Tag: history

Gifts for Sports Fans: Who's on first?

Abbott and Costello

 

Abbott and Costello’s comedy routine, “Who’s on first” is a classic that remains funny today. It’s a wonderful slow burn where Lou Costello gradually gets angrier and angrier at Bud Abbott’s answers about a fictional baseball team because they don’t make sense to him. Explaining a joke always ruins it, so instead of trying to do it myself, let’s just enjoy the comedy genius of this Wikipedia explanation:

The premise of the sketch is that Abbott is identifying the players on a baseball team for Costello, but their names and nicknames can be interpreted as non-responsive answers to Costello’s questions. For example, the first baseman is named “Who”; thus, the utterance “Who’s on first” is ambiguous between the question (“Which person is the first baseman?”) and the answer (“The name of the first baseman is ‘Who'”).

Hysterical, right? I’m sure you’re LOLing already, if not ROTFLing. Seriously though, I think it’s one of the best routines out there. I enjoy it so much that I couldn’t help but label the positions with who played them (I know… first base…) in the skit throughout my post explaining what (second) each infield position does. Abbott and Costello are well worth enjoying with the sports fan in your life. Here are some great ways to enjoy their comedy and proudly represent yourself to the world as someone well versed in the history of sports and comedy.

  • You can listen to the skit for only 99 cents (or free from a transactional perspective if you have Amazon Prime) here.
  • Buy their entire collection of Universal Pictures films for $86.54 here. This includes Naughty Nineties and One Night in the Tropics, both of which have versions of Abbott and Costello performing Who’s on First.
  • There’s a variety of wonderful shirt options, as you might expect. Here are a few of my favorites:
    • The baseball jersey that has the name “Who” on the back, with the number “one.” Quick aside: thanks to Wikipedia, I found out that there have been two actual baseball players with Abbott and Costellian names: there was Allie Watt in 1920 and Chin-Lung Hu in 2007, of whom legendary announcer Vin Scully said, “Shades of Abbott and Costello, I can finally say, Hu, is on first base.”
    • There’s a classic t-shirt with a picture of Abbott & Costello performing the skit with the full text on the back.
    • For the visual learners out there, there’s a nice indie looking design with a baseball diamond drawn and filled in with the players’ names. This comes in all different formats: t-shirt, hoodie, men’s, women’s, baby’s, and more.
    • Finally, if you’re looking for the ultimate combination of nerdy comedy references, buy this shirt with a design that shows the classic time and space traveling phone booth from the show Doctor Who in the position of first base on a baseball diamond. Very clever!!
  • If you’re looking for other ways to physically represent the hilarity of the skit in your house, there’s a pair of Abbott & Costello animated dolls, a Throw Pillow, and a 27×40 poster.
  • Last but not least, and possibly going fast, is a copy of the 1978 “Who’s on First” Memory Game! There seem to be cards with names of players on them which you place on a baseball diamond board to challenge the other person’s memory and patience.

If you are a sports fan, a history fan, or a comedy fan or are looking for a present for someone who fits that bill, these are all great options.

What is a Conference in Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a conference in sports? What makes a conference a conference? And why is it called a conference?

Thanks,
Erik

— — —

Dear Erik,

Thanks for your question. A conference is a collection of teams that play more against each other than they do against the other teams in their sport. As you’ll see, conferences have various histories and meanings in different sports. In some sports conferences are defined geographically. In some they are the remnants of history. In some sports the conferences are actually pseudo competitive bodies themselves and in other sports they are cooperating divisions within a single organization. Conferences vary in importance and independence from sport to sport. Before we get into the differences, let’s start with some general truths about conferences that apply across (almost) all sports.

Teams within a conference play more games against each other than against the other teams in their sport. It varies by league and by sport. In the NHL, for example, teams play at least three times per season against every other team in their conference but only twice against teams from the other conference. In Major League Baseball teams only play 20 of 162 games against teams from the other conference.

Conferences crown conference champions in all sports. In many leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB, playoff brackets are organized by conference. Teams in the AFC (one of the NFL conferences) only play teams from the AFC in the playoffs until the Super Bowl. So, the conference champion is basically the winner of the semi-final game. In other sports, mostly college sports, the conferences only really have meaning during the regular season, so conferences have different ways of deciding a champion. Depending on the sport and conference, there may be a conference tournament at the end of the regular season or a single championship game between the two teams with the best records in the conference. In some conferences, like Ivy League basketball, the champion is just the team with the best record in games against other teams in the Ivy League.

What Sports Have Geographically Defined Conferences?

A geographic division of teams is perhaps the most sensible way of defining a conference. Since teams within a conference play more games against each other than against teams outside of their conference, organizing geographically saves money, time, and wear and tear on the players by reducing the overall travel time during a season. The NBA and NHL are organized in this way. Both leagues have an Eastern and a Western Conference and both stay reasonably true to geographic accuracy. The NBA has a couple borderline assignments with Memphis and New Orleans in the West and Chicago and Milwaukee in the East. The NHL recently realigned its conferences, in part to fix some long-standing issues with geography like Detroit being in the West. Geographic conferences seem logical because they simplify operations for the teams within them. Many college conferences began geographically but as we’ll see later, that’s no longer their defining characteristic or driving force.

What Sports Have Historically Defined Conferences?

It’s easy to think about the sporting landscape as a set of neat monopolies. The NFL rules football, the NBA, basketball, the MLB, baseball, and the NHL, hockey. It wasn’t always that simple. Most of these professional leagues are the product of intense competition between leagues and only became supreme after either beating or joining their rival. The NFL was formed by the merger between two competitive leagues, the traditional NFC and the upstart AFC. The NBA beat out its biggest rival, the ABA, in 1976 but took many ideas from it, like the three-point line but alas not the famous ABA multi-colored ball. Believe it or not, Major League Baseball was not a single entity until 2000! Before then its two conferences (still called “leagues” because of their history as separate entities but pretty much, they are conferences,) the National League and the American League were independent entities.

Two leagues, Major League Baseball and the National Football League continue to have conferences defined by their competitive history. In baseball, the American League and National League each have teams across the entire country, often even in the same city like the New York Yankees (AL) and Mets (NL), Chicago with its White Sox (AL) and Cubs (NL) and Los Angeles/Anaheim with the Angels (AL) and Dodgers (NL). The NFL has similarly kept its historic leagues, the AFC or American Football Conference and NFC or National Football Conference. Each NFL Conference is broken up into three geographic divisions, East, Central, and West, but they all play more against the teams in their conference, even far away, than the teams close by but in the other conference. In the NFL the two conferences play under exactly the same rules but in baseball there are still some major historic differences in how the game is played, most significantly that pitchers have to also bat in the National League but are allowed to be replaced by a designated hitter in the American League.

What Sports Have Conferences that are Competitive?

So far we’ve looked at geographic and historically defined conferences. It’s clear that geographic conferences don’t compete against each other — they are part of the same entity. You can imagine that because of their history, the conferences in the NFL and MLB may be a little competitive with each other, like brothers or sisters. There are still some conferences though where competition against other conferences is their key driving force. These conferences are largely found in college sports.

Most college conferences have geographic names — the Big East, the South-Eastern Conference (SEC), the Pacific Athletic Conference (PAC 12), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Sun Belt, and the Mountain West. When they formed, they formed for all the reasons we discussed above in the geographic section but also to take advantage of financial arrangements that could only be made together, most importantly television contracts. As the money has gotten bigger, especially in college football, the competition between conferences for the best teams and the most lucrative contracts has become incredibly intense. In recent years, you’ve seen conferences poach teams from one another in a race to provide television viewers with the most competitive leagues to follow and therefore generate gobs of profit. This scattered the geographic nature of these conferences so that a map showing which teams are in which conferences now looks like a patchwork quilt.

Like it did with the ABA and NBA, the NFC and AFC, and the NL and AL, my guess is that this competition between conferences in college sports will resolve itself into some more stable league form. No one knows when this will happen but my guess is that it will be in the next ten or fifteen years. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

Thanks for asking about conferences,
Ezra Fischer

When is a Conference Not a Conference? A Sports Theseus Paradox

This Wednesday, March 12, the Big East Men’s College Basketball Tournament starts at Madison Square Garden in New York City as it has every year since 1983. This year though, the tournament is different enough that it has many sports fans asking the question, “is this the same tournament?” Similar questions about the consistency of existence have been asked throughout history in the form of a paradox called the Theseus Paradox.

gerry_mcnamara
Syracuse and Pitt, who faced each other in the 2006 finals, are both gone from the Big East.

The Theseus Paradox, first posed by Plutarch in his first century Life of Theseus, asks whether Theseus’ ship, having been preserved by replacing one by one, every single board, is truly the same ship? This question is also commonly asked about “my grandfather’s ax”: This is my grandfather’s ax. My father replaced the head and I replaced the shaft. (As an aside, this is one of the many quotations on my father’s classroom wall. I guess the tree doesn’t grow far from where the apple falls…) The question the paradox asks is about the nature of existence — in the case of a sports conference, what makes the Big East the Big East? Is it the conference name, the location of its tournament, or the teams that play in it?

The Big East was formed in 1980 as a collection of schools, many Catholic, mostly in the Northeast of the country, whose priority when it came to sports was basketball. It quickly became a powerhouse college basketball conference in part because of its television contract with an up and coming network called ESPN. For almost two decades, it drove college basketball and was driven by college basketball but then the rise of college football as the big money-maker for college athletics caught up to it. From the mid-1990s the economics of college sports forced the Big East to start making moves to improve its standing in College Football even at the expense of its basketball history. It added schools like Miami, West Virginia, and Virginia Tech which were not only far from being in the Northeast but were also primarily football schools. This emphasis on football mixed with the Big East’s tendency to be stronger in basketball than football despite its best attempt to conform eventually led, starting in 2004, to the slow but steady flight of football-strong schools from the conference. One of my favorite sports writers, Michael Wilbon, wrote a good article about this in 2011. The conflict came to a head last year when seven of the original members of the Big East (all Catholic and all primarily basketball schools) petitioned the league to break away from the remaining schools and form their own league. They succeeded in seceding and because they represented a majority of the remaining charter members, were able to take the Big East name with them.

This year’s Big East consists of those seven teams plus three more they poached from other leagues. It’s this league that will be having their postseason tournament in Madison Square Garden this week but its unclear how much the new tournament will “feel” like the old one. It will be missing most of its biggest teams and rivalries. Syracuse, UConn, Louisville, and Pitt are gone and with them seventeen of the thirty four Big East historic championship teams. The last remaining historic powerhouse, Georgetown, is robbed of its main rivals and having an unusually weak year. According to Forbes, ticket sales are down 11%. The New York Post argues that what the current tournament has “lost in star power” it has “made up in drama.”

Coming back to the metaphor of the ax, the parallel to the paradox is not complete. Seven of the ten schools in this iteration of the Big East were charter members of the original Big East. So, while the head of the ax may have been changed, at least the shaft is the same piece of wood. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes added a question to the paradox using the metaphor of a ship — what, he posed, if the original planks had been collected on their way out of the ship, and assembled back into another ship? Which would be the “real” ship? Luckily we don’t have to answer this question about basketball because the teams that have left the Big East have mostly scattered into other conferences.

What’s the answer? Is the Big East still the Big East? Perhaps there’s a clue to be found in (the all-knowing, all-powerful,) Wikipedia having two seperate entries for the Big East, one pre-2013, one post? Perhaps there is no answer? Perhaps the only way to know will be to tune in and watch the tournament…

Did a Woman Strike Out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig?

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Ruth and Gehrig look on as Jackie Mitchell warms up.

From Tony Horwitz in the Smithsonian Magazine comes the true story of a woman who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back to back in a baseball game in 1931. Back in those days it was more common for today to have professional teams that existed outside of the structure of the major leagues. The Harlem Globetrotters are the only example of this today that I can think of and though they have a rich competitive history, today they rarely play games against major league teams. The Chattanooga Lookouts (who still exist today as a minor league affiliate of the LA Dodgers) were an independent team with an entertaining history. Reports Horwitz, “The Lookouts’ new president, Joe Engel, was a showman and promoter whose many stunts included trading a player for a turkey, which was cooked and served to sportswriters.”

In 1931 Engel signed 17 year-old pitcher Jackie Mitchell to a contract days before playing the New York Yankees in two exhibition games. On April 2, Mitchell got her chance to pitch after the Lookout’s starting pitcher gave up hits to the first two batters he faced:

First up was Ruth, who tipped his hat at the girl on the mound “and assumed an easy batting stance,” a reporter wrote. Mitchell went into her motion, winding her left arm “as if she were turning a coffee grinder.” Then, with a side-armed delivery, she threw her trademark sinker (a pitch known then as “the drop”). Ruth let it pass for a ball. At Mitchell’s second offering, Ruth “swung and missed the ball by a foot.” He missed the next one, too, and asked the umpire to inspect the ball. Then, with the count 1-2, Ruth watched as Mitchell’s pitch caught the outside corner for a called strike three. Flinging his bat down in disgust, he retreated to the dugout.

Next to the plate was Gehrig, who would bat .341 in 1931 and tie Ruth for the league lead in homers. He swung at and missed three straight pitches. But Mitchell walked the next batter, Tony Lazzeri, and the Lookouts’ manager pulled her from the game, which the Yankees went on to win, 14-4.

Was it real? Horwitz tries hard not to take too strong of a position on either side but it seems to me that he favors it not being completely honest. He notes the game was originally scheduled for April 1 (for those wondering, April Fool’s day is apparently really old; like 1392 old!) and that Ruth’s reported rage seems, in the few remaining photos of the game, to be a little tongue-in-cheek. For her part, Mitchell always insisted that it was real. Of striking out the two hall-of-famers, she said:

“Why, hell, they were trying, damn right,” she said of Ruth and Gehrig not long before her death in 1987. “Hell, better hitters than them couldn’t hit me. Why should they’ve been any different?

Hope you enjoy the article here and you can follow the Smithsonian magazine on twitter @SmithsonianMag. Thanks to Deadspin.com for leading me to the article on their post here.

Sports and the Star-Spangled Banner

good picSporting 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 does "Original Six" mean in Hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

What are people talking about when they say “the original six” in hockey? Is this some hockey equivalent of original sin?

Curious in Connecticut

Dear Curious,

The “Original Six” is a phrase used to identify the six teams generally thought to be the founding members of the National Hockey League. It’s actually a little more confusing then that. There were other teams before these six but they all disbanded although some have now been reformed. That said, the Original Six: the Boston Bruins, Chicago Black Hawks, Detroit Red Wings, Montreal Canadians, New York Rangers, and the Toronto Maple Leafs are the only teams in today’s league that have operated consistently since the 1920s. For a period from 1942 to 1967 they were the only teams in the league. In 1967 the league expanded to twelve — six expansion teams joined the original six.

The reason you might be hearing more about the original six now is that two of the four remaining series’ in the playoffs feature two original six teams playing against each other. In the Eastern conference, the New York Rangers are playing the Boston Bruins and in the Western Conference the Detroit Red Wings are playing the Chicago Black Hawks.

These six teams continue to have a luster, an elite atmosphere, a je ne sais pas that divides them from the rest of the teams in the league. They are hockey aristocracy, the blue bloods of the National Hockey League. Even though the Pittsburgh Penguins are this year’s favorite to win the Stanley Cup, their series vs. the Ottawa Senators feels indescribably less important than the ones involving original six teams. And it’s not just me. You can see objective evidence in how the the league and their television network partners schedule the games. This weekend they had four games to schedule and gave both the best slots to matchups of the Original Six. Detroit versus Chicago got the Saturday prime-time Hockey Night in Canada slot. Of the two games on Sunday, the favorable Sunday afternoon slot went to New York versus Boston while the Pittsburgh versus Ottawa game goes up against Mad Men and Game of Thrones on Sunday night.

It’s hard to describe why the concept of the Original Six still has meaning. Perhaps it’s that they’ve won so much. Obviously, when there were only six teams to challenge for the Stanley Cup, it’s natural that some of them would win a lot, but the distance between the Canadiens, with 24 Stanley Cups, and the rest is remarkable. The top non-Original Six team, the Edmonton Oilers, won the cup six times and they needed the great Wayne Gretzky to do that! Maybe it’s because the Original Six have remained so consistent in their look. Most of them have resisted the temptation to fiddle with their uniform, preferring to play off their history rather than sully themselves with seasonally popular fads like teal or v-necks. Compare how little the Maple Leafs have changed their jerseys since 1927 to the radical and constant shifts the Vancouver Canucks seem unable to prevent themselves from making.

The thing that I find most remarkable about the Original Six is that it seems like however they were selected, through design or coincidence, they really are the right six teams. In 2012, the original six teams were the six biggest hockey markets as listed in Forbes magazine. According to Forbes, “the sport’s three most profitable teams–the Maple Leafs ($81.9 million), Rangers ($74 million), Canadiens ($51.6 million)–accounted for 83% of the league’s income.” Compare this success to other “original numbered things,” like the 10 original amendments to the U.S. constitution (the second one is definitely unclear and maybe should be re-written) or the 10 Commandments (at the very least, there is debate over how to number them, although the late George Carlin thought the problems went deeper.)

Hope this answered your question and that we become one of your Original Six blogs!
Ezra Fischer

Where Does Strawberries and Cream at Wimbledon Come From?

Dear Sports Fan,

How did the tradition of eating strawberries and cream at Wimbledon originate?

Thanks,
Tina

 

Dear Tina,

According to the BBC Surrey the first time strawberries were paired with cream was in the 1500s at the table of Cardinal Wolsey. Wimbledon is the oldest tennis tournament in the world, but it’s not that old. There has been a tennis tournament since 1877 when “The All England Croquet Club” changed its name to “The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club.” In the late 1800s, according to the New York Times, strawberries signified the beginning of summer. Soon after 1877 (and perhaps in part because of the pairing of tennis with strawberries,) tennis began to be associated with the start of summer as well. It’s unclear when cream was added to the mix. Jeanne Rose, writing for Yahoo claims that cream was “added into the food tradition in 1970.” Digging through the archives of The Daily Telegraph contradicts this opinion, as Martin Smith points out on sportingintelligence.com. He claims that “in 1881, just four years after the inaugural Lawn Tennis Championship, the Telegraph correspondent noted that as the Challenge final was about to begin, ‘the refreshment pavilion emptied directly…for strawberries and cream and even ices, notwithstanding that the heat of the sun was almost intolerable, had no charms for the enthusiastic multitude once the rivals were ordered to be ready’.”

Fuzzy derivation aside, one thing is clear: a lot of strawberries and cream are consumed during Wimbledon. The estimates vary but they seem centered around 60,000 pounds of strawberries and 1,800 gallons of cream (from eatocracy.) This year, in what is either a brilliant marketing ploy or a horrible degradation of tradition or both, Tesco has introduced a “calorific treat of clotted cream, jam, and strawberries” so that people throughout Great Britain can enjoy the traditional Wimbledon snack. We don’t have Tesco in the U.S., but making a little snack of strawberries and cream to eat in front of the television sounds like a great way to enjoy tennis to me!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra