An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Every week we publish a calendar with everything you need to know to plan your week. And today we’re announcing a new feature – a table that shows which of the many baseball games happening each day are actually worth watching. Check it out on our MLB Forecast page. Here’s what’s going on today:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Every week we publish a calendar with everything you need to know to plan your week. Here’s what’s going on today:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Every week we publish a calendar with everything you need to know to plan your week. Here’s what’s going on today:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
The themes for this week’s best sports stories are the widespread nature of sports and unintentional consequences. A blue musician grew up in Texas before professional baseball existed there, so he became a New York Yankees fan. Now he travels all around the country and roots for his team from afar… even in Boston. A man from Finland travels to the United States over a hundred years ago. Today, the version of baseball he created in Finland still thrives. A trend in naming soccer teams in America suggests emulating common European club team names but doesn’t take into account the history of those names. An international sporting event comes to a town obsessed more with government ethics than sports. Read all four of these pieces in your leisure time. You won’t be disappointed!
This is a brilliant look into the history of soccer in Eastern Europe during the Cold War that leaves its readers wanting much more.
After ditching one offensive name, Houston stumbled onto something worse, either not knowing or not caring that “Dynamo” carries with it perhaps the darkest connotations of any team name in modern European soccer.
In a communist dictatorship, sports franchises obviously aren’t for-profit businesses the way they are under capitalism. Instead, the major soccer teams in Eastern Bloc countries were founded as club teams for various state-run entities. You’ll see repeated names throughout former Warsaw Pact countries: CSKA for the army, Lokomotiv for the transportation ministry, and Dynamo for the secret police.
Did you know the Pan-Am games were happening right now? Did you know they were in Toronto? If you answered “no” to both questions, you’re not alone. Even many people in Toronto don’t know or don’t care.
In a country where even minor misuse of public money can be the stuff of scandal, some observers think the Toronto games never got over the black eye.
“For the general public, there has been an apathy which is being driven by a dissatisfaction with the management of the games,” said Cheri L. Bradish, who teaches sports marketing at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Making matters worse, officials have been issuing early and frequent warnings to adjust travel plans because of the expressway lane closings, resulting in apocalyptic news coverage.
“You can’t do that for weeks and then turn around and say: ‘It’s going to be great,’ ” Ms. Bradish said.
This article is worth reading for the sheer thrill of learning about a strange version of baseball whose evolution diverged from American baseball more than a hundred years ago. The fact that it’s hysterically written and includes video (video!!) of pesäpallo is a bonus.
And those are only some of the quirks of a game that includes a zigzag base path, a rectangular outfield, trios of designated hitters called jokers and managers whose primary mode of communication resembles the feathers of a peacock.
“If you dropped acid and decided to go make baseball, this is what you would end up with,” said Andy Johnson, a Minnesota Twins scout based in Norway.
Jarring as it might look, pesäpallo is no mere curiosity in Finland. It is considered the national sport, and has been known to elicit uncharacteristic displays of emotion from the famously stoic Finns. Clapping, for instance, and speaking.
Why include an interview of a blues man from an art-focused part of a Boston-area NPR outlet? Well, for full disclosure, Mason is a friend of mine, but it certainly qualifies as a sports piece thanks to a series of long wandering comments about sports that the subject of the interview, Steve Earle (who you may know from The Wire) makes.
I’ll never forget, the funniest thing, it was a light moment in a dark era, is I was leaving Boston—I was going through security at Logan [Airport]. My sister lived in Boston for years, she’s married to a guy from there, she lived in Weymouth for a long time. And I don’t remember whether it was business or if it was seeing my sister but it was after 9/11, and not long after 9/11, and they still had a city cop and a state cop and a National Guardsman standing at security at every checkpoint. And I was going through, and I pulled my computer out of the bag and I had a great big top hat Yankees sticker on it. And the sate trooper that was standing there looked at it and goes, “Aw, strip search this one.” And everybody, including me, busts out laughing. And at this point, this was probably in October or November, and one of the planes did leave from Logan, you know, so security was really tough and everybody was really afraid to joke about anything.
Dear Sports Fan,
Ok, so I downloaded the app FotMob and being a newbie to soccer (thanks to Fancred), I have a few questions. What are all the different leagues in the U.S.? I thought I would start out following those and the World Cup stuff when it comes around. Just trying to figure out what all is going on. Would take any suggestions on who else to follow. What leagues and people should I follow as a new soccer fan?
Thanks,
Tim Lollar
Dear Tim,
Congratulations on getting into soccer! Learning any new sport can be a fun and intellectually stimulating experience. As you learn the new sport, it subtly changes the way you think about sports you already understand well and even other aspects of your life. You may even find yourself having eureka moments about something at work or with a relationship and be able to trace it back to something you thought of while learning soccer. Long story short, learning about anything sparks learning about everything. If you haven’t already explored them, we offer a few easy email courses on soccer: Soccer 101, Soccer 201: Positions and Logistics, and Soccer 202: Culture.
It’s a particularly interesting time to become a new soccer fan. Thanks to this year’s women’s World Cup and last year’s men’s World Cup, both of which were conveniently located for U.S. soccer fans, there’s a tremendous amount of excitement about soccer. Unfortunately, it will be another three years until the next men’s World Cup and four until the next women’s. That’s a shame because, especially for the non-totally-hard-core soccer fan, the World Cup is the ultimate competition. Luckily, the alternatives are plentiful and exciting in their own right:
As you can tell, there’s always something to follow in the world of soccer! Apps like FotMob, which provide news and schedules for virtually every league and competition in the world are great resources to have. Twitter is another great resource for following soccer. I would start by following Grant Wahl, a leading U.S. soccer reporter who works for Sports Illustrated. He maintains lists of other people in the soccer world to follow for breaking news, as well as the men’s and women’s World Cup. Poke around in his lists and you’ll find some great soccer people.
Thanks and good luck,
Ezra Fischer
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Every week we publish a calendar with everything you need to know to plan your week. Here’s what’s going on today:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
Dear Sports Fan,
Why is it that in Major League Baseball, every team have to have at least one representative in the All-Star game? Other professional leagues, like the National Football League don’t require one representative from each team. Why does each team get a player in the MLB All-Star game?
Thanks,
Derek Blackman
Dear Derek,
All-star games are a funny reminder of the thin line between sports and entertainment. The difference lies in the competitive nature of the games. Take that away, as you do during most all-star games, and what you’re left with is purely entertainment, even if it still looks like sport. That’s one of the reasons why sports leagues are so concerned about any accusations of match-fixing or betting on games by players or managers. They understand what differentiates them from reality TV is true competition and how easily the perception of its truth can be undermined. An all-star game is a voluntary relaxation on the part of sports leagues. For a day or a weekend during the middle (or in one case, close to the end) of the season, the league takes a rest from competition and puts on a purely entertaining show.
Tickets to the show are expensive – this year’s MLB All-Star game has tickes on Stubhub ranging from just under $300 to over $4,000 – but it’s primarily a TV show. Baseball games are normally TV shows, each one attracting fans of the two teams involved as well as a smaller number of casual (or obsessed generalist baseball) fans but if the league is going to halt all their other shows for a single one, they better be sure it’s going to get the ratings (and therefore advertising dollars) to merit the break from normal games. Baseball has lots of tactics to make sure this happens. It packages the game (made less interesting by the lack of competition) with lots of novelty events (the Home Run Derby, primarily) that don’t happen at any other time during the year. They partner with strong television networks who will promote the game incessantly. Lone among the leagues, Major League Baseball gives their all-star game importance to the regular season. The league that wins the All-Star game (which is played between the American and National Leagues) ensures that its representative in the World Series (baseball’s championship which is also contested between the two leagues) has the opportunity to play four out of the seven possible World Series games at home. The fact which you mention in your question — that every MLB team is required to have at least one of their players on the All-Star team — is another important way of ensuring an audience. Representation from each team, regardless of how bad the team is, is meant to guarantee representation from each team’s fan base when it comes to watching the All-Star game. So far, it seems to be working. The MLB All-Star game does get much better ratings than an average baseball game. In the past few years, it’s averaged around a 7 rating (7% of all households that have a television were watching this) while regular season baseball games averaged only a .7. This means ten times more people watch the All-Star game than a normal game.
Major League Baseball is not alone in this approach to its all-star game. The National Hockey League (NHL) also requires one representative from each team and, although they experimented a few years ago with taking away that rule, they went right back to it. The NBA All-Star game does not work that way, in part simply because of numbers. With 30 teams and only 30 All-Star players, a requirement to have one player from each team would be obviously unfair to players and fans of extremely good teams and would lower the level of entertainment by excluding too many well-known stars. The way the NFL schedules their all-star game, called the Pro Bowl, precludes it from including everyone. Held one week before the Super Bowl, players from the two Super Bowl teams are excluded. Even setting those teams aside, the league allows some teams to be excluded. In 2014, for example, four teams had zero players selected to the Pro Bowl.
Major League Baseball’s approach to team representation in its all-star game makes sense if you view all-star games as purely entertaining TV shows. Many people feel that the logic begins to break if you view the All-Star game as competition – as sport. Normally players, coaches, and fans wouldn’t dream of viewing an all-star game this way, but by making the game decide home-field advantage in the World Series, baseball forces this interpretation to some extent. If the All-Star game is competition, then it follows that each team should be trying to win as hard as they can, even if this means excluding some teams entirely from the game. The argument against this line of thought is that there’s always a balance between entertainment and competition inherent in any televised sport. Surely it would be easier to win if you hid the other team’s cleats from them so they had to play barefoot but it wouldn’t make for as appealing entertainment (actually it would, but you can supply your own example). The All-Star game must get higher ratings than a normal game to justify its existence and a rule that requires representation from all 30 teams and fan bases helps make that happen.
Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer
Dear Sports Fan,
Beginning baseball fan here, trying to catch up on some of the basic stats in baseball. It seems impossible to follow baseball without knowing these. Can you help? What does the ERA or earned run average stat mean in baseball? How is it calculated?
Thanks,
Sharon
Dear Sharon,
Baseball requires more of its viewers from a statistical standpoint than any other sport. You can group baseball stats into three main categories: basic stats like runs, hits, runs batted in (RBIs) which seek to simply state what happened during a game, advanced stats like BABIP (Batting Average on Balls in Play) or Isolated Power that try to create objective and detailed truthful interpretations out of what happened, and intermediate stats that do limited interpretation. Earned Run Average (ERA) is one of the earliest intermediate stats. The statistic was invented and popularized by Henry Chadwick, a newspaper man and early baseball statistician who died in 1908. So, it’s been around for a long time. At its essence is an attempt to compare the performance of pitchers. The formula for ERA is 9 x Earned Runs Allowed/Innings Pitched. Let’s unpack what that means and why it’s meaningful.
The simplest way of comparing pitchers would be to state how many runs opposing teams scored while a pitcher was playing. There are two key problems with this approach, one obvious, one less so, both of which the ERA statistic attempts to solve. The first and most obvious issue is that pitchers don’t all pitch for the same number of innings or at bats. If you only compared how many runs opponents scored while a pitcher was playing, pitchers who pitch fewer innings would always seem better than those who pitch more. Of course, we know that’s not the case. Usually, if a team wants to win, it plays its best player at every position for as long as it can. So, ERA normalizes the number of innings a pitcher has played by taking the number of runs allowed, dividing by the number of innings pitched, and multiplying by nine. It sounds like fancy mathematical footwork, but all it’s doing is ensuring that a pitcher who allows one run in one inning has the same ERA as a pitcher who allowed nine runs in nine innings or three in three.
The second issue that ERA tries to accommodate is that sometimes a run will score while a pitcher is playing that is not the pitcher’s fault. Let’s create an extreme example that’s theoretically possible even if it’s insanely unlikely. Imagine that a batter hits a weak little pop fly ball directly to the third baseman. He should be able to catch it easily and get the batter out. Instead, he gets distracted by a tasty-looking plate of nachos in the stands and instead of catching the ball, he lets it hit him on the head. It knocks him out and as he falls to the ground, the ball somehow manages to slide down his shirt. His teammates are torn – provide medical aid, find the ball, or stare at the nachos. They stare at the nachos. All the while, the player who hit the ball is tearing around the bases, running like the wind. Before the ball can be found, the running goes all the way around for an in-the-park home run. Sure, it’s a run, but is it really the pitcher’s fault? If we’re trying to compare the performance of one pitcher against another, should we really take it into account? ERA says “no.” In order for a run to be included in the ERA metric, it must be an “earned run” that is not the result of an error or series of errors on the part of the pitcher’s teammates. In addition to errors, a pitcher is not responsible for the runs scored by base runners who were already on base when the pitcher entered the game. This means that if a relief pitcher comes into the game with two men on base and then gives up a home run, he’ll only have one of the three runs go into his ERA formula. The other two will go into the previous pitcher’s ERA total.
ERA seems like a pretty neat statistic and it’s certainly passed the test of time. It’s been a key statistic in baseball for over 100 years. It’s not perfect by any means though. It’s key problem is that, while it does a good job at reflecting the outcomes for pitchers during a previous period, it’s not good at predicting the future. A pitcher with a good ERA this year is not much more likely to have a good ERA next year than a player with a bad ERA this year. This is because, despite weeding out errors, ERA still judges a pitcher for many things which aren’t under his or her control. For example, a pitcher who plays for a team with an extraordinary outfield may benefit from their ability to get to difficult fly balls. If that pitcher switches teams to a team with an average outfield, his ERA is probably going to fall. Situations like our example above, where a relief pitcher came into the game with two men on base, happen often in baseball. A starting pitcher’s ERA is to some extent at the mercy of the relief pitchers that replace him.
Many new advanced stats have been created to improve upon or replace ERA but for now, it’s still an integral, commonly used statistic.
Good luck and thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer
If you are a sports fan or if you live with a sports fan then your weekly schedule becomes inextricably linked with what sporting events are on at what times during each week. The conflict between missing a sporting event for a poorly committed to social event and missing an appealing social event to watch a game is an important balancing act in any kind of romantic, familial, or business relationship between a sports fan and a non-sports fan. To help facilitate this complicated advanced mathematics, Dear Sports Fan has put together a table showing the most important sporting events of the upcoming week. Print it out, put it on your fridge, and go through it with your scheduling partner.
Download a full-size copy here.
Monday: With Wimbledon a fond memory and the Tour de France taking one of its rare rest days, this is the first morning in a while that there hasn’t been excellent breakfast sports viewing available. The evening’s lineup is full of events whose outcome doesn’t matter, at least for some of its participants. Major League Baseball’s All-Star game week gets started with a new edition of the Home Run Derby. This year’s contest will feature a time limit, which should make it better television entertainment, at least. In the Gold Cup, the United States men’s team has already clinched first place in their group but the outcome of their game against Panama and the earlier game between Haiti and Honduras will decide which one or two of those teams goes through to the knockout round.
Tuesday: After a day of rest, the Tour de France is back and for the first time enters the mountains. Stage 10 ends with riders climbing almost a mile straight up to the Col de Soudet. Hitting the mountains begins the process of weeding out the sprinters from the climbers and the true contenders from the rest of the field. The mountains also bring with them greater variety and interesting tactics. In the evening, you can choose between two more Gold Cup group stage matches and Major League Baseball’s All Star Game.
Wednesday: By now the week has settled into a bit of a pattern. Tour de France in the morning and Gold Cup soccer in the evening. Today’s stage of the Tour de France is a challenging mountain stage, which is exactly what some riders won’t want after their exertion the day before. Expect the field to really start breaking up during the last two climbs (12 km at 6.5% grade and 17 km at 7.3%!!) of the day. The Gold Cup matches will end Group C and the group stage. Trinidad & Tobago has surprisingly clinched a spot in the knockout stage already but Mexico, Guatemala, and Cuba are still fighting to advance.
Thursday: Another morning sports option enters the fray with the start of the men’s golf British Open. You have to get up pretty early to watch it begin – 4 a.m. ET!! If you’re determined to make a day of it, watch golf until the cycling begins at 8 a.m. ET — there are three mile-high climbs in today’s stage – and then switch back and forth between that and golf until they’re both done. Then nap.
Friday: Date night is uninhibited this week! That is, unless your date night begins at 4 a.m. (or more likely was on Thursday and is still going on at that time). Spend your morning watching the second round of the British Open and Stage 13 of the Tour de France. After that, you’re free!
Saturday: The single elimination phase of the Gold Cup begins with two games. Although we don’t know yet who the U.S. men’s national soccer team will play, it does look like they’ll play today. Golf’s British Open continues in the morning, as does the Tour de France. Stage 14 features a brutal 3 km at a 10% incline towards the end of the stage. My legs are burning just thinking about it! In the NWSL, the Washington Spirit play the Seattle Reign and the Chicago Red Stars play the Boston Breakers.
Sunday: Finish the week with a full day of sports. The final round of the British Open begins at a much more reasonable 6 a.m. ET, the Tour de France comes down from the mountains in what should be a much more reasonable day in the saddle for its riders, there are two more Gold Cup quarterfinal games, a NASCAR race in the afternoon, and an NWSL match between the Western New York Flash and New Jersey’s FC Sky Blue to end the day.
Caveat — This forecast is optimized for the general sports fan, not a particular sports fan. As such, your mileage may vary. For instance, you or the sports fan in your life is a fan of a particular team, then a regular season MLB baseball game or MLS soccer game may be more important on a particular day than anything on the forecast above. Use the calendar as a way to facilitate conversation about scheduling, not as the last word on when there are sports to watch.
If you watched the Wimbledon men’s semifinal today between Roger Federer and Andy Murray, you would have noticed a striking difference in behavior between the two men. Murray was emotional throughout the match, screaming, talking to himself, and banging his racket against the ground or his insteps. Federer barely uttered a word, except a few classic tennis “come ons!” His face registered neither fear nor excitement nor exertion. Federer showed no emotion, Murray showed lots. Murray lost.
Although Federer is an extreme example — he is one of the greatest winners in tennis history and he’s known for his monk-like disposition — the question of how outward displays of emotion effect a player’s chances in tennis is a real one. It’s particularly interesting to consider whether showing emotion is something that a player does when he or she is going to lose or whether it’s something that helps bring about the player’s demise. In other words, does the losing cause the emotional outburst or does the outburst cause the losing? It’s not just Federer. Some of the greatest winners in tennis are reticent. Rafael Nadal is the opposite of Federer when it comes to showing how hard he’s working during a tennis match, but they are similar in their ability to maintain emotional peace or an incredible facsimile of it. Nadal seems sure that he will be able to beat his opponent simply by working harder than them and he never seems to doubt that he can work harder. Take Novak Djokovic, the new reigning number one men’s player in the world. Early in his career, he was prone to losing matches that he seemed to be in control of. How did this happen? Something bad would happen and he’d lose his temper. He’d break rackets and curse at himself in Serbian. He’d hit himself in the head with his racket. Once he got his emotion under control, he started winning tournaments. Or, wait… was it the other way around?
My money is on the emotion being the egg and the winning being the chicken. Tennis is a uniquely psychological game. It’s intensely isolating for its players, who are not allowed to even talk to their coaches during major tournaments. It’s very intimate — when you’re at a tennis match live, even from the very last seat in the biggest tennis stadium (I know, I’ve sat there) you feel as though you can speak directly to the players. Showing yourself to be unflappable through all the ups and downs inherent in a tennis match has to unnerve your opponent. My guess is that players who learn to control their emotions and who develop great poker faces (maybe we should start calling them “Federer faces”) are able to win more than players with equal or similar skill levels.
Serena Williams, who will play in the 2015 Wimbledon finals with a chance to win her fourth straight major tournament in a row and her 21st major singles tournament overall, may be an exception to this rule. She is openly emotional on the court. She does show when she’s angry at herself and when she’s excited. It’s possible that she’s able to win despite giving up the advantage of unflappability because she and her opponents are women and they and our culture in general expect different behavior from women emotionally. It’s also possible that her skill level is so much higher than everyone else’s that she doesn’t need to sweat small advantages like this. A third possibility is that part of her tennis brilliance has come from taking a different path through the emotional forest. Maybe she unnerves people and strengthens herself by doing just the opposite of what works for everyone else.
