Tag: mlb

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

Cue Cards 10-14-2013: NFL One Liners & Bonus Baseball

clapperboardCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners in our cue cards series on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

NFL One Liners

Cincinnati 27, Buffalo 24 — If the Bengals needed overtime to beat the Bills, who didn’t even have their best quarterback playing, they’re not a serious playoff contender.

Detroit 31, Cleveland 17 — Lions rookie tight-end Joseph Fauria caught three touchdowns and did a different celebratory dance each time.

Oakland 7, Kansas City 24 — Kansas City continues it’s undefeated season on the strength of its defense which sacked quarterback Terrelle Pryor 10 times and intercepted him three times.

Carolina 35, Minnesota 10 — The Vikings signed deposed former Buccaneer quarterback Josh Freeman in the middle of last week. You’ll hear a lot of talk about how “distracting” that was to the Vikings.

Pittsburgh 19, New York Jets 6 — The Steelers win their first game of the season sending the Jets back to earth after a week of flying high following their big victory over the Falcons.

Philadelphia 31, Tampa Bay 20 — Eagles quarterback Michael Vick missed this game because of an injured hamstring and might never get it back after replacement Nick Foles’ four touchdown day.

Green Bay 19, Baltimore 17 — Green Bay squeaked out a victory in this matchup between two teams that have been very, very good over the last five years but are struggling to get things together this year.

St. Louis 38, Houston 13 — Talking about struggling to get things together, there’s going to be a lot of people quoting Apollo 13 after the Texans lost their fourth game in a row.

Jacksonville 19, Denver 35 — The story with this game all week was that Vegas bookmakers had set the Broncos as 28 point favorites, equalling the highest line ever. Denver won but it was much closer than expected so now the story will be about how the plucky Jaguars showed so much heart.

Tennessee 13, Seattle 20 — This game was a comedy of errors that ended in a Seahawks win which undoubtedly made their cutest fan very happy.

New Orleans 27, New England 30 — In our post last week about how to negotiate with a fan in your life who wants to watch football all day, we mentioned that one of the reasons was chasing the rare game that becomes a transcendent experience. This was one of those games. Leading in the last five minutes, the Saints had two chances to win the game but failed to get a first down both times leaving Tom Brady and the Patriots with about fifty seconds to go down the field and score a touchdown… which was exactly what they did.

Arizona 20, San Francisco 32 — The Forty Niners are like the weather in San Francisco: unexpectedly fierce.

Washington 16, Dallas 31 — The good news for Washington is that their quarterback, Robert Griffin III, finally looked like he wasn’t hampered all that much by his knee which is recovering from ACL surgery. The bad news is that at 1-4 on the year, it might be too late for them this season.

Sport: Baseball
Teams: The Detroit Tigers and the Boston Red Sox
When: Sunday, October 13
Context: Game two of the American League Championship Series, Detroit was up 1 game to zero
Result: The Red Sox won 6-5
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • Boston’s transcendent sports day continued into the night at Fenway park. Down 5-0, the Red Sox scored one run in the sixth and then four in the eighth when David Ortiz, known as Big Papi, hit a grand slam (a home run with three of his teammates already on base) to tie the game. The Sox then scored one in the bottom of the ninth to win the game.
  • If there’s anyone at work today from Boston, you’ll be able to tell from the big circles under their eyes and the goofy grin that keeps appearing on their faces. Last night’s game reminded Bostonians of 2004 when the Red Sox and David Ortiz seemed to do this almost every night during the playoffs on their way to winning their first world series in 86 years.

What’s Next: They play again tomorrow at 4:07 for game three of the seven game series.

How do the Major League Baseball Playoffs Work?

I went to a Mets game this year and took this photo. They did not make the playoffs.

The Major League Baseball playoffs are among the most confusing playoffs for me because they have the most variety of format of all of the major sports’ playoffs. The MLB playoffs consist of four rounds and three different formats. It’s also confusing to me because it’s the sport I follow the least but since it started yesterday I’ve done some reading, some watching, and some listening and I am ready to report back to you what I’ve learned and then comment on what makes sense about it and what doesn’t. Let’s travel backwards through the playoffs starting with the most famous and familiar element, the World Series.

The World Series

The World Series determines the championship of the MLB. It is a best of seven series where the first team to win four games wins the series. This format is the one the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League use throughout their playoffs. Instead of dividing the league into East and West as the NBA and NHL have done for years, baseball (like football) uses history to divide their league in two. The National League was formed in 1876 and the American League in 1901. Teams from the two leagues have been facing each other in the World Series since 1903.[1] The first two games are played at one team’s home stadium, the next three at the other’s, and the last two, if necessary, at the first team’s stadium. Instead of using regular season record to decide who gets four potential games at home and who three, since 2003, this advantage was granted to the team representing whichever league won in the mid-season all-star game, an otherwise meaningless exhibition.

The Championship Series

To make it to the World Series, a team has to make it through the semi-final round, confusingly called either the American or National League Championship Series, again for historic reasons. This series follows the same seven game format as the World Series. Another oddity of baseball that stems from its history as two separate leagues is that each league plays under slightly different rules. The biggest difference is that in the National League, pitchers are required to bat whereas in the American League teams have the option[2] to replace the pitcher in the batting order with a player who only has to hit, never field. That “position” is called the designated hitter. These rules have all sorts of tactical consequences which deserve their own post but which become even more interesting in the World Series when both teams must play by the home team’s rules.

The Divisional Series

The four teams that make it to the ALCS or the NLCS have won the previous round, the Divisional Series. The divisional series’ are the quarterfinals and consist of eight teams. The format is a five game series where the first team to win three games wins the series. Each League is made up of three five-team divisions. The team in each division with the best regular season record is a division winner and automatically gets a place in the divisional series. The other two teams that make it to this round are called wild-cards and until 2012 were the two teams, one from each league, with the highest win total among non-division winning teams.

The Wild Card Playoff

Since 2012 the two extra teams to make it into the Divisional series have been the winners of the Wild Card Playoff. The Wild Card Playoff (surprise, surprise) follows a third format. It is a single elimination game. One game, the winner of which advances to the next round of the playoffs. The four teams that make it to to the Wild Card Playoff, two from each league, are the teams with the highest and second highest win total in the regular season among non-division winning teams. In 2013, the Wild Card Playoff games were between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati in the National League and Tampa Bay and Cleveland in the American League.

What Makes Sense and What Doesn’t

There are elements of this complicated setup that make sense and some that don’t. Increasing the number of games in a series as the playoffs go on makes sense because the longer a series is, the more likely it is that the better[3] team will win, and it feels more important to get the championship right than it does the quarterfinals. Varying the length of the series’ also makes sense because it maximizes the number of teams involved while answering critics who say that the playoffs are too long to sustain interest. Maximizing the number of teams involved is great for fans who may wait years for their team to even make the playoffs and great for owners who might earn more money from one playoff game than a dozen regular season games.

What doesn’t make sense to me is the Wild Card Playoff. Reducing a series from seven games to five as a trade-off between getting it right and making it worth watching seems reasonable to me but going all the way down to one game sacrifices too much. Any one game between professional teams, especially ones that are good enough to make it to the playoffs, approaches a coin-toss. The coin may be weighted in one direction or another but at most it’s probably a 40-60 proposition. One game is simply not statistically significant enough to be a reliable indication of who is better. This is particularly unsatisfying in a sport that takes statistical significance so seriously that it plays 162 games in its regular season as opposed to 82 in professional hockey and basketball and 16 in football. On an emotional level, I can’t imagine following a team for 162 games over six months only to have it end with one bad game.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Believe it or not, the two leagues only merged as corporate entities in 2000!!↵
  2. Which they basically always take.↵
  3. It’s easy to twist yourself into knots about this one. If the worse team wins then aren’t they the better team? It can be an endless argument or an unspoken agreement.↵

What Does Games Back Mean in Sports Standings?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does games back mean in sports standings? And how can a team be a half game back?

Thanks,
Greg

— — —

Dear Greg,

That’s a great question! Games back can be a confusing concept. Games back is a metric that attempts to show how far behind a team is, controlled for the number of games they have played. A team can be a certain number of games back from another team or from a position in the standings. In both scenarios, the target is moving. Games back is a concept that confuses many people who follow sports religiously so showing an understanding of this concept gives you a simple way of flashing your sports expertise, even among sports fans!

On the first day of a season, Team A beats Team B. Team A’s record is now 1 win and 0 losses. Team B’s is 0 wins and 1 loss. Team B is behind Team A in number of wins and in games back. So far those are the same thing. On the second day of the season, Team A plays Team C and wins again. Team B doesn’t have a game. Now Team A’s record is 2 wins and 0 losses and Team B’s record is still 0 wins and 1 loss. Team B now has two fewer wins in the standings but they are not two games back of Team A. This is because Team B has played one fewer game and the games back metric tries to control for that. Games back controls for unplayed games by counting them as one half of a win. You may hear these unplayed games called games in hand, so just remember that while a game in hand may be worth two in the bush, it’s only worth half a game in of games back. Team B is said to be 1.5 games back from Team A.

As the season goes on, this metric becomes a little harder to calculate in our heads like we just did for Team B and Team A. Wikipedia has a simple calculation for games back and though I don’t exactly understand why it works, I believe it works. It’s Games Back = ((Team A’s wins – Team A’s losses) – (Team B’s wins – Team B’s losses))/2. In our scenario, that’s ((2-0)-(0-1)/2 which simplifies to 3/2 or 1.5 games back.

In addition to calculating how many games back Team B is from Team A, it’s also common to express games back relative to a position in the standings. Two common ones are games back (or behind or out of) first place or the last team that would qualify for the playoffs. In this case, the calculation is the same, it’s just done by comparing Team B to whatever team represents that place in the standings. If today Team A is in first place, Team B would be 1.5 games out of first place. If tomorrow Team C, D, or E[1] is in first place, the calculation would be done between their record and Team B’s record.

AL StandingsBefore we leave this topic, let’s look at some real standings as of today in Major League Baseball. The WCGB column stands for WildCard Games Back. The way baseball playoffs work is that the three division winners all make the playoffs automatically and then the next two teams with the best records make it as well. These two playoff spots for non-division winners are called Wildcards. The WCGB column is calculating the number of games back a team is from getting that second and last wildcard playoff spot.

Right now the Indians are in the last playoff spot so they are zero games back. They are the target. The Rays have played the same number of games as the Indians and have one more win and one fewer loss so they are said to be +1 games back. Don’t worry about how stupid that sounds, this means they are a game ahead. The Rangers have also played exactly the same number of games as the Indians. They have one fewer win and one more loss though, so they are 1 game behind the last playoff spot as represented currently by the Indians.

We have to go all the way down to the Mariners to find a team that is an uneven number of games back. If you add their wins and losses, you see that the Mariners have played 159 games compared to the Indians’ 158. That explains the .5 in the games back column. The Indians have 18 more wins than the Mariners but because they have a game in hand, they are given an extra .5 when calculating how far back the Mariners are compared to the Indians.

Data visualization guru Edward Tufte uses sports standings to show how much data can be packed into a simple table and remain understandable (even to dumb sports fans is the unspoken ellipses that I hear) and why making a chart for any fewer than a few hundred data points is usually not necessary. As a devotee of his, I’m happy you asked this question. Hopefully this post has made all those tables in the sports section a little easier to read!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. GO TEAM E!!!↵

Did a Woman Strike Out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig?

Jackie-Mitchell-1
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.

Which Baseball Stats are Habitual and Which Have Meaning?

Dear Sports Fan,
Which baseball stats do we track based on tradition and which really matter?
Thanks,
Pat

Dear Pat,

Thanks for the question. You have put your finger on a question that has come to dominate the conversation among baseball experts – both those who play and coach the game, and those who cover it – for the past decade or more.
More than any other sport baseball values its tradition and measures and compares eras by statistics. In today’s data driven world, however, baseball professionals have come to realize that many of the tools they have relied on are overly blunt.
Common statistics hitters were measured by, for example, included:
  • RBI: Runs Batted In – ie, I hit a ball, and as a result a runner already on base scores
  • Batting average: the percentage of times a player gets a base hit(successfully reaches base by hitting the ball where it can’t be caught/he can’t be put out)
For pitchers:
  • ERA: the number of runs a pitcher allows on average (discounting errors by the position players in the field behind him)
  • Wins: the number of times a pitcher’s team wins a game when that team maintains a lead established after the pitcher has pitched 5 2/3 innings
What we now know is that these statistics do not actually capture an individual player’s true value – in most cases, because they rely on the contributions or efforts of other players. For example, it’s difficult for a player to have a high RBI count if the players who hit before him don’t get on base – thus giving him an opportunity to drive them home.
In addition, batting average counts hits, but it discounts other contributions a batter makes – for example, getting on base by taking a walk or bunting or hitting a ball in such a way as to move a base-runner ahead, even if they themselves make an out. A pitcher could dominate an opponent and still lose a game because his teammates either do not score runs or play bad defense behind him.
As a result, baseball clubs have largely moved beyond these blunt tools and, to varying degrees of complexity, have designed metrics that directly measure how each individual player’s presence makes it more or less likely for their team to win. This phenomenon – which started in baseball and was captured most memorably in the book Moneyball – has spread to virtually every other sport.
One example of this is the Value Over Replacement Player – an advanced statistic that allows teams to compare one of their players to an an average player at the same position. I basically failed math, so I’d be hard pressed to explain in much more detail – but as far as I can tell, the people who were paying attention in algebra have magically figured out a way to calculate how many more runs a player is contributing to his team than that average player would.
Thanks,
Dean Russell Bell

Gifts for Sports Fans: Nesting Russian Dolls

We’re starting a new feature for Dear Sports Fan — gift suggestions for the sports fan in your life. Please let us know what you think of this! Do you ever need recommendations for sports related gifts? How do you feel about giving sports related gifts? We’re thinking we will mostly search for gifts that are a little off the beaten path of jerseys, hats, etc. How can we customize this section for you? Thanks!

Custom Sports Team Nesting Russian Dolls

What says sports and sports culture more than dolls? I saw these dolls first on the Brooklyn Game, a Brooklyn Nets blog that I read. An excited Devin Kharpertian wrote this about the dolls:

These Brooklyn Nets matryoshka dolls, better known as nesting dolls, are… pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted in a Brooklyn Nets gift. Shout out to Russian culture? Check. A recognition by Russian doll makers that Andray Blatche and Brook Lopez succeeded together? Check. A tiny Andray Blatche? All the checks

Not every team has a Russian owner but that’s no reason to think that the sports fan in your life would appreciate these dolls any less. These dolls have a fascinating history. According to Wikipedia, the first set of matryoshka dolls was “carved in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by Sergey Malyutin, who was a folk crafts painter in the Abramtsevo estate of the Russian industrialist and patron of arts Savva Mamontov.”

The doll figures usually create a set, like cats, dogs, astronauts, politicians, etc., so the idea of creating one out of a team seems to be a natural fit. Plus they nest. Which means they are fairly compact when a social occasion calls more for white table-cloth and less for a matching set of Kansas City Royals infielders…

The dolls can be purchased on Etsy for $60 which seems to include shipping. If you don’t see your fan’s favorite team, you can order a custom set for the same price. One note of warning — not all the sets seem to have differentiated figures modeled after actual players. For instance, my Pittsburgh Penguins all look roughly like a cross between Evgeni Malkin and Donald Duck.

What Does it Mean to Strike Out Looking?

Dear Sports Fan,

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)

  1. 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.↵

Why Do People Like Baseball?

Dear Sports Fan,

Could you please explain to me the appeal of baseball?  Cricket is obviously a superior sport yet somehow has not caught on in the USA.  Baseball being the slightly developmentally challenged cousin of cricket, do you think the game is simply too cerebral for American audiences (which i would disagree with since NFL football to me is one of the most cerebral sports and you concussively need to use your brain a lot).  Did we just hate it because it was a British Sport and too much of an upper class Gentleman’s Game?

Thanks,
Jango

Dear Jango,

The attraction of baseball for the casual or non-fan is easy enough to explain: you could be at a baseball game, or watching a baseball game on TV, and never once feel like you’re actually at a sporting event. It’s essentially a four hour outdoor picnic with overpriced beer. Among the major sports, it is the one where fans are least engaged on a minute to minute basis. You could do anything while watching a baseball game – knit, iron, write the great American novel. It’s the most easily-casually watched sport there is.
For the die hard fans, the attractions are different. Some fans really do hang on every pitch, for the simple reason that something incredible could happen – though, to the casual fan, or non-fan, those things may not seem so incredible. Also, because the baseball season is so long (162) games, there’s essentially a 50 percent chance your team is playing on a given day. It gives you a long time to get to know the players – their quirks, their weaknesses, their interminable at-bat routines – and you’re therefore more invested in them each year, even if they’re not any good.
There is strategy in baseball, from the macro level down to every pitch. But its enduring popularity is based more on tradition and the special place the sport has in our (and other) countries’ sporting histories.
Finally, to fans there’s real beauty in a ball game – there’s nothing like the sound of a ball hit solidly by a wooden bat; or watching the mechanics of a smoothly turned double play, and the way incredibly skilled players make it look so effortless; or the one on one duel between pitcher and batter, or the sheer improbability of a human hitting a tiny orb moving at 95 miles an hour – let alone hitting it hundreds of feet.
So I know it seems slow, and games are too long, and it seems like nothing happens- but it’s a sport that can be seen and understood At many levels. Or – at worst – it can be an opportunity to drink overpriced beers outside for four hours. Is that really the worst thing?
Thanks for the question,
Dean Russell Bell

What is a Sweep?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve been following the NBA playoffs and have heard announcers talking about one team sweeping another. What does that mean?

Thanks,
Don

Dear Don,

When one team wins all of its games against another team in a particular set of games, it is said to have swept the other team. The reason you’re hearing it so much now is that the NBA playoffs are organized into best four out of seven series. For a team to move on to the next round of the playoffs, it must beat its opponent four times within those seven games. If it were a set of three games instead of seven, a team would have to win a majority of two out of the three to win the series. If a team gets to having won a majority of the games in a series by winning consecutive games, they have swept the series.

You’ll hear talk about sweeps most often in sports that organize their games like basketball does. The NHL and MLB playoffs also are organized around seven game series. In the NFL, where the playoffs are single elimination, you may still hear someone talk about a team sweeping a “season series ” against another team. This means the team won all (usually it is just two) games against a particular opponent even if the games were not consecutive.

Being swept is seen as humiliating in professional sports and players are determined not to let it happen to them. It’s actually fairly common though — as of 2009, 18% of NHL playoff series ended in a sweep. In this NBA playoffs so far, there are four teams at risk for being swept: the Celtics by the Knicks,[1] the Bucks by the Heat, the Lakers by the Spurs, and the Rockets by the Thunder.

If you’re having trouble remembering what a sweep is, here are two possible derivations that might help. One possibility is that the usage comes from the image of using a broom to sweep your opponent out of the way — that opponent put up so little fight that you could use the broom instead of having to pull a mop out or get on your hands and knees to scrub. Another possibility is that this usage shares a derivation with the word sweepstakes — a contest where one party sweeps all of the possible winnings into their lap — the image of one of those miniature shuffleboard sticks that roulette dealers use comes to mind.

Enjoy the playoffs!
Ezra Fischer

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Not anymore, since I started writing this, the Celtics won in overtime to avoid being swept 4-0.↵