Raising athletes to win, serve, and live

Sports are at least as big a part of raising children in this country as religion or civics. Kids spend hours every day playing sports and the way they see adults handle the everyday drama of sports helps to each them how to handle the real dramas of growing up. This week we have three stories about raising kids in and around sports. We’re going to hear from a former major league baseball player who has recently begun coaching his children’s t-ball team and from the family and friends of a young athlete who took her own life. We’ll hear about the army’s newfound devotion to women’s lacrosse and why their focused on that sport.

Confessions of a Major League T-Ball Coach

by Doug Glanville for the New York Times

Former baseball player Doug Glanville walks the line in this article. It’s tricky to write comedically about children — if the snark has even a hint of mean-spiritedness in it, the whole article will fall apart at the seams. I don’t sense snark at all, only love and appreciation for the absurd.

Base running is a little more straightforward, even though it can create moments I have never seen or imagined before in my life. The other day, we had three runners on third at the same time. After first trying to sort it out, I thought, “No big deal, let me see what happens when the hitter puts the ball in play.” So he did, and two out of the three ran home. Not bad.

T-ball is subject to a range of delays that have nothing to do with rain. Nor do they come from pitching changes or from challenging a call with Instant Replay. No. Our catcher went off to the Port A Potty; another one of our players was shaken up after being engulfed by his own teammates (eight apparent shortstops trampled him to get a ball hit near the pitcher’s mound); a couple of other players found the joy in knocking each other’s hats off at second base — until they found themselves disoriented in the evil and boring outfield.

Why Does the Army Care so Much About Women’s Lacrosse?

by Jane McManus for ESPNW

The image you might have in your mind of women’s lacrosse is that of a genteel sport played by young ladies. Don’t be tricked by the skirts that the players wear, they are ladies, but they’re the kind of ladies that will shove you to the ground and sprint over you to score a goal. That’s exactly the kind of people the army needs as they continue to open more combat positions to women.

The Army believes there is a crucial relationship between those two things — an athletic background and being a soldier. As the military prepares to allow women on the front lines of combat in 2016, there is an immediate need for strong, tough women from within the Army’s ranks. And, in a philosophy often mentioned on campus and believed by MacArthur himself, the Army believes athletes make better soldiers.

The data seems to support the basic premise held at West Point: that female athletes possess critical tools that would make them ready for the front lines of combat. Lacrosse is the next frontier for pulling good athletes to the academy

Split Image

by Kate Fagan for ESPN

This is a brutal article. It tells the story of Madison Holleran, a successful multi-sport athlete who recently died by suicide. As much as her family and friends would like there to be an answer to why and what we can do as a society to prevent other people from doing the same, there just isn’t. Depression is a nasty disease and it can strike anyone, anywhere. What follows here is some of Fagan’s writing about the impact of social media on young women’s lives. It’s not an explanation for suicide but it is something that we can improve.

Madison was beautiful, talented, successful — very nearly the epitome of what every young girl is supposed to hope she becomes. But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly. She was a deep thinker, someone who was aware of the image she presented to the world, and someone who often struggled with what that image conveyed about her, with how people superficially read who she was, what her life was like.

Everyone presents an edited version of life on social media. People share moments that reflect an ideal life, an ideal self… With Instagram, one thing has changed: the amount we consume of one another’s edited lives. Young women growing up on Instagram are spending a significant chunk of each day absorbing others’ filtered images while they walk through their own realities, unfiltered… She seemed acutely aware that the life she was curating online was distinctly different from the one she was actually living. Yet she could not apply that same logic when she looked at the projected lives of others.

Happy Mothers' Day 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do hockey sticks break?

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Thanks,
Nathan

Dear Nathan,

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

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

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Thanks,
Drew

Dear Drew,

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

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

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Thanks,
Charlie

Dear Charlie,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for asking about customization,
Ezra Fischer

Need to Know Sports: May 7, 2015

I’m introducing a new thing this week. It’s called Need to Know Sports and its a daily email that answers the question, “What do I need to know about sports today?” Whether you’re someone who needs to know everything about sports to feel alive or someone who views sports as being strictly on a need to know basis, this is a good way to start your day.

Sign up to receive Need to Know Sports

Here’s a preview of today’s edition.

Subject: Need to know sports: May 7, 2015

Dear Sports Fan,
What do I need to know about sports today?

Today’s Top Stories

DEFLATEGATE RETURNS: Remember that big bruh-ha-ha before the Super Bowl about how the New England Patriots may or may not have (but probably did) illegally deflate the footballs they were playing offense with in their AFC Championship game against the New England Colts? Well the official NFL investigation finally published their findings yesterday. After three months and 243 pages, the NFL’s conclusion is pretty much what we started out with. The Patriots, quarterback Tom Brady in particular, “more probably than not” broke the rules by intentionally deflating footballs. While some of the reaction to this release has been a condemnation of Brady and the Patriots as cheaters, even more of it has been making fun of the NFL for being the type of overly officious organization that needs a 243 page report created over three months to confirm the obvious. The next step will be the NFL deciding how to punish Brady and the team. That will generate another big offseason football story soon. If you want to read the whole report (and apparently there are some very funny txt message conversations in it) you can find its full text here.

Yesterday’s Games, Today’s Conversations

National Basketball Association – Things evened up in the NBA Playoffs last night. The Cleveland Cavaliers, who had lost Game One of their series against the Chicago Bulls, beat the Bulls 106-91 to even up the series 1-1. The Houston Rockets had the same scenario against the Los Angeles Clippers and came away with the same result, winning 115-109. This sends both series to the lower seeded home court for Games Three and Four with the series tied 1-1.

National Hockey League – The Montreal Canadiens 2-1 to the Tampa Bay Lightning. The Lightning are now up 3-0 in the series and are only one win away from advancing. The Canadiens are one loss away from being swept. Hockey is the one sport where coming back in the playoffs from down 3-0 is actually somewhat common — maybe it happens once every two years — but it still seems like the Canadiens would need a miracle to stay alive. In the other Eastern Conference series, the Washington Capitals took a three games to one lead against the New York Rangers after beating them 2-1 in a game that featured a rare playoff fight.

MLB Baseball – It’s a mixed bag for the New York Yankees this year. They’re in first place, which most people did not expect to happen, but one of their important pitchers, C.C. Sabathia has yet to win a game. He’ll have to wait another week or so after pitching last night against the Toronto Blue Jays and taking the loss in a 5-1 game.

Champions League Soccer – The dream matchup between Barcelona and Bayern Munich lived up to expectations in some ways and not in others. It was an exciting game, full of incredible skill. Where it fell down was in creating a suspenseful second game between the two teams — after Barcelona scored three goals in the last 25 minutes of the game, to win the game 3-0, there seems to be almost no doubt about which team will advance to the finals this year.

Today’s Sports Forecast

NHL Hockey

Montreal Canadiens at Tampa Bay Lightning, 7 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network: There’s no rest for these teams who just played last night. It’s hard to tell who that will help. Will the Lightning, up 3-0, benefit from Montreal not having time to regroup? Or will the Canadiens use the strength desperation gives them to overcome a fatigued Lightning?

Chicago Blackhawks at Minnesota Wild, 9:30 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network: The Wild are also facing elimination tonight, down 3-0 to the Blackhawks. Losing in four straight games to the hated Blackhawks would be a sorry way for the Wild to end their year. I’m hoping they can pull out a victory tonight for their fans at home.

NBA Basketball

No playoff action tonight. Weird. The NBA does sneaky stuff with their playoff schedule to get their best games on during the weekend.

MLB Baseball

Chicago Cubs at St. Louis Cardinals, 1:45 p.m. ET on regional cable: Believe it or not, despite their being 11 games on the MLB schedule today, this is the only one between two winning teams. It’s a traditional rivalry too, although it’s hard to have a real rivalry when one team (the Cardinals) has a history of success and the other (the Cubs) hasn’t won a world series in over 100 years. Cubs fans had high hopes this Spring that this would be the team to break the streak of losing and it still could be, but not if the Cardinals, who have a league leading 20 wins, continue to play so well.

Verisimilitude (or How to Sound Like a Sports Native)

It’s hard to believe the story of Mike Burke who went from college football player to soldier to spy to hollywood consultant, back to spy, to the circus (really) to television before finally becoming the president of the New York Yankees. Read this editorial written by a Rutgers senior, Joe Rivera, who argues for the return of the college’s crew program to Varsity status. Barry Bonds became one of the biggest villains in sports by taking performance enhancing drugs and annoying teammates and journalists alike with his arrogance but this is actually a pretty nice post-career profile about his newfound passion of cycling and the support he gives to a women’s professional team.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Photo by Sponchia.

Sports Stories: Mary Reagan

Everyone has a sports story. As part of my mission to create peace in the world between sports fans and non-sports fans, I am doing a set of interviews of people on both sides of the line. Whether you’re a die-hard fan with their favorite player’s face tattooed onto their body or someone who is not a fan but whose life intersects with sports in some way, you have a valuable story to tell. Sign up today to tell your story on our easy to use booking page.

Today, I’d like to introduce you to Mary Reagan. Mary has been a Boston sports fan her whole life and after years as a transplant, she’s returned home with lots of great stories. You can read a synopsis of our interview below or listen to it in full here.

Name: Mary Reagan

Current Location: Outside of Boston
Home town: Outside of Boston

Teams:

Boston Red Sox
Boston Bruins
New England Revolution

What’s your earliest sports memory?

Going to Fenway park with my father. Back then you used to have to go into the ticket office to buy your tickets. So we would have our yearly ritual of going into Fenway and deciding which games we wanted. I have very distinct memory of the first time I was allowed to pick a game. I picked the Milwaukee Brewers because my favorite player at the time had been Billy Conigliaro and they traded Billy to the Milwaukee Brewers and back then the brew were in the same league, so I got to see that game. And I actually met Billy Conigliaro a couple years ago and I told him that story. And he said, “Do you remember what I did that day? I wasn’t happy with the Red Sox and I knocked one out of the park.”

Why was he your favorite?

“Everybody else loved Tony Conigliaro and I had to be different, so I liked his brother. Of course everybody loved Yaz and the biggies but you had to have another player that was one of your favorites. So I decided Billy wasn’t getting enough love, and so this little kid was going to be his number one fan.”

On how she started rooting for the New England Tea Men, an NASL soccer team in the late 1970s:

When I was in high school, I actually started rooting for them because I was babysitting for the players kids and they would give me tickets for the Saturday afternoon games when the kids were going to come so they didn’t need a babysitter. So I picked up on Soccer that way.

On how she started rooting for the Boston Bruins

Bruins, I’m a big hockey fan. My cousins used to play hockey so my mother would keep her sister company during the practices and bring me along when I was a little kid. So, I was exposed to hockey very young. And I grew up in the age of Bobby Orr.

Was watching sports a part of your friendships as a young person?

Probably not, it was more of a family thing. Brother and sister. And my mother was into sports as well. She liked basketball though, and I never quite got into basketball. And my father’s a huge football fan and that didn’t stick with me.

What about now?

My sister and I in particular go to a lot of games together. She’s a big Revolution fan so she mostly comes with me to those games but occasional Red Sox. And my brother comes once or twice a year to the Red Sox, he’s not as into soccer. And my father hasn’t been but he’s thinking about coming to a Red Sox game with me… if I can get good seats for him.

Biggest difference in the at-stadium experience between now and when you were a kid?

Yeah, there is a lot more of that, but I like it. I don’t like — when I would go to other fields, not Fenway — I don’t like what I would call the minor league stuff at the high end games. I don’t like the between innings — I don’t know if you’d call them games or activities. That’s a minor league thing in my mind and I don’t like the “make some noise” and “everyone clap your hands” at Red Sox games. I know they do it at hockey games but… Okay, I’ll let them slide, but at baseball I’m a purist, and when you cheer, you cheer because it’s organic and not because someone tells you to.

What was it like to be a Boston Sports fan living in New York City?

It’s interesting. Especially, since 2004. It’s more of a thing with baseball than another sport I follow… The Yankees – Red Sox thing was a bit hard. It was also tough because back then, there were Red Sox bars — in part I didn’t know about a few of them and then some of the ones that have come along since came along after 2004. So I hadn’t gotten as clued into that scene. I would just watch whereever I could find it and then found out later — oh there were hundreds of people gathered at each of these bars cheering for the Red Sox.

My two go-to bars in the last few years have been Riviera and Professor Thom’s. Primarily Professor Thom’s but I started out with Riviera for hockey. It’s a Boston bar that’s not in-your-face Boston… So it’s low-key in that sense but it’s hard core when it comes to watching the games. And then Professor Thom’s is like a mecca for Boston fans in New York though. You walk in and you know you’re in a Boston bar.

Do you have any sport superstitions?

We are convinced that if we order and consume, of course, the loaded tots at Professor Thom’s that the Red Sox and Bruins will win. So our ritual — we don’t take a chance. It doesn’t always work but every time we go to watch the game, we buy the loaded tots. And we have tried tots at other places and there’s just no comparison. The loaded tots at Professor Thom’s are fantastic! I keep telling them they should make a smaller portion so that if i’m there by myself i can order it.

What do you think being an Boston sports fan says about you? What makes it different from rooting for any other teams?

What stands out most is being a Red Sox fan growing up and the decades of hoping and not getting that championship. It took dedication to keep following the Red Sox through all those years.

What’s the most important thing you’d like non-sports fans to understand about sports?

I think it’s that, especially if you’re at an event, non-sports fans can enjoy going to sporting events even if they don’t like sports. I can definitely understand people who aren’t going to sit with me and watch it on TV — might even not go to a bar and watch it there — but having people give it a chance to go to an event and experience it first hand. It may not turn them into sports fans but it may help them understand or at least appreciate — especially nowadays when there’s so much to do at events and so much that can capture your attention. I think that’s kind of cool.

Need to Know Sports: May 6, 2015

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Subject: Need to know sports: May 6, 2015

Dear Sports Fan,
What do I need to know about sports today?

Today’s Top Stories

There’s really no giant headline today beyond yesterday’s games and today’s too. There is this, but it’s not a giant, blockbuster story:

ISIAH THOMAS BACK IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN: Isaiah Thomas was an all-star NBA player before he was a terrible, terrible coach and general manager for the New York Knicks. He was fired in 2008 amid reports of his sexual harassment of women who worked for him that were later confirmed when he was found guilty in a lawsuit. Yesterday news broke that James Dolan, the owner of the Knicks and their WNBA counterpart, the New York Liberty, wants to hire Thomas back, this time as President of the Liberty. This seems almost spit-takingly insane to me, as it does to many people. Forget that he was a disaster working for the Knicks before, he also seems uniquely unqualified to run the operations for a women’s sports team given his well-established history as someone who has sexually harassed female employees. Kate Fagan and Jane McManus wrote a point-counter-point article on ESPN that will tell you more about this story.

Yesterday’s Games, Today’s Conversations

National Basketball Association – The Washington Wizards played Game Two of their series against the Atlanta Hawks without their point guard and best player, John Wall. It showed. The Hawks beat the Wizards 106-90 to tie the series at one game apiece. The number one overall seed in the NBA playoffs, the Golden State Warriors finally lost a game, 97-90 to the Memphis Grizzlies. At times it’s seemed like the Warriors path to the title was becoming more and more frictionless, but last night was a bump in the path. How big remains to be seen.

National Hockey League – Oh, Minnesota Wild. I want you to be good, so badly. You’re the closest thing the United States has to a Canadian style, hockey means everything state and yet your NHL team just cannot beat the Chicago Blackhawks. Last night, the Hawks beat the Wild 1-0 to take a virtually impenetrable 3-0 lead in the series. The Calgary Flames beat the Anaheim Ducks 4-3 in overtime to keep their dream and the dream of having a Canadian Stanley Cup winner alive. The series is now 2-1 in favor of the Ducks but that’s a lot better than 3-0.

MLB Baseball – 41 year-old Bartolo Colon remains amazing for the New York Mets. He pitched 7 and 2/3 innings last night and only allowed a single run. The Mets were able to score three and only let in one more after Colon left the game. That’s all the ingredients necessary for a 3-2 win over the Baltimore Orioles.

Champions League Soccer – I wrote in yesterday’s post that Real Madrid was probably feeling lucky having drawn Juventus as their semifinal opponent instead of Barcelona or Bayern Munich. Well, I guess ‘be careful what you wish for’ is the lesson to be learned after Juventus beat Real Madrid 2-1.

Today’s Sports Forecast

NHL Hockey

Montreal Canadiens at Tampa Bay Lightning, 7 p.m. ET on USA: Down 2-0 in the series, having lost both of the first two games in Montreal, the Canadiens and the whole province of Quebec will be in mourning if their team cannot find a way to win this game.

New York Rangers at Washington Capitals, 7:30 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network: The Rangers have played eight games in the playoffs so far and every single one of them has been decided by a single goal. That’s a hard way to win and it’s starting to show. They’re down two games to one against the Capitals.

NBA Basketball

Chicago Bulls at Cleveland Cavaliers, 7 p.m. ET on TNT: The Bulls sauntered into Cleveland and won the first game of the series. The Cavaliers may be in trouble, but they’ve got basketball’s best trump card, LeBron James. I’d be surprised if LeBron didn’t score over 35 points tonight. The question is — will it be enough?

Los Angeles Clippers at Houston Rockets, 9:30 p.m. ET on TNT: The Clippers are another road team that won the first game of their playoff series. Winning the first game on the road pretty much turns the second game into as close to a nice-to-have as you can get in the playoffs.

MLB Baseball

New York Yankees at Toronto Blue Jays, 7 p.m. ET on regional cable: Baseball believes it has a speed problem — it’s games are too slow. If you agree, this would be a good game for you to watch. The Blue Jays pitcher who’s pitching in this game, Mark Buehrle is amazingly quick. He pitches, gets the ball back from the catcher, and pitches again. It’s great.

Champions League Soccer

Bayern Munich at Barcelona, 2:45 p.m. ET on Fox Sports 1: This is a massive soccer game. The game involves two of the most scintillatingly beautiful and talent laden soccer teams in the world. The plot revolves around Bayern Munich manager, Pep Guardiola. Guardiola was a long-time Barcelona player and later an extremely successful Barcelona manager. He’s a winner wherever he goes but the question is, which team has more Pep in them? His old team or his new team?

Verisimilitude (or How to Sound Like a Sports Native)

Talk about a busman’s holiday, retired baseball player Kyle Farnsworth has resurfaced playing on the defensive line of semi-pro football team in Orlando, Florida. If you’ve got half an hour on a train, bus, or plane, read this moving and deeply confusing ESPN article by Wright Thompson about legendary baseball player, Ted Williams’ daughter, Claudia Williams, and the difficult emotional and physical legacy she lives with. From Sarah Lyall comes the New York Times tale of a 1965 high school football game that continued on despite a school building burning to the ground just a few dozen yards from the field and the photo that made it famous. Ken Dryden, a great former NHL goalie and contemporary author, writes an article about Carey Price, the man who currently plays goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, Dryden’s old position.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Photo by Eduardo Davad.

What is a good foul?

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Just wondering,
Ronnie

Dear Ronnie,

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

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

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

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

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Need to Know Sports: May 5, 2015

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Subject: Need to know sports: May 5, 2015

Dear Sports Fan,
What do I need to know about sports today?

Today’s Top Stories

CHICAGO TAKES GAME ONE FROM CLEVELAND: The most intriguing game on yesterday’s sports lineup was Game One of the NBA series between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Chicago Bulls. That these teams would meet in the playoffs has seem fated since the day LeBron James announced he was returning to Cleveland and fans have been anticipating it ever since. The plot became even more compelling when the Cavaliers lost two key players: Kevin Love to a shoulder injury which required surgery and J.R. Smith to a suspension. This focused the narrative even closer on LeBron James and whether his personal brilliance would be enough to carry his team past the Bulls. For one night at least, the answer was no, as the Bulls beat the Cavaliers 99-92.

THE FLOYD MAYWEATHER VS. MANNY PACQUIAO STORIES ARE ROLLING IN: Despite the pedestrian nature of the fight itself, the atmosphere around the fight and the stories that have sprung from it are quite enjoyable to read. This isn’t surprising. Most of my fondness for boxing comes from having read about it, not actually witnessed it. Maybe that’s the secret to enjoying this brutal sport — don’t watch it, read about it. If you do choose to do that, here are three stories to read: Eric Nusbaum’s Vice Article in which he concludes from having seen the fight first-hand, that it was “only the Fight of the Century until they got in the ring.” Bryan Curtis of Grantland asks, “Has there ever been a once-in-a-lifetime sporting event that made everyone feel worse than Mayweather-Pacquiao?” Grantland also sent writer Rafe Bartholomew to watch the fight, not in Vegas, but in the Philippines where Pacquiao is a congressperson and the country’s biggest celebrity.

