Better Outman Than In, Man

One of the many reasons I love baseball is the injuries. Baseball is really the only sport where you get the truly crazed injury reports[i]. It’s where you get guys missing games for strained eyelashes. It’s where you get geniuses stabbing themselves in the stomach trying to open DVDs, or ironing their shirts while wearing them, or scalding their pitching hands on baby formula, or – and you really can’t talk baseball injuries without going to the Glenallen Hill well – having a nightmare about spiders and beating themselves up so badly they fall down the stairs.  I mean, any of those is way more interesting than another strained hammy, any day of the week. And other sports just don’t give you that.

Hockey has precisely three types of injuries that get reported: “Lower body injuries” (Got hit in the nuts with a stick), “Upper body injuries” (got rammed face-first into a wall by a large, angry man from Moose Jaw), and “Took a puck off the face” (Took a puck off the face). Soccer[ii], on field heart-attacks aside, has no actual injuries, just really good impressions of them. And football – all injuries in football get spun by the Orwellian propaganda machine that is the NFL to make them sound as GODDAM MANLY as possible. Trust me, if a Green Bay Packer wound up on the disabled list because he’d stuck his personal Johnsonville Sausage[iii] onto a live George Foreman grill, “just to see what it felt like”, the NFL press release would read that he was dealing with “thermal stress reaction injuries to connective tissue in the groin”. (Basketball-related injuries tend to boil down to either stress fractures, things requiring protective goggles, and guys with large salaries whom teams want to make Go Away For A While)

But baseball is refreshingly open and honest about its injuries, which is why we have stories like yesterday’s bit about Oakland hurler Josh Outman. Outman’s headed to the DL with a strained oblique, having incurred the injury in a post-Denny’s bout of Technicolor yawning[iv]. (And I think I speak for all of us who’ve staggered into a Denny’s at 3 AM, impaired for one reason or another, that violent illness is a generally accepted consequence of that choice.) It’s amusing, well, for everyone but Outman and Oakland’s pitching coach. It’s different. And it’s human, in a way that other sports try to deliberately keep their athletes from being.

So hurl on, Josh. We’re with you.

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[i] Golfers dropping jet skis on themselves doesn’t count. Golf, in the words of George Carlin, is not a sport. It’s an activity.

[ii] Yes, this is a sop to my co-author. Deal with it.

[iii] Though to be fair, if it’s a Packer, it’s probably a cheesy brat

[iv] Of course, the details of the matter are still up for debate. I mean, you can’t dust for vomit.

Team From State Starting With "K" Wins NCAA Title

And so endeth possibly the blandest NCAA tournament in recent memory. In the end, the chalk talked. A few untimely absences (Fab Melo, Kendall Marshall) maybe made Kentucky's road to the title a little easier than it might have been, but really, nobody works the system better than John Calipari these days. Come play for me for a year, we'll win games, and I'll turn you into a lottery pick - what kid in his right mind would refuse that? You go 29th in the draft, you wash out of the league in a couple of years, you've still got plenty of cash to go back and finish up that degree with. It's a no-brainer.
But yet this year, ratings be damned, seemed ultimately dull. Too many of the close games were close because one or both teams spent the second half clanging shots off iron. Too many games turned into throttlings. And while it was fun to celebrate Norfolk State and "We messed up people's brackets", all the bracket-messing-up was essentially gone by the end of the first weekend. Hell, even the usual frenzies of "how's your bracket? how's your bracket" seemed muted this year; everyone knew the answer. You picked Mizzouri or Duke, you were screwed. You picked any other high seeds, you were generally fine for a good long way.
So congrats to Kentucky, and hopefully the fires will be out soon. (Seriously. One report from a Lexington, KY police scanner indicated that the cops were just letting the small fires burn, because they were stretched too thin already to deal with every minor act of arson). Here's wishing its players well at the next level; when interviewed they generally seemed like decent folk as well as transcendent talent, and it's a cinch they're not sticking around. And already, no doubt, the Joe Lunardis of the world are putting together their first brackets of the 2013 tournament, because it's not enough to enjoy what just happened; we need to be on the way to the next thing already or else we risk becoming irrelevant.
Of course, if you keep rushing away from the things you've built up as important, that's a way to get irrelevant, too. But don't tell Lunardi and his ilk. They've got a 15-2 game a year from now to make a completely random guess at, and to someone other there, it matters.

We Must (Not) Ignite This Couch

If there is anyone out there who can draw the logical progression from "A sports team I cheer for won a game" to "I should set this total stranger's property on fire", please feel free to post it in the comments below.
For my part, bearing in mind that I am A)careening rapidly towards middle age and B)generally a fan of teams who couldn't win a giant stuffed animal at the state fair midway if you spotted them three milk jugs and let them stand inside the booth, I don't get it. Yeah, you want to celebrate. Yeah, you want to live in the moment. But how you get from that to "We should bust into a total stranger's place, haul their furniture out into the street and torch it" is beyond me.
I'm fairly certain there are ways to celebrate your favorite team winning a big game that don't involve acting like a douchebag. Many of these even involve drinking, carousing, getting together with a few thousand of your closest friends in the street and sharing in the moment of shared joy. But if you cannot actually experience the thrill of victory without arson, theft, and general mob behavior, maybe it's time to re-examine what you're actually getting out of being a fan.
Because whatever it is, rooting clearly isn't enough.

How To Beat Kentucky

Is it cynical to suggest that in all the "how do you beat Kentucky" analysis going around ahead of the Final Four, the best answer is the one that's not being spoken: Wait a few years and have the NCAA force  Calipari's former employer to vacate the wins?

13 Things We Will Learn This Baseball Season

1. Jamie Moyer, penciled in as the Rockies' #2 starter, will be caught during a road trip to Miami sneaking off to the pool from Cocoon, where he will drain strange alien energies to revitalize himself.
2. Royals prospect Cheslor Cuthbert will be revealed to have escaped from Middle-Earth, because everybody is named Cheslor there and he wanted to stand out for a change.
3. Regardless of the verdict of arbitrators, Ryan Braun is a pretty damn good baseball players
4. Yoenis Cespides will hit a ton of home runs and produce a ton of strikeouts. He will also cause at least one announcer to mispronounce his name in a way that produces write-in protests, tons of YouTube hits, and at least one guest appearance on The Soup.
5. Jim Thome will play first base just fine for the Phillies for about a month. Then, on a ball hit three steps to his right, he will explode. Vertebrae will land as far away as the ninth row of the stands.
6. "Yu" puns related to Texas Rangers pitcher and Japanese import Yu Darvish will stop being funny around April 15th. Sportswriters will continue making them well into the postseason.
7. Someone will get accused of taking steroid with absolutely no proof.
8. Someone who did take steroids will get a free pass from the media because "he's a good guy" and/or "he plays for the Yankees".
9. Andy Pettite's triumphant comeback tour is going to include at least two 6-inning, 8 earned run shellackings at the hands of the Red Sox and/or Rays
10. Albert Pujols is going to have a great year, leading stat head baseball fans to completely ignore what's going on on the field and concentrate on what an albatross that contract is going to be eight years from now.
11. Brandon McCarthy will get traded at the deadline. He will go someplace there aren't dozens of acres of foul territory. The results will be ugly.
12. A Phillies batboy will actually need to run out to second base with an oil can at some point this season after Chase Utley breaks down like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.
13. The Giants will completely and utterly screw up Brandon Belt's development, ultimately dumping him in a late-July trade. He will go on to a long and successful career somewhere else. In 2022, Brian Sabean will look at the aging, no longer mobile Belt and decide that he's a perfect fit for the Giants.

Games

I took the kids to see The Hunger Games over the weekend. Excellent movie, and very true to the book. Jennifer Lawrence was excellent and I particularly enjoyed Elizabeth Banks's work as well.

As you no doubt know by now, in the dark future of The Hunger Games, a group of teenagers is forced to fight, suffer, be maimed, and die in a televised competition for the general public's entertainment.

It's a good thing it's fiction. How barbaric it would be if that were real!

Fullback Trade News

The New York Jets this week are finalizing a trade with the Denver Broncos to pick up little-known fullback Timothy Tebow.  Tebow, about to enter his second year in the league, has been unable to find a consistent starting slot at fullback with the Broncos.  With Denver, Tebow competed with two-way player Spencer Larsen and undrafted rookie Austin Sylvester.
The deal is not yet finalized; the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars says he's interested in picking Tebow up as well.
Tebow would face stiff competition for the starting job with either club. Jaguars fullback Greg Jones was a first alternate Pro Bowl selection in 2007. Jets coach Rex Ryan is unstinting in his praise of his current fullback, John Conner, as well.
Tebow may have to get comfortable in a backup position.

What's a Freddy Galvis?

A Mr. Freddy Galvis is your new starting second baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, and that's problematic.
Oh, it's not that Galvis can't play the position. Going into last year in the minors, his defense was major league caliber at shortstop; there'll be no problem with him sliding a little bit down the defensive spectrum. And he's certainly the best defensive option the Phils have at second base, now that Chase Utley's timetable looks more and more like "Waiting for Godot". Michael Martinez is injured, just like most of the rest of the Phils' infield. Ty Wiggington knows where second base is, but that's about it, and besides, he's probably going to be needed at 3rd to spell the increasingly fragile Placido Polanco.
No, there are two problems with Galvis playing second base for a team with World Series aspirations and an aging roster. One is that he can't hit. Until last year, he might as well have been carrying an inflatable lawn gnone to the dish with him; even last year's offensive "surge" only brought him up to "decent for the minors". Asking him to replace the production of an Utley, even an injured Utley, even an injured and declining Utley, is like asking a line cook from Jim's to step in at Bec Le Fin. (I'm old. Work with my references here, people.)
And the other problem is that, as feeble as Galvis may be at the plate, there's not a lot they can do to replace him. The Phils are built to win now. They've gone all in, emptying the farm system to get Lee and Halladay and Lee again and Blanton and Pence and, well, sooner or later that well runs dry. There's nobody in the Phillies' system who makes other teams drool. There's nothing left to swap for a  middle infielder worthy of a spot on a championship-quality team. Maybe they'll move damaged uber-prospect Domonic Brown; maybe they'll try to get something for hulking excess starter Joe Blanton. But the drive to win now has left them perilously thin, perhaps too thin to achieve that stated goal. That's the problem with going all in - sometimes you need to go a little further, and you're tapped when you do.
Of course, all hope is not lost. The Phillies still run Halladay and Lee and Hamels at you, which is enough to win three games out of five without breaking a sweat. They still have above-average production from behind the plate and in 2/3 of their outfield, and the relentless Jimmy Rollins at short. They have monsters at the back end of the bullpen, and they have more interesting pieces on the bench than they've had in years.
But that's all they've got, and it only gets harder from here.

Oh God He's Talking Soccer Again

Let's imagine that your kid just started playing soccer for the first time, and while watching the adorable little rugrats chase the ball across the field, you think to yourself, "Well, I'd better figure out what this sport is about, since Billy loves it so much*"

So you turn on the NBC Sports Network or ESPN2 or the Fox Soccer Channel or some damned thing and find a soccer game. If you're lucky you find a European soccer game**, and you're astonished at its style, precision and beauty.***

If you're slightly less lucky you find an American soccer game, played by one or more teams from the MLS.  I'll offend... somebody... by suggesting that MLS soccer is about on a par with a third-division European league.  The MLS All-Stars regularly lose to Manchester United, but the games are sometimes competitive. I'm sure the All-Stars could beat a second-tier English team, and that suggests to me that the Colorado Rapids might be able keep up with Scunthorpe United**** or Exeter City.

Perhaps FC Dallas is playing Sporting Kansas City, or you may see the LA Galaxy play Tigres UANL of San Nicolas, Mexico.  You might even see DC United against the Rochester Rhinos (Really! The Rochester (NY) Raging Rhinos are a minor-league soccer club).

You might be confused.  Although there are three Canadian teams in MLS, there aren't any Mexican teams.  What's the Galaxy doing playing Tigres?  And the Rochester Rhinos are an NASL team -- the US's semipro minor leagues -- not MLS.

Several major competitions go on in parallel in North America every year.  (For simplicity's sake I will focus on MLS games and ignore things like Mexico's Primera Division regular season.)

The first is the MLS regular season.  This runs from March through December; each of the 19 teams in the MLS plays 34 games exclusively against other MLS teams.  The top 10 teams in the league go to the MLS Cup playoffs, culminating in a single champion.

You may see teams play in the CONCACAF***** Champions League.  The top 4 US MLS teams in any given year participate in the CCL the following year, and play against the top teams from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Canada.  This would be why you'd see Galaxy play Tigres.

Finally, you might be seeing part of the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup.  This is a knockout tournament open to the top teams from all 5 layers of US Men's Soccer, from amateur adult clubs up through MLS teams.  This would be why you'd see DC play Rochester.  (And Rochester did beat Colorado to win the cup back in '99).

These do all go on in parallel.  LA Galaxy might play a CCL game on Tuesday, an Open Cup game on Thursday, and an MLS game on Saturday, all in one week. That can lead to some of the more successful clubs complaining of exhaustion near the end of the season, while they are playing more games than competitors who didn't do well enough to get into the CCL, for instance.  Many clubs use the CCL and Open Cup as a way to get their prospects more touches and rest their premiere players; LA Galaxy may not put Landon Donovan and David Beckham on the field against Addison United of Vermont.

* At this point, Billy actually just loves the juice box and bag of pretzels he gets after the game, but that may change.
**  It irritates me that American soccer correspondents insist on calling a game a "match" and a field a "pitch" because that's what they're called in England.
*** You're also astonished at the audacity of players diving to draw foul calls when they haven't been touched. Doubly so if they're Italian.
**** Take that, obscenity filters
***** The North American continental soccer confederation, which includes the US, Canada, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean

Notes From Spring Training

• Rockies scratch Jamie Moyer from his start Friday due to leg issue - apparently no one's had to go to the DL for "acute fossilization of the hamstring" before
• Luke Scott not expected to use a glove during spring training - and not to know what to do with one once the season starts
• Ryan Madson's elbow reportedly near "100%" - Scott Boras immediately working on hardbound coffee table book of "elbows worse than Ryan Madson's", with foreword by Neil Gaiman
• Kansas City Royals sign SS Alcides Escobar to long-term contract - Joe Posnanski nearly leaps from a hotel room window before being reassured it's not Yuniesky Betancourt
• Several teams watch Joe Blanton pitch for the Phillies - Because really, there ain't a hell of a lot else to do in Clearwater
• Roy Halladay says he's fine, despite bad spring training stats - Because he's Roy Goddamn Halladay, and I'm not going to argue with him. Not even a little bit
• Michael Pineda says he's fine, too - Him, you can argue with. For now.

Sometimes, It Is the Coach

Mike D'Antoni stepped down as coach of the New York Knicks today, and it had the feel of a mercy killing. D'Antoni, as anyone who follows the NBA knows, ran an up-tempo mile-a-minute offense. At it's best, it's Westphalian, literally running other teams out of the gym and providing entertaining basketball. It's a system made, not for stars or guys who demand isolation plays, but rather for gym rats and guys who do one thing well, who can find a niche in the system and own it. When he has the players who fit his style, D'Antoni wins games. When he doesn't, the whole thing breaks down like a multiple-car pileup in a school zone.
New York is not a market for plucky role players and system basketball. It's a city that demands stars, wins be damned. And so when a spare part named Jeremy Lin took advantage of a temporarily star-less Knick team, filling the stat line and leading it to victories, he instantly became A Star, because, hey, that's the narrative the Big Apple pressure cooker demands. And when the team's real star, Carmelo Anthony, returned, the wheels fell off D'Antoni's scoring calliope as Anthony sucked the air out of the room.
But New York demanded Carmelo. It demanded a star, regardless of whether he fit in the coach's system, and so the Knicks mortgaged their future and ditched players who fit D'Antoni's system and just maybe listened to Isaiah Thomas' evil whisperings in owner James Dolan's ear to bring "star" Anthony to the big stage. It sank the team, but hey, the Knicks, who for years and years had wallowed in anonymous mediocrity, could at least reclaim the back pages.
But while they may have been more famous, they stopped being good. And the coach pays the price for that, regardless. D'Antoni was set up to fail. As a coach, he simply couldn't win with his system and these players. And so, unfair as it might be, that's why he had to go.

Then there's Western Kentucky, best known for being the only team in this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament (because as hard as it is to believe, the NCAA runs a LOT of tournaments - they just don't televise women's fencing) with a losing record. Not long ago, WKU was something of a mid-major terror, largely because it had a 7'2" center and a mascot who looked like a roided-out Grimace, but those days are gone. This year, they snuck into the Big Dance(TM) with a 15-18 record, even after winning the conference tournament.
Except, of course, that's not the whole story. They were 5-11 when they fired coach Ken McDonald. Do the math, and under new guy Ray Harper - a longtime success at lower levels - they went 10-7. Not great, no, but a winning record. And if you throw in the few games it took for Harper to get the team turned around, it looks like this ain't a bad team at all. Not great, maybe, but the same players who were cratering under McDonald are good enough to win a tournament play-in game over 20+ win Mississippi Valley State.
Sometimes, it really is the coach.

Manning Up

The Peyton Manning Free Agency Victory Tour is only superficially like the Brett Favre Dance With Me Free Agent Victory Tour in that Manning is a proud Super Bowl-winning Hall of Fame quarterback coming off a devastating neck injury looking for a job, while Favre was a proud Super Bowl-winning Hall of Fame quarterback coming off a devastating interception looking for a job.That being said, the question of whom Peyton's going to go steady with has turned this NFL offseason into a Jane Austen, as various unsuitably ruffianish but wealthy callers have pressed their suits, whilst the ethereal Peyton has dithered over commitment whilst actually orchestrating the whole grand dance to his benefit1.
Now, there were some places Peyton would never go. New York, for one - never mind the Jets' "commitment" to Mark Sanchez, there was no way Manning would share the limelight with or invite comparison to his brother. With that in mind, here's a rough breakdown of Manning's likely landing spots, from Most Likely to Least Likely:
Denver - Denver needs a quarterback. No, seriously, they need a quarterback, because they don't have one. Even if the reports of Manning's recovery are false and he can't throw the ball better than Garo Yepremian, that's still a step up from Tebow. And the arrival of a genuine certified bona fide midasized Hall of Famer like Manning would provide enough cover for John Elway to have Tebow quietly bundled up and shipped off to Jacksonville in the truck of a 96 Coupe de Ville.
Arizona - Arizona's best quarterback last year attended Fordham. Think about it.
Miami - Dan Marino is still Miami's best option at quarterback, and at this point his entire body has been transformed into an Isotoner glove. They have a talented receiver, which aging quarterbacks tend to like, and, err, their owner has a lot of money. A whole lot of money.
Cleveland - Hahahah. Just kidding.
Baltimore - Because it's totally the quarterback's fault that the kicker missed, and thus Joe Flacco must be replaced. Also, that defense would put Peyton back on the field a lot, and if there's one thing aging quarterbacks like more than having one talented wide receiver, it's the chance to pad their stats extensively.
Creighton - With National Player of the Year contender Doug McDermott, the Blue Jays are a serious Sweet 16 Contender, and adding a long-range gunner like Manning could help them out. Also, adding a NCAA Championship Ring to the trophy collection would keep him one step ahead of Eli.
Kansas City - Rumor suggests that Manning is interested in following in the steps of the legendary Joe Montana by finishing his career out in Kansas City, mostly horizontally.
New England - Manning is said to be intrigued by Bill Belichick's plan to move him to strong safety on passing downs.

1There is nothing wrong with Manning orchestrating things to his benefit. You get leverage, you use it. What is ridiculous, however, is the willful blindness of the sports media to the fact that Peyton is in fact orchestrating things to his benefit, as opposed to fluttering from city to city on waves of ethereal football goodness. This is a guy who locked another QB out of the film study room while in college, for God's sake. He's not Mother Theresa in cleats, and he never has been.

Sportsthodoxy Interview: Craig Calcaterra

By any reasonable sports blogger standard (if such a thing exists), Craig Calcaterra is living the dream. From starting his highly regarded Shysterball blog while working full time as a lawyer to taking the reins at NBC's Hardball Talk, Craig is one of the most-read - and most readable - folks writing on baseball out there. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions for us, covering everything from the narratives of baseball to the identity of the greatest Atlanta Brave of all time....

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We’re almost at the start of a new season, thank God. How difficult is it keeping up a flow of content through the offseason?

It's definitely way more difficult than during the regular season. November and December are not too bad due to all of the hot stove stuff, but January and early February is like death for a volume blogger. And I suppose one answer is to back off on the volume of posts some. Which we do a little bit. But HBT readers have come to expect frequent updates. And frankly, if I'm not writing a post at almost all times of the working day, I get a little bored.

You’ve got a particularly...expressive community of commenters that’s grown up on your posts on the NBC site. How do you cultivate a community that holds both the Old Gators and the Jonny5s of the world? 

I wish I had the answer to that, but really, it just happened. I think we're pretty lucky to have a fairly disparate cast of commenters without the proceedings getting too crazy. Part of it is that, especially as the site was getting off the ground, I made a point to show up in the comments myself and engage with readers. I think one of the reasons comments sections get out of hand so frequently is that people assume no one is watching. Readers know I see every comment that comes in. That tends to make newer readers act a bit better and empowers regulars to help police the site for knuckleheads and apply some pretty effective peer pressure.

Narrative is a strong thread through the material you post, whether it’s childhood memories of the Tigers, growing up watching Braves games on TBS, or the “Best Shape Of His Life” spring training narrative that pops up every year. What part do you think that narrative attachment plays in becoming a baseball fan? 

I think it plays a pretty huge part. There are so many games. Single events, single games mean so very little. As such, the way in which a lot of other sports are discussed -- "what does Team X need to do to win today," etc. -- is pretty meaningless in baseball. People still write and talk about that stuff, but it tells us nothing.  A narrative overlay gives us something to grab on to and to put what are seemingly random and insignificant happenings into a human context.  It can also lead to horrible baseball writing -- most of the bad sportswriting you see is really bad narrative-creation and perpetuation -- but if you treat baseball games as small parts of a larger story, they're way easier to get your mind around.

If narratives are important, is the rise of advanced analytics in conflict with that? What effect do you think it might have on baseball fandom going forward?

I don't think it's in conflict. Indeed, statistical analysis is itself about making sense of randomness, so in some ways it's also about narrative-creation in some weird way. Now, I don't think most analysts would think of it that way, but there are narratives that pop up as the result of such analysis. Stuff about player aging patterns. Reactions we have to less-than-optimal player deployment ("Free [underused Player X]!") The sheer mass of humor we get when a guy like, say, Miguel Cabrera, is being moved in the wrong direction on the defensive spectrum. That sort of thing.

As for the effect on baseball fandom: Maybe less direct impact than we think. Go to a ballpark and listen to conversations about the game and it may as well be 1950 as far as the analytical savvy on display. But I do think that there has been a pretty big effect on announcers and mainstream sportswriters, especially in recent years, and that over time, common fans will begin to internalize light sabermetric thinking, even as they continue to talk about so-and-so being "a competitor."

On a related note, the Hall of Fame debate appears to be the new ground zero between analytics-driven fans and “you had to be there” types, and the intensity seems to be ratcheting up every year. Are we approaching some sort of armageddon where Jay Jaffe and Dan Shaughnessy go Thunderdome on the streets of Cooperstown?

I would use my childrens' college funds to pay to see that.

Seriously, though, it has gotten more polarized. And I think it's going to get way worse in the next few years as the steroids guys like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens appear on the ballot and get rejected over and over.  Unfortunately, the way the Hall of Fame voting is set up -- you have to be a ten-year member of the Baseball Writers Association of America and you don't lose your vote even if you lose you daily writing gig -- all but ensures that the Hall electorate is an older, reactionary lot of curmudgeons. Many of them don't understand advanced analysis and even if they do, many of them blame its rise and the rise of the Internet in general as the reason they lost their job or their newspaper went out of business.  It's going to be years -- decades -- before the more intelligent discourse that has risen up around baseball truly impacts the Hall of Fame vote.

Switching to actual, you know, baseball and stuff, is this the year the Braves dethrone the Phillies in the NL East?

As I write this, I am a couple hours removed from listening to the first Braves exhibition game of spring training. They were on-hit by the Tigers. As such, I am in no position at the moment to let go of my innate, ridiculously overblown pessimism about my rooting interest and make any such declarations.

What storylines - besides the ones about “best shape of their life” - are you most interested in seeing play out this year?

I'm certainly excited about what, on paper anyway, looks like a major shift of power in the American League to the AL West and, to a lesser degree, the central. The Angels and all of their acquisitions and the Rangers and theirs. The Prince Fielder Tigers and the young, frisky Royals. I'm also curious to see if the new wild card setup -- the one-game play-in, essentially -- really causes teams to go crazy to win their division. I'm still a little skeptical of the idea that a sure wild card team is going to go full-throttle to make up a three or four game deficit in the division race in the final two weeks of the season simply to avoid the wild card. Maybe I'm wrong.

Last question - Biff Pocoroba. Great Atlanta Brave, or greatest Atlanta Brave ever?

He's not the Greatest Atlanta Brave Ever -- we all know that title belongs to Rick Mahler -- but Pocoroba may be the most Atlanta Brave Ever.

Many thanks to Craig for taking the time to answer these! You can find his baseball writing at Hardball Talk.

Sportsthodoxy Fantasy Baseball Tips: Buy Low Targets

As Opening Day approaches, many baseball fans' thoughts turn to their upcoming fantasy drafts, because, well I have no idea, and I say that having participated in one straight 4x4 roto league for over two decades. With that in mind, Sportsthodoxy is pleased to offer free, utterly worthless fantasy baseball advice to any and all of our readers. Today's topic, the first in an occasional series, is bounceback players you should target in your draft:

A.J. Burnett, Fungo Bat, Pittsburgh Pirates - Burnett is now out 8-10 weeks after bunting a ball off his face and breaking an orbital bone. Yankees fans will say that this guarantees he will have, at least for the next 8-10 weeks, more value than he did last year as a member of the New York Yankees. Bargain hunters will note that Burnett is moving from the AL East to the functional-first-baseman-less NL Central, from a hitters park to a pitcher's park, and from the seething media crucible of New York to Pittsburgh. Plus, Burnett's got the reputation of being damaged goods, all of which should make him available for bottom-feeders on draft day.

Adam Dunn, Continental Massif, Chicago White Sox - Dunn was considered one of the best free-agent signings of the off-season, going into 2011. Averaging 40 HR per year over roughly most of your career and moving to a ballpark that could double as a slingshot for orbital payloads will do that. Instead, he hit .159 and produced less offensive value that Neifi Perez1. So this year, he's a perfect buy-low target. Why? Because one of two things is going to happen. Either he's going to figure out what the heck happened and go back to being the homer-mashing Doc Samson clone we all know and love, or he's going to continue playing like he has been, and a couple of drunken fans are going to leap out of the stands and break his legs before he does too much damage to your hitting rate stats. (What? The dude does play in Chicago, after all.) Either, as they say, works.

Joe Blanton, Fifth Beatle, Philadelphia Phillies - Remember Joe Blanton? The merely solid (OK, really, really solid, but that's the cheesesteaks talking) guy who was going to hold down the fifth spot for the Phillies' quartet of starters for the ages last year? The guy who got hurt roughly fifteen minutes into the season and got bypassed by "Cousin" Vance Worley? The guy everyone kind of forgot was on the Phillies, who still figure to have at least a league-average offense? Yeah, him.

Bobby Abreu, Ronin, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Which Happens To Be In California On The West Coast Of North America And Oh God Can We Please Let This Joke Die Already - On the surface, Abreu looks fork-ready. His stats last year were down, he plays the outfield like a Roomba, and the Angels have loaded up on 1B/DH types. That being said, you look at some of the warm bodies that were wheeled out there to serve as DHs last year and Abreu can outhit at least half of them with his eyes closed. (Which, to be fair, is the way the Mariners' DHs played all year). He may not be getting younger or faster, and he may not have guaranteed PT in Anaheimangelsifornia, but sooner or later somebody's going to need a bat, and Abreu will be waiting.

Frank Francisco, Vulture, New York Mets - Frank Francisco is not a particularly good closer. That's all right, because the Mets aren't a particularly good team. As a matter of fact, they're probably going to be a terrible team, and one that struggles to score more runs than, say, the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs. That's terrible news for Mets fans, but good news for whoever falls into the closer role for the team (most likely Francisco) because low-scoring teams generate a disproportionate number of save chances, and none of the Mets' starters are the sorts of guys who are likely to throw a ton of complete games, even the six-innings-shortened-by-rain sort. So the Mets may not win a lot, but those games they do win will more likely generate save chances. And when they do, Francisco will be there. Waiting.








1I know Neifi didn't play last year. That's kind of the joke.

Not to Go All FJM On You...

I'm not a huge fan of ESPN: The Magazine. OK, I've subscribed for several years. This is largely because A)I get it dirt-cheap and B)it makes decent throne reading, but there's a certain formula there that's never grabbed me. On average, a given issue is going to feature one story about a perceived-bad-guy-who's-shown-to-not-be-so-bad, a big glossy spread on one of the minor sports ESPN is trying to push in its programming, a reprinted Bill Simmons ramble, and a whole lot of infographics. Nitty-gritty sports content of the sort I used to get from The Sporting News, not so much. Then again, TSN's gone all strange and occasional, and ESPN took that opportunity to transform its print edition into a dead ringer for TSN's old format, so what the hell do I know.
The latest issue, the slightly hyped "Analytics Issue" (as opposed to the heavily hyped "Let's Get Professional Athletes To Take Their Clothes Off Issue") does have some good reading in it. The piece on the efforts Stan Conte is making to quantify injury data? Very cool. The piece on A's pitcher Brandon McCarthy? Great stuff. And then, at the back, there's a thoughtful column from Chris Jones about a time he sat down with former NFL running back and widely mocked iconoclast Ricky Williams.
Jones makes some good points in the piece, most notably talking about how there are very real people who aren't emotionless robots playing the game, and that Williams overcame a lot more than Miami's lack of a decent pulling guard to play in the league.
But before you get to any of the good stuff, you get this:

When I first met Ricky Williams, he was in the kitchen hut in a commune-turned-campground outside Byron Bay, Australia, squeezing the juice out of a giant stalk of celery before he headed back to his tent to finish reading a book called Gardeners, Gurus & Grubs.

Great lead, right? And then it's followed by this:

That sentence could not be written about any other athlete in the history of the world.

Or at least, any other athlete not named Ricky Williams.

Gamification For Dummies And Left Tackles

In my day job, one of the hot topics currently bubbling merrily away is "gamification" (and so help me God, if autocorrect switches that back to "ramification" one more time I'm putting a boot through my Macintosh). This notion can be briefly summed up as "turn everything into a game and it becomes more interesting to do". Now, I'm not here to debate its merits one way or the other. What I can say, however, is that the concept has generated innumerable conference talks and blog posts, not to mention all sorts of Facebook content, wildly convoluted consumer loyalty programs generated by people who don't actually understand games, and rants saying mean things about Reality is Broken author Jane McGonigal.

But if you really want to see gamification in action, you just need to look at the NFL combine. What is basically a glorified weight room session has been thoroughly, magnificently gamified.

Let's face it: there's damn little more boring than watching other dudes work out. But turn it into the Combine, start racking up the scores on how many presses at what weight a guy did, comparing that to other prospects, and invent a leveling system out of Mel Kiper's Big Board - hey, you did twenty reps at 325, you're now a potential FOURTH rounder, up from fifth - and suddenly it's a whopping, sweaty ball of gamified excitement. The rewards, like game rewards, are ephemeral - there's nothing concrete to Mel Kiper suddenly declaring you a third rounder instead of a sixth rounder rounder, but it feels like something, just like getting a virtual badge that serves as bragging rights with folks you've never met1. And the guys doing it buy it, and ESPN buys it, and most of all, we buy it.

Because otherwise, it's just a bunch of guys working out in a really big building in Indiana, and who wants to watch that.





1And I say this as someone who's now rolled over his badge collection twice on Jetpack Joyride.

In Which the Venn Diagram of SportsCenter And News Shows No Overlap

Back when I was in college, I had a first date that involved going over to some friends' living quarters (the word "habitrail" really was appropriate) for some board and card games. The last game came down to me and my date, and as we got down to the finish, it became clear that I was not going to take it easy on her in order to increase my chances of late-evening canoodling. I won the game, the evening wrapped up, and as I walked her back to her dorm, she asked me to apologize.
"For what?" I said.
"For not letting me win."
I very politely (because she was a very attractive young woman) told her that there was no way in hell I would apologize, and that I wasn't going to insult her by "taking it easy on her because she was a girl."
And she asked me again to apologize, and I told her that I wouldn't.
And then for the third time, she asked, and I said, no, and she said, "Good. If you'd actually apologized, I wouldn't have wanted to go out with you."

Fast forward to tonight, and the lead story on SportsCenter. (Don't ask me why I was watching SportsCenter. I never watch SportsCenter any more; there's too much Center and not enough Sports these days.) Now, admittedly, any night where the biggest game is UConn-Providence isn't a big sports night, but still, they led with the fact that Dwyane Wade had apologized to Kobe Bryant for accidentally breaking his nose during Sunday's All-Star Game.
Now, I'm not a big believer in the cult of ultimate macho, where you regard the guys in the other city's sweat pants as the eternal enemy and don't allow yourself to admit to feeling bad that you might have, you know, hurt him. These guys know each other off the court; they hang out, they do commercials together, they play on Olympic teams together, and they're hopefully well-rounded human beings who still exist once they're off the 94 feet of hardwood. In fact, I think it's an admirable gesture on Wade's part, and considering Bryant's well-known proclivities for being perhaps a trifle rude, possibly more than he would have gotten in return had the situations and nasal passages been reversed.
And yes, it was announced later that Bryant had a concussion, which is indeed big news, considering that the Lakers had only recently rounded into form, and without their best player they're the third-best team in LA, behind the Clippers and Long Beach State. Leading with the concussion announcement would have been eminently understandable. It's sports-related, it has a direct impact on the games, and it's news.
But instead, we got the apology. The perfectly sincere, absolutely respectful apology, which had about as much to do with actual sports news as, well, anything Skip Bayless says. I'm sure that someone at ESPN saw the opportunity to lead with an item that involved the names "Kobe" and "D-Wade" and got all fluttery over it, but it was barely sports and it was barely news, and it certainly didn't deserve to be the top headline.
I mean, yes, an injury in an All-Star Game could be news. The litmus test here sits at the intersection of Rose and Fosse, wherein baseball's all time hit leader deliberately and with hard-nosed intensity aforethought, leveled a guy right out of his playing career in order to win the game. Wade, on the other hand, committed a pretty generic foul without malicious intent. Rose didn't apologize. Wade did. There could have been news, but there wasn't, and leading off with that - implying that anything that follows is going to be less newsworthy and less about sports - is a great indicator that anyone actually looking for sports news ought to change the channel.
So I did.

Dear Terry Collins:

I understand that you want to be a football coach. Football coaches have all the power, after all. To misquote Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, there is nothing so much like God on earth as a football coach on the practice field. They get to make men many times larger than themselves run until they puke. They get to pontificate to a rapt media about their tactical brilliance. They get to call "voluntary" workouts and then cut the guys who actually understand the dictionary meaning of the word "voluntary".
You, on the other hand, had a shortstop show up on time for spring training. He did nothing wrong. He did nothing to get upset about. He simply did his job, and you, you chose to make An Issue out of it because, well, there's nothing else worth talking about in Mets camp, is there?
Look, Terry, I understand. You have a team with the deep potential to be terrible. Your best player left. Your second best player is undergoing the sort of power outage that usually goes with a flying saucer hovering over your car. Your best pitcher doesn't throw hard enough to break glass and nobody can pronounce your catcher's last name. And above it all lurks the high probability that you're going to have to hold bake sales in the concourses of Citi Field to make payroll this year, because your owners are in deeper financial dookie than the Greek government.
But really, Terry, taking it out on the kid in the media? Dragging it out long past the natural lifespan of the story? Isn't there anything, anything else at all you could be talking about? Or maybe you could just get down to getting a baseball team ready for spring, and not wish you were a football coach. At least, not quite so loudly.

Dudes Who Are Preternaturally Good At Their Thing

Lionel Messi is arguably the greatest soccer player in the world. One of the things that makes him great is that he refuses to go down even when being fouled. Plenty of soccer players "dive," that is, hurl themselves to the ground and pretend to have been grievously fouled after the slightest contact. Not Messi.

The Pittsburgh Penguins' Evgeni Malkin suffers a bit by sharing a team with Sidney Crosby. Malkin is merely incredible while Sid is unearthly. Sid's out, though, and Evgeni has stepped up his game something ferocious. Shades of Mario Lemieux.

Really, It's the Lack of Parties

Earlier this weekend, I heard ESPN's J.A. Adande discussing why some of the luster was apparently off the NBA All-Star festivities this go-round. Bear in mind that I generally find Adande's commentary some of the most insightful stuff ESPN offers, and I will therefore willingly listen to him talk about things that I otherwise have no interest in.
But this time, not so much. One of the things he threw out there was that because the NBA season's schedule was so out of whack, there hadn't really been enough time for booking venues for parties and other festivities during the weekend1. And so some of the big parties weren't being thrown, and therefore the weekend wasn't as All-Star-Spectacular as it had been in years past.
Now, call me crazy, but I'm reasonably sure the reason nobody was excited about the All-Star Weekend, and particularly not about the 3 Point Contest and the Slam Dunk Contest, was due to a combination of two factors. One, nobody knew when the hell All-Star weekend was going to be. (Did it just happen? I don't know. I wasn't looking.) Two, the Slam Dunk Contest2, typically the only part of the weekend that non-hardcore fans care about, was populated by something called a Chase Budinger (who has played a grand total of 24 minutes in his team's last 3 games), a Paul George (averaging 12 points per game), a Derrick Williams (18 minutes and 7 points per game) and your winner, Utah's Jeremy Evans, owner of a career mark of 3.2 points per game. That's three backups and a fourth option. It doesn't matter how many glow-in-the-dark jerseys or two-ball slams get thrown, if nobody's heard of the guys throwing them down, nobody's going to watch. This is a league that's been hanging it's image on visuals of stars like Blake Griffin, Kobe Bryant, Amar'e Stoudamire, and Dwight Howard posterizing hapless D-League refugees. To promise that, and then deliver the guy on the end of Utah's bench? That, not the lack of parties that all blend together for those of us on the wrong side of the velvet rope, just might be why interest was down.





1If Nike can't figure out how to leverage its cash and resources to throw a party on only a few months' notice, Nike isn't that interested in throwing a party.
2Ironically, the 3 Point Shooting Contest, which traditionally gets as much love as Uwe Boll at the Oscars, had a couple of actual stars in it this year. I didn't know that, either.

Your Handy Ryan Braun Conspiracy Theory Guide

Conspiracy theories are dumb. They are predicated on the simultaneous notion that A)there are vast, powerful groups of people exerting their reach invisibly to alter the course of world events on a scale vast and unimaginable and B)they're doing so in such a way that every dude named Shecky with dialup access can find the clues they're leaving behind. I mean, sure, the idea that someone out there is planning all this has to be comforting on some level - more comforting than the notion that there's no one in charge and thus, no one to magically save the day should events warrant it - but as a dedicated reader of conspiracy theory material for writing-related purposes, I can safely say that one conspiracy theory is generally dumber than the next. Doctor Rich recommends taking two Michael Shermer books, chasing them with Jon Ronson's excellent treatise Them, and taking a nap.
That being said, the Braun verdict has produced any number of hare-brained analyses, ranging from the insulting to the deeply insulting. Here's a quick rundown.

Braun Got Off Because Bud Selig Used To Own The Brewers
The key term in all this, of course, is "used to". As in, "he sold the team". As in "Some other dude named Mark Attanasio owns it now." Sure, the conspiracy theorists say, but it was his team, and it's in his hometown, and they've got a statue of him out front of their park! Surely that's enough reason for Bud to ham-fistedly rig the appeals process!
Which, of course, conveniently dodges the fact that MLB - which Selig runs - is so visibly unhappy with the results of the Braun case that they're ready to run into the buzz saw of litigation to try to overturn it. Yeah, that totally makes sense if Bud's the one who rigged it in the first place.

Braun Got Off Because Selig's Incompetent and the Player's Union Beat Him Like A Rented Mule Again
First of all, the MLBPA didn't appeal. Braun did. Union head Michael Weiner was nicely gracious in the wake of MLB's tantrum over the results, but that's long-distance applause from after the fact. The appeal was handed down, not by the union, but by a panel comprised of one union rep, one MLB rep, and one independent arbitrator with a resume longer than a Robert Jordan novel. Predictably, the union guy on the panel voted one way, and the management guy voted the other, leaving the independent arbitrator - not the union, not Bud Selig - to cast the deciding vote.

Braun Got Off Because the Arbitration Was Rigged
This one's being championed by Mike Lupica, who, if he had a goatee, would probably be best described as the Mirror Universe Bob Costas. To imply that independent arbitrator Shyam Das, who has worked with baseball for decades, offered decisions that have been roughly split down the middle in terms of who's won, and whose case history is both impressive and wide-ranging, would be biased or corrupt is lazy, juvenile mudslinging at its worst. For a putatively professional journalist like Lupica to even imply this sort of thing is because he didn't get the result he wanted is the sort of tantrum-throwing nonsense that immediately dismisses its author as a crank. The fact that it's deeply insulting to a respected professional and a leader in his field just emphasizes how thoroughly wrong-headed Lupica is in all this.

Braun Got Off Because the Sample Delivery Was Rigged
This one, superficially, appears to maybe have some legs. I mean, surely the courier responsible for passing along Mr. Braun's pee could have checked a website or two to get the hours of the local FedExOfficeWeUsedToBeKinkos, and found one that would be open long enough to divest himself of the urine in question - unless he were tempted not to do so by a nefarious bribe!
Except, of course, the guy in question is a Cubs fan, and thus unlikely to be doing the Brewers and their best player a favor. His stated logic - he thought the sample would be safe with him than sitting in a Kinko's waiting for pickup - makes a lot more sense than "Braun got to him!"
Besides, if Braun were going to bribe this guy, why didn't Braun just bribe him to pee in the vial instead, and thus save all the agita? It fails the sniff test, not that you particularly want to be sniffing in this instance.

Braun Got Off Because He Had Super Duper Expensive Ninja Lawyers
All things considered, Ryan Braun is a very rich man. He can hire very good lawyers.
The guys on the other side from him on this appeal are from MLB. MLB is the parent organization of the team that writes checks to Mr. Braun, as well as 24 other players. No matter how expensive a lawyer Braun can hire, MLB can hire more expensive ones.

Braun Got Off Because He's Jewish
Of course. Because Steve Carlton's wackier purported fantasies are right, and it's Sandy Koufax, Brad Ausmus, and the ghost of Hank Greenberg sitting in a luxury cave in Barbados with the last of the Rothschilds, secretly controlling the destiny of all of baseball.
Now call me crazy, but if I were running the secret Jewish cabal that oversaw baseball and I found out that Ryan Braun, the Great Whitefish Hope, had tested positive for something not normally found in rugeleh, wouldn't it make more sense to squash this before the results get passed to Braun? Before the results get announced? Before the appeals process happens? Before there are months and months of fevered speculation on this topic that would make any kind of manipulation of the results look like the sort of ham-fisted (sorry, trayf) dabbling that any kind of conspiracy worth its (kosher) salt would do its utmost to avoid?


Of course not. Shecky's got dialup, after all, and the interwebs have spoken.

Landon Donovan Should Stay In England

Landon Donovan, probably the best-known American male soccer player today, is under contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy of US Major League Soccer. The Galaxy won the MLS championship this past year due in no small part to the efforts of Donovan and foreign teammates David Beckham and Robbie Keane.

Only few members of the US Men's National Team come from the MLS ranks, because few MLS players have the skills necessary to thrive in international play. That's not to say that American men can't succeed in international soccer. The most successful active (male) US soccer player, Clint Dempsey, has been a top player at Fulham, and US MNT goalkeeper Tim Howard has played for Everton for years.

(For non-soccer-savvy readers, neither Everton nor Fulham is a powerhouse of the Premiership, but both have been pretty good teams by EPL standards for the last few years. Consider Everton to be the equivalent of the Chicago Bears or thereabouts: A club with a rich history that consistently does okay but not great, and whose last sustained success came in the 80s. Fulham, by contrast, is more like the Cleveland Browns. Perennially middling, gone entirely from the top-flight league for a span in the 90s, but back in moderate contention.)

Editor's note -- for those who don't follow American football, Mr. Kiley has just paid Fulham a grievous insult.

Since the MLS season is offset from the soccer season of the ENTIRE PLANET*, there's a two-month window during which MLS players can play for international clubs. In 2010 and 2012, Donovan has been loaned to Everton for several weeks during that window. In each of those two years he's received an Everton "player of the month" award. Near the end of the last home game of Donovan's 2010 Everton stint, fans at the stadium chanted "U-S-A" to credit his excellent play.

For the betterment of his own skills, and for the sake of the US national soccer program, Donovan should remain with Everton.

A player really only improves when he faces opposition that is comparable to his own talents. There are a few good teams in Major League Soccer. Donovan's championship LA Galaxy is chief among those. By comparison to the English Premier League, the rest of MLS is the soccer equivalent of the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs.

There's something to be said for keeping the American game's biggest star playing within the United States. It certainly helps raise the visibility of the league in general, and helps the league be taken more seriously. But the best thing that can be done for American soccer is for the men's national team to have consistent success in the World Cup. Once that happens, the MLS will be seen as more than just a second-flight league. And until that happens, the best American players need to face the world's best competition.

* Don't get me started.

Braun and Journalism

Apparently everyone got scooped on this one by a 16 year old high school student with an unhealthy Nyjer Morgan fixation.

I anxiously look forward to Ken Rosenthal castigating him on live national television for not being a real journalist.

Braun Skates By a Razor's Edge

Defending NL MVP Ryan Braun has had his 50 game suspension for testing positive for a banned substance overturned by a 3-arbitrator panel. This has produced all sorts of interesting reactions in the chattering classes because A)it's never happened before, at least that we know of B)it massively changes the dynamic in the NL Central this upcoming season C)there was considerable weirdness around the whole case from the get-go and D)the reason the suspension was overturned will no doubt cause endless controversy going forward. 
For those unaware of the facts of the case, such as they are, they can be summed up thusly:


What Happened:

• At the end of last season, Milwaukee Brewers slugger Ryan Braun tested positive for a banned substance, later revealed to be artificial testosterone.
• Braun was informed of the positive test privately, as per MLB's drug testing regulations, before the voting for NL MVP. 
• Braun immediately took another test, which was negative.
• Braun won NL MVP over a slightly-more-deserving-but-saddled-with-a-joke-of-an-owner Matt Kemp of the LA Dodgers*, knowing of the positive test but not violating his right to privacy and due process by informing the voters of the BBWAA of the test.
• The test results were leaked, causing many of the writers who had voted for Braun to verbally roast him and demand he turn in his MVP award.
• All sorts of weird bits of evidence surrounding the test came to light, and Braun vowed to appeal

Reasons to think Braun is clean:

• He'd never failed a test before or since (23 clean results)

• There's absolutely no logical reason he'd start juicing at the end of a season when he'd been clean all year and put up monster numbers.

• His test numbers were so out of whack - we're talking "Bruce Banner in line at the DMV" out of whack - they looked like they came off a video game, and statistical outliers that berserk are always suspicious.

• His followup test was clean.

Reasons to think Braun isn't clean:

• His sample tested positive. Way, way, positive.

• It is theoretically a very accurate test, with basically zero chance of a false positive.

Random bullshit swirling around the case:

• The way the results were leaked on the supposedly anonymous testing is highly unethical, to say the least.

• Various holier-than-thou reporters were ready to crucify Braun for daring to win the MVP award they voted for while testing positive, and not turning the award down

• Rumors that Braun tested positive because he was taking a herpes med. (What is it about baseball players and wacky herpes rumors? See also: Jeter and Jessica Alba)

• Conspiracy theorists claiming that since Selig once owned the Brewers, he was going to rig things so that Braun would get off.

The ruling:

Braun's guilt cannot be proven because there's a break in the chain of custody of the first sample, which tested positive. Apparently the messenger charged with transporting it thought that the local FedEx Office was closed and held onto it over the weekend, creating a two day gap in the chain of custody during which time anything could have happened to the sample, up to and including contamination, deliberate mucking about, or Moises Alou using it to wash his hands. 

The verdict was rendered 2-1 by the panel, which consisted of one MLB rep, one MLBPA rep, and one independent arbitrator (Shyam Das) who has a history with these things. MLB is furious about the whole thing, which is idiotic - the last thing you want to do is keep trashing your product, particularly your young, superstar, photogenic product, once you've been given an out on this whole embarrassing mess.


Why Everyone Is Mad:
The reason Braun's suspension was overturned by the arbitrator - and let's be honest, this was a one-man show, because the MLB arbitrator was always going to rule one way and the MLBPA was always going to rule the other - was, as noted, because the chain of evidence was broken, and Braun's sample apparently spent two days in a bike messenger's fridge. Now, leaving aside all jokes about what you're likely to find in a bike messenger's fridge (and they are plentiful), the fact is, the sample was not where it was supposed to be according to the rules of the testing. Period. That's it. Never mind that weird things can and do happen to samples that are not kept according to strict protocols, never mind that the tamper-proof seal was supposedly in place - none of that matters. The rules were broken, which leads to the inescapable conclusions that A)the positive test was unreliable, because it was not conducted under the agreed-upon rules and B)the way in which Braun's appeal was upheld will be described in all corners as "on a technicality".
And since we all now "on a technicality" means "he did it and got away with it but those darn rules kept a good cop from taking a dirty scumbag down like in that episode of Law and Order I just watched"**, those convinced that Braun actually did cheat will just entrench in their positions, forever convinced that he was guilty and that only some sort of shenanigans got him off. 
And to those who feel that way, I say "bugger off". As noted above, the chain of evidence was broken. None of these jokers would hesitate for a minute to use a broken chain of evidence defense if they were on trial, even if only in the court of public opinion. And as noted above, weird things happen to samples that aren't dealt with according to protocol. Ryan Braun did not test positive; a sample of Ryan Braun's tested positive under circumstances that rendered that test invalid. 
There's a whole other debate to be had on this, over the fact that Braun's results were leaked in violation of MLB's CBA with the players' association, a fact that conveniently gets overlooked in the supposed greater good of "finding cheaters". But that's a topic for another time. What matters now is that somehow, the system creaked to a conclusion in accordance with its own rules. It didn't get there quickly, and it didn't get there painlessly, but it got there. And that, more than any positive test, means that the system is working. Short-sighted zealots my decry this as Braun setting up a blueprint for cheating the system***; wiser heads will realize that preserving the accuracy of the testing process is more important in the long run.
And some of us do still remember the long run.








*Many of these same writers were ready to run Kemp out of LA on a rail the year previous for being "lazy" and "a clubhouse cancer" and so forth. Funny how that changes.
**Just so you know, Law and Order doesn't actually get that stuff right all the time.
***Step one: Cheat. Step two: find bike messenger too dumb to read the posted hours at Kinko's. Step three: PROFIT!

Get Those Bums Outta Here

It's telling that the biggest story around NC State basketball this season does not have anything to do with, say, their new coach. Or the continued gelling of players like C.J. Leslie, or their epic collapse and near miss at Duke, or, really, anything to do with NC State basketball. Instead, the one thing that's gotten the Wolfpack any kind of national play - and the first national attention they've gotten since the foofaraw wherein one particularly insensitive dolt of a columnist compared the then-vacant State coaching job to Khloe Kardashian - involved the somewhat irregular ejection of two notable Pack alumni, Tom "Googs" Gugliotta and Chris "I Now Hawk Mortgages on Local Sports Talk Radio" Corchiani, from last weekend's game against Florida State. Apparently the ref didn't follow proper procedure in asking that the two gents - whom everyone swears were innocently spectating - be booted from the building, possibly as a result of the fact previously, he had followed procedure and the desired results had not been achieved.
Whatever. I don't know what Gugliotta and Corchiani were saying or not saying, and I don't particularly care. No matter how just or unjust their ejection might have been, neither of those guys was on the court. On the court, the Wolfpack was getting its head handed to it by an eminently beatable Florida State team, even though State desperately needed one more signature win to cement their NCAA tournament status. And on the court is where things theoretically matter. It's all well and good to get excited over stuff like this, but the fact that more heat is being generated over what happened to a couple of guys who last suited up when the Raleigh Bullfrogs were a going concern than about the actual team. Better to focus attention and discussion on the guys who are on the court, and then maybe, just maybe, ESPