Football is America’s favorite sport. The season is anticipated, watched, obsessed over, and celebrated to an incredible extent. From the first week of September to the first week of February, football is almost unavoidable. Football is one of the least accessible sports for new viewers but we believe that with a little care and effort put into explaining it, it can be quite rewarding for a new or beginner viewer. Here is a collection of posts that may spark an interest or explain a long harbored question.
Happy watching! And please submit questions as you think of them. Getting questions is by far my favorite part of this blog and all the best posts come from your questions!
I read over the weekend that the NFL settled a lawsuit out of court with retired players on the subject of concussions. I know concussions are an increasing concern in sports. How should I feel about the NFL concussion settlement?
Thanks,
Tricia
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Dear Tricia,
Every good settlement is going to leave people on both sides with mixed feelings. The agreement that the NFL made to give $765 million to retired players is no exception to that rule, but I think it is more good than it is bad. Here are a few reasons why:
People Need Help Now
Retired football players who are suffering from the result of head trauma need help now. This is clear from the high-profile suicides of former players like Junior Seau, Ray Easterling, and Dave Duerson as well as the heart-wrenching stories of Steve Gleason and Kevin Turner and many others who are alive but severely affected by early dementia and Alzheimer’s, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease, which has been linked in theory, even on nfl.com, to brain trauma), and other issues. You might expect NFL players to have enough money to take care of their own health care but salaries have only skyrocketed to the current in the past thirty one years since the 1982 strike and there is still an enormous amount of inequality within NFL player salaries. There are a lot of older players and less successful players out there who never made a lot of money. It’s conceivable for recent retirees to be rich beyond our wildest dreams, but if you look at the bigger picture you will find many stories like Terry Tautolo‘s, who ended up homeless.
Retired NFL Players are Not the Public
One of the best arguments you will hear for why this settlement is a bad thing is that it allows the NFL to avoid being forced to reveal in court how much it knew about the effect of concussions and when it knew what it knew. Daniel Engber of Slate.com makes this case forcefully but I don’t totally buy it. It’s easy to see parallels between this situation and Watergate or cigarette companies. The questions “what did they know” and “when did they know it” are instinctive because of those cases. A key difference is that this is a dispute between employees and an employer, not between a government and its citizens or a group of consumer companies and its customers. In terms of being truthful to the general football-watching public, the breach of trust is happening more now that the NFL is trying to market a softer, safer sport than it has in the past. If the NFL knew that it had an unsafe work environment (okay, obviously it’s unsafe, but I mean…really unsafe) and they actively hid information about the hazards from its employees, they should pay and pay punitively. The NFL owes its former employees but it does not owe the public nor would justice be served by its public humiliation or destruction.
It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over
This settlement does not preclude future lawsuits. NFL players like Scott Fujita, who wrote a great article in the New York Times about the settlement, know this. Fujita writes that he did not get involved in the lawsuit because he didn’t want to “risk watering down a potential award for so many people who are legitimately suffering. There are numerous former players experiencing a wide range of brain-related health issues. Right now, I’m not really one of them.” If he starts experiencing symptoms he is free to open his own suit against the league. The NFL knows this too, and that’s why the settlement is not just for players who actively participated in the lawsuit. Any retired player suffering from brain injury is entitled through this settlement to up to $5 million depending on their particular ailment.
A timeline of the lawsuits and settlements against cigarette companies over the past fifty years is a good reminder that the first settlement can be followed by later, larger settlements. The deadspin.com timeline of the NFL concussion issue only has one settlement on it so far but otherwise it looks chillingly similar.
It Would Have Been Tricky in Court
Although it seems obvious that a profession that involves being smashed repeatedly in the head had something to do with the damage done to its employees, it might have been very difficult for the players to win this case in court. Brain injury is more clearly understood all the time, but it remains frustratingly elusive both from a medical standpoint and a legal one. Matthew Futterman and Kevin Clark of the Wall Street Journal made this point convincingly in their article about the settlement:
Legal experts familiar with the case say the plaintiffs’ attorneys didn’t believe they had enough firepower to win in court. NFL lawyers were prepared to probe each plaintiff about his athletic history to try to convince the court the NFL couldn’t be held liable for injuries that could have come from youth, high-school or college football—or substance abuse.
The NFL has virtually unlimited resources to throw against their former employees in court. It might not have been a pretty sight. It still might not be.
Which Lesson Has Been Learned?
It’s easy to point at the overall value of the settlement relative to the wealth of the NFL and argue that the only lesson this will teach the NFL is that they can continue to get away with downplaying the danger of brain injury among their players. This doesn’t seem likely. For one thing, it’s clear from the history of the 2012 NFL referee labor dispute that the NFL often operates on principle instead of or in addition to finance. That the NFL reached a settlement suggests to me that it is ready to understand (or has already understood) that brain injury represents one of the biggest potential threats to its existence as an institution and profit-making machine. If this is true, the league will accelerate its initiatives to create a safer environment for current players.
I know all of you are lying around wondering what you can possibly do with yourselves now that your primary hobby (I’m talking about wearing white pants, of course) is coming to an end. Here are three good sports related stories to fill the void with.
Amazing Sports Photography
This photo was taken by Lorenz Holder and was entered in the New Creativity section.
In their ongoing attempt to link ingesting caffeine, taurine, glucuronolactone, B-group vitamins, sucrose, and glucose with exciting adventure sports, Red Bull sponsors a tri-annual sports photography contest. Many of the photos are amazing and I enjoyed paging through them all. Voting is still open for the people’s choice award.
Name Dropping – Hip Hop and Basketball
Hip hop and basketball have always shared a special connection. They’re both forums that reward creativity and style within well defined boundaries. Rap is full of cultural references and basketball players often find themselves planted in a lyric. Usually this is just because the rapper admires the basketball player’s style or performance, but sometimes it’s as a form of coded speech. Bdon.org created a handy infographic that charts the number of mentions a basketball player gets in raps against the number of points he scored in that year. A couple of surprises to me were how few Allen Iverson references there were given that he is generally thought of as the player who brought hip-hop to the NBA and also how references to Scottie Pippen have accelerated in the bast few years despite his having retired years ago.
Thanks to Deadspin.com for finding this infographic.
A Sad Story of Loss and Love and Basketball
A year or so ago there was a story that popped up in the news that bewildered me. A former NBA player, Dan Roundfield, had drowned in the Caribbean where he had been on vacation with his wife and family. The news stories were all a little unclear about what exactly had happened but they all said that Roundfield had died saving his wife from drowning and they all portrayed the deceased as a remarkable man. My eyes perked up the other day when the New York Times returned to the story a year later. The story is sad, obviously, but like the best eulogies or obituaries it conveys the great joy of Dan Roundfield’s life as well.
I have a question for you from my coworker. He is making a last ditch attempt to get his wife interested in sports, especially pro football. She loves murder mysteries, so he asked for book recommendations that would merge the two. Do you have any recommendations? Preferably murder mysteries, but any engaging book will do!
Thanks, Helen
— — —
Dear Helen,
Last ditch attempt, huh? I too am a lover of detective novels but when it comes to introducing someone to American Football through a mind-blowingly good read, there’s only one book I would recommend: Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side. I know you might be thinking “wasn’t that that chick flick from a couple years back starring the woman from Speed?” And you’d be right — yes, the material from the book was made into a movie starring Sandra Bullock in 2009. I’ve seen parts of it and I think it’s probably a good movie but it probably wouldn’t get your friend’s wife into football. The book? The book might just do it.
Michael Lewis is an economist and a writer and a sports fan and he uses all three to great success in The Blind Side. The book has two key chronological stories. One, the one that the movie focuses on, is the story of a young, poor black boy growing up near Memphis. Michael Oher, the kid, is taken in by a rich white family and grows physically and academically until he is a 6’4″, 300 pound potential star college and eventual high NFL draft pick playing the position of left tackle. This is a great story in and of itself, and Lewis does a great job telling it without flinching or sensationalizing any of its many dicey elements — from Oher’s extreme poverty, to his academic and social struggles, to the suspicion that the Tuohy family (who basically adopt Oher) have designs on his playing for their alma mater, Ole Miss.
The other side of the story is a remarkably accessible history of football’s tactical evolution from being dominated by teams that could run the ball the best to teams that pass the ball the best and the effect that this evolution had on the position of left tackle. The left tackle is one of the offensive line-men, and thirty years ago the left tackle was just one of the offensive linemen, the big guys whose job it is to either clear the defense away from where the running back wants to run or to protect the quarterback from defensive players). As football began to tilt towards emphasizing the pass and the left tackle starting increasing in importance until around the time Michael Oher was in high school, when the left tackle was usually one of the top three players in terms of salary and importance. Why the left instead of the right tackle? Well, because most quarterbacks are right handed, when they prepare to throw the ball, their body is perpendicular to where they want to throw it, with their right arm cocked back. In this position, they cannot see defenders attacking them from the left side of the field. The left tackle protects a quarterback’s blind side when he is passing the ball.
The brilliance of the book and the cleverness of its title comes also from a mostly hidden third narrative. This narrative asks a tough question about our society. If somany semi-miraculous things had to go right for Michael Oher’s talent to make him successful, how many other talented poor children are we missing out on? If rags to riches is so insanely difficult on the football field, where talent is so objectively measurable (again — 6’4″, 300 pounds, and unbelievably athletic) how difficult is it for our society to identify talent in more subjective fields? The quarterback’s blind side makes him vulnerable to defensive rushes. He needs a strong left tackle to protect him. Social stratification makes our culture vulnerable to missing out on some of its brightest talents. Where’s our country’s left tackle? On top of being a touching story and a great tactical history of football, The Blind Side, is an insightful, challenging book about America.
Is tennis sexist? After Andy Murray won at Wimbledon last week I heard a bunch of stuff about gender politics. What gives?
Thanks, Amy
No one claims Andy Murray is sexist, but what about the sport he plays?
—- —- —
Dear Amy,
I don’t know if tennis is inherently sexist. There are a couple things about the sport and its culture and history that are controversially gendered if not out and out sexist. Two things happened last week that brought these feelings to the surface.
Last Sunday Andy Murray won the Men’s Finals at Wimbledon. Wimbledon is one of the four big tennis tournaments of the year and the only one that takes place in England. It drips with history and nationalism. The last time a British man had won Wimbledon was 1936 and before last week the British people were desperate for a local champion. Way back in 2006 ESPN ran an article about this entitled “Decline of the British Empire” in which it detailed the continued failure of the best British men’s tennis player at the time, Tim Henman:
“WIMBLEDON, England — The autopsy was predictably grim. For the 13th consecutive year, Tim Henman — led by the dour and disheartened British scribes — discussed his failure at the All England Club.”
The same year, the ESPN scribe Greg Garber identified a 19 year old Andy Murray as being the future hope of the British people. Seven years later, he finally won. As you might expect, the reaction of the British fans was enormous. Deadspin.com re-posted the almost messianic image on the front cover of the English newspaper The Times. After 77 years a Brit had won Wimbledon!! But wait, hold on a second, said a few small voices, hadn’t some British women won Wimbledon in the intervening years between 1936 and 2013? One of those voices, that of the feminist blogger and media personality Chloe Angyal, was in tweet form, retweeted almost 20,000 times:
Murray is indeed the first Brit to win Wimbledon in 77 years unless you think women are people.
The reverberations of this statement made it into the mainstream press even in England where The Guardian ran an article about the controversy and pointed out that not one but four British women have won Wimbledon since the last British man before Murray won the tournament.
Meanwhile, also on Twitter, another gendered conflict was brewing. A fan (or theoretically a troll) tweeted Andy Murray to say that he thought Serena Williams, the great women’s tennis champion, could beat Murray on grass. Murray went with it and tweeted back that he thought so to and that maybe someday they would play. For those readers who are tennis fans or over the age of 50 this probably brings back memories of Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs’ Battle of the Sexes in 1973. Riggs was a former top men’s professional tennis player. At the age of 55 he became one of the sport’s great villains by claiming that women’s tennis was inferior to men’s and that he could, even at his age, beat top female players. His challenge was taken up first by Margaret Court, a great women’s player, and then after he beat her, by Billie Jean King. King was another great women’s player but not as great as Margaret Court, who won 24 major tournaments in her career, which remains a record. King was and is much more high profile off the court as an advocate for the game of tennis and for sexual equality. King beat Riggs soundly in front of a television audience of over 50 million.
The proposed match between Murray and Williams has none of the chauvinistic feel of the Riggs v. King spectacle. Both players are close to the top of their abilities and, though this would likely make it less of a close contest (Serena herself said she doubted she’d “win a point,”) it also significantly lowers the stakes when it comes to humiliation. Both players have responded to the idea as a fun exhibition for the sport of tennis and my guess is that if the match happens it will be all about making creative points on the court, not political points.
1973 was a breakthrough year for women’s tennis in another way — it was the year that the U.S. Open, the first major tennis tournament to do so, equalized the prize money between men and women. It took a long time for the other three major tournaments to follow suit. The Australian Open equalized in 2000 and the final two, the French Open and Wimbledon, didn’t until 2007. These moves have not been without criticism from players who point out that men and women tennis players are getting paid for different amounts of work. What’s that you say? That’s right, men continue to play best three out of five sets in major tournaments while the women play best two out of three. This may not sound like a big deal but it means that women’s finals at Wimbledon have averaged around 90 minutes in the past 30 or so years, while the men’s finals have averaged 150 minutes.[1] Many protest that the message this sends is that women are less able to hold up against the rigors of a long match, and tennis will remain at least somewhat sexist as long as this is true.[2] As the UK Telegraph concludes in their article about this conundrum, “equal pay can ultimately be justified only be equal play.”
Thanks for your question, Ezra Fischer
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
Possibly ironically, I got this stat from a blog post that used it to argue in favor of giving male tennis players more money for winning than female tennis players.↵
Any readers who think that women actually couldn’t stand the rigors of a long match, please read Brian Phillips’ excellent Grantland piece about the Iditarod which features Aliy Zirkle, a woman who places a close second in the 1,000 mile week-long pain-fest of a dogsled race.↵
Sporting events are among the few times and places where the national anthem of the United States, the “Star-Spangled Banner” is predictably performed. In fact, if you believe this ESPN article about the history of the national anthem at sporting events, the adoption of the “Star-Spangled Banner” as a baseball tradition preceded and perhaps contributed to it becoming the official national anthem in 1931. The anthem and sports have had their highs and lows together, both literally and figuratively. This supports Dear Sports Fan’s proposition that sports are so ingrained in our society that they are worth understanding and enjoying if possible.
Juxtaposing the anthem with a sporting event often leads to interesting customs, not all of them completely dignified. Almost every audience I’ve ever heard begins cheering before the song is over, as if to say, “let’s get this anthem business over and get to the real event!” The Chicago Blackhawks fans stand and cheer throughout the entire song. The Baltimore Orioles fans holler “O” along with the “Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave”. And of course, there are plenty of anthem singers who mess up in almost every way imaginable.
Rueben Fischer-Baum of deadspin.com (no relation that I’m aware of) recently did a study that attempted to discover where the most treacherous parts of the song were for anthem singers at sporting events. Writes Fischer-Baum:
The danger zone seems to be a pair of lines in the middle: O’er the ramparts we watched / Were so gallantly streaming? These lines are tough for a few reasons. First, as everyone learns in Intro Psych, it’s harder to remember stuff that’s in the middle of a sequence than it is to remember stuff at the beginning or end. Second, the structure of this whole section is poetically jumbled (easier to understand:“Whose broad stripes and bright stars / were so gallantly streaming / through the perilous fight / o’er the ramparts we watched?”)
It’s not really our style at Dear Sports Fan to post cringe-worthy videos of people messing up in public, but this one of Natalie Gilbert is a famous and heartwarming one because of how former basketball player and then coach of the 76ers, Mo Cheeks, comes to the rescue of the young singer.
As Fischer-Baum also mentions, the tune itself is notoriously difficult to sing. The Star-Spangled Banner is set to the tune of “a popular British song written by John Stafford Smith for the Anacreontic Society,” a “popular gentlemen’s club of amateur musicians.” How difficult is it? Difficult enough that a few years back it made the New York Times Magazine‘s now sadly defunct “Year in Ideas“. The idea was that lowering the official key of the tune to create a “singable national anthem” could have a positive effect on our entire culture as it pertains to singing.
”The Star Spangled Banner” has contributed to a nationwide decrease in singing, because Americans are routinely embarrassed by how badly they sound hollering it out. “This has caused a form of post-traumatic stress disorder in our culture,” [Ed Siegel] says. “People freak when asked to sing.”
Of course, changing the song’s key doesn’t fix its absurdly wide range, and the new lows will be too low for some. ”People can mumble those parts if necessary,” Siegel says. ”But everyone should be able to hit the high notes — that’s where it gets exciting.”
The anthem can be exciting indeed when it is sung by master musicians, and there is a tradition of popular singers taking the anthem before a sporting event and making it their own. The aforementioned ESPN article about the anthem reminds us that “Whitney Houston’s rendition before Super Bowl XXV in 1991 has been a top-20 single not once but twice: first in 1991 during the Gulf War and again in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks.” Grantland had an entire feature article about Marvin Gaye’s famous anthem before the 1983 NBA All-Star Game. Gaye took such a nontraditional approach to the anthem that as soon as the beat dropped, the Lakers’ public address man, Lawrence Tanter, thought, “Ah, shit, man,they’ve got the wrong tape. This is ‘Sexual Healing’.”NPR remembered the performance on its twentieth anniversary and credited Gaye for having opened up the pregame national anthem as a vehicle for musical statements instead of simply a straight-ahead, nationalistic, musical requirement.
Sometimes though, the straight ahead way is the best of all, like at the first Boston Bruins game after the Boston Marathon bombing. Despite all of its faults, it’s a pretty nice song.
What is going on up in Boston with the football player Aaron Hernandez? Did he really kill someone? Why does it seem like athletes are in trouble with the law so often?
Thanks, AJ
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Hi AJ,
It’s not completely clear what’s going on in Boston with Patriots’ Tight End Aaron Hernandez. Here’s what we do know: a 27 year-old man named Odin Lloyd is dead. He was found Monday morning and by Wednesday his death had been ruled a homicide. As the Boston Globe reports, Aaron Hernandez is “embroiled” in this story in a number of ways. Lloyd either was or had been dating Hernandez’ sister. Hernandez was out with Lloyd and some other people the night Lloyd died. Hernandez apparently drove Lloyd and two other friends in a car away from the club where Lloyd was last seen alive. The car, a rental, was found abandoned near the body and had been registered to Hernandez. Hernandez also is said to have destroyed his home security system and cell-phone sometime after Monday night.
The media of course (including this website, I guess, although this is our first and hopefully last post on the subject) has been ALL over this story. According to the New York Times which clearly likes to see itself as above the fray:
“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” said Michael McDowell, a laborer for a mason contractor, as he cleared off the bed of a company truck and looked up at a chopper overhead. He wore a faded Patriots T-shirt. “Football player, on the run.” Hernandez was not running from the police; he was evading the news media, who sprang into action for a relatively mundane pursuit when he left his house on Thursday morning.
The blog-o-sphere has been equally focused. Deadspin.com even ran a post covering a tweet which relayed the information that an edible arrangement had just been sent to Aaron Hernandez’ house. Meanwhile the police have been fairly silent on the topic aside from saying that Hernandez is a “person of interest.” The most recent development is that lots of sites reported that an arrest warrant for Hernandez for obstructing justice had been issued. That report was pretty quickly disputed and as of now it seems as though no warrant has been issued.
So what do we make of all of this? There are a few things I find interesting. First is of course the question you asked about why it seems like athletes are always mixed up in stuff like this. I’m cautious about commenting on this authoritatively but most of what I find online suggests that “it is not clear that athletes are any more involved in serious crime than the general population is.” An interesting Duke study concludes that athletes actually commit fewer crimes than a similar segment of the general population. When they do commit crimes, it stands to reason that they will be far more public than the general population. Second is whether or not Hernandez committed a crime. My guess is that he did, but it seems just as likely that he is guilty of aiding, abetting, and protecting someone who committed murder as it is that he committed murder himself. Last is my own reaction which has been a small but constant voice in my head saying “this guy was on my fantasy football team!??!” As if somehow that makes me connected to the incident or more shocking that someone I’m related to that closely is involved with a murder. This speaks either to the power of fantasy sports or to my having a screw loose.
From the how-weird-can-it-get files, this story is about whether or not the Russian politician Vladimir Putin stole an NFL Championship ring from the owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft.
The story begins in the summer of 2005 when Robert Kraft went on a trip to Russia. The New England Patriots, then (as now) one of the best teams in the National Football League, had just won their third Super Bowl in four years. Vladimir Putin’s record was almost as good as Kraft’s. Elected in 2000 after his predecessor Boris Yeltsin resigned unexpectedly, Putin had just been reelected in 2004 with 71% of the vote. At the end of a day of meetings between Putin, Kraft, and other American businessmen, something happened and Putin ended up with Kraft’s Super Bowl ring.
What’s in a ring? Most team sports leagues, including the NFL, give out a trophy to the championship team. There is also a tradition that the winning organization rewards its own players and coaches with gaudy championship rings as a celebration of the winning season. These rings have become a sort of jockish short-hand representing the championships themselves. One common factor in arguments about how to rate a player is “how many rings does he or she have?” Athletes use the word like this too, as in the famous rejoinder, ““I can’t hear what Jeremy says, because I’ve got my two Stanley Cup rings plugging my ears” by hockey goalie Patrick Roy when taunted by Jeremy Roenick, a good player but one who had never won championships like Roy had.
The exact series of events that led to Putin possessing Kraft’s ring was never completely clear, even in 2005. In the Boston Globe article Donovan Slack wrote that it could be “an international incident of sorts, a misunderstanding of Super Bowl proportions. Or it could be a very, very generous gift.” Despite Kraft’s statement a few days later that he, “decided to give him the ring as a symbol of the respect and admiration that I have for the Russian people and the leadership of President Putin.” there was always a certain mystery around the incident.
In a wonderful profile of Kraft’s wife Myra in 2007, the New York Times reported her version of the story which involved an off-color remark by Putin that he could “kill someone” with the ring before more or less walking off with it, to her husband’s dismay. The story of the ring being a gift was a cover-up to avoid an international incident, she said.
The story resurfaced this week when Robert Kraft finally confirmed his now deceased wife’s version of the story, even adding some henchmen into the mix: “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”
Just to make things even more scandalous, Putin responded to the story today through spokesperson and witness Dmitry Peskov, who said that “what Mr. Kraft is saying now is weird.” As reported by CNN, the metric system-obsessed spokesman remembered that he “was standing 20 centimeters away from him and Mr. Putin and saw and heard how Mr. Kraft gave this ring as a gift.”
What will happen next? Who knows! But it’s truly a great world that creates the headline “Putin denies stealing Kraft’s Super Bowl ring” and puts it on the front page of ESPN.
Why is soccer a summer sports in the United States, but an autumn/winter sport in most of the rest of the soccer-playing world (i.e., the rest of the world)? I’ve long associated soccer with drizzle and mud and it’s bizarre to see it played in the hot sun on a dry pitch. There’s no overlap with players as far as I know–the big stars play in Europe exclusively.
Thanks,
Guy
Dear Guy
When I was a kid, I played on a “traveling” soccer team and I seem to remember that soccer season was fall and spring… although we also played indoor soccer in the winter… and went to soccer camps in the Summer. So I guess I do remember growing up playing soccer year round although when it comes to scholastic sports in America, soccer is a fall sport ending in early winter.
The most popular soccer league in the world, the English Premier League runs from August to May so you’re right, that’s mostly Fall/Winter with a little bit of Summer and Spring peeking out the sides. Major League Soccer (MLS is America’s attempt at professional soccer,) which is not as popular as other soccer leagues around the world – does have a summer-heavy schedule (March to December,) though the playoffs extend well into the fall and winter.
The reason for that is simple: competition. Not athletic competition, mind you – but TV competition. The summer is traditionally a TV sports dead zone, when baseball is in full swing but only truly captivating to a subset of the population, basketball and hockey are ending and, every two years, the Olympics may capture the nation’s attention for a couple of weeks, depending on the charisma of that year’s girl’s gymnastics team. Most importantly, American football – the dominant sports TV franchise in America, even though soccer (or football, as the rest of the world calls it) is the most popular sport in the world – is completely off the air.
So it makes sense that, in trying to make professional soccer a competitive economic enterprise in America – where TV viewership is the key – the powers that be focused on that dead zone and scheduled the bulk of the season for the summer.
Hope this answers your question – certainly I think it’s a more responsive answer than my gut reaction, which was to say that you associate soccer with cold and rainy weather because you’re used to watching soccer in England where – to indulge an ignorant American stereotype – everything from warm beer to Marmite is associated with cold and rainy weather.
I’m curious about baseball slang. What does it mean to strike out “looking?”
Thanks,
Pat
Dear Pat,
I’m curious about baseball slang too! I think there are a lot of compelling elements of it — many of them [ahem] colorful! What I think you’ve got here though, with the phrase “to strike out looking,” is somewhere between slang and straight terminology. We should be able to unpack it fairly easily from a technical angle and maybe even add a little extra how-to-use-this-in-a-non-sports-setting as well.
Baseball is made up of a series of one on one contests between a pitcher and a hitter. Each pitch has a result — a ball, a strike, a home run, a foul ball, a fly out, a ground out, etc. I’m going to assume that most of you know what a ball and a strike are. If not, we’d be happy to write another post about them! The contest is over when the batter hits the ball, when the ball count reaches four (a walk), or when the strike count reaches three (a strikeout). A strikeout is the worst thing that can happen to a batter because they lose the chance to hit the ball. It is true that if they hit the ball and someone catches it they are equally out but at least in that case they’ve forced the other team to make a play (that they could theoretically mess up) to get them out.
Assuming that a batter is going to strike out, there are two ways for them to get that third and final strike: they can swing and miss the ball or they can not swing and the pitch can be called a strike[1] by the umpire. When a batter gets that last strike on a pitch that the batter chooses not to swing at it is said that they “struck out looking.” To strike out swinging is to get that third strike by swinging at the ball and missing. I’ve looked around a bunch and despite the enormous amount of statistical analysis that has been done on baseball in the past twenty years or so, I can’t find anything that says whether it is actually better for a batter to strikeout swinging or looking.
What is clear is how the phrases have entered the vernacular. In common usage, to strike out looking is to fail without even trying. For instance, assuming it’s girls you’re after, say one night you see a cute girl at a bar and talk to her for a while. When it’s time to go, you have two options: you can ask for her number or say goodbye and walk off. If you would like to call and “striking out” would be to not get her number, what you don’t want to hear from your buddies later is that you “struck out looking” by not even asking!
Thanks for the question, Ezra Fischer
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
The difference between a strike and a ball is highly subjective but basically if a pitch is between the right and left edges of home plate and the batter’s knees and the midpoint between his or her shoulders and waist, it’s a strike.↵
starring Sandra Bullock in 2009. I’ve seen parts of it and I think it’s probably a good movie but it probably wouldn’t get your friend’s wife into football. The book? The book might just do it.
. The book has two key chronological stories. One, the one that the movie focuses on, is the story of a young, poor black boy growing up near Memphis. Michael Oher, the kid, is taken in by a rich white family and grows physically and academically until he is a 6’4″, 300 pound potential star college and eventual high NFL draft pick playing the position of left tackle. This is a great story in and of itself, and Lewis does a great job telling it without flinching or sensationalizing any of its many dicey elements — from Oher’s extreme poverty, to his academic and social struggles, to the suspicion that the Tuohy family (who basically adopt Oher) have designs on his playing for their alma mater, Ole Miss.