Yesterday’s Games, Today’s Conversations

National Basketball Association – As covered above, the Chicago Bulls beat the Cleveland Cavaliers, 99-92. The Los Angeles Clippers beat the Houston Rockets 117-101 in Game One of their series last night. This was despite playing without their point guard and arguably their best player, Chris Paul. Line: Sometimes missing an important player for one game can provide a spark. It’s missing him for the second and third games that’s more difficult. When will Chris Paul be back?

National Hockey League – The Washington Capitals beat the New York Rangers, 1-0 in another one of these low-scoring playoff games that’s becoming the norm this year. This puts the Capitals up 2-1 in the series. Line: “Game one (when the Capitals scored a goal with less than two seconds left to win the game) was a killer. It just feels like the Caps have the upper hand.”

International Men’s Ice Hockey – USA/Russia – Do you believe in mild surprises? That’s what happened today as the USA beat Russia 4-2. Russia never led the game but they were coming on in the third period and it felt like if they had had another 20 minutes, they might have caught up. It’s just the group round of the tournament, so these teams may meet again. Line: “This US team is an interesting mix of veteran NHL players and up and coming college or junior players. They’re fun to watch and root for!

Today’s Sports Forecast

NHL Hockey

Chicago Blackhawks at Minnesota Wild, 8 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network: This is it for the Wild. Okay, it’s not really it, it. If they lost this one, they wouldn’t be eliminated from the playoffs, but they might as well be because they’d be down 3-0 to the team that’s knocked them out of the playoffs in both of the last two years.

Anaheim Ducks at Calgary Flames, 9:30 p.m. ET on USA: The Flames are in the exact same position as the Wild. Lose and they’ll be down 3-0. Win and they’re right back in the series.

NBA Basketball

Washington Wizards at Atlanta Hawks, 8 p.m. ET on TNT: The Wizards shocked the Hawks by winning Game One of this series in Atlanta. They’ve now won five games in a row and haven’t lost in the playoffs. The Hawks, brilliant in the regular season, have been anything but that in the playoffs so far. Is this the night the Hawks recapture their mojo? We’ll see.

Memphis Grizzlies at Golden State Warriors, 10:30 p.m. ET on TNT: The big story of this game will be whether Grizzlies point guard, Mike Conley Jr. can play. If he does, he’ll be playing with a mask to protect his broken face. Some players have seemed to take power from these masks, so much so that at least one player, Rip Hamilton, wore his mask for the rest of his career.

MLB Baseball

Baltimore Orioles at New York Mets, 7 p.m. ET on regional cable: Is the bloom starting to fall off the rose that has been the Mets early in the baseball season? They’re still in first place of their division but they’ve lost five of their last six games. They’ll be trusting 41 year-old Bartolo Colon with the start against the Orioles.

Champions League Soccer

Real Madrid at Juventus, 2:45 p.m. ET on Fox Sports 1: In the draw to choose opponents for the Champions League semifinals, three of the remaining four teams, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and Real Madrid were probably all hoping to play Juventus. It’s no big insult to the italian team but they’re just a tiny cut below the other semifinalists. Real got the lucky draw but today we’ll get our first chance to see just how lucky it was. Juventus is no joke and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see them pull an upset today on home soil.

Verisimilitude (or How to Sound Like a Sports Native)

If you’re looking for a little rage this morning, read Jane McManus‘ jaw-dropping and yet totally expected column about how shoddy NFL teams’ vetting process for draftees is… still, even after last season’s Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson fiascos. Meanwhile, somewhere in Pennsylvania, a sporting goods store is offering $10 insurance on any Eagles jersey they sell. If the player gets traded or cut, you can get another jersey for 50% of the normal cost. It’s a bad deal, but good commentary on the hyper-active Eagles’ offseason. Aaron Gordon of Vice Sports did a highly unscientific (and slightly tipsy) analysis of the words used by NFL draft analysts/commentators during the draft. Surprise, surprise, there’s a revealing racial bias. Check out this interview with one of the people behind the documentary, Bounce. It made me want to see it, what about you?

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Photo of Bert and Earnie by See-ming Lee.