Understanding Sports Archives - Page 27 of 43

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

What different kinds of pitchers are there in baseball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What different kinds of pitchers are there in baseball? It seems like a very specialized position. I keep hearing people label pitchers in all sorts of different ways, “junk pitchers, submariners, middle relievers,” but I don’t know what all the terms mean. Can you help?

Thanks,
Jan

Dear Jan,

There are a lot of different ways to describe a pitcher. “Junk pitcher, submariner, and middle reliever” are not only three different descriptions but they each describe a different class of description. “Junk pitcher” refers to the kinds of pitches a pitcher throws, “submariner” describes a pitcher’s throwing motion, and “middle reliever” describes when, during a game, a pitcher plays. One of the cool things about baseball is that none of this is rule based. All pitchers are the same according to baseball rules. It’s convention that defines how pitchers are classified. Let’s run through each category and look at the common descriptions and meanings together.

Pitchers classified by the pitches they throw

Junk pitchers – Junk pitchers specialize in throwing slower (relatively slower — they might still throw up to 85 miles per hour) pitches that fool a batter by curving down or sliding sideways as they approach the base.
Knuckleballers – A knuckleballer is an extreme version of a junk pitcher. These pitchers basically only throw one type of pitch — the knuckleball — which flies in such a tortured way that it’s often hard for the catcher to even catch it, much less a batter hit it. Because the pitch is thrown so slowly, these pitchers can have very long careers.
Power pitchers – Also called fireballers or flamethrowers, these guys throw extremely hard. Nowadays, a good power pitcher can throw in the upper 90s or even 100 miles per hour. Their pitches may not move as much in the air but it’s extremely hard for batters to “catch up to them” before they’re in the catchers mitt.

Pitchers classified by throwing motion

Sidewinders – Sidewinders throw the ball with a motion a little like a normal frisbee throw. Their arms stay around shoulder or chest level throughout their delivery. These pitchers are rare in American baseball but oddly common in Japanese baseball.
Submariners – Submariners are a rare breed of pitcher that throws the ball with a motion that brings their hand almost down to the ground before releasing the ball. It’s a crazy looking thing but it’s often very effective, partially because throwing the ball this way makes it move in unusual ways as it approaches the plate.
Normal pitchers – The vast majority of pitchers in Major League Baseball throw with the same overhand motion that most of us were taught to throw with as kids. They just do it with so much velocity that, if you watch them in slow motion, it looks like they’re going to rip their arms off their body from the strength of their throwing motion.

Pitchers classified by when they pitch

Starters – Starters are expected to pitch for the first six innings of the game. They will often throw close to a hundred pitches before wearing down enough to be taken out of the game. Starters pitch only once every five days. That’s how harsh this job is on their bodies.
Middle Relievers – Middle relievers take over for a starting pitcher who needs to be substituted before the eight inning. They’re the least valued members of the pitching staff but also often the most versatile.
Closers – These pitchers come in to “close out” a game in the ninth inning when their team is ahead. They are specialists and most throw relatively few types of pitches. Often they are fireballers but once in a while, a very effective junk pitcher can excel in this role.
Set–up men – Set-up men are a relatively new innovation. They’re specialists who come in just for the eight inning to “set-up” the closer. Think of them as the second best closer on the team. The Kansas City Royals have made a splash in the 2014 season by using two set-up men, one for the seventh inning and one for the eight. They may have just created the position of the set-up set-up man.

Pitchers classified by how they try to get batters out

Ground ball pitchers – Ground ball pitchers aim to get batters to hit their pitches but to do it only under circumstances that the pitcher controls. Through placement, speed, and spin, the pitcher serves up only pitches that he thinks will result in an easily fielded ground ball.
Fly ball pitchers – A fly ball pitcher, like a ground ball pitcher, pitches “to contact.” They don’t try to avoid having the batter hit the ball, they just manipulate the situation so that when a batter does get a hit, it flies harmlessly up in the air.
Strike out pitchers – Strike out pitchers don’t want anything to do with the batter hitting the ball. They would much rather strike the batter out through deception or brute force or a mixture of the two than have them hit the ball into play.

These aren’t the only ways to describe a pitcher (he’s a bum/ace) but they are some of the most common ones. See if you can use one or more of these descriptions the next time you watch a baseball game.

Happy watching,
Ezra Fischer

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

Deciphering TV Graphics: NBC and ESPN NFL Football

Sports is no fun when you don’t know what’s going on. That’s never more true than when a beginner sports fan sits down to watch football with a bunch of die-hards. One of the constant challenges in that scenario are the television graphics that overlay the football game. Every network has a different way of displaying information to the viewer. These graphics are packed with information and mostly well designed but they are never explained. Networks simply assume that viewers will be able to decipher the TV graphics for themselves. Most long-time football fans can but for casual fans, it’s just one more artifact that makes getting into the sport difficult. That’s not how it should be! I took screenshots of the ESPN and NBC NFL Football TV graphics so that I could explain them in detail. Both graphics show exactly the same set of information but they arrange it in different ways. I covered Fox and CBS’s graphics last week. Send me an email at dearsportsfan@gmail.com or leave a comment if you have a particularly problematic graphic for me to unravel.

What information is encoded in these TV graphics?

Score

The score should be one of the easiest things to see from the graphic and indeed, it is.

Timeouts remaining

Each team gets three timeouts per half. Of the four channels that televise NFL football, NBC is the only one that shows timeouts with white colored bars instead of yellow. In our screen captures, both teams have three time outs remaining in the ESPN game but in the NBC game, San Francisco has one timeout remaining and Denver has three.

Quarter

Pretty intuitive, this is just which quarter the game is currently in. Since quarters range from 1st to 4th and so do downs, it’s better to have the quarter close to the time remaining and far from the down and distance.

Time left in quarter

NFL games are organized into four quarters of 15 minutes each. Like basketball and hockey, the clock counts down from 15 as opposed to soccer which counts up to 90.

Down and distance

Down and distance are football shorthand to express the situation of the game. Which of the four chances a team has to move the ball ten yards are they on and how far do they have left to travel? I wrote a whole post on this which I recommend if you, like the person who asked me this question, have always wanted to know what down and distance were but were afraid to ask.

Play time left on clock

Teams with the ball have forty seconds from the end of one play to start running another. This is an important tactical factor because teams can stretch out the time between plays if they are ahead or rush them if they are behind. A penalty is assessed for letting the play clock run out without running a play. For viewers it can also tell them when to look up from whatever else they’re doing so they don’t miss a play. NBC shows this nicely but ESPN doesn’t. It’s possible that a graphic showing the play clock on ESPN comes onto the screen only when it’s close to running out.

What’s missing?

Possession

CBS and Fox both show which team has the ball in their TV graphics. NBC and ESPN don’t. I’m not surprised that, if there were going to be differences, that the two channels that show primetime games would move together. That said, showing which team has the ball is really useful. I’m not sure why NBC and ESPN omit it from their graphics.

Got it, let’s see the graphics

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?

What is identifying the Mike linebacker in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

Something funny happened yesterday in the Giants vs. Cowboys game. Or at least, the football fans I was hanging out with thought it was hysterical. The Cowboys quarterback shouted that one of the Giants players was the “Mike” and the Giants player yelled back that he wasn’t the Mike. I get that it’s funny for opposing players to be having a dialog on the field but I don’t know what they were talking about. What is identifying the Mike linebacker in football?

Thanks,
Jordan

Dear Jordan,

I saw that video too! It was pretty funny. Here’s the video for everyone to watch. After you give it another watch, I’ll explain what the quarterback was doing and why. After that, I’ll attempt the always dangerous explanation of why something was funny.

The name “Mike” is common football short-hand for the person playing the middle linebacker position. We’ve got a detailed post on linebackers and their specific positions within the most common defensive formations, so I won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice it to say that in a standard, vanilla defensive formation, there are often three linebackers on the field lined up behind four defensive linemen. The linemen are the big dudes who line up with their hands on the ground opposite their behemoth counterparts on the offensive line. The linebackers line up behind the defensive line, standing up, where they are in great position to tackle a running back, cover a wide-receiver, or sprint up to try to hit the quarterback. The three linebackers positions in this standard 4-3 formation are not called left, middle, and right, they’re called weak, middle, and strong. (Quick detour — the strong side is the side with more offensive players lined up on the line of scrimmage — linemen and tight ends, the weak side is the one with fewer players, usually just two.) These positions have nicknames: Will, Mike, and Sam which correspond with Weak, Middle, and Strong. (It hasn’t always been Will, Mike, and Sam. Back in 1959, the Giants coaches used the names Wanda, Meg, and Sara.) When a quarterback screams a defender’s number before the start of a play or points at him, he’s identifying the Mike or middle linebacker.

You might be thinking to yourself, “That’s silly, I can look on any team’s website and find out before the game who is playing middle linebacker. Why would the quarterback need to scream about it before each play?” It’s a good point. The thing is, what’s on the website is the player who plays the middle linebacker position in an absolute sense. What the quarterback cares about is who is playing the middle linebacker on each play in a relative sense. Or, to be more realistic about it, he is identifying the player he wants his teammates to consider the middle linebacker of the defense on that play no matter what position he’s actually playing.

On passing plays, somewhere between five and eight of a quarterback’s teammates are responsible for keeping the quarterback safe by blocking defenders who are trying to tackle him from getting near enough to him to do that. The plan for how to do this is called a blocking scheme. Blocking schemes are about as complicated as the choreography of a ballet and at least as opaque to outsiders. Let’s pretend for our purposes though, that they’re pretty simple. Let’s say that the five offensive linemen are going to block, one-on-one, one member of the opposing defense. They’ll move as one unit of five players to block five defenders. They just need to be aimed. When the quarterback calls out the Mike, he’s centering the blocking scheme. He’s ordering the offensive line to center themselves on that player and then block accordingly. If the quarterback calls out someone lined up far to the right as the Mike, the offensive line will aim themselves to the right, the center blocking the Mike, the guards blocking the defenders lined up to either side of him, and the tackles blocking the defenders two people on either side of the Mike. If the Mike is to the left, the line will aim itself to the left. If the Mike is actually in the center of the field, like in the video above, the line will be centered.

So, what’s so funny about the video of Jameel McClain loudly denying Tony Romo’s declaration of his being the Mike? Well, for one thing, it’s funny because the Cowboys have no reason to believe anything McClain is saying. McClain’s profession is to help win football games. Why would he help the opposition? It’s like a poker player interrupting the deliberations of an opponent at the table by saying, “don’t worry about calling my bet, I only have a pair of twos.” McClain’s position is so unbelievable that saying he’s not the Mike is not even a good form of misinformation, it’s just silly. If you really want to get comedy and football nerdy at the same time, you might argue that the funniest thing about McClain screaming that he wasn’t the Mike is that it could be interpreted as a deliberate misunderstanding of the two meanings of Mike: relative and absolute. You could argue that McClain was interpreting Romo’s declaration that for the purposes of the Cowboys’ blocking scheme, Romo wanted his team to interpret McClain as the relative Mike (center of the blocking scheme) and answering honestly that he wasn’t the center of the defensive scheme or the absolute Mike. When everyone can tell the truth and successfully communicate nothing to anyone… that’s funny.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Deciphering TV Graphics: Fox and CBS NFL Football

Sports is no fun when you don’t know what’s going on. That’s never more true than when a beginner sports fan sits down to watch football with a bunch of die-hards. One of the constant challenges in that scenario are the television graphics that overlay the football game. Every network has a different way of displaying information to the viewer. These graphics are packed with information and mostly well designed but they are never explained. Networks simply assume that viewers will be able to decipher the TV graphics for themselves. Most long-time football fans can but for casual fans, it’s just one more artifact that makes getting into the sport difficult. That’s not how it should be! I took screenshots of the Fox and CBS NFL Football TV graphics so that I could explain them in detail. Both graphics show exactly the same set of information but they arrange it in different ways. I’ll do the other two NFL stations next week and more sports later. Send me an email at dearsportsfan@gmail.com or leave a comment if you have a particularly problematic graphic for me to unravel.

What information is encoded in these TV graphics?

Possession

Possession is simply which team has the ball at the moment. This is one of the harder things to discern from the graphics. Fox uses a yellow bar which is easy to miss and looks a little like the timeout counter. CBS uses a small white dot next to the name of the team that has the ball.

Score

The score should be one of the easiest things to see from the graphic and indeed, it is. Fox does a better job of this by making the score by far the biggest numbers out there. CBS’s score is only marginally bigger than the other numbers on its graphic.

Timeouts remaining

Each team gets three timeouts per half. Fox and CBS both show the number of time outs remaining by using yellow bars. In our screen captures, both teams have three time outs remaining in both games.

Quarter

Time left in quarter

NFL games are organized into four quarters of 15 minutes each. Like basketball and hockey, the clock counts down from 15 as opposed to soccer which counts up to 90.

Down and distance

Play time left on clock

Got it, let’s see the graphics

Why do people like tennis?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people like tennis?

Thanks,
Heidi

Dear Heidi,

Tennis is a great sport to play and watch but its charms are not always immediately obvious. To the uninitiated, tennis can seem like watching a game of Pong but with horrible grunting and screaming instead of charming, robotic “bong bong” noises. Tennis is a relatively easy sport to learn and I think it’s worth picking up. Here are some of the reasons why I like tennis.

Long, stable rivalries: Tennis players these days have long careers and at least in the men’s game, the best players stay at the top of the game for a long time. This leads to wonderful rivalries that last for a decade or more. It’s rare and rewarding to see two or three great players battle each other for years on end.
Personality shines through: More than any other sport, as a viewer of tennis, you get to know the players you’re watching. You learn their nervous tics, you see them get mad at themselves, you witness their struggles with fatigue and injury, and if you and they are lucky, you get to see them celebrate the pinnacle of their professional lives.
Psychologically challenging: Tennis is the most psychologically challenging sport. More than any other sport I have seen, tennis players are alone when they compete. In major tournaments they are actually prohibited from having any communication with their coaches. The way the sport is constructed, there are almost always lots of ups and downs in any match and the margin between success and failure is literally inches. You’ll often hear people say that great quarterbacks or baseball hitters need to have “short memories” so they can approach each pass or hit with a blankly optimistic mind. Quarterbacks throw thirty passes in a game. Baseball players get four or five attempts at the plate. Tennis players have to blank their minds this way hundreds of times in every match.
Matches last as long as they are good: The way tennis works, uneven matches are over pretty quickly — an hour for a three set match or two for a five set match — but great matches stretch out in enjoyable luxury. A close, hard-fought match can last three hours for a three set match or more than five hours for a five set match. It’s like there’s a built-in mechanism in the sport to make the better viewing experiences last longer and the worse ones end quickly. Compare that to timed sports like soccer, basketball, and hockey, where the great games fly by and the bad ones feel like they are going to last forever…
Has its own vocabulary: Tennis has great words and phrases that only exist in the context of the sport. They’re easy to learn and once you know them, you feel like an insider!
Stylish players: Dressing to play sports is not usually the time you choose to make a fashion statement. There are so many sports fashion choices that are about function over style: bike shorts, squash goggles, over-sized hockey jerseys — but tennis has always prioritized function and style. Even at Wimbledon, where the players are required to wear only white, tennis players exhibit their own styles. Rafael Nadal and Rodger Federer are known for capris and gold accented clothing as much as they are known for winning titles.
Varying surfaces make for different styles: Most sports are only played on one surface. Professional basketball is played on wood, baseball on grass and dirt, football on grass and fake grass. Ice hockey is played on ice and swimming is done in water. Only tennis is played on grass and clay and asphalt where each surface is meant to influence how the game is played. On grass, big serves rule the day. Clay is slower, encouraging defensive tactical play. Hard court falls in between. As a viewer, you develop a preference for watching one surface or another (I love clay) or you just appreciate each of them for their peculiarities.
Wimbledon: Alone among the major sporting events, Wimbledon retains an air of gentility while being a thrilling, top-level competitive event. Let football have it’s Tostitos Fiesta Bowl and hot dogs, tennis fans are happy with Wimbledon and strawberries and cream.

Enjoy the tennis,
Ezra Fischer

What is a spike in football? Why would you fake it?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching the Green Bay Packers play the Miami Dolphins yesterday and Aaron Rodgers “faked a spike.” The announcers acted like it was a big deal but I don’t really understand what happened. What is a spike in football? And why would you fake it?

Wondering,
Ana

Dear Ana,

Great question! When Aaron Rodgers faked that spike yesterday, it was exciting for a bunch of different reasons, some topical and some historic. Before I explain the specific play though, let’s get into the nature of a spike in football.

Spiking the football just means slamming the ball straight down onto the ground. A spike is a physical act. It’s often done in celebration, particularly, it seems by the New England Patriots. They’re just one team but they seem to loom large in the celebratory spiking world. Their star tight end, Rob Gronkowski is a spiking artiste of the highest order. Alan Siegel of Boston Magazine wrote in his A Brief History of the Gronkowski Spike that “Rob Gronkowski’s method of celebrating a touchdown is blissfully unsophisticated performance art.” In a recent game, quarterback Tom Brady and wide receiver Julian Edelman played hot potato until Brady finally spiked in triumph. Spiking the ball in celebration is an instinctive thing but it’s not what you’re asking about.

Spiking the ball can also have a very specific tactical use within the game of football. When a team is trailing at the end of a half or game, they’re compete not just against the other team but against the clock. Depending on what happens in each play, the clock either runs between plays or it stops. It’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of the various clock rules but here are the most common ones:

The Clock Stops
- When a team takes a time out
- When the ball goes out of bounds
- When a pass is incomplete
- When there’s a score
- When there’s a penalty
The Clock Runs
- When a runner or receiver is tackled in the field

Spiking the ball is like a special form of the incomplete pass. According to the NFL rules, “A player under center is permitted to stop the game clock legally to save time if, immediately upon receiving the snap, he begins a continuous throwing motion and throws the ball directly into the ground.” Spiking in this form is also called “clocking the ball” because you’re spiking to stop the clock.

So, when a team is running out of time late in the game and they either don’t have any time outs left or don’t want to take one, they can line up as for a regular play and then have the quarterback spike the ball. This stops the clock but it does count as a down. So, if it’s first and ten and the quarterback spikes the ball, the clock stops but the downs shift to second and ten. If you don’t know what that means, that’s fine — check out our post on understanding downs in football.

The thing with spiking the ball, is that usually it’s pretty obvious when a team is going to do it. The context of the game dictates when a team should spike and, just in case it wasn’t obvious, the quarterback is usually gesticulating wildly with spike-like arm motions to make sure that his teammates know what he’s going to do. It’s natural for the defense to pick up on what’s going on, and because they know their opponents aren’t really trying to do anything other than stop the clock by spiking, they have a tendency to relax and catch their breath for the next play. This leaves them vulnerable to a crafty quarterback who decides to take advantage of their assumptions.

If a quarterback decides to trick the defense, he can pretend to spike the ball and then run a regular play. This is what Aaron Rodgers did yesterday. The context of the game (down four points, twelve seconds remaining, first down) dictated a spike and so did the Packers’ body language. Instead of spiking it, Rodgers made a vague spiking motion and then quickly threw the ball to receiver Davante Adams who ran the ball about ten yards before being pushed out of bounds. The Packers went on to score a touchdown and win the game, partially because of this play. So why don’t more teams do this? There’s real risk in trying it. If Adams had been tackled in bounds, instead of getting out of bounds, the game would probably have ended without the Packers getting another play. It’s far safer to spike the ball and then use the remaining ten seconds to throw the ball into the end-zone where the only possibilities are a touchdown (Packers win), an incomplete pass (clock stops, they get another chance as long as there’s time remaining), and an interception (Dolphins win.) The Packers would probably have had two or three chances if they chose the safe route.

As an added bonus, the most famous fake spike ever was executed by the most famous Miami Dolphin ever, Dan Marino. His fake spike resulted in a touchdown and victory over the New York Jets in 1994. When Rodgers pulled the fake spike yesterday, the announcers pointed out that, by doing it in Miami, he was almost performing an homage to Marino. I doubt Rodgers himself was thinking about that during the game yesterday. In fact, it came out after the game that the receiver who caught it had no idea it was coming.

The fake spike is a big deal because it happens rarely but when it does, it often is pivotal to the result of the game. It’s also enjoyable because it’s one of the ultimate chutzpah moves in sports. A quarterback who fakes a spike is taking all of football’s conventions and breaking them to trick their way to a win.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What does the green dot on a football helmet mean?

The green dot on a football helmet signifies the player whose coach can talk to him through a radio. It has a long and curious history to explore…

Dear Sports Fan,

I notice that some football helmets have little green dots on the back of them. What does the green dot on a football helmet mean?

Thanks,
Gordon

Dear Gordon,

The green dot on the back of a football helmet means that there is a small radio receiver and set of speakers inside that helmet so that the player wearing it can hear their coach talk to them at specific times during the game. This seems like a really weird thing to have in the middle of sporting event but it’s not as rare as you might think. Race car drivers and cyclists have two-way radio capabilities during races and, although without radio technology, most team-sport athletes can hear their coaches during games. National Football League stadiums are just so loud during games that without radio, coaches would not be able to talk to their players. Let’s find out a little more about the history and use of radio in the NFL.

The first coach to put a radio receiver into a helmet was legendary Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown (not related) way back in 1956. Mark Bechtel wrote a great article about this for The MMQB. A few themes that will follow us throughout the history of the helmet radio were present at its inception: radio interference and attempts to cheat and counter-cheat with the radio. At this point, there were no rules legislating the use of helmet radios, so just having them was seen as cheating. It didn’t work that well for the Browns though because their opponents quickly, “became suspicious when they realized that Brown was no longer using offensive linemen to shuttle in plays.” Soon, another opponent got wise to what was happening and, “simply listened in and asked a former Browns player to decipher what was being said, then prepared accordingly.” Not that listening to the radio was all that helpful to anyone. Radio technology being what it is, there was a little bit of cross-pollination. According to Bechtel, the Browns stopped using the helmet radio when their quarterback, “called timeout, took off the helmet and reported to Brown: “Coach, some guy just got stabbed over on Fifth Avenue.” Not so long after, the radio was officially outlawed by the commissioner of the NFL.

The radio made a comeback in 1994 when its use was legalized as part of a sweeping set of changes intended to make life easier for the offense. Kevin Craft chronicles the history of these changes in a Slate article on the topic. The rule allowed for quarterbacks and only quarterbacks to have radio receivers in their helmets so that their coaches could talk to them. The only real caveat to their use was that the receivers would shut off for the last 15 seconds of the 40 seconds each team has to run a play. As soon as the rule went into effect, the race to cheat started. ESPN’s Mike Sando wrote an article in 2007 about all the various ways a team could try to beat the system and communicate all the way through the play clock. Jamming your opponents’ ability to communicate is another good cheat that teams have been trying (or accusing other teams of trying) since the radios were legal. And although the radios are now digital, jamming complaints continue despite highly encrypted and monitored systems. Meanwhile, the interference that led the Browns to give up the system in disgust back in 1956 have been a comedic trope all the way through. The articles I read for this post were full of funny interference stories. My favorite is from Sando’s article:

“I remember one time I was playing, I forget where it was, but I could hear the concession communication,” said Tennessee’s Kerry Collins, a veteran of 148 regular-season starts. “They were asking for popcorn on the second level or something like that.

In 2008, the NFL modified the helmet radio rule to allow for one defensive player to wear a radio in their helmet as well. In Jim Corbett’s article about the rule change for USA Today, he surmised that it was part of a league effort to “counter-balance the New England Patriots’ illegally video taping of the New York Jets’ defensive hand signals in last year’s season opener.” The same fifteen second cutoff applies to the defensive radio helmet which is most often worn by a middle or inside linebacker. Basically team’s want their best, smartest defensive player who almost never leaves the field and is centrally located enough to pass messages on to the rest of his unit to wear the helmet.

Back to the green dot. The dot is actually a sticker with a small NFL logo on it that the guys over at Uni Watch absolutely hate. The NFL rules about radios make it very clear that only one player from each team is allowed on the field at a time with a radio in their helmet. On offense, this is simple — it’s the quarterback — but on defense, there may be some packages that even the best middle linebacker isn’t in. In that case, an alternate player, who registered with the refs before the game as being a radio alternate, can come in off the sidelines with a second radio helmet, designated with a green dot. Before the play starts, he has to tell an official that the primary radio player has left the field and that he’s now the radio guy. The green dot helps officials make sure that there’s only one player from each team with a radio helmet on during each play.

My question has always been — what are the coaches really saying to their players? Oh, I’m sure they say the name of a play, but that only takes a second or two. Coaches are crazed, egotistical people. Are they really able to resist the temptation of being able to talk to a player who can’t talk back? Corbett provided us just a glimpse of this one-way communicative world:

Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder would appreciate calmer and clearer communication from excitable defensive coordinator Paul Pasqualoni.

“It scares the hell out of you sometimes because Pasqualoni is not the calmest guy in the world,” Crowder says. “He gets to yelling in there every play. He’ll say, ‘Watch the run! Watch the pass! Watch it!’

“What else can I do? It’s run or pass.”

I guess in the end, the green dot on football helmets lets us know which player is most thoroughly being harassed by his coach.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer