Hockey Archives - Page 8 of 9

Hockey Culture and Ken Dryden's 'After the Hit'

On May 8 we answered a question about the rules of lacrosse from Alana. In it the subject of how different sports deal with players who put themselves in dangerous situations came up. In women’s lacrosse there are rules against endangering oneself. In ice hockey, we noted, the rules and the ethos of the sport are the opposite. If you put yourself in a dangerous position in hockey you are likely to get hurt by a player acting within the rules and hockey culture will tell you that you have no one to blame but yourself.

On the same day Grantland.com published an article by Ken Dryden about the same topic. The first sentence of Dryden’s Wikipedia page describes him as “a Canadian politician, lawyer, businessman, author, and former NHL goaltender.” He was a Stanley cup winning goaltender for the Montreal Canadians in the 1970s and later wrote a book about his experiences called The Game which is widely thought of as one of the best books about hockey ever written. He’s definitely got the credentials to be well respected and closely listened to about hockey.

In the article, “After the Hit,” Dryden comments on a violent collision and the resulting injury and suspension from a recent game between the Ottawa Senators and the Montreal Canadians^[1] and he wonders if hockey’s ethic on responsibility as it pertains to endangering oneself has gone too far:

It’s this aftermath to the hit that I’ve found most remarkable. There is an ethic in sports that wasn’t always there. It goes, As a player, I can do what I want to do. I will do what I must do. I will face the consequences of my actions and of the rules. Other players will and must do the same. It is my responsibility to protect myself; it is no one else’s. It is their responsibility to protect themselves; it is not mine. If, out of this, things happen, they happen. I may feel sadness as a human being toward another human being, but sadness is not the point. I will feel no regret. I expect none from others. That’s hockey. That’s life.

There is another ethic in sports that has also always been there, and still is. It is worn as a badge of honor, particularly by the “tough guys.” It goes: I will not hit someone when he is down. I will not hit someone when he is defenseless. There is no courage in that. There is dishonor in the doing. The question in this case: What makes a Gryba hit clean and good on a defenseless Eller when a punch to the face of someone lying on the ice, equally defenseless, is not?

I encourage you to spend a few minutes with his article!

Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

There are some graphically violent videos in the post so watch out — but you don’t need to click on them if you don’t want.↵

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.↵

Why do People Like Hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

So, the NHL is back from it’s most recent labor issues. My housemate is very excited. I’m not. Hockey leaves me uninterested in a way other sports don’t. What am I missing? Why do people like hockey?

Thanks,
Mitch

— — —

Dear Mitch,

Thanks for your question. I happen to love hockey more than any sport I never played seriously. Here are seven reasons why I love hockey, why I think most hockey fans like hockey, and why you might like it too if you want to and you stick with it for a few weeks.

You can see the puck — in the old days this was the number one objection for dubious and myopic hockey haters.^[1] “You can’t even see the puck!” they would say. And, to give them some credit, it was hard to see the puck on a small standard def television. In fact, this problem was taken so seriously that for one season Fox put a computer chip into the puck so that they could add a glowing halo and a comet trail to their hockey broadcasts in real time! This was pretty terrible. Now, HD TVs have solved this problem — you can see the puck! At least almost all of the time!
The Stanley Cup — the Stanley Cup is the championship trophy for hockey. It is old and enormous and shiny and it has great traditions that go with it. As a matter of principle, no hockey player will touch the trophy unless their team just won it. When a team wins it, one player, usually the captain, will lift the trophy above their head, (no small feat, it’s three feet long and 35 pounds,) kiss it, skate around a bit, and pass it to one of their teammates who will do the same until all have had a turn. During the summer after they win it, each player gets a day with the cup. They can take it to their home town, take it to their favorite vacation spot, to visit a hospital, or a bar… they drink champagne from it or eat cereal. Some have slept with it in their beds.
The Playoff Beard — I’ve written about the playoff beardbefore but suffice it to say that watching a hockey team you root for get hairier and hairier is an oddly satisfying part of a successful playoff run.
45 seconds — Hockey players generally play between 30 seconds to a minute at a time before they hop over the boards back to their bench and are replaced by a teammate. These short bursts of activity are called shifts and they are the source of many of the elements that make hockey unique and enjoyable. Because players play in such short bursts, they can go all out when they are on the ice. It also contributes to the hockey ethic of playing through injuries. All sports have this to some extent, but hockey players take it to an impressive extreme. I think part of this is that you can grit your way through injuries for 45 second bursts that you wouldn’t even think about trying to play with if you were playing 90 minutes like in soccer or 35 like in basketball. Watching teams change lines (groups of players who usually play together) is the easiest “advanced” thing to watch in hockey because goals are often scored against a team who is unable to change switch their players out and get stuck with tired guys on the ice or who try to sub at a bad time and are stuck with people not in the right position.
It makes you go “aaaahhH!” — I watch a lot of sports and none make me squeal as much as hockey. It’s so fast, so suddenly desperate, so chaotic that it always finds a way to surprise. Whether it’s the power of a long shot that hits the back of the net at 90+ miles per hour, an open ice body check that sends someone flying, or a scramble of six or more guys in front of the net desperately trying to score/prevent the other guy from scoring, hockey will almost always find a way to surprise and delight.
Grace — This absolutely is hockey playing against type, but it’s nonetheless true. Think a little bit about what’s going on when you watch a hockey game: ten guys wearing armor and holding spears are moving around at 20 miles per hour with razor sharp knives on their boots. The goal is to get a tiny little piece of vulcanized rubber into a net and to do this they pass the puck back and forth, do all sorts of fancy footwork and stick-handling, and shoot with surprising accuracy, all while the other team is taking every opportunity to physically knock them off their feet. There’s an amazing amount of skill, strength, and grace involved in every hockey game.
Blood (and Consent) — Okay, yes. There’s also a lot of violence. There’s no way that I can do this subject justice. The New York Times’ three part story about Derek Boogaard is an amazing and disturbing read. What I can say is this — if we are okay as a society with violent sports (football, MMA, boxing, horse racing,) I think hockey does it about as well as it could be done. There are surprisingly few violent hits to the head. Compared to football, it’s no contest — the fluidity of the sport ensures that most contact is body to body. And fighting, always a controversial topic, is done in as controlled and ritualized way as possible. This is not to say that sometimes fists aren’t thrown in anger, but most of the time it happens more like the way Tanner Glass described his fight from a day or two ago in the New York Times.

“I just said ‘hi’ to him at the face-off,” Glass told Pittsburgh reporters. “I squared off against him. He said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ I said, ‘Sure.’

“He said, ‘Good luck,’ ” Glass said. “I like when a guy does that.”

And believe it or not, when these guys are done with a fight (as soon as one of them looses his footing or is otherwise at a clear disadvantage,) they will often congratulate each other on a job well done. It’s bizarre to outsiders like me but because players are sometimes miked for television, I’ve actually heard it before.

So there you have it Mitch, seven reasons why people like hockey. I hope one or a few of these connect with you enough to give it a shot or at least to understand what your housemates are excited about!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

i.e. my Dad↵

Can You Help Me Understand the Playoff Beard?

Dear Sports Fan,

The guy I’m dating has started to grow a “playoff beard” to support his favorite hockey team. Can you tell me what he could possibly be thinking? And is there anything I can do to stop him?

Thanks,
Sonja

Dear Sonja,

The growing of a playoff beard in the context of a relationship can be a very delicate issue, particularly if you are not into your beau’s tonsorial experiment for stylistic reasons. We must deal with whether it’s okay to try to influence the beard, and if so, what the best methods are.

In most cases, I would argue that a partner’s appearance is out of bounds. Everyone influences their partner’s style by complimenting them on certain choices and staying silent on others. It’s even okay to say things like, “Honey, those neon teal capris are very flattering on you, but I think I prefer the way a simple pair of jeans allows your natural elegance to shine through.” It’s fine to express an opinion, but when it comes to actually asking, negotiating, or demanding a stylistic change… that crosses a line and becomes an infringement on your partner’s individuality and personal control.

Is a playoff beard really a choice of style though? I don’t think so. I think it’s an element of fandom divorced from^[1] style. It’s more akin to painting your face on game day or wearing giant foam fingers^[2] than cutting bangs into your hair. It’s very likely that he is doing this because somewhere deep down, he feels like his actions will affect the success of his team. This is as obviously insane as it is common.

One argument you could make is that the playoff beard isn’t really as much of a rule as people think it is. The playoff beard is a relatively recent tradition, having been started by the New York Islanders in the 1980s. It was immediately correlated with victory when the Islanders won four Stanley Cup championships in a row.^[3] The NHL has been around since 1917, so the majority of its history has been spent sans beard. Even since 1980 there have been lulls and resurgences in the popularity of the playoff beard. For instance, in 2009 the Detroit Red Wings used the slogan “The Beard is Back” on their way to the finals. Unless your date is a Red Wings fan, he probably hates that team. Ask him if he really wants to be a part of something the Red Wings “brought back.”

If you prefer the indirect approach, here are a couple things you might want to try.

Wait until day four. This is probably the itchiest day in the history of the universe. Watch for a particularly agonized moment and mention how much more you enjoy kissing his neck when it’s smooth.

According to the rules of playoff beards, not being able to grow a beard does not excuse you. For example, Patrick Kane grew a playoff mullet a couple years back. Tell your boyfriend that you’re going to join him this playoff season as best you can. According to the rules, “Women are not exempt from playoff beards. Some refuse to shave their legs…others get more…um…creative. I’ll just leave it at that.”

Your third option is to embrace the playoff beard! You might be surprised at how much you grow to like the “fuzzy and furry facial accoutrement” growing on his face. The female bloggers over at Puck Daddy certainly do — they just wrote a “Guide to 2012 Stanley Cup scruff.” Encourage him to take part in the beard-based charity drive at Beard-A-Thon where hockey fans have raised over $100,000 so far!

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

perhaps even intentionally oppositional to↵
of course if he is growing a beard, he probably does those things too…↵
Also point out that they have not won since… so it may be more of a curse than a boon↵

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.↵

When Will People Stop Playing Violent Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

Someone died in an Indy Car race today? Why do people do this to themselves? When will they stop?

Seriously, this is crazy,
Fernando

Dear Fernando,

It does seem a little crazy, doesn’t it?

Dan Wheldon who was a former Indy 500 champion died today during a race in Las Vegas in a crash that involved 15 cars traveling at over 200 miles an hour. I don’t know what makes people do risky things. In sports there are obvious dangers — car crashes, broken bones, and torn ligaments. Taking a stick, puck, elbow, or fist to the face leaves a visible and sometimes permanent mark of the perilous life of an athlete. We now know there are less visible but still insidious dangers that lurk in the repeated collisions that take place on every play of every football game and practice. I’m not sure what attracts us to sports. Are we attracted in spite of or because of the danger?

When it comes to injuries short of death (and to an increasing extent, brain injuries, but that’s another story…) sports cultures tend to build off the courage and intolerance to pain that are a necessary part of doing anything as physically challenging as playing a sport to create an intolerance to the admission of pain. There is a cliche that there is a line between being hurt and being injured. You can play hurt. You can’t play injured. The line moves a little from sport to sport, but reasonably bizarre things are often on the line of hurt. How far you are willing to push that line for your own body generally has a lot to do with how your teammates and coaches think of you. I played soccer for about 10 years growing up and I am still proud to say that I never missed a game with a “hurt.” Sure, I dislocated each of my kneecaps twice… but those were “injuries.” At the level (low) that I was playing at, this is usually a fairly innocuous attitude to have, but at higher levels, it leads to people pushing their bodies into all sorts of situations that are likely to have long-term effects on their health. This Malcolm Gladwell article made a big splash for its revelations about concussion, but when read carefully, it suggests something else — that willingness to put ones own health at risk for the good of the team is basically selected for throughout youth sports, so that by the time you get to the highest levels of competition, basically everyone is like this.

One would think that death cannot be an extension of this attitude towards your own body. And in fact, I imagine it’s not. But risk of death might apply. There is some risk of death inherent in every sport. It’s certainly higher in sports like football, hockey, cheerleading, boxing, and racing than in sports like baseball, soccer, and basketball. I can’t speak for drivers, but I imagine that like with injury in other sports, people who do not have the quality of being willing to risk their lives in their sport are weeded out long before we ever see them on television.

I don’t know why there are people willing to risk their bodies and their lives for a particular activity, but I do know that for the most part, these are the people who are successful enough to make it to the professional ranks of each sport. It’s almost a catch-22, but the reason drivers are crazy enough to get in cars and risk their lives is because only people that crazy can drive professionally.

Let’s hope risk doesn’t turn to loss again for a long time,
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

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

Why Aren't the Rules the Rules? (Part 2)

Dear Sports Fan,

Reading about the bad call in the Pittsburgh/Atlanta game last night reminded me of something I’ve always wondered. Whether it’s because the ref is looking the other way (literally or figuratively), or because of just plain human error, the rules in sports are often either not enforced, or not enforced correctly. But in many cases, it seems like people just consider that an integral part of the game! Especially given the increasing ability of technology to settle disputes, why not just come up with what the real rules ought to be, and then enforce them as thoroughly as possible?

Thanks,
Erik

— — —

(This is a continuation of an answer to this question. The first half was posted here.)

It will ruin the game:

There is some concern that adding technology to sports will ruin the game by making it too sterile or too slow. Taking the humanity out of the game could be a concern, but as much as people love discussing disputed calls at the water cooler, they also love talking about great (and terrible) performances, and great (and terrible) decisions on the part of the players and coaches. There will always be something to talk about. As for making the game too slow… uh… it could not possibly slow down the game as much as television time-outs, arguing with refs about calls, or in the case of baseball… adjusting your batting gloves, hat, glove, or cup compulsively over and over and over again.

It’s too expensive:

FIFA, the notoriously frustrating international federation of soccer refuses to add video replay to international competition because it would be too expensive for some of its member nations to implement. This is a curious reason since it seems like knowing ahead of time that you will actually know whether the ball crossed the goal line during the game shouldn’t change any element of tactics or strategy.

What do you mean “right?”

This is the heart of the answer to your question. A rule says, “it’s against the rules to trip an opponent” but does that mean “it’s against the rules to trip an opponent” or “it’s against the rules to trip an opponent if you get caught?” It’s clear from these two sports cliches which way the sports world leans: “it’s not a foul if you don’t get caught” and “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”

Sports, particularly baseball is all about cheating. The last twenty years have been shaped by steroids and HGH. Before that there were amphetamines called greenies. Before that teams regularly intimidated officials or just plain assaulted them when they didn’t like the calls they were getting. It’s well know that the 1919 World Series was fixed by a few players on the White Sox and there have always been unproven rumors that the 1918 one might have been fixed as well. Cyclists are jam-packed full of drugs. They have been for a long time but “tiny electric motors…?” That’s a new one.

Even if a player is clean when he steps onto the court, he or she is rarely clean by the end of the game. Some of the most memorable plays in sports history have been the beneficiaries of some incorrect or missed calls. In soccer there is the “hand of god” goal, in basketball, Michael Jordan’s famous shot to beat the Utah Jazz is an offensive foul. Watch the video and notice Jordan’s left hand on his defender’s hip… he definitely pushes off.

Jordan is not great in spite of pushing off, he’s great partially because he pushed off and didn’t get caught.

Another way to state the question is — do we really want to have the game called “perfectly?” Here’s an example of this in the non-sports world. We certainly have the technology to identify each car and driver and what road they are on. Why shouldn’t we simply fine people whenever they go over the speed limit? Why waste all the time, money, and talent of our police departments lurking around trying to catch people when we could just automate it? I know we’ve started doing this with running some red lights, but I think that if we tried to automate speeding tickets on a large scale there would be riots and political parties would shape up around the issue… and I’m not sure which would be worse! It’s the same with most sports — a totally policed game is a boring one.

Thanks for the fun question,
Ezra Fischer

Why Aren't the Rules the Rules?

Dear Sports Fan,

Thanks,
Erik

Dear Erik,

Great question! In fact, this is such an interesting question that I’m going to break my answer into a couple blog posts.

The bad call that you’re referring to is this one:

It won’t work:

Sports rules are complicated and the action happens very, very quickly. Assuming that there is no way that we’re going to be able to rework the rules to change something as integral as “if the catcher has the ball in his glove and touches the runner before he touches home plate, he’s out” then one has to wonder how technology will help. Setting aside video replay for a second, let’s look for another solution. Okay, so — let’s put a chip in the ball. Then, let’s put some material in the catcher’s glove such that the ball knows when it’s in the glove. Great — now we’re cooking with gas! Now we have to have either more material covering the runner’s uniform… and hands, arms, head, neck, etc. Or, I guess we could just monitor whether the glove is making contact by putting some sort of pressure meeter into the ball or glove. Except that won’t work because that glove could hit the ground, the ump, or the catcher’s own body. I’m not sure any of this will work, so let’s go back and examine video replay.

Video replay is the most common form of technology in sports. Football, basketball, hockey, even baseball (believe it or not) have some form of video replay in their rules. In baseball use of video replay is restricted to basically deciding whether a ball was a home run or whether it never left the ball-park, did leave but was subject to fan interference, or left but was foul (too far off to the side to count.) Other sports have more extensive video replay rules. You may have noticed NFL coaches comically struggling to get a little red flag out of their sock, pants, shirt, etc. and throw it onto the field — they are “challenging” the ref’s judgement and calling for a video replay. Every goal in hockey is reviewed by a team of video officials in Toronto. The NBA has been able to replay shots at the end of quarters and games and just recently added video replay for unclear out-of-bounds calls.

Tennis has a system called Hawkeye. This is probably as close as it gets to your suggestion. According to Wikipedia, “all Hawk-Eye systems are based on the principles of triangulation using the visual images and timing data provided by at least four high-speed video cameras located at different locations and angles around the area of play.” In tennis the rules are objective and there is technology which insures the calls are too. Or at least can be. The computer has not totally replaced the line-judges or the referee yet… although I could see a time in the not so distant future where they could.

Most other sports are not as tidy as tennis though. Take the call at home plate that started this discussion: here’s how Jonah Keri described it on Grantland.com

If you want to use replay to make a simple yes or no call, you won’t get unanimity. And no, the fact that Lugo acted as if he were out does not constitute iron-clad proof.

Watch the replay for yourself, with the sound off.

Here’s what I did see: Lugo starts his slide well in front of the plate. Home plate umpire Jerry Meals starts to make his safe sign just as Lugo touches home with his right foot. There’s no way Meals has time to process the play and rule that Lugo had already touched home. He’s also not looking at Lugo’s foot, but rather at the swipe tag. (It should be noted that Lugo did in fact touch home with his right foot the first time — the follow-up tap of home with his left foot was unnecessary.)

Either way, replay wouldn’t have resolved the issue. Not to the point where all parties, including a purple Clint Hurdle, would have been satisfied.

And, as Keri also points out, at the time of this call, the ump had been on the field working in a high-pressure environment for six hours and 39 minutes. Furthermore — even Baseball is a nice tidy game compared to Hockey or Football. No matter how many cameras, sensors, and computers you have, there is no chance in hell you’ll be able to figure out what happened at the bottom of a pile with thousands of pounds of angry football player fighting over the ball.

More tomorrow…
Ezra Fischer