Why did the Red Sox game on Marathon Monday stop early? Isn’t that unfair? Who gets to choose when they’re stopping? How does it work in baseball when a game is called part of the way through?
Thanks, Bobbie
Dear Bobbie,
It’s true, the game on Patriots’ Day in Boston between the Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles ended in less than the full nine innings. It was stopped by the umpire in the middle of the seventh inning because of rain. The game was not restarted, nor will it be finished at a later date. In baseball, it’s okay to have a game that’s less than nine innings and its result counts towards the final standings just as much as if it had been played all the way through. When this happens, it’s usually because of weather, but there are other permissible reasons. This may seem weird to you but it’s all part of baseball’s unique structure and culture.
If you want to understand the exact rules that govern when and why a baseball game can be stopped, your first stop might be the official rules of the game. The problem with this is that these rules appear to have been written by a mixture of lawyers and spies. You need an expensive education and a one-time pad just to make sense of them. Here’s an example:
No game called because of a curfew (Rule 4.12(a)(1)), weather (Rule 4.12(a)(5)), a time limit (Rule 4.12(a)(2)) or with a tied score (Rule 4.12(a)(6)) shall be a suspended game unless it has progressed far enough to have been a regulation game pursuant to Rule 4.10(c). A game called pursuant to Rules 4.12(a)(3) or 4.12(a)(4) shall be a suspended game at any time after it starts.
For mere mortals like us, it’s probably enough to know a simplified version of these rules. This information will serve 95% of time.
Once the game starts, the only person who gets to choose if and when to stop the game is the head umpire.
A game can be stopped temporarily, usually for rain, and can be restarted once the conditions allow play again.
If a game has to be stopped for the day, it is declared a “called” game and this is when the mildly complicated stuff starts.
If a game is called before four and a half innings are played, the game is declared not to have existed at all and the teams need to reschedule it and start from the beginning. All of the statistics accumulated in the game are stricken from the record. Let’s take a minute to think about how totally insane that would feel as a player. You’re having a great game — the best of your life. You’ve got two home runs in the first three innings. Then it starts raining and they’re just gone. Of course, a bad game of fielding errors could just as easily be wiped from the books, so maybe it works out. Rany Jazayerli has a great article about this in Baseball Prospectus. He notes that Roger Maris, who held the single season home run record with 61 for decades, actually would have had 62 but for one being erased in this way.
If a game has reached four and a half inning and the home team is winning (and therefore nothing that happens in the bottom of the fifth inning, when the home team is up to bat, could change the outcome,) the game is over and it counts as a regulation game.
If a game has reached the four and a half inning mark and it is tied, the game will become a suspended game. It must be rescheduled and when play starts, it will pick up right where the two teams left off, although some player substitutions are allowed.
Weather is by far the most common reason for calling a game, but the rules allow for light or other technical malfunctions, “a curfew imposed by law” and the mysterious “a time limit permissible by league rules.” As far as I can tell, the rules that the rules are referring to here, do not exist.
With all the money and competitive importance involved in professional sports today, these rules may seem archaic or even irresponsibly lighthearted. They seem to suggest that the outcome of a game is not so important, that once the game is half through, that’s enough to call it done. This ignores a thousand late-inning comebacks. The thing is, baseball is a little bit archaic and that’s part of its nostalgic charm. It is more relaxed than other sports. The length of the regular season (162 games) means that each game actually does mean less. Compared to an NFL football season of 16 games, each baseball game is only 1/16 as important as each NFL football game. Part of what makes baseball fun to follow is its every-day, low-key rhythm. Being calm enough about a sport to accept a loss even though you were only down by one run in the fifth inning when it started to rain is emblematic of what baseball fans love about their sport.
There’s an old joke, usually attributed to Rodney Dangerfield, about hockey that goes, “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.” At the risk of trying to explain humor, this joke works because it flips what would be a more reasonable comment, “I went to a hockey game the other night, and a fight broke out.” In reversing the statement, the joke identifies a hidden truth about how many people watch hockey — the violence is the primary attraction and the sport, secondary. The juxtaposition of two news stories today from Yahoo!’s hockey blog, Puck Daddy, made me think about the joke in another way.
The first of the back to back stories was a story by Greg Wyshynski about an NHL player whose choice to play with a tinted visor on his helmet following a concussion casts doubts on whether he truly recovered. Wyshynski suggests that the player, Matt Calvert, played through concussion symptoms earlier in the year before being held out for fifteen games. Now that he has apparently recovered, he’s returning with a tinted visor because he is still sensitive to light. Now, it’s not impossible that his light sensitivity is unrelated to the concussion or that it’s not a sign that he hasn’t truly recovered enough to be playing, but it sure is suspicious. The second story, published eight minutes later by Sean Leahy, comes from Sweden, where a 31 year old hockey player named Andre Deveaux has had an arrest warrant for an assault charge issued following something which happened before a Swedish club hockey game. Deveaux felt he had been dangerously attacked by an opposing player in a previous game and decided to take his revenge during pre-game warm-ups. In video you can see Deveaux skating up behind an opponent, swinging his stick at the player’s feet, and then wrestling him to the ground. When asked about it afterwards, Deveaux protested that his actions were not as bad as his opponents, because he felt the hit he took was more dangerous (and indeed, he claims to have had concussions symptoms since that hit, although he still played) than the attack he perpetrated.
The connection between these two stories may not be obvious but I do think it’s significant. Both stories are about grappling with violence in the context of hockey. Hockey has a complex set of written and unwritten rules that determine which forms of violence are acceptable. The outside world does as well, both in the form of laws and cultural norms. When we criticize a sport for allowing a concussed player to return too soon after a concussion, we’re basing that view on our ever-changing set of cultural norms. When we issue an arrest warrant for a player for assaulting another player, we’re basing that on both laws and cultural norms.
In the first article, we never find out much about the hit that caused Matt Calvert’s concussion, but we don’t really need to. Like in American Football, the collisions that are integral to hockey are more than enough to plausibly and perhaps inevitably cause brain injuries among a good percentage of its players. That Calvert got a concussion playing hockey is understood — what’s at question is how he and his team and the league should be handling his diagnosis, recovery, and return to play. In the second article, the details of the incident are important. It’s rare but not unprecedented for a warrant to be issued from an incident on a hockey rink. Of course, hockey players assume a certain amount of violence when they step on the rink. Lots of what happens on a hockey rink would be fairly considered assault of the rink. What differentiates Deveaux’s assault from a normal body-check is primarily the rules, written and unwritten, of hockey itself.
“I went to a hockey game the other night and a conversation about cultural acceptance of violence broke out.” Is, perhaps, less of a good joke, but in this case, it’s probably more true to life.
Obituaries are a wonderful source of amazing stories about people you wish you had known more about when they were alive. That’s true in sports as in so many aspects of life. This week, I read three amazing pieces about recently departed sports figures.
In today’s climate of concern about brain injuries in football, it’s hard to remember that football’s culture was exactly the opposite for many years. Football glorified its violence for decades and in doing so, it made heroes out of players who injured another player in a particularly epic way. Chuck Bednarik became one of those heroes after he hit Frank Gifford in 1960. Gifford was injured so badly on the play that he missed the rest of that season and all of the next. Bednarik was glorified. This one incident became Bednarik’s main claim to fame and was (quite literally as we found out last week) in the first paragraph of his obituary. The hit unquestionably caused a terrible injury, but for the most part, the idea that it was a brutal hit remained unquestioned until Steven Fatsis researched it and wrote about it this week. What he found may surprise you.
So was it a blindside tackle to the chest? A right shoulder under the chin? Or a forearm to the chest? Was Bednarik moving at full speed? Did the blow itself knock Gifford out? Was it one of the hardest hits ever?
Let me respond to those questions: no, no, no, no, no, and no.
Sports logos are so ingrained into the fabric of the teams that they represent that they’re almost invisible. You can’t think about the Toronto Maple Leafs without the leaf or the Oakland Raiders without their eye-patch festooned pirate. If we rarely think about the logos themselves, we almost never think about the people who design them. Patrick McDarby was one of those people.
Over the years, Mr. McDarby designed more than 200 logos. For each, he received a flat fee, no royalties and, by the nature of his craft, little public recognition…
The design of sports logos entails singular challenges. In a small space, and only two dimensions, the artist must convey a sense of movement, excitement and power. The design must be simple enough to be immediately interpretable but evocative enough to be enduringly memorable. Ideally, it should distill the very essence of the thing it represents.
When legendary North Carolina basketball coach, Dean Smith, died last month, the sports world poured out an unbelievable slew of tributes to him. He was, by all accounts, a good person as well as a great coach. He was an early leader in integrating college basketball in his area. One of the things that made him special was the tight connection he developed with his players, which continued throughout his and their lives. This week we found out that it actually continued a little bit past Dean Smith’s life.
In the letter Smith’s former players received from Miller McNeish & Breedlove, PA, it was revealed that Smith requested each of his former players be sent a $200 check with the message, “enjoy a dinner out compliments of Coach Dean Smith.” The enclosed checks also included the notation, “Dinner out.”
What happened to our incredible Jeremy Lin? What is he up to these days?
Thanks, Jeehae
Dear Jeehae,
Jeremy Lin is still chugging along, playing basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA), currently with the Los Angeles Lakers. He’s a solid NBA player but has never regained the spectacular play that made him a cultural phenomenon in 2012 when he played with the New York Knicks. Those crazy days of stardom which came to be known as “Linsanity” are now just a memory to be treasured or deconstructed.
For those of us who don’t remember or who never really knew what Linsanity was all about, here’s a short recap. At the start of 2012, Jeremy Lin was one of the dozens of people hovering around the fringes of NBA teams, good enough to have been signed by a team but not quite good enough to be a regular member of that team. Lin played his college basketball at Harvard where he played for four years and grew as a player each year. In his senior season, Lin was voted unanimously to the All-Ivy League First Team and received several other college honors as well. All-Ivy League First team is great, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into having a professional career. The Ivy League is a much weaker conference than the conferences most prospective NBA players play in. Indeed, Lin was not drafted by any of the 30 teams in the 2010 NBA draft but, after a decent showing in the NBA’s summer league, he was signed to a two-year contract by the Golden State Warriors. This seemed like a great fin. The Warriors were Lin’s favorite team, having grown up nearby, and as the first Chinese or Taiwanese-American player in the NBA, Lin was disproportionately popular for an unheralded rookie, especially among the Warriors already large Asian-American fan base. After one year with the Warriors, Lin was waived or released from the team. This isn’t unusual for a player of his stature in the league, and Lin wouldn’t have to wait long for a second and third chance. The first team to pick him up was the Houston Rockets but Lin could not break through the three more established players that team already had at his position. The Rockets cut him as well. After several weeks without a team, the New York Knicks claimed Lin.
Even though the New York Knicks signed Lin, he was no sure thing to succeed there, or even to play. He needed a little bit of luck just to get onto the court. He found that luck in January, after a particularly bad game from the Knicks starters prompted then Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni to turn to Lin in desperation (and perhaps to instill some competitive fear in the rest of the team.) Lin took off. For a couple weeks, it seemed like he could do no wrong on the basketball court. He set records for performance in his first handful of starts. He averaged over 20 points and seven assists in his first five games and made a couple memorable buzzer beaters. Lin got famous in a hurry. After the season was over, the Knicks were expected to give a long term contract to their new most popular player. It wasn’t meant to be. Lin was a restricted free agent, which means other teams were able to make contract offers to him, but the Knicks could match their offers and keep Lin if they wanted. The Houston Rockets, perhaps feeling regret over having had Lin on their team and then releasing him, made Lin an offer he couldn’t refuse and the Knicks couldn’t match. All of a sudden, Lin was a Rocket and Linsanity in New York was just a memory.
Since then, the Knicks have never recaptured the city or the world’s attention the way they had it when Lin was a thing, nor have they been very successful as a basketball team. Lin too has never been as good as he was in those first days in New York. He struggled for two seasons in Houston before being traded to Los Angeles in a move that was more about Houston releasing themselves from the financial obligation of paying him than it was about basketball. In Los Angeles this year, Lin has been a part of one of the worst teams in the league. Still, he’s in the NBA and shows no signs of leaving, which is actually more of an achievement than you might think. The NBA is an amazingly shallow league — there simply aren’t that many jobs for basketball players and each year between 30 and 60 new, young, players come out of college or Europe to compete for jobs. Lin should be proud of simply staying in the league.
How should we evaluate Linsanity with the benefit of hindsight? It was truly a remarkable performance from a relatively unknown player but the phenomenon of Linsanity was also aided by two important factors: Lin’s unique backstory as the first Asian-American NBA player and the fact that he was playing for the New York Knicks, a marquee franchise because of its history and location. Streaks of impressive play by newcomers do happen. Any player who is skilled enough to make the NBA is skilled enough to put together a string of seemingly unlikely statistical performances but they don’t always become cultural stars. A good comparison is the case of Hasaan Whiteside. Whiteside was almost a complete unknown before this year. He had played college basketball at Marshall University in West Virginia and, unlike Lin, was actually drafted by an NBA team. Before long though, he was out of the league and played in the NBA Development League, Lebanon, and China, before being welcomed back into the NBA by the Miami Heat. When he broke into their lineup this January, he quickly became a basketball revelation of similar proportions to Lin. Whiteside is an athletic seven-foot tall player who puts up remarkable scoring, rebounding, and blocking statistics. As famous as he rapidly became in basketball circles, he never broke out of the sports section and onto the news pages. Whiteside is not notable from a personal interest or historical standpoint and Miami, without LeBron James to make them notorious, is not as interesting a team as the New York Knicks are (even when they’re terrible.)
Linsanity was a special time and Lin is a good NBA player but he’ll probably never be as good again as he was in his first games with the Knicks.
March Madness, the annual NCAA Men’s College Basketball tournament begins today. It’s a remarkably popular event. The tournament storms through the sports world, eclipsing nearly everything else for its duration, and makes significant inroads into the normal, non-sports fabric of the United States. If you go into a sports area in the physical world, like a sports bar or your office’s water cooler, or in the virtual world, like the sports-only social network Fancred, you’ll hear a lot of people saying the same thing: “The first four days of March Madness are my favorite days of the year.” On the other hand, if you roam into some non-sports areas, like a folk dance or an intelligently satirical television show, you’ll hear sentiments that range from the casually uninterested to confusion about why so many people are so excited about the tournament to righteous indignation about March Madnesses exploitative nature. As with so many differences in life, there is truth on both sides. Let’s try to bridge that gap by running through the arguments on both sides, starting first with the hate and moving to the love. If you’ve never understood how anyone could hate March Madness or how seemingly everyone could love it, keep reading.
March Madness is big business. The last time the television rights to the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament came up for bidding was 2010. CBS and Turner Sports agreed to pay close to $11 billion dollars to the NCAA for the right to broadcast the games for the next 14 years. It’s safe to assume that CBS and Turner both plan on making a profit from their investment. The NCAA, despite being officially a non-profit, certainly makes a profit in the way that most people think about profit. Their president, Mark Emmert, took a $1.7 million dollar salary in 2011. His job, as vital as it may be to facilitating the organization of basketball games, is not what generates all of this money. What generates the money, is basketball, and the people who play that basketball, the so-called “student-athletes,” don’t receive a salary at all.
HBO’s extremely good Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did a wonderful job with this topic in last week’s show. If you’re new to the subject or just want a wonderful refresher course, I suggest you watch it now.
If you’re a sports fan, Oliver’s argument is so old-hat that it’s hard for it to generate any real passion any more. But that’s kind of the point. It’s good to be reminded that the NCAA’s case for continuing not to pay their labor force is almost as twisted and circular as Groucho Marx’s in the 1929 film, The Cocoanuts.
The NCAA essentially says, “We can’t pay you, you’re amateurs.” After asking his workers if they want to be wage slaves and receiving a “no”, Groucho says, “Well, what makes wage slaves? Wages! I want you to be free. Remember, there’s nothing like Liberty — except Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Be free, my friends. One for all, and all for me, and me for you, and three for five and six for a quarter.” Both Groucho and the NCAA are so brazenly absurd that they [seem to, at least for a while] get away with it.
My only issue with Oliver’s coverage is that he doesn’t offer a solution, which inadvertently puts him level with the protagonist in a heavily censored version of the Nelly song, Hot in Herre, who he made fun of earlier in the episode, saying, “Now it’s just a man complaining about the heat and offering no solution whatsoever.” There is a solution out there, there has to be, but for now it is enough to simply identify the problem and agree that it needs to be fixed.
While the underlying hypocrisy and exploitation inherent in March Madness rankles, there are some really great reasons to both enjoy and cherish the tournament. One of the primary reasons to love the tournament is its sloppy but undeniably democratic nature. Compared to virtually every other American sporting event, March Madness in unique in its combination of the highest quality play with the most inclusive format. College basketball is enormous. There are 347 Division 1 college basketball teams. Each of these teams plays in one of 32 conferences. Each of these conferences crowns a champion at the end of the year and every single one of these champions is given automatic qualification into March Madness. It’s true that the majority of the other 36 places are given to teams in one of the top four or five power conferences, but the nature of the tournament is still extremely inclusive. This is also what makes the tournament so exciting. No where else (in American sports at least, this kind of thing is much more common in European club soccer) do you get to see and root for such extreme underdogs.
In the past week, two wonderful pieces of journalism, one video, one narrative and written, were released. If you want to get a deeper understanding of how the NCAA tournament came to be so inclusive (and how it almost wasn’t) and just what being able to compete with the biggest schools means to people in the smallest basketball towns, I cannot recommend these two pieces highly enough. From Grantland and director Nick Guthe comes a short film called The Billion Dollar Game. The 13 minute video tells the story of how a single, almost-upset of a number 1 seeded Georgetown team by number 16 seeded Princeton (not normally an underdog in anything, but in men’s college basketball, they certainly are) in 1989 was such a powerful example of the potential for drama inherent in asymmetric sport that it convinced the NCAA and their television partners to maintain the democratic nature of the tournament. Justin Pahl’s piece on SB Nation, Countdown to March: Life and Death with a Small Town Team is just an incredible article. It’s more a short memoir than a long article, really. Pahl grew up in the small, midwestern city of Valparaiso, Indiana. His father was a professor at Valparaiso University and they shared a love that bordered on obsession for the school’s basketball team. Pahl mixes the story of what happened to that team and to the older kids in his town whose athletic feats he grew up idolizing with the story of his own coming of age in a beautiful way. Reading this article will give you a profound understanding of the conflicting urges of small-town America: pride, desires to stay and to leave, inferiority complexes, love. When I see a small-town team from an lesser known conference keep pace with one of the big boys in this year’s tournament, I’ll think of Princeton’s Billion Dollar Game and Valpairaiso’s Countdown to March and pull for them just a little bit harder than normal.
No theme this week, just a selection of wonderful articles about sports that I flagged throughout the week. One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from the best articles of the last week on the subject of attitude:
Football is everywhere, right? And the Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event of the year. It’s virtually a holiday! Here’s the story of a small but growing group of people who engage in their own Super Bowl competition: who can make it longest without finding out who won. They’re called “runners” and losing, or finding out who won, is jokingly referred to as “dying” or a “death.” This is a great article.
Most of the runners, however, found themselves waking up each day in a cold sweat. “I feel like I’m being sequestered for the stupidest jury trial in modern history,” one competitor said. “It’s gotten to the point where three things may end me: recklessness, homesickness, or sheer boredom.”
“I’m starting to think that #DeathByGirlfriend is becoming a reality as she gets more fed up with me being anti-social,” one runner wrote on Twitter. A doctor feared going to the hospital, where he would have to make small talk with patients. A stripper in Los Angeles slept through the Super Bowl—most of the clientele was watching the game—but found the rest of her work week difficult: “Starting every conversation with ‘Don’t tell me who won the SB!’ is hilarious but not the best way to make money in a strip club.”
Now that the Super Bowl is won and gone, the biggest story in the sports world is… still NFL football. It’s now time for free agents to be wooed and signed by new teams. The biggest and best free agent this year is a ferocious defensive tackle named Ndamukong Suh. Suh is known equally for being an impactful player and a dirty one. In this article, Brian Phillips pierces through the first level of analysis and tries to get at what makes Suh the type of player he is.
We want football players to be blood-scenting berserkers half the time and upstanding sportsmen the other half; even if you don’t agree that the line is in kind of an arbitrary place, can you imagine how hard that would be to navigate, from Pop Warner on? You’re a big, fast kid who can hit people hard. You’re taken into a room and told, first of all, that this makes you special, and second of all, that your special self is subordinate to a team. You’re told that all your future specialness will depend on how completely you subordinate yourself. You’re told to give everything. Give your all. Leave it on the field. Never stop trying to win. Never stop trying to get better. You’re told that there’s no room for weakness. You’re told that there are no excuses. You’re told to make yourself a weapon. You’re told that the only thing that matters is beating your rivals. You’re told to call me sir. You’re told that what you’re doing when you’re playing defense is hunting. You’re told to seek out any edge, any advantage, any crack you can use for a toehold. If you win, the crowd roars your name. But the crowd will like you only if you’re humble. The crowd is screaming for you to kill your opponent. But do it at the wrong time, in the wrong way, and they’ll turn on you. Be a warrior. Be a killer. But be respectful. Give 110 percent, but hold yourself in check.
As a set of inputs, this is madness. What person’s brain could line that up into anything like coherence?
Soon, college basketball will take over the sporting landscape as early March transitions into March madness, the NCAA men’s college basketball championships. As such, it’s time for the personal interest stories to start flowing. This story is a particularly excellent example of the genre. It follows Isaiah Williams, a junior guard for Iona, a small school New Rochelle that hopes to qualify for the tournament this year. Williams grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and has struggled during his college career with finding a balance between trying to help his family out of their socio-economic and violent plight, and personally protecting his little brother, Kevin.
Teammates wondered how Isaiah held it together.
“It’s not just like, ‘My best friend got killed,’ which is hard enough to take,” says Iona senior forward David Laury, Isaiah’s closest friend on the team. “It’s like, ‘One of my best friends got killed.’ Two months later, ‘Another one of my best friends got killed.’ Another month later, ‘Another one of my best friends got killed.’ These are kids that he grew up with from around, like, sandbox time. It was just ridiculous.”
The off-campus house Isaiah shares this year with seven students is quintessential college — dirty floors, a Fry Baby in the kitchen and a sign hanging in the foyer that reads “5 O’Clock Somewhere Ave.” He says he’s doing well balancing books and basketball as he works toward a degree in criminal justice and currently sports a 3.0 grade-point average thanks, in part, to Wednesday evening date nights with Menendez at the library.
The biggest difference between New Rochelle and Newark is obvious, Isaiah says.
“Here, you can walk outside around 11 o’clock and you don’t have to worry,” he says. “Back home, once the sun goes down, you need to be in the house. Not even — when the sun’s up, you still not safe.”
Even with Isaiah at school, his presence is felt in the family’s Newark home. His associate’s degree hangs next to the front door. The living room alcove is filled with 26 trophies and dozens of medals. Framed pictures of Isaiah dot the walls.
The sports and pop culture media outlet, Grantland, is featuring six short films by Errol Morris this week in a series they’re calling, It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports. I’ve been following along, watching, thinking, and reviewing here. I wrote about the first film in the series, The Subterranean Stadiumon Monday, and the second and third films, The Heist and The Streaker on Wednesday. Today’s release is Being Mr. Met an extended interview with AJ Mass, the first person to play the New York Mets mascot when the team revived the character in 1994.
Being Mr. Met is a disappointing effort in what is increasingly a let-down of a series from one of my favorite film-makers. Of the four films, only the first had the type of emotional depth that can elevate this type of short film. Morris barely scratches the surface of what it’s like to be the person inside of a mascot costume. Oh, sure, there’s the obligatory mascot getting hit in the nuts story as well as what could have been a truly scary moment with a group of middle-schoolers with baseball bats. There’s a gesture (one might even say a head-fake to use sports language) at the disconcerting process of separating the actor from the character when Mass was fired by the team.
Mass is a modestly interesting character but nothing in this film even approaches the hilarity and interest in the excellent This American Life radio piece about Navey Baker, a shy high school girl who comes alive when she puts on the school’s tiger mascot costume. That story grabs your attention from the beginning by describing Navey as a four year-old obsessed with pretending to be a dog.
Navey drank from a bowl, crawled around sniffing crotches, and, let’s let her Dad tell the piece de resistance:
I mean, I was fine with her being a dog until she started crapping in the yard. I didn’t think that was very funny [chuckles]… it is funny though.
From that moment on, you’re transfixed to the radio as Navey’s cousin, Elna Baker, leads you in an exploration of her Navey’s life and just how strange the full embodiment of a character can be. Towards the end of the segment, Elna tests her cousin to see if it’s true that she can’t do a simple cartwheel without wearing her tiger costume. It is. Outgoing and acrobatic in costume, Navey remains shy and awkward without it. That’s the type of examination into the power of character and mascots that I would expect Morris to be engaged in with his story about Mr. Met. Instead, Morris seems satisfied to ask softball questions about the “trouble” between Mass and the New York Mets organization and, instead of pursuing a deeper answer, retreats back into detached bemusement.
Errol Morris is widely regarded as the premiere documentary filmmaker alive. This week, the sports and culture website Grantland has declared it to be “Errol Morris” week and is celebrating their own invented holiday by releasing a brand new Errol Morris short documentary each day. The first one, It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports: ‘The Subterranean Stadium’, is a 22 minute slice of life focusing on a man whose love for electric football permeates the life of his wife, family, and friends. I plan to watch and review all of the films this week. For full disclosure, I am a big fan of both Grantland and Morris, so I’m likely to enjoy most of them. I loved this one.
The film begins by focusing on the game of electric football. Electric football is a table-top game invented in the late 1940s and still produced today. Although its prominence in the world of football make-believe and simulation has long been superseded by both fantasy football and football video games, electric football continues to have a passionate following and is still sold today. Since its invention, more than 40 million sets have been sold. Players set up miniature football players on an electrified field. When a switch is flipped, the field electrifies, and the players, whose bases serve as conductors (both for electricity and to provide direction for the player), take off. When a defender makes contact with the player with the ball, the play is over and the setup begins again. By now, of course, you might be thinking that you don’t actually feel that interested in the minutiae of an archaic sports simulation. You’re in luck. No matter what the subjects of Morris’ films are, what he cares about is people.
People are the true focus of this film and the results are spectacular. Morris’ films can be separated into two main groups: the ones where he takes a serious topic and dissects it (like wrongful conviction in The Thin Blue Line, the Vietnam war in The Fog of War, or Abu Gharaib in Standard Operating Procedure) and the ones where he takes a frivolous or mundane topic and enlivens it (like small town life in Vernon, Florida or animal lovers in Gates of Heaven). This is definitely an example of the second. Love and humor are present in the thirty year tradition of gathering once a week in John DiCarlo’s basement to play electric football but as the documentary goes on, you begin to understand that there’s real pathos as well. Morris and whoever created the music for the film do a masterful job of allowing some of the tough realities of these people’s lives trickle into the film. You learn that DiCarlo is a Vietnam veteran who suffers from serious health problems due to his exposure to Agent Orange. The scene-stealing star of the film, a hot-blooded hot-dog vendor nicknamed Hotman (real name Peter Dietz) provides laughs and grins for most of the film and then the best line towards the end. When discussing his regret about never having children, he looks at the camera and says, “I had to play the hand I dealt myself.”
“I had to play the hand I dealt myself.” That line perfectly encapsulates this short film. The people who congregate in John DiCarlo’s Subterranean Stadium are realistic about their lives but also unrepentant. They know better than we do that winning an electric football simulation can only momentarily sooth the wounds of the lives they’ve lived, full of war and drugs and hardship and loss, but they’re unrepentant. The awkward beauty of the mangled card metaphor is that, had Dietz thought about it a little longer, he would have found that the perfect metaphor wasn’t playing cards with all its inherent randomness but electric football where you place the players where you want them and then sit back and watch the action unfold.
Sports are constructed universes that each have their own set of rules. One of the most attractive aspects about being a frequent visitor to a sports world is that it’s rules are so much clearer and more well defined than the rules of the real world. Each sport has a clear objective and every game that’s played has a winner and a loser. It’s no coincidence that virtually every sports arena has a large screen in it which shows the current score at all times. Unlike the other facets of most people’s lives — workplace dramas, romantic relationships, friendships, etc. — a sports fan always knows how their team is doing. Every game ends with a win or a loss. Every season ends with a championship or no championship. In a blurry, grey world, sports offers black and white contrasts. Fans, athletes, coaches, and general managers are free to pursue a single goal with an unwavering commitment rarely available or wise outside the realm of sports.
“You play to win the game.” If you were to watch ESPN 24 hours a day (not a real recommendation) you would probably hear this phrase at least four or five times a day. The phrase first assaulted the sports Zeitgeist in 2002 when New York Jets head coach Herm Edwards said it in a post-game press conference.
The appeal of Edward’s rant is, at first glance, obvious. It’s a strident statement of the foundational truth about sports that we described above. Sports is objective. There is a winner and a loser and the goal is to be the winner. The second level of enjoyment for many people is in how dismissive and obnoxious Edwards is being towards the media member who somehow suggested that winning was not the ultimate purpose of sports. Bullying media members is, at this point in the United States, basically its own sport, and Edwards (who now works for ESPN himself,) is a champion at disdain. Forget those first two levels though, it’s the third level that we’re interested in today. The third level of interpretation reveals that this quote is complex. The thing about “playing to win the game,” is that it isn’t really true. Or at least, it’s a more paradoxical truth than it seems at first glance.
Today we’ll look at some of the ways in which teams don’t always choose to win games at all costs in two sports: NBA basketball and European club soccer.
NBA Basketball
Not trying to win or even trying not to win is one of the biggest topics in basketball right now. It’s seen as a crisis by many. There are two main ways in which teams subvert the single-minded goal of winning each game. The first is a strategy commonly known as tanking, where teams try to increase their chances of getting a high draft pick in an upcoming draft by losing as many games as possible in the current season. In an article on mathematical elimination, I described tanking as “a scourge to the sports world roughly equal to the flu in the normal world or sarcoidosis on House.” Tanking is trying not to win. The other focus of attention in the NBA is teams not trying to win an individual game by choosing not to play a player who is theoretically healthy enough to play that game. Unlike tanking, this tactic is used more by teams that believe themselves to be in championship contention.
Tanking
More than any other team sport, basketball teams are only as good as their best player. If you start in 1980, and list out the NBA Championship winners by their best player, the names are almost all recognizable, even to non-sports fans: Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Magic, Julius Irving (Dr. J), Bird, Magic, Bird, Magic, Magic, Isaiah Thomas 2X, Michael Jordan 3x, Hakeem Olajuwan 2x, Jordan 3x, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant 3x, Duncan, the exception to the rule that is the 2004 Detroit Pistons, Duncan, Dwayne Wade, Duncan, Paul Pierce, Kobe 2x, Dirk Nowitzky, LeBron James 2x, Duncan. Only once in the past 35 years has a team without a super-star won the championship!
The clear lesson for teams is that if they don’t have a super-star, their chances of winning a championship are drastically reduced. By far the easiest way of getting a super-star on a team is to draft him, usually with one of the first picks of the NBAdraft. There’s some chance involved, but at the end of every season, the team with the worst record has the best chance of getting the first pick, the second worst team, the second best chance and so on. If a team is going to be in the bottom third of the league, there’s a clear incentive to be as bad as possible.
Teams pursue this strategy in a number of ways, most of which don’t involve actually instructing their players not to score. By far the most common form of tanking is for general managers to manipulate the chances of their team winning by trading its best players. The goal is to have a set of players and coaches that all try their hardest to win but simply don’t have enough experience or talent to do it. The current Picasso of tanking is General Manager Sam Hinkie of the Philadelphia 76ers. Hinkie, who was recently profiled brilliantly by ESPN writer Pablo S. Torre, is taking this strategy farther than anyone has ever taken it before. He’s drafted injured players so that they cannot possibly cause the team to win the year after they are drafted. He’s drafted players from Europe and the rest of the world who will not actually come to the United States to play for the 76ers for several years. One of his first moves when he got the job was to trade away the 76ers best player, Jrue Holiday, and just a week ago, he traded two of their best players away again, mostly for future picks.
It remains to be seen whether this strategy will work or whether it will be a complete disaster. It’s also unclear how much longer it will be possible. Tanking is odious enough to people in the sports world that the NBA is likely to make structural changes to how it decided its draft pick order to take away the incentive to tank.
Resting Players
Unlike tanking, where a team is eager to forgo winning games in one season for the potential of winning games in a future season, this tactic involves reducing a team’s chances of winning a game in order to increase the team’s chances of winning the championship that year. Increasingly, basketball coaches and executives are realizing that most players cannot play at peak effectiveness for an 82-game regular season and then a playoff run that could involve as many as 28 additional games. Smart teams that hope to make it deep into the playoffs have adjusted to this knowledge by managing the number of minutes their players play during the regular season in the hopes of keeping them fresh for the playoffs. Often that means reducing a player’s normal time on the court per game from 35 minutes (out of 48) to 30 minutes over the course of the season. Other times, that might mean sitting a player for the entire second half of a game that is evidently going to be a blow-out win or loss by half-time. Even more blatant is the tactic of choosing not to have a player on the bench and available to play for a particular game.
Teams that choose to rest a player who isn’t seriously injured often choose one of the many small hurts that player is suffering from and use it as an excuse. A team might say, “Oh, So-and-So is out tonight because of a knee injury. They should be fine for the next game.” Usually the media knows this is nothing more than an excuse, but the gesture is enough to maintain the appearance that the team is optimizing to win every game. Some coaches, led by the example of San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, don’t even bother with the excuse. They simply list players as “DND – CD” which stands for “Did Not Dress – Coach’s Decision.” Popovich famously thumbed his nose at the practice of using half-true injury designations to excuse coaches’ decisions to rest players in 2012 when he listed Tim Duncan as “DND – Old” for a game.
Resting players is not as noxious of a strategy as tanking, probably because the teams that do it are more well-respected (because they win) and because the future gain is so much closer and more concrete than the gains that teams tank for. The largest criticism of resting players is itself problematic. People often criticize resting players because the one game Tim Duncan sits out may be the only time a fan sees his team play in person all season or ever. By choosing to sit a player, a team is intentionally lowering the entertainment value of the game for its fans without a commensurate lowering of the cost. That argument make sense but only if sports is primarily entertainment rather than competition — and if it’s entertainment, then that in and of itself threatens the principle of trying to win every game. Uh oh, logical black hole alert! Let’s move on to soccer.
European Club Soccer
The structure of European club soccer creates a few scenarios where not winning is enough of a draw that even the most obsessed coaches are tempted to instruct their teams NOT to play to win the game. This subversion of what seems to be an obvious truth about sports is one of the curious and interesting things about learning how another continent organizes its sports leagues. Here are three common times when soccer clubs in Europe may be intent on something else more than on winning.
Balancing priorities
In American sports, there’s only one primary goal: win a championship. In European soccer, club teams compete for several different championships during a year, often simultaneously. A team may be playing in one or more domestic tournaments against teams within their country, an international club tournament like the Champions League or Europa League, at the same time as playing their normal league schedule against teams in their own country in their own league. This sometimes leads to conflicts of interest. If a player has a slightly injured ankle, will the coach choose to play him in a league game on Saturday knowing that there’s a Champions League game on Wednesday? What if the coach senses that the whole team is weary? Would it be better to lose in a domestic cup early on to clear the calendar for more rest days and practices? Will the benefit of rest and practice mean the difference between fifth and third place in the domestic league? Is that worth it? Which competition does the team have a better chance of winning? Which competitions are more lucrative and prestigious to do well in?
In American sports, coaches and teams don’t need to balance priorities like this, but in European club soccer, it’s a regular part of life. I wonder what a European soccer fan would think of Herm Edwards’ saying “you play to win the game?” Would they think it was funny because it’s true, funny because it’s not true, or just inaccurate and confusing?
The logic of aggregate goals
Many of the competitions that European soccer clubs take part in are tournaments. These tournaments often have a group round-robin stage and a knock-out stage, just like the World Cup. Unlike the World Cup and most other tournaments we’re used to, instead of one game against each opponent, European soccer clubs play two — one at each team’s home stadium. The team that has scored the most goals at the end of the two games (called aggregate goals) wins the matchup. The rules about breaking ties vary from tournament to tournament but they often have something to do with which team scored more goals when they were playing in their opponent’s stadium. The result of this is that teams pretty frequently go into games with goals other than simply winning. An underdog playing on the road in the first half of the two game series (often confusingly called a “tie”) may think that their best bet is to play defensively and try to leave with a 0-0 tie. A team that goes into the second game down a goal or two knows they need to not only win but to win by two or three or four goals. Likewise, a team going into a second game with the lead in aggregate goals knows they can lose the second game and still win the two-game series. They are not playing to win the game, they’re playing to win or tie or lose by a small enough margin to still win the series. Put that in your remix and smoke it!
When a tie is better than a win
Even in the most twisted of aggregate goal logic, it’s still always better to win than tie or lose but there is one situation when a tie is preferable than a win. Some tournaments, England’s FA cup being the most famous example, are set up as single elimination tournaments but, instead of overtime, if the score is tied after 90 minutes, the teams pack their bags, go home, and schedule a second game to decide who advances and who is eliminated. The second game is played in the stadium of the team that didn’t host the first game. Since the FA Cup is an association cup, open to every team in English soccer, from the rich, famous Premier league teams all the way to tiny seventh tier virtually semi-professional teams that no one has heard of, this leads to an interesting point. When a tiny team plays in a giant’s stadium, they get an enormous financial benefit from exposure, television money, and ticket sales. The bigger and more famous their host opponent, the more money they make. So, it’s often financially better for a tiny host team to tie a giant visiting team so that they get an extra game to play against the giant in the giant’s home stadium. Oh, sure, they’d love to beat the giant and move on to the next round of the tournament, but if they did that without ever playing at the giant’s stadium, especially if their potential opponent next round is not as rich or famous, they’ll really be losing out on an enormous payday. Small teams in this type of tournament have an incentive to tie, not win, games they host against storied opponents.
I’ve seen a lot of articles over the last day or two about the NBA trade deadline. What is a trade deadline? Why do sports leagues have them?
Thanks,
Anne
Dear Anne,
It’s hard to define what a trade deadline is without using the words trade or deadline! The trade deadline is a particular date and time after which teams in a professional sports league cannot agree to exchange players or draft picks with other teams. It’s exact date varies by league and by year but each sport has a standard for when it falls in their calendar — half-way through, three-quarters of the way through, etc. It’s an exciting time for sports fans, because, like the day of the draft, it’s a time when fans of every team in the league can be feel hope.
The NBA trade deadline in 2015 is on February 19 at 3 p.m. ET. By this date, most teams will have played between 52 and 55 of their 82 game seasons. They are around two-thirds of the way through the season. The NHL trade deadline this year is on March 2, also at 3 p.m. ET. By then, teams will have played 63 to 67 of their 82 game season. That’s a little farther along — more like 77-82% of the way through the season. On the other end of the spectrum is the NFL, which places its trade deadline right after week eight of 17 or 47% of the way through. What’s the impact of this choice? Well, teams usually decide to be more of a “buyer” meaning they are willing to sacrifice future prospects for players that would be of use this season, or “sellers” meaning they are willing to trade the present for the future, based on how well they’re doing each year. The later a trade deadline falls within a league calendar, the more sure teams will be of their chances to win a championship this season and therefore which role they should play in trades. A later trade deadline creates more and more impactful trades.
Aside from tradition, it’s not entirely clear why teams are not allowed to trade players year-round. I think there is a sense that should be cohesive units before the playoffs begin. During the playoffs, the intensity of emotion and physicality of sports increases. Team allegiance starts to feel more like a matter of identity than choice. Having unfamiliar players on your team at the start of the playoffs or even seeing players move from team to team during the playoffs would break the spell. There’s also the question of competitive balance. Teams might be willing to sacrifice a lot of their future assets on the last day of the season if they were in a position to acquire a player they think could help them make the playoffs or qualify for the next round. Sports leagues understandably may want to protect rash team owners from hurting themselves and their fans for the next five or ten years for a short-term gain.
The day of the trade deadline and the day or two before it are among the most exciting days in sports. If the team a fan roots for is terrible, by halfway to four fifths of the way through the season, its fans are probably a little sick of watching it play. At trade deadline time, the team can interest them again by making moves to get better next season. For fans of teams that seem like they have a chance to win a championship, it’s even more exciting to speculate and then witness what the team does to make itself better for its playoff run. Every fan likes to think of themselves not only as an athlete on their favorite team, the coach of their favorite team, but also the general manager too! Speculating about trades before the trade deadline is an exercise in imagination. What player from an opposing team would fit best with your favorite team? Who could your team part with without losing their essence?
Trade deadline day is covered obsessively online, primarily on Twitter, and also live on TV. Sports channels are happy to devote time during a week-day to a panel of “experts” who blab and blab all day about the trades as they are reported to the league office and the media. The excitement (I know I sound a little cynical about this, but I do get really excited too) peaks right around the time of the deadline and for a few hours later as information about trades which were executed right before the deadline comes out through the media to fans.
If your colleagues are more distracted on February 19 or March 2 than they normally are, you’ll know why!
, the Vietnam war in 
, or Abu Gharaib in 
) and the ones where he takes a frivolous or mundane topic and enlivens it (like small town life in 
or animal lovers in 
). This is definitely an example of the second. Love and humor are present in the thirty year tradition of gathering once a week in John DiCarlo’s basement to play electric football but as the documentary goes on, you begin to understand that there’s real pathos as well. Morris and whoever created the music for the film do a masterful job of allowing some of the tough realities of these people’s lives trickle into the film. You learn that DiCarlo is a Vietnam veteran who suffers from serious health problems due to his exposure to Agent Orange. The scene-stealing star of the film, a hot-blooded hot-dog vendor nicknamed Hotman (real name Peter Dietz) provides laughs and grins for most of the film and then the best line towards the end. When discussing his regret about never having children, he looks at the camera and says, “I had to play the hand I dealt myself.”
