Understanding Sports Archives - Page 15 of 43

How does candlepin bowling work?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does candlepin bowling work? How is it different from regular bowling? How does the scoring work?

Thanks,
Scott

Dear Scott,

Candlepin bowling is a fun game simultaneously more accessible to beginners than standard bowling and more difficult for experts to master. It was invented in 1880 in Worcester, Massachusetts by a man named Justin White. It remains the primary form of bowling in much of New England and parts of Canada. The basic architecture of candlepin bowling is the same as the standard form of bowling found in most of the United States, called ten-pin bowling. Players stand on one end of a long, narrow, lane and compete to see who can knock the most stuff over at the other end by rolling down it. The difference is largely in the details of how the game works, its terminology, and how it is scored.

What’s the difference between candlepin bowling and standard bowling?

There are two obvious categories of differences between standard bowling and candlepin bowling: the equipment used and how the game works. Candlepin gets its name from the wooden pins used, so let’s start there. Candlepins are much thinner than regular bowling pins and are virtually straight up-and-down cylinders. They do taper out a tiny bit at the middle (don’t we all), but at their thickest, they are less than three inches in diameter. The pins are the same at top and bottom and weigh only two pounds, eight ounces. The ball is similarly much smaller than a regular bowling ball. It is only four and a half inches in diameter and weighs slightly less than a single pin. As you might expect for a ball that easily fits in most people’s palms, there are no finger holes. In terms of gameplay, the two biggest differences are that each bowler gets three chances to throw the ball down the lane instead of two and that any pins that are knocked down during the first or second throw are left on the lane and are therefore live to use as obstacles or helpful projectiles/things to bounce off of during subsequent throws.

What are some candlepin bowling terms to know?

For games that are so similar, candlepin and standard bowling use surprisingly different terms:

Game : String — In candlepin bowling, a single game (sorry to use the term in its definition, but…) is called a string.
Frame : Box — An opportunity to amass points by using three (two in standard bowling) rolls of the ball to knock down a single set of ten pins.
Strike : Strike — When a bowler knocks all ten pins down on their first throw.
Spare : Spare — When a bowler knocks all ten pins down on their second throw.
N/A : Ten-box — When a candlepin bowler knocks all ten pins down on their third throw.
N/A : Wood — Fallen pins that remain on the lane after being knocked down.
N/A : Half Worcester — Candlepin bowling has lots of colorful terms (see the Wikipedia entry for more) for specific combinations of pins remaining after one or two throws. This one refers to the pins remaining after a ball hits the pin to the right or left of the head pin (the front-most one) and knocks only that one and the one behind it over.

How do you score candlepin bowling?

I once wrote a long post about how scoring in regular bowling works. Luckily for all of us, the scoring in candlepin bowling is much simpler! Oh, it may seem complicated, but actually it’s very easy.

The string is divided into ten boxes during which each bowler has to knock down the ten pins. Each pin a bowler knocks down is worth one point. However many pins a bowler knocks down in three chances, that’s how many points she gets. Easy, right? All the complexity comes into the game when a bowler knocks all ten pins down before she has used all three balls. Don’t panic though, here’s the important thing to remember — no matter what happens, each box gets the score of three throws. So, if a bowler knocks down all ten pins in two throws, she gets ten plus however many pins she knocks down on her next roll. If a bowler knocks down all the pins in one throw, he gets ten plus the number of pins he knocks down on his next two rolls. Instead of taking the time for those extra rolls on their own, we simply use the roll or rolls from the bowler’s next turn and those count for the previous and current box. The only exception to this is the tenth and last box. Since there is no next turn, the bowler takes their one or two extra rolls right after knocking down all the pins during their normal turn.

Which game is better?

Haha, good try — I’m not going to start a regional battle on this site. Both games are fun and I’d be happy spending an evening playing either of them. Candlepin bowling is more physically accessible for beginners because of the ball size and weight. The sheer weight of a standard bowling ball can turn a fun evening into a week of soreness for beginners (on the flip side, you get some exercise!) The fact that a stronger person who can comfortably throw a heavier ball faster has an advantage also creates an immediate imbalance in standard bowling that candlepin bowling does not have. On the other hand, candlepin bowling is much harder, even for experts. The thinner pins don’t help each other fall down in candlepin with nearly the predictability or consistency of standard bowling. As a result, beginners are going to have more trouble ramping up to intermediate status. After a few games of standard bowling, you can start attempting to be intentional about what you’re trying to do when you roll the ball. After a few games of candlepin bowling, you’re still basically just trying to roll it straight and hit something. Strikes and spares are easier to come by in standard bowling. In candlepin, even the experts don’t often get strikes.

Time to get out there and try it yourself! Let me know how it goes,
Ezra Fischer

Happy Mothers' Day 2015

In the sports world and also in the real world, Mothers’ Day is a great excuse to tell stories about mothers and how important they are to their children’s lives. Michael Farber wrote an excellent article for Sports Illustrated about hockey player Alexander Ovechkin’s mother, who passed down her athletic genes at birth (she was an Olympic basketball player) and has continued to nurture her son in her own distinctive way to this day. That way included being the primary negotiator of his 13 year, $124 million contract with the Washington Capitals. Not bad. In the hopes that one day my mom or grandmother will negotiate a deal like that for me, I want to share some stories about them today. Jokes aside, I want to thank them for being a big source of inspiration for Dear Sports Fan. This site is the product of my love for sports and writing, both of which I can trace back through my matrilineage.

Before I could even walk, I was a soccer player. My mom would lift me up and swing me at a soccer ball, teaching me simultaneously how to kick and how to strive for skills just beyond my reach. Before I was old enough to play on a club team, my mom and I were an elite pair of soccer spectators, spending hours watching my brother’s team play. She coached our Saturday morning “house league” teams and helped manage our club teams. She quite un-ironically drove us all over the state to games and tournaments in her minivan. To this day, the term “soccer mom” in our family bears only positive characteristics. My mom got her love of sports from her parents. Her dad, my grandfather, was a member of the Italian-American Bike Club of New York (he was of Russian/Polish ancestry, but he sure could bike) and raced bicycles on the wooden velodromes of the city before World War II. During the war, he played soccer for an American military team who played against other allied teams in England as the soldiers waited to invade Europe. Back home, my grandmother was growing to love the sports her husband loved. The early days of their romance were full of sporting activities. He taught her to ski and to skate and to bicycle. Together they learned to play tennis and golf. They had season tickets to the New York Islanders throughout the glory days of the 1980s. Sports were a glue that bound them together through 50+ years of marriage.

Before I could even write, I was an author. For some reason (my brother claims I’m actually a lefty), I found the physical act of writing difficult. Gripping a pen was awkward, painful, and frustrating. When forced to write for a school assignment, I would do as little as possible, preferring to skimp on composition for the sake of convenience. Instead of trying to force me to write more, my mom developed a work-around. She would sit at the typewriter (later a computer) and let me dictate my homework to her. At times in my life, I’ve felt embarrassed by this luxury — how many other seven year-olds have a secretary? — but now I’m convinced it was a smart move. Without being freed from the physical act of writing, I don’t think I ever would have discovered a love for the mental aspects of composition. As for my Nana, well, I forget exactly when it began, but before Dear Sports Fan was even the germ of an idea in my mind, Nana had begun encouraging me. “You’re a writer,” she would say, or “One day, I’m going to see you in the back of the New York Times magazine.” These little remarks fostered a slow burning desire to write and a spark of belief that I could.

Of course, the content and style of Dear Sports Fan would be nothing without perseverance. The life of a blogger is not a particularly hard one, but you do need to keep plugging away at it, turning out two or three posts a day, week after week, month after month, year after year. I don’t have an enormous following, so most of the views I get each day are from people who go to Google, wondering about some aspect of sports. By writing every day, I make it more likely that I’ve written about what they’re wondering about and more likely that Google will favor my site in its search rankings. How do I keep going every day? It’s in my blood. My grandmother has been making art for decades and the thread that connects her printmaking to her sculpture to her haiku is a confident determination to always be creating something. My mom always has a project too. For over 35 years, it was inspiring classrooms of students to love nature and be creative. Now that she’s retired, she’s concentrating on different things, like taking care of her grandchild or cleaning out the garage (sorry Mom for all my junk in there).

The three of us enjoy sports together too. With the Women’s World Cup coming up, I was thinking about the finals of the last World Cup in 2011. The United States played Japan in the finals and I was in Long Island, watching with my Mom and my Nana. To be historically accurate, the three of us started to watch the game but my Nana decided to leave the room at some point in over time because she was getting too fired up! Today, on Mothers’ Day 2015, the three of us won’t be in the same place geographically, but sports might still find a way to bring us together. The U.S. Women’s National team will play against Ireland in a friendly World Cup warmup game. It will be televised live on Fox Sports 1 at 2:30 p.m. ET. Here’s a video of the team saying happy Mothers’ Day to their moms.

Happy Mothers’ Day, Mom and Nana, and to all the other mothers out there as well. Thanks!

Why do hockey sticks break?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve got a question here — why do hockey sticks break? It seems like they break all the time and whenever they do its bad for the player whose stick breaks and the team he’s on. Why don’t they just make stronger sticks?

Thanks,
Nathan

Dear Nathan,

Although hockey sticks don’t actually reproduce, you can think about their design as being under a type of evolutionary pressure. Professional hockey is an extremely competitive landscape, not just among teams, but among players looking to secure spots on one of the 30 NHL teams. Ineffective players will be dropped and replaced quickly. One thing that ensures that a player will be ineffective is a bad stick. Players who want to get and keep a job playing hockey have an interest in getting the best stick possible. Over time, what has generally been accepted as the best way to make a stick has changed.

The first hockey sticks were made of wood. This is traditionally the material we think of when we say the word, “stick” after all. Wood sticks remained standard throughout hockey until the 1970s when companies began experimenting with other materials like fiberglass and aluminum. Aluminum took over as the stick du jour throughout the 1980s. These sticks were made of two pieces, a shaft, and a blade that fit into the shaft. The benefit of the aluminum stick was that it almost never broke — one shaft might last the lifetime of several replaceable blades — and its production cost was much lower than the traditional wood process. The downside was that the sticks didn’t perform quite as well as wood ones. They produced less accurate and weaker passes and shots. The major reason for this is that aluminum is not as flexible as wood, at least not under the type of pressure that a hockey player can generate when shooting or passing. So, beginning in the 1990s, the favored material migrated once more from aluminum to a mixture of materials: graphite, carbon fibre, and titanium, among them. At first, these sticks followed the two-piece design of their aluminum predecessors, but soon their designers realized that they could use the extra malleability of the new materials to create a one-piece stick. The result was the one-piece composite material sticks that are most popular today.

These new hockey sticks have all of the benefit of wood’s flexibility and feel with significantly less weight. It’s also much easier to create batches of identical sticks when you’re creating them in a lab or factory than in a wood-shop out of natural material. Modern sticks are much easier to control. The only downside of these sticks is that they break. As you said, it’s pretty common to see sticks break in an NHL game. And when they do, it can be a big problem for the player and their team. Aside from goalies, it’s illegal for a player to play with a broken stick. This is pretty clearly a safety issue, even more so now with composite sticks than the original wood ones. So, when a player breaks his stick, he has to drop it immediately and his effectiveness on the ice is severely limited until he can get a new stick or get off the ice. I wrote a post a few weeks back about why you’ll sometimes see one player give her stick up to a teammate in this situation. A lot of people claim that the new sticks break more than the original wood sticks. The Wikipedia post on sticks denies this, claiming that wooden sticks actually had slightly shorter lifespans.

In any event, whatever the nature of the stick, the essence of your question is: why not design a stick that won’t break? The answer is that if you made it strong enough to never break, it wouldn’t make a very effective stick. A hockey player relies on her stick to bend, sometimes more than you would imagine it bending, especially when taking a slap shot. Unlike a wrist shot, whose strength is the quickness a player can release it with and its accuracy, a slap shot is a power tool. During the action of a slap shot, the stick bends against the ice and then springs off of it, more like a slingshot or a bow than a baseball bat. The ability to bend and therefore the risk of breaking is essential to a hockey stick’s utility. The best way to understand this is to watch it in slow motion:

Having a stick break in the middle of a game is a pain but it’s not as damaging as not being able to shoot it like that!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

How do basketball games start? What's a jump ball?

Dear Sports Fan,

How do basketball games start? I know there’s a jump ball to begin but I don’t really understand how it works and what it decides.

Thanks,
Drew

Dear Drew,

Every college and NBA basketball game begins with a jump ball. During a jump ball, two players stand on either side of a referee who then throws the ball up between them. Once the ball has reached the highest part of its arc, it is then free to be touched. Both players attempt to tip the ball to one of their teammates who are set up around the jump ball in a circle with alternating players on each team. Once the ball is tipped, it’s a free-for all. Whichever team gets the ball, gets the ball.

Basketball games in the NBA and WNBA start with a jump ball. There isn’t a jump ball at the start of each quarter, instead the initial jump ball is used to determine who gets the ball to start each of the other three quarters. The team that loses the initial jump ball gets the first possession of the second and third quarters. The team that gains possession of the jump ball to start the game also starts with the ball in the fourth quarter. I’ve never seen a study which tried to figure out whether it was actually better to win the jump ball and get the ball in the first and fourth or lose it and get it in the second and third. My guess is that it’s insignificant because of the high number of possessions overall (around 200) in each game.

The jump ball is not a unique feature of sports. It is a little bit like a face off in hockey or lacrosse, although in both those games the ball/puck is either dropped down onto the ground or begins on the ground. In all three sports, the goal is to start play with both sides having an even (or close to even. In hockey the home team gets a small advantage) chance of gaining possession of the ball. In lacrosse there are face offs at the start of the game, at halftime, and after every goal. In hockey, face offs are quite common, and are used whenever play needs to be restarted after a whistle.In basketball, jump balls are much more rare. In many games, the jump balled used to start the game, sometimes called an opening tip, will be the only jump ball during the game. In the NBA and WNBA, jump balls can happen during the game if there is a “tie-up” when two players from opposing teams seem to simultaneously have possession of the ball. When that happens, the referee stops play and those two players compete in a jump ball to see who can get the ball. This is better than allowing the game to dissolve into a wrestling match but it does sometimes result in some pretty funny looking jump balls between players of very different heights.

The jump ball hasn’t always been rare. Before the 1930s, it was used just like a hockey face off is, to restart play after almost every stoppage. Think about how often that must have been in as high scoring a sport as basketball! This was before the shot clock had been implemented, so basketball wasn’t as high scoring as it was today, but there still must have been a lot of jump balls. Winning jump balls would have been an important skill to have because a team that was good at it could have gotten possession of the ball, scored, and then gotten possession right back again. Today, the jump ball is archaic and almost extinct. It’s not used in college basketball or international basketball except to start the game. If there is a tie-up during a game in college or internationally, one team will get the ball and then the next time it happens the other team will. This is called alternating possession. Although equally fair, there’s something more pleasing to me about the jump ball. I hope it doesn’t disappear completely.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Aside from footballs, what else can be customized in sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

Okay, so… what with the whole Deflategate thing popping up again, I understand that in football each team is allowed to customize their balls within certain parameters, and the Patriots probably went too far. Honestly though, I was surprised that football teams could customize their balls at all. What else in sports is customizable?

Thanks,
Charlie

Dear Charlie,

I too was surprised when I first learned that NFL teams were allowed to customize the balls that they play offense with in each game. It seems unusual to give a team leeway over such an important piece of equipment. The ball is not customizable in any other sport that I’m aware of. Not in soccer, basketball, lacrosse, field hockey, volleyball, rugby, or even kickball. Perhaps it’s because in football, the ball is only used by one team at a time. Each team gets a turn playing offense with the ball while the other plays defense without it. When there’s a change of possession, there’s a whistle and the balls can be swapped in or out. Baseball is somewhat similar, although the ball is used somewhat equally by the defense (pitcher) and offense (batter.) It’s not surprising then that despite rules against any customization of the ball in baseball, it’s the one sport I know of where players (usually pitchers) are semi-frequently caught for trying to customize the ball to their liking. Pitchers won’t deflate the ball (it’s not inflated, so good luck deflating it) but they do try to scuff it up, spit on it, or rub sticky stuff onto it. That said, what you asked about were the elements of sports equipment that can be customized. Here’s a quick list off the top of my head of important elements of the five major sports that can be customized.

Soccer: Not much. But then again, there’s not much equipment in soccer at all, that’s one of its attractions. A player’s cleats can be custom-made although the materials used as well as the sharpness (they can’t be sharp) and the height (they can’t be stilts) are controlled.

Basketball: Again, not much here. A players shoes can be customized and if he’s famous enough, they will be to great profit for him or her and a shoe company. There was a fad a while back of players wearing full-length tights on their legs but the league put an end to that, not because it necessarily gave anyone an advantage, but because (I think) they thought it made their players look silly.

Football: Beyond the ball, there are a few things football players customize. Their helmets are remarkably unregulated — mostly because regulation by the NFL would theoretically further their liability for brain injuries incurred under their auspices. Face masks may be customized but cannot include tinted visors unless players ask for and are granted a medical waiver. The number of bars and their location is also regulated and some of the more crazy Hannibal Lector looking masks you’ve seen in past years are being outlawed. (Which is good, because their weight is likely contributing to concussions among the players who wear them.)

Baseball: Major League baseball players are allowed to customize their bats and gloves but within pretty tight regulations. Bats have a maximum diameter (2.61 in) and length (42 in) and must be made of a solid piece of wood. Players have been caught corking their bats (hollowing them out and replacing the center of the wood with cork to make them lighter and theoretically better) and punished before. Gloves have a complicated set of rules, but basically they have maximum dimensions (catchers and first basemen have separate limits from all other fielders) and have to have individual fingers, not a webbing.

Hockey: Now we’re talking. Virtually every piece of equipment in hockey, except for the puck and the goals, are customizable within limits. Goalies wear armor from head to toe that is carefully regulated but thoroughly customized. For other players, the most important thing is the stick. Players can and do customize the length of the stick and the curve of the stick’s blade. The maximum stick length, of 63 inches, can be extended by special waiver for players over 6’6″. The longest stick, is 65 inches long, and used by 6’9″ Zdeno Chara. The blades can be curved however a player wants them to be but at no point can the curve be deeper than 3/4 of an inch. This is a rule that’s broken with great regularity and almost never called even though at any point a coach or player can challenge another player’s stick and have the referees check to see if it is legal. If it’s not, a two-minute penalty is assessed and one team gets a power play. The most famous (or infamous) stick challenge came in the finals of the 1993 Stanley Cup. It’s interesting that, as opposed to the current kerflufle in football, no one really blamed the stick violator, Marty McSoreley, or his team, the Los Angeles Kings for cheating in this way. In fact, if either team was seen as guilty, it was the Montreal Canadiens for calling it out.

Generally, it seems as if the more equipment a sport has and the more its use is isolated to one player or one team, the more customization is permitted. Anything that can be customized is regulated but breaking these regulations is often seen as a normal part of the sport — perhaps worthy of punishment but not of scorn.

Thanks for asking about customization,
Ezra Fischer

What is a good foul?

Dear Sports Fan,

Here’s something I’ve been wondering about. Sometimes while watching a game on TV, usually basketball or hockey, I hear the announcer say something like “that was a good foul.” What does that mean? Is it a moral judgement? A stylistic one? What is a good foul?

Just wondering,
Ronnie

Dear Ronnie,

I love the idea of a foul being morally good. And while I’d love to invent scenarios where that is the case, the most common usage of the phrase “good foul” refers to a foul being good in a tactical sense. Tactically speaking, a foul is considered good if it benefits the team committing it by either increasing the likelihood of their scoring or more likely decreases the likelihood of the other team scoring.

Here are some examples of common good fouls from different sports:

In basketball, any foul that prevents a player who is close to the basket from making a dunk or a layup is thought to be a good foul because the team that has committed the foul trades a close to 100% chance of giving up two points for giving up two free throws. With the league average free throw percentage right around 75%, this clearly a good trade. One danger of trying to commit this type of good foul is that if the foul doesn’t actually keep the player from making that easy dunk or layup, they could be given the two points plus a single extra free throw. This is called an “and one” and a foul that results in this is always a bad foul.
In soccer, there are two similar but slightly different types of good fouls. There is a subtle, non-dramatic foul that stops a team which looks like it is about to generate a scoring chance in its tracks. There is also an obvious foul once a team has a clear and extremely threatening scoring chance. The first type is generally not penalized with a card, or if it is, it’s a yellow card, but the latter almost always is. Even if the player committing the second type of good foul gets a red card, and their team is forced to play a player down for the rest of the game, the foul is still generally thought of as good if it prevented a goal. That’s how important goals are in the low-scoring sport of soccer. These intentional good fouls are sometimes called “professional fouls” in soccer.
Good fouls in hockey are similar to soccer, with one additional category. In hockey, a violent foul that doesn’t affect a scoring chance may sometimes be called a good foul for reasons of morale. Hockey teams are often thought to run on emotion, maybe even a little bit more than other sports, and a player can stir up their team by roughing it up or even fighting with a player from another team. This type of emotional effort is retroactively judged to be good if it works, but if the player’s team doesn’t react or if the opposition scores on the resulting power play, it may be thought of as a bad foul.

The concept of a good foul in sports is an interesting one because it reveals that the rules in sports are not actually rules. They’re more like guidelines. The existence of set penalties in every sport — free kicks and yellow or red cards in soccer, foul shots in basketball, power plays in hockey — proves that these rules are expected to be broken. Rules in sports generally aren’t drawn on moral or ethical lines. No one gets mad at a player who takes a good foul in basketball and gives the other team two free throws. When you see athletes get mad, it’s usually because they feel that some unwritten rule has been broken — that a player has taken a good foul but done it in an unnecessarily violent way. As a character from one of my favorite P.G. Wodehouse books, Monty Bodkin in Heavy Weather says frequently, “There are wheels within wheels.”

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Why not make the NFL draft more fair to players?

The NFL draft was this past week. It has become a three-day extravaganza, hyped for weeks before and analyzed for months afterwards. Although we treat it like a sporting event, it’s really just a mutated job fair. The way it works is that the 32 NFL teams take turns selecting players. The teams select in the reverse order of how well they did in the previous year. This year, the first pick was made by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who won two games and lost 14 last year and the last pick was made by the New England Patriots, because they won the Super Bowl last year.

This seems like a fair system. Giving the worst teams the best new players, (or at least their choice from the new players) should create a league with some amount of parity, where it is difficult for some teams to continually be the best and some teams to get stuck at the bottom of the standings forever. Who, exactly, is this fair for? It’s fair for team owners who, despite a fair number of socialist league policies (revenue sharing, etc.) do benefit from the popularity and success of their own teams. It’s also fair for football fans who generally have hope each year that their team may compete for the playoffs or even the championship.

I suppose the current system is also fair for players, each of whom have declared themselves eligible for the NFL draft with a full and easy understanding of just what that means to their futures. It’s not always very nice though. A player can easily be drafted by a team whose management or coaches he does not like or from a city or region he doesn’t feel comfortable. A football player doesn’t get to choose where he lives, who he works with, or for. This year, Deadspin ran a short photo with caption style post about Amari Cooper, drafted by the Oakland Raiders with the fourth overall pick of the draft. The headline was “Amari Cooper Looks Really Happy to Be on the Raiders.” He doesn’t. And why would he? The Raiders are a notoriously inept organization with insane (sometimes good insane, sometimes bad insane, but either way, an acquired taste insane) fans. Cooper is from Florida and played his college football in Alabama. Now he’s got to move out to Northern California and play for a team that hasn’t had a winning record since 2002… when Cooper was eight years old.

Sure, there’s no need to cry for Cooper, he’ll be making over $400,000 this year, but the same cannot be said for the players who were drafted in the fifth, sixth, or seventh rounds. These players are on the fringes of the NFL and close to as many of them won’t have a job in two years as will. For all players, but for these guys especially, the difference between getting picked by a good team and a bad is enormous. So, why not think about other systems that are equally fair to fans and owners but perhaps more fair to the players? There are lots of different “fairs.” Before joining a pickup basketball game, the first thing you ask is “winners or losers?” In other words, does the team that just scored get the ball to start the next possession or does the team that just got scored on? Both are seen as fair options, one simply rewards one thing and one rewards another? The NFL could just as easily reverse the draft and reward the teams that perform well by letting them select first. That will help some players but not all of them. Another option would be to reverse the power structure. Make the NFL a little bit more like college, where teams can recruit players, but the players eventually get to choose from the teams. That’s actually a more feasible option than it may seem at first glance. Not all the players will just go to a few of the best teams because, thanks to the NFL salary cap which limits the amount of money teams can pay players, there’s a preexisting brake on how many good (and therefore expensive) players a team can have at one time. We could even still have a draft — where teams take turns announcing that they’ve chosen to select a particular player from the group of players that have said they wanted to play on that team. If a player gave his assent to a group of five or ten teams, the draft order might still determine which team gets to hire him.

Why not give a little bit more freedom to the players?

Beyond juleps and hats – the Kentucky Derby

Dear Sports Fan,

What’s so great about the Kentucky Derby? Isn’t it just an excuse to wear silly hats and drink mint juleps?

Thanks,
Luke

Dear Luke,

You’re absolutely right. For many of us, the Kentucky Derby is an excuse to wear silly hats and drink mint juleps while being thoroughly confused by the arcane world of horse racing. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, in fact, I’ve been happy subsisting solely on silly hats and mint juleps on Kentucky Derby day for years. This time around though, I thought I would try to add a serving of understanding to my meal, just to make it more well rounded.

The Kentucky Derby is one of the three big races in the United States that make up the so-called Triple Crown of horse racing. It’s the first and most prestigious of the bunch. The 1.25 mile race been run every year since 1875. Its long tradition, somewhat rare in this country, is part of its appeal, but for the horses owners and racing fans, the biggest draw is money. The winning horse will get $1.24 million dollars and that’s without considering the largest source of money in horse racing: gambling. Betting on horse races is a tradition that certainly predates the Kentucky Derby and it’s still going strong. You should expect that over $125 million dollars will have been bet on the race by the time it begins. This year, the race will be televised on NBC. You can tune in at 4 p.m. ET for lots of talk about the race, the hats, and the juleps but the race itself will begin at 6:24. It’s probably a good idea to turn it on at least a few minutes early. The race only lasts two minutes, so turning it on a couple minutes late could be enough to make you miss the whole thing.

Rivaling even the silly hats as a Kentucky Derby tradition is, of course, gambling. I wrote a whole post about gambling yesterday with everything you need to understand how betting on horse racing works. This morning I added a second post, where you can test your knowledge through the gift of musical theater. It’s easy to bet on horse racing. It’s actually the only sport in the United States that is completely legal to bet on online. That said, it might be more fun to bet just with your friends. You can make up your own form of betting by using your (potentially newfound) understanding of odds. Pick horses and reward the winner based on the odds. If someone picks a long shot 40/1 horse and they win, maybe you all collectively pay for the next 40 beers or chicken wings they buy or maybe even a bouquet of that many roses. That will give people a good incentive to pick a favorite (likely to win but may only get them a couple of beers/chicken wings/roses) and equally a good incentive to pick a horse that is unlikely to win.

Another great element of horse racing is the names. Horses often have absurd names. There is a reason for this or at least an explanation. Horses have to have names that are not just unique but also easily distinguishable when race announcers say their names. Quick aside on race announcers. They are an amazing mix of auctioneer, square dance caller, and huckster. To get a feel for it, watch this call by Tom Durkin:

You can imagine that if horses had similar names, all hell would break loose as people who gambled a significant amount of money on a horse named The Rural Juror ran up to collect their winners only to bump into another group of convinced winners who had bet on the actual winning horse, The Plural Furor. As many limitations do, the strict prohibition on similar sounding names for horses had led to some wonderful comedy. Take, for example, this race:

However you decide to partake in the race today, do it safely and enjoyably!

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What musical theater can teach us about betting on horses

Betting and horses go together like two degenerate peas in a pod. I wrote about this yesterday in our post on how to understand gambling on horse races. Once you’ve picked up the basic elements of any new skill, the first thing to do is to test it in a real world situation. In the realm of gambling, that often means losing lots of money. A great alternative is to watch a race with an experienced gambler and make some imaginary bets with her so she can tally up your winnings/losings at the end to see what you would have won or more likely lost. If you’re like me, you might not be able to find an experienced gambler. The only ones I know are characters in a musical… so I figured, why not test our knowledge on them??!

I’ve annotated the lyrics to one of the great horse racing songs of all time, Fugue for Tinhorns from the musical Guys and Dolls. Each singer’s line goes in and out, but to simplify things, I’ve stuck with the loudest. The guy in the center, who starts the song is improbably named Nicely-Nicely Johnson. The shorter man who prefers the horse, Valentine, is Benny Southstreet and the third man is Rusty Charlie. Listen to the song and see if you can decipher all of the horse racing betting terms. If you need help, look at the annotated lyrics below.

I got the horse right here.
The name is Paul Revere and here’s a guy that says if the weather’s clear,
can do, can do. This guy says the horse can do.
If he says the horse can do, can do, can do.
You other two guys should listen to me, because I know which horse is going to win. His name is Paul Revere and I have received information suggesting that as long as it doesn’t rain (some horses run better on a wet racetrack than others) he should win.

I’m picking Valentine, ’cause on the morning line,
the guy has got him figured at five to nine.
I’m ignoring your advice and betting on a horse named Valentine. His odds are 5/9 which means that if the race were run 14 times, he should win nine times or 64% of the time. That’s a big favorite, no wonder the little guy in the grey hat wants to bet on him.

But look at Epitaph, he wins it by a half,
according to this here in the Telegraph.
Rusty Charlie prefers a horse named Epitaph whose odds he does not quote but who the horse racing tout (columnist who predicts the outcome of races) in a New York City newspaper claims will win.

For Paul Revere I’ll bite, I hear his foot’s all right.
Of course it all depends if it rained last night.
Nicely-Nicely remains determined to go with his initial horse, although he’s still a bit nervous about the weather. And now a new concern, the health of the horse’s foot has cropped up. I’m not sure our friend here is the most convincing.

I know it’s Valentine, the morning work looks fine,
you know the jockey’s brother’s a friend of mine.
Benny is always looking for an edge and he thinks he’s got some valuable inside information. The “morning work” would be a pre-race workout the horses run. Despite this exercise being likely closed to the public, real gamblers like these guys have connections, like the brother of Valentine’s jockey or rider for the day.

Just a minute boys. I got the feed box noise,
it says the great grandfather was Equipoise.
I wasn’t positive what “feed box noise” was but this guy on Answers.com argues fairly convincingly that it’s slang for scuttlebutt or gossip that people would have traded around the horse’s feed box. That makes sense to me. The internet was also helpful in teaching me that Equipoise was a famous horse who raced in the early 1930s. A horse’s genealogy, often referred to as its bloodlines, is of intense interest to gamblers, who generally feel as if specific characteristics like a desire to run, a willingness to obey the jockey, or a dislike for being hemmed in by other horses are passed down from one horse to another over generations.

I told you Paul Revere, now this is no bum steer,
it’s from a handicapper that’s real sincere.
Poor Nicely-Nicely. He’s still trying to convince the other two that his advice (steer) is good or at least not bad (bum). His argument is that the handicapper (tout, horse racing prognosticator) is sincere. Which seems like just a terrible argument to me. Who cares about sincerity? What we need is accuracy!

I’m picking Valentine, ’cause on the morning line,
the guy has got him figured at five to nine.
Benny is sticking to his guns.

So make it Epitaph, he wins it by a half,
according to this here in the Telegraph.
As is Rusty!

Epitaph. Valentine. Paul Revere.
I got the horse right here!

Thanks for reading and good luck,
Ezra Fischer

How do people gamble on horse racing?

Dear Sports Fan,

How do people gamble on horse racing? Like most people, I’ll watch the Kentucky Derby or one of the other Triple Crown races if its on but I never understand the gambling talk. Can you help?

Thanks,
Kelly

Dear Kelly,

As with many sports, but perhaps even more so in horse racing, one of the primary attractions is gambling. There are lots of ways to bet on a horse race, so many in fact, that to the uninitiated it may seem like an impossible task. There are really only two key things that need to be deciphered to have a basic understanding of how to gamble on horse racing.

The first is how to understand odds. Each horse has odds expressed as a combination of two numbers that can be written as “40 to 1” or “40/1”. These numbers are simultaneously an expression of what people think is going to happen and how lucrative betting on that horse could be. The easiest way to think about this is by fitting the numbers into the sentence: If the race were run [sum of two numbers] times, you should expect this horse to win [second number] times. As you sub the numbers in, you can see why betting on a 40/1 horse (one that, if the race were run 41 times, should be expected to win only once) is called a long shot bet or one that is unlikely to pay off. A bet on the favorite, this year a horse named American Pharoah who currently has 5/2 odds (if the race were run seven times, you should expect him to win twice), is more likely to win. That’s why the payouts also vary depending on the odds. A long shot bet on a 20 to 1 horse will typically pay $21 for every one you bet while a 5/2 bet like the one you’d place on the favorite this year will typically pay only $7 for every one you bet. There’s no need to memorize the payouts but if you want to cheat sheet, ABC News has a handy one here.

The second piece of gambling on horses to learn is that there are several different things that you can bet on. This is a little like the prop bets that are so popular around the Super Bowl. In horse racing, betting on which horse is going to win is just the start of things. There are also bets called Place or Show that give you a little flexibility in case your horse doesn’t win. Betting on a horse to place means you win if they come in first or second while show means you win if they come in first, second, or third. With each additional piece of flexibility, you stand to win less though. The other main vector of betting is in the other direction — betting on your ability to predict not just which horse will come in first but also which will come in second, third, fourth, or even fifth. As you add horses that must finish the race in a specific spot, your chances of winning go down and your potential payout goes up. The name for each bet also gets increasingly silly. Predicting the top two exactly is called an Exacta, three a Trifecta, four a Superfecta, and five a Super High-Five.

Unlike other sports, where it’s usually recommended not to split your rooting interests for the sake of gambling (watching a game in which you’ve bet money against your favorite team is a confusing and disheartening experience) at a horse race, it’s often more fun to make multiple bets. If you take a liking to two or three horses, it can sometimes be better to bet different combinations of them in exactas or even trifectas than to bet them straight-up.

Now that you have a basic understanding of some of the key concepts and terms in gambling on horse racing, you can go off and lose (or win!) some money or you can test your knowledge. Keep your eyes peeled to Dear Sports Fan for our upcoming annotated version of the classic horse racing gamblers song, Fugue for Tinhorns from the musical Guys and Dolls.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer