The easiest thing to do would be to advise against watching the Sunday night game. That game looks to be an entertaining one between the Green Bay Packers and the New Orleans Saints. I wouldn’t suggest skipping it, particularly if you enjoy making themed food according to the teams involved. Mmmm cheese curds and gumbo! Plus, Game Five of the World Series is on Sunday night. No, instead, I say just roll with the punches on Sunday and then plan a sports-free day on Monday.

The Monday Night game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins is probably going to be pretty dull anyhow. Dallas is playing better than it’s played in years and Washington is a complete mess. The Redskins are going to be starting their third quarterback of the year on Monday and they just lost one of their top three defensive players for the year with a torn pectoral muscle. Dallas is favored by ten points, the most points of any team this weekend. The opening paragraphs of the ESPN preview of the game even struggle to create any drama:

The Dallas Cowboys are rolling to a degree that is even surprising owner Jerry Jones thanks to the productivity of DeMarco Murray and Tony Romo.

Their next opponent, the Washington Redskins, isn’t even sure who will start at quarterback.

If ESPN, the network covering the game, can’t muster up any more enthusiasm, you shouldn’t bother watching. This game is going to look like a bad Godzilla film if instead of destroying Japanese towns, Godzilla had declared himself eligible for the NFL draft, had been selected by the Cowboys, and then dismantled the Redskins on national television.

Alternate: If you or the sports fan in your life is a fan of one of these two teams, then this isn’t a good game to skip. Instead, skip the CBS early game at 1:00 on Sunday afternoon between the Seattle Seahawks and the Carolina Panthers. Both these teams were great last year. This year they’re just fine and that’s just going to be a let down.

Why do baseball managers use so many pitchers?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching the World Series last night and the San Francisco Giants used so many pitchers in that one inning. I didn’t know they were allowed to do that? What were they thinking? It obviously didn’t work.

Just wondering,
Garrett

Dear Garrett,

You’re right that the San Francisco Giants use of relief pitchers in the bottom of the sixth inning was unusual. They tied the record for most pitchers used in a single inning at five. That’s an unusual number of pitchers but what they did was not illegal and their reasons for doing it were pretty normal as well. Like you said, it didn’t work — the Kansas City Royals scored as many runs in that inning (five) as the Giants used pitchers.

Baseball teams in the post-season are allowed to have 25 players on their roster. There aren’t any rules about how many of these can be pitchers. In fact, the Kansas City Royals chose to carry one fewer pitcher than the San Francisco Giants for this World Series. The Giants have 12, the Royals 11. Of those pitchers, each team has four that are expected to start the up to seven games in the series. That leaves eight pitchers for the Giants and seven for the Royals. Each team has a designated closer who pitches the ninth inning if their team has the lead. The remaining six or seven pitchers are miscellaneous relief pitchers that their managers can choose to use however and whenever they want in a game. The Royals manager, Ned Yost has chosen to use two of his relief pitchers, Kelvin Herrera and Wade Davis almost exclusively for the seventh and eighth innings, but all of this, even the starter/closer/relief pitcher distinctions are just tactics, not rules. The only real rule regarding pitching substitutions is that once a pitcher starts pitching to a batter, he’s got to finish that batter unless he gets hurt.

So, fine, teams have a lot of pitchers and they can pretty much use them however they want. Why would the Giants manager, Bruce Bochy, want to use so many of them in the sixth inning last night? Aside from the first pitcher, each of the next four was determined in part by a simple concept: “when a pitcher and a hitter pitch or bat with the same hand, the pitcher typically has the advantage.” Let’s see how it played out:

Pitcher 1: To start the inning, he went with the starting pitcher, Jake Peavy. Peavy had pitched well in the game up to that point, letting up only 2 runs, and had only thrown 57 pitches. Starting pitchers can usually throw close to a hundred pitches before really breaking down, so, although he’s doubtless being second-guessed today, I don’t see anything controversial about starting the inning with Peavy. That said, Peavy did not start the inning well. He let up a single and then walked the next batter to put two men on base.

Pitcher 2: Seeing that Peavy was in trouble, Bochy decided to take him out of the game and put in a relief pitcher. The next batter up was Billy Butler. Butler is right-handed and hits much better against left-handed pitchers or southpaws than he does against righties. In terms of batting average, a flawed but well-known statistic, he goes from being a .321 hitter against lefties to a .255 hitter when facing a righty. So, Bochy brought in right-handed pitcher, Jean Machi. Butler outfoxed him and hit a single to the outfield which allowed the two men on base to score.

Pitcher 3: The next batter up was Alex Gordon, who bats lefty. Again, Bochy chose to change pitchers because of handedness, so he brought in Javier Lopez, a lefty. This time it works — Lopez gets Gordon to hit a fly ball to the outfield for an out. No runners advance.

Pitcher 4: Next up for the Royals was their catcher, Salvador Perez, who is… you guessed it, a righty! Off Bochy goes again to the mound to remove his pitcher. This time he brings in Hunter Strickland, who is, you guessed it again, a righty. Things go really off the rails for Strickland. He gives up a double to Perez and then a home run to Omar Infante. Why did he get to face two batters? Because Infante, like Perez, and Strickland for that matter, are both righties.

Pitcher 5: Up comes Mike Moustakas, a lefty, and off goes Strickland to be replaced by Jeremy Affeldt who throws with his left. Moustakas singles. The next batter is Alcides Escobar. He bats righty, but Bochy, perhaps thinking he’s made enough of a mess of things, doesn’t bother replacing Affeldt with a righty. It works out for them when Escobar hits into a double play to end the inning.

So, there you go — most of the mysterious comings and goings of the Giants pitchers last night can be attributed to the simple desire of the Giants manager to have right-handed pitchers face right-handed batters and left-handed pitchers face left-handed batters.

Thanks for the question, enjoy the rest of the World Series,
Ezra Fischer

 

Sports Forecast for Thursday, October 23

I’m trying something brand new today. A four minute audio preview of today’s biggest sporting events.

It’s my first time doing this, so please let me know what you think! Is this good for sports fans? For non-sports fans? What would make it better for each audience? What was confusing? What was clarified? When might you listen to something like this during the day? Why?

In today’s segment, I covered a couple of choice soccer games from the Europa Cup, all the games in the National Hockey League, the two college football games of note today, and the Thursday Night National Football League game.

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on:

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link.

Theme music by Jesse Fischer.

Thursday, October 23

  1. Royals win to tie World Series at 1-1: That’s right, the Royals answered everyone’s questions about how they were going to react to losing their first game of the playoffs by exploding in the sixth inning to shift game two of the World Series from a 2-2 tie to a 7-2 blow-out. The Giants did tie a World Series record but it’s not a particularly good one — they used five pitchers in that one inning. None were all that successful.
    Line: Looks like we’ve got a real, competitive series going on!
    What’s Next: Game Three is at 8 p.m. ET, Friday, October 24, on Fox.
  2. National Hockey League honors Canada: The NHL reacted to yesterday’s shootings in Ottawa by postponing the game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Ottawa Senators that was supposed to take place in Ottawa last night. In Pittsburgh, the Penguins showed their sympathy and support by lighting the ice like a Canadian flag. The fans sang along to Oh Canada as if it was their own anthem.  In Edmonton, it is the fans anthem.
  3. Losing but still laughing: Rex Ryan, the coach of the not-very-good New York Jets crashed a press conference call and nominally posed as a reporter while asking a question to a player from the opposing team in this weekend’s upcoming matchup. Ryan is always good for a chuckle. When being interviewed for the Jets coaching job, he took a road trip with the team’s general manager who said he knew Ryan was the right man for the job when, after spilling a giant limeade on his lap, he shouted, “On no! The dress sweats!”
    What’s Next: The Jets play the Buffalo Bills Sunday, October 26, at 1 p.m. ET on CBS

Wednesday, October 22

  1. A Royal Surprise: After eight straight wins in the playoffs, the Kansas City Royals finally lost in the first game of the World Series. The San Francisco Giants jumped on them early, with three runs in the first inning, as if to say, “things are going to be different now that you’re playing us.” The Royals could never quite get their feet on the ground and ended up losing 7-1. If you missed our preview of the World Series (really just a reblog of the two best other previews out there,) read it here.
    Line: Now we’ll see what the Royals are made of.
    What’s Next: Game two is tonight, at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.
  2. Giant scores in the Champions League: As we explained in our article about the UEFA Champions League, the tournament is set up with the twin goals of inclusion and competitive balance. Yesterday’s slate of games had a few examples of what happens when inclusion overwhelms balance. Bayern Munich beat AS Roma 7-1, Chelsea beat NK Maribor, 6-0, and Shakhtar Donetsk beat BATE Borisov 7-0. They weren’t all blow-outs though, the most exciting a surprising result was a comeback 2-2 draw between Manchester City and CSKA Moscow.
    Line: If you let all the champions of all the leagues, even the small ones, into the tournament, sometimes you’re gonna get some blow-outs.
    What’s Next: Another set of games today at 2:45 p.m. ET on ESPN3 and ESPN Deportes.
  3. Cowboys waive Sam: That’s right, remember Michael Sam? The first openly gay person to be drafted by a major professional sports team? After being cut by that team before the season started, Sam was signed by the Dallas Cowboys to play on their practice squad. Yesterday he was cut by the Cowboys. This doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t good enough, practice squads are pretty small and teams often need to cut players for positional reasons (they need an extra wide receiver there more than they need a defensive end, for example.) Still, it means that Sam is another step farther from landing a contract as a roster player for a team. Hopefully this is a case of one-step-back-two-steps-forward. The New England Patriots just lost their best defensive end (the position Sam plays) for a month yesterday… maybe they’ll sign Sam?
    Line: People get cut from practice squads all the time for all sorts of reasons. Let’s hope this isn’t the last we hear of Sam.

What are refs for?

Something interesting happened at the end of the National Football League (NFL) game last Thursday between the New England Patriots and the New York Jets. A small interaction between a ref and a player played a potentially big role in the outcome of the game. Of interest to us is not the outcome of the game but what it says about the function of officials in football and how well that maps to our perception of authorities in the rest of society. Let’s start unpacking this thing from the trunk.

At the end of the game, the Patriots were up by two points. The Jets last chance to win the game was to kick a very long field goal to get three points. They lined up for a 58 yard field goal. This is not an impossible task but it’s very difficult. As the teams set up for the attempt, a Patriot defender was lined up directly opposite from the Jets center. On field goal attempts, the center is a specialist called a long snapper who’s entire job is to snap the ball back to kickers on field goal and punting plays. The New York Times ran an incredible video feature on how field goal attempts work back in 2013. Check it out here if you want to know how they work. Anyhow, the thing that’s important to us is that when the long snapper is doing his thing, he’s basically an open target to defenders who could really smush him into the ground. So, the NFL created a rule to protect the long snapper by mandating that defensive players may not line up directly opposite from him. The exact text of the rule from the NFL playbook is this: “When Team A presents a punt, field-goal, or Try Kick formation, a Team B player, who is within one yard of the line of scrimmage, must have his entire body outside the snapper’s shoulder pads at the snap.”

The Patriots player was set up in an illegal position and, if the ball had been snapped while he was in that position, his team would have been assessed a five yard penalty. The Jets could then have tried a 53 yard field goal to win the game instead of a 58 yard one. How big of a difference is this? Pretty big. Jets kicker Nick Folk has made a little more than half his field goal attempts over 50 yards but never one over 56 yards. So, that penalty could really have helped the Jets. Unfortunately for them, a ref did something which is apparently very common and noncontroversial: he stepped forward, and nudged the player in the illegal position to warn him to move over so that he didn’t get a penalty. The defender moved, the long snapper snapped the ball, the kicker aimed low so that his kick had a chance to fly 58 yards, and a defender reached up with his hand and blocked the kick. No penalty was called. Game over, the Patriots win.

What’s so interesting about this is that we normally think of refs as being there to penalize wrongdoing not to prevent rule breaking or to protect the safety of the players. In the aftermath of the game, after initial claims of controversy and cheating, we learned that refs do this type of preventative action all the time. The most interesting part of the story became how non-controversial it was. Even the Jets coach admitted the ref was “not wrong doing what he did.” League spokesman Greg Aiello was interviewed by Dom Cosentino in his article about the incident for NJ.com. Read closely because Aiello offers two explanations:

It is a standard officiating procedure that occurs regularly… That rule was adopted for player safety purposes, another good reason to help avoid violations in advance.”

“Helping players get lined up properly takes place in other pre-snap situations to avoid administrative penalties… It’s a longstanding standard officiating mechanic.”

Preventing penalties serves the twin purposes of player safety and maximum entertainment even if it comes at the cost of some marginal amount of competitive balance. Teams that are slightly sloppier in their mechanics probably receive more help from refs than more precise teams. It’s hard to shake the feeling that the Jets got a raw deal. Losing a game in part because a ref helped an opponent avoid a penalty doesn’t feel fair, even if the overall approach seems reasonable.

Does this same principle hold for authorities outside of sports? Take the approach of police to the dangerous practice of speeding. Police give out penalties for drivers they catch speeding, just like refs do for players caught breaking the rules. Police also do things to prevent speeding without giving tickets. If you’ve ever seen an empty police car at the side of the road or one of those digital readouts that show your current speed next to the speed limit, they are tactics the police use to slow people down without giving tickets. In this context, authority measures used to prevent violations before they occur don’t seem so bad, do they?

Tuesday, October 21

  1. Pittsburgh win, Houston loses: The Monday Night Football game was a game of streaks. The Texans had the first streak during which they opened a 13-0 lead against the Steelers. Then, the Steelers had the next one when they scored 21 points in the final two minutes of the first half! That was the decisive streak. After that, the teams traded points in the fourth quarter but the game was really decided in those last two minutes of the first half.
    Line: Sometimes, you can play well enough to win for 58 minutes and bad enough to lose in the other two.
  2. U.S. Women perfect through three: The U.S. Women’s National Soccer team is perfect through three games of World Cup qualifying. They beat Haiti 6-0 last night to advance to the semifinals on Friday against the winner of the Mexico v. Jamaica game tonight with a 3-0 record in the group stage. This isn’t surprising, the level of competition in North America and the Caribbean, with the exception of Canada, is not at the U.S.’s level.
    Line: No surprises here.
    What’s Next: A semifinal game on Friday against Mexico or Jamaica. The winner will qualify for the World Cup.
  3. Baseball’s long wait is over: Nothing happened yesterday in the baseball playoffs, just like nothing happened on Sunday, Saturday, or Friday. That’s right, just before the World Series, baseball took a four day break from having games. I don’t know about you but any momentum I had as a casual baseball fan to watch the games feels like it has dissipated. It also feels a little cheezy because it seems like baseball was trying to avoid having the first game of the World Series go up against college or professional football because their ratings would look bad in comparison.
    Line: Thursday to Tuesday is too long a wait between games.
    What’s Next: Game One of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.