Three baseball writers fail to explain their love of the game

Last night I attended a Pitch Talks event in Boston. Pitch Talks‘ website describes what it does by saying it “connects diehard baseball fans with sports insiders by hosting informed and entertaining discussions on all aspects of the game.” Last night’s event, at the Cask & Flagon bar right next to Fenway Park, the ancestral home of the Boston Red Sox, was a moderated panel discussion with lots of opportunity for members of the audience to ask questions. The second segment of the evening was a three-part conversation between host Pete Abraham and panelists Dan Shaughnessy and Nick Cafardo. Each of these men is an eminent sports writer covering baseball for the Boston Globe. During their question and answer session, I was called on to ask a question. I addressed the panel with a question true to the essence of Dear Sports Fan:

How do you explain your love of baseball to people who don’t share it?

The response I got, from all three of the writers was equal parts insightful and profoundly disappointing.

Let’s start with what was good and educational and heart-warming. All three of the panelists expressed their profound love for baseball and seemed completely earnest in doing so. They all think baseball is the best sport to cover and follow, and that’s quite nice to see in people whose profession demands they follow baseball to an extreme degree. As for why, each of the three writers spoke about the everyday nature of baseball. As opposed to football, where teams play once a week, and hockey or basketball where teams play every two to four days, baseball teams play almost every day, sometimes more than once. Shaughnessy was the first to answer and the first to introduce this feature as a main driver of baseball’s unique appeal. He identified that playing almost every day gives baseball players and teams more chances to create meaningful redemption narratives for fans to enjoy. Cafardo built off of Shaughnessy’s comments by pointing out other benefits of the everyday nature of baseball. He said that this makes baseball extremely compelling: “As opposed to football where the rest of the week [other than the once weekly game days] is boring,” in baseball there is a story every day. Abraham chimed in as well, noting that watching a team play almost every day helps fans get to know the players in a uniquely intimate way; much more than in other sports.

It was wonderful to hear people who have devoted their lives to a sport explain what it was about that sport that they found so compelling. What was disappointing was their attitude towards the hypothetical person who didn’t like baseball that I invented in my question. They were dismissive. Shaughnessy said he “doesn’t try to push it” with people who aren’t baseball fans and that if people don’t like baseball, “that’s your loss.” When it was Cafardo’s turn, he added that he doesn’t get people who don’t like baseball.” They made unwarranted assumptions about that imaginary person. Shaughnessy imagined that they were either an impatient young person who couldn’t take baseball’s slower pace or someone who didn’t appreciate baseball’s complexity. He and Cafardo both went out of their way to insult soccer and soccer fans, clearly assuming that this imaginary non-baseball fan must be a soccer fan.

What a depressing response. Sports fans in general and people who make a living from sports even more should be more welcoming to non-sports fans than that. I appreciate Shaughnessy’s choice not to proselytize, but I wish he had a better explanation of why he loves baseball ready and waiting for the many non-baseball fans he meets in his daily life. I love that Cafardo shared with the audience his sense that he was “born with” baseball, how he “loved watching the games as a kid” and how he still “hates it” when the season ends. It’s great to have passion about what you do but surely a professional baseball writer should want to expand the reach of the game to people who didn’t grow up with baseball in their lives. What about immigrants from countries where baseball is not a common sport? What about women who grew up during a time when girls were not expected or encouraged to take an interest in sports? Those people deserve to be treated with respect. They shouldn’t be dismissed, they shouldn’t be belittled, they shouldn’t be stereotyped, and they shouldn’t have their interests (for surely, some of them are actually soccer fans) insulted.

The next time someone asks one of these writers or any baseball fan out there why they like baseball, I hope they have a positive answer prepared. I hope they are open to understanding why the person across from them doesn’t like baseball. There’s simply no downside to open dialogue and there’s lots of upside. Here’s an answer to that question from my colleague Dean Russell Bell in 2013. He likes baseball because watching it in person is like being at an outdoor picnic, because of the emotional investment baseball fans make in their teams, and because of strategy, tradition, and beauty. That’s his answer. What is yours?

Sports Forecast for Friday, July 10, 2015

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.

How does the NFL Supplemental Draft work?

Dear Sports Fan,

I recently posted this question on Fancred, “Raise your hand if you understand the supplemental draft at all.” Barely anyone raised their hand, and we’re all sports fans on Fancred! Can you help? How does the NFL Supplemental Draft work?

Thanks,
Jake N.

Dear Jake N.,

Hey Jake — I think I can help. Every spring, the NFL holds an entry draft for any player who has played at least two years of football since high school and would like to play in the NFL. This is a giant event with over 200 players selected and many more who declared themselves eligible for selection but who were not picked. When a team picks a player in the draft, it means that they have the exclusive right to negotiate and sign a contract with that player. No other team can try to sign them. Players who don’t get picked become free agents and are able to negotiate with any team that wants them, and indeed, many of them get signed, albeit to shorter, less lucrative contracts. Every year though, there are a few players who slip through the cracks. Either they intended to be in the draft but messed up their paperwork or, at the time they needed to make the decision, they wanted to stay in college for another year, but since then, something has changed in their life. This change could be a life event –  a death in the family, an expected child, or it could be something more salacious, like having become academically ineligible for another year at college or getting in trouble with the law. The Supplemental Draft, held in July, is a chance for players who missed the draft but have a qualifying reason (the NFL decides) to enter the NFL this year, to be chosen by teams.

The Supplemental draft is a reasonably simple procedure but it’s badly named. It works much more like a blind auction than a draft. The first thing that happens is that an order of teams is established. All the NFL teams are divided into three groups: teams that won six or fewer games last year, teams that won more than six games but didn’t make the playoffs, and teams that made the playoffs. Within each group, a random drawing is done to establish an order. Once the order is set, teams can make bids on eligible players. This year there are seven eligible players. Teams bid on players by declaring a number from one to seven. These numbers are meant to be the equivalent of the round in the normal draft the team would have selected the player if they had been the normal draft. Of course, as with most elements of sport, there’s no obligation to be truthful. Teams bid whatever they think will work, not what they actually would have done. Once all the bids are in on a player, the team which claimed they would have drafted the player in the earliest round (1st is better than 2nd is better than 3rd and so on) gets the right to negotiate with that player. If there are two or more teams with the same bid, the team that is earlier in the order gets the player.

The reason why the numbers correspond to draft rounds, instead of being totally arbitrary, is that there is a cost for winning a supplemental draft bid. When a team drafts a player through the supplemental draft, they lose the equivalent round draft pick in next year’s normal NFL entry draft. This is a fairly big cost, considering that the pool of players to choose from is so much bigger in, say the fourth round of next year’s draft compared to the handful of players in the supplemental draft. As such, teams virtually never bid very high for players in the supplemental draft and in many years, the draft comes and goes without a single player being picked. The only exception to this rule is firmly an element of the NFL’s history, not its present. In the mid-1980s, a couple players used the supplemental draft as a means of controlling which team they ended up with. This loophole, most famously used by Bernie Kosar to get to the Cleveland Browns and by Brian Bosworth to avoid the Indianapolis Colts and Buffalo Bills, was firmly closed in 1990.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Understand the odds – how betting on tennis works

When Americans think about betting on sports, our first thoughts usually turn to football and horse racing. Over in England and Europe, the sports to bet on are soccer and tennis. To explain how betting works in tennis, I called on Luke Rees, a British sports fan and writer. Here’s what he wrote:

When placing a bet on a tennis match, it can often be quite confusing to interpret the various odds available. There are numerous markets to pick from, and also many different options for those looking to boost their profits, meaning punters often decide to stay clear of the tennis game.

This article will outline the basics of reading the odds, and provide advice for tennis spectators who want to make the game a little bit more interesting.

Betting On the Money Line

Money line bets are the most basic and popular market in tennis (and the majority of sports for that matter, including horse racing). Essentially, the bookies provide the odds on the outright winner of a match, and you simply pick your favorite for the win. The favorite in a match is given a negative (-) money line, and the underdog is indicated with positive (+) money line.

Here’s an example:

  • Andy Murray -190 (favorite)
  • Vasek Pospisil +300 (underdog)
  • Negative money line: this indicates the amount of money needed to bet in order to win $100 in profit. So, in the example above, it would require a $190 wager on Andy Murray to win $100 in profit, for a total pay-out of $290.
  • Positive money line: this indicates the amount of money that would be won from a $100 wager. In the example above, a $100 bet on Vasek Pospisil would result in a $300 profit if he wins the match, for a total pay-out of $400.

The first step to take when making a bet is to look at the money line and decide if it is worth taking out a bet. For instance, you may decide that betting on Pospisil is not worth it at 4/1 odds ($400 return for $100 bet) because Murray is currently the strong favorite. But say the money line on Pospisil was 8/1 or +800: you might have a different opinion if you stood to make a $900 return.

The money line is used not only for individual games, but also for betting on a player to win the tournament outright. This is commonly referred to as Outright Winner betting: you can see some Wimbledon outright winner predictions at Bookmakers, for example.

Betting ‘Each Way’ means you place two bets, one on the player to win the tournament and one on them to finish in the top 2 places (i.e. to reach the final).

The Handicap Market

The handicap (or HCAP) market is another popular market. This is because rather than predicting the outright winner, you are instead betting on how a certain player performs. A handicap market simply means that one of the players is given an advantage at the beginning – usually by adding a certain amount of games to their overall score.

Let’s take the same tennis example. This is how it might look:

Andy Murray -7.5 -190 vs. Pospisil +7.5 -190

The money line is even on this bet, what has changes is the handicap. In both cases, a wager of $190 would bring back a $100 win if the right player is chosen. The pay-out is even, because the spread has balanced out the competition between the two players.

Imagine that this is the result from the match: 6-3 6-4 6-4

Totals Games Won – Murray 18 vs. Pospisil 11

As you can see, despite losing the match in straight sets, a bet on Pospisil would have actually been the winner in this case. The handicap of +7.5 games for Pospisil gets added to his 11 games won to give him 18.5 total. That is a half-game ahead of Murray in this case, and so a bet on Pospisil would be paid out.

Betting on Accumulators

One final interesting way to bet – if you’re feeling especially confident and want to boost your profits throughout a tournament – is to place multiple bets on a series of matches. These are known as Doubles, Trebles, and Accumulators. For the bet to come through, you have to get each result correct, otherwise there is no pay-out.

Imagine a $30 single bet on Novak Djokovic to beat Andy Murray at odds of -250 (or 2/5) returns just a $10 profit. This may not be particularly appealing, so to make it more worthwhile you could put down a treble on three different games. If all of them pay out around -250, your $25 stake will make you $50 profit. After each correctly predicted match outcome, your profits go up exponentially.

With the tennis season well underway, and the U.S Open just around the corner, now’s the time to get down to the bookies with your new betting know-how. But always remember, never bet what you can’t afford!

Luke Rees is a sports writer and enthusiast from London, UK, who likes to cover tennis, cycling, and football (or soccer to y’all). His most memorable sports experience was watching Federer and Roddick in the Wimbledon final in 2009 – he was rooting for Roddick, but Federer absolutely smashed it!

Sports Forecast for Thursday, July 9, 2015

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.

How valuable is a signed baseball bat?

Dear Sports Fan,

How valuable does signed stuff actually get? If, for *cough* example, I had a little league bat signed by Brooks Robinson in the 80’s, would that be valuable or just something that a million other kids had?

Thanks,
Justin

Dear Justin,

Brooks Robinson is an awesome dude. During a 23 year Major League Baseball career, all as a member of the Baltimore Orioles, he went to 18 All-Star games and won 16 consecutive Gold Glove awards as a third baseman. He played in the World Series four times and won it twice. He had a great nicknames: The Human Vacuum Cleaner and Mr. Hoover. Elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1983, he in one of only 16 people to be voted in during their first eligible year. At 78, Robinson is still active in the baseball community, serving as head of the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association. There is a 1,500 pound statue of him in downtown Baltimore. And yet, unless there is something particularly special about the signed bat you have, it’s probably not worth very much.

Sports autographs can mean big money, with the most valuable signatures going for millions of dollars, but they’re also big business. Memorabilia companies arrange for athletes to sign lots and lots of balls, uniforms, bats, gloves, baseball cards, and posters. As a result, the vast majority of signatures are not worth all that much. There are a multitude of factors that effect how much a signed item is worth but the underlying principle is that the more rare something is, the more valuable it is. Here are some of the factors that effect your bat:

  • Is it authentic and authenticated? — Two different things, an authentic item is one that is both real (the bat is a bat, not a loaf of bread shaped into a bat) and really signed. An authenticated item is one that has been certified to be authentic by one of a number of companies that exist for this sole purpose.
  • Is it game-used? — A bat that was used in a game by Robinson is worth more than one that wasn’t. Of the bats that weren’t, those that were produced for him to use in a game are worth more than those that were produced primarily so he could sign them before being sold to the public.
  • Is there something special about your item? — Did Robinson use it to hit during a memorable game? Was it the last he ever used? Or the first? Did he set a record with it? Use it to injure an offensive pitcher? Is it a brand he didn’t normally use? Is he someone who rarely ever signed bats? Again, rarity converts to value when it comes to signed items.

The Professional Sports Authenticator’s website has a handy chart showing the estimated value of “normal” signed items from a large number of professional baseball players, including Brooks Robinson. It suggests that your bat, if authentic and authenticated and in good condition, would be worth $100. If only you had something from the next Robinson on the list… Jackie Robinson! That estimate seems about right, if a little high, based on a search of sold Ebay signed Brooks Robinson bats that ranged from around $25 to $150.

You could sell it and probably make a little money. Although, since brand new baseball bats on Amazon are going for between $20 and $60 themselves, you’re almost better off just keeping it and using it as a baseball bat!

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

How do suspensions in soccer work?

Dear Sports Fan,

Can you explain to me how Clint Dempsey was supposedly suspended from games but is starting tonight? I’m confused. How do suspensions in soccer work?

Thanks,
Brian Cadavid

Dear Brian,

As we now know, Clint Dempsey did play in last night’s Gold Cup match between the United States men’s national team and Honduras. It’s a good thing for the team that he did, too, because he scored the team’s two goals on their way to a 2-1 victory. It was a bit of a surprise though. Last night’s game was played less than a month after Dempsey was thrown out of a game he was playing for his club team, Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders, after grabbing a referee’s notebook out of his hands and tearing it up.

This violation, as silly as it seems, by the letter of the rules, qualifies as assaulting the ref. A violation of this type is supposed to come with a minimum of a six game suspension. If Clint Dempsey had received a six or more game suspension for assaulting the referee, he would have been banned from taking part in any official soccer while serving the six game suspension. Since the Sounders only had three games between Dempsey’s infraction and last night’s USMNT game against Honduras, a six game ban would have excluded Dempsey from participating. SB Nation’s Sean Steffen wrote a post about this logic before the ruling had been handed down. When the ruling came, it was a major surprise: only three games. As Doug McIntyre wrote for ESPN, “It’s good to be a big-name star like Clint Dempsey in Major League Soccer.” Crisis averted – Dempsey would be able to play in the Gold Cup.

The way that this suspension worked is the exception, not the rule in global soccer. In the vast majority of leagues, and even in the MLS for non-assault based infractions, yellow cards, red cards, and suspensions that a player receives do not bleed over into other forms of competition. This is important because soccer players, way more than players in any other sport, play in different competitions simultaneously. In the course of a month, a player may play for a national team and for his or her club team in a league game and in one or more cup or tournament games. For example, Clint Dempsey was playing in the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup when he earned that red card. His team’s next game was a normal MLS league game. And then, as we know, he went and played for the national team. The same trichotomy exists, perhaps even more, for players who play in European club soccer. Each league and cup and tournament has its own rules about suspensions. Although they are all quite similar, thanks to the octopus-like international soccer organization, FIFA, when it comes to suspensions, they each have mostly separate jurisdictions. A yellow card picked up in the Champions League does not carry over into the British Premier League or Spain’s La Liga. A suspension a player gets during an international game for their country usually only pertains to international games.

The fact that if Clint Dempsey had been suspended for six games for his “assault” on a referee, his suspension would have applied not just to games played for the Seattle Sounders but also to games played by the U.S. men’s national team is the exception that proves the rule. Most suspensions in soccer only apply to the form of soccer being played when the player commits the act that gets him or her suspended.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Sports Forecast for Tuesday, July 7, 2015

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 best sports stories of the week 7.7.15

Now that the excitement of the World Cup is beginning to die down, it’s time to empty my inbox of some amazing non-World Cup articles from the past couple weeks. Our first two articles are serious journalism about how sports can be an enormously positive part of living in restrictive environments. Our second two articles are lighter fare, concerned with the junction of sports and words. Enjoy all four of them.

Thriving in a Barren Land

by Jere Longman for the New York Times

One of the reasons why soccer is the world’s most popular sport is that it’s so universally easy to play. All you need is a field, a ball, and some friends/opponents. But what if you live in the Arctic and there is no grass, only tundra? And traveling so expensive that you can only reasonably find opponents once a year? Well, you’re going to have to improvise…

Assis, the chief referee, stood at the front desk of the Frobisher Inn, using a pair of scissors to make yellow cards and red cards from construction paper.

“Think FIFA does this for the World Cup?” he said, smiling.

Occasionally, travel in Nunavut called for extreme alternative transportation. In 2011 and 2012, a soccer team from the village of Igloolik traveled about four hours over ice to Hall Beach, riding in an oversize sled called a qamutik, pulled by a snowmobile and bundled in winter gear and caribou skins.

[Soccer] helped provide a year-round activity, a sense of community, a connection to the outside world and a distraction from social problems like alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual abuse and the alarming suicide rate.

Run on Sentence

by Rick Maese for the Washington Post

In this second story of the week, we enter an environment even more forbidding than the arctic; prison. In a handful of Utah prisons, sport is being used as the basis for rehabilitation. And it’s working.

[Kurtis Hunsaker] initially spurned treatment behind bars. [He] said he’d “rather pull my toes off with pliers” than attend AA meetings. He attended the initial Addict II Athlete meeting last spring and for the first time felt a sense of control. In contrast to programs that encourage patients to surrender to the addiction and call upon a higher power, he was in charge of his own workout, had an outlet for the pent-up emotions and anxieties and was part of a team. And perhaps just as important, he finally had something to look forward to each day.

Most games in prison have the familiar rules with minor wrinkles: In Ultimate Frisbee, for example, when a disc hits the fence, it sets off an alarm in the control room and is therefore considered a turnover; and in softball if the bat comes into contact with a person, the game is automatically over.

Where Ott and Orr Are Most Valuable: 15 Across, or Maybe 7 Down

by Victor Mather for the New York Times

They’re obviously nothing compared to living in the arctic or being in prison but for many of us, New York Times crossword puzzles are the toughest part of our week. One thing that makes them ever so slightly easier is the frequent reuse of some short, vowel-heavy names. Often, these are athletes whose crossword puzzle notoriety has outstripped their athletic achievements.

Of course, there is no conspiracy of delusional Ott-loving crossword constructors. Mel has gained his fame because of his last name, which is short and starts with a vowel. The clunky “DiMaggio,” with its double G, is much less useful to a crossword creator.

The Real Reason Americans Call It ‘Soccer’ Is All England’s Fault

by Tony Manfred for Business Insider

While we’re on the subject of words, if you grew up a soccer player and fan like me, you may have developed a slight inferiority complex about calling the sport “soccer” instead of “football” or “futbol.” Read this article and hold your head high evermore.

The interesting thing here is that Brits still used “soccer” regularly for a huge chunk of the 20th century. Between 1960 and 1980, “soccer” and “football” were “almost interchangeable…” [After 1980] British people stopped saying “soccer” because of its American connotations. So, no, it’s not wrong to call it “soccer” if you’re American.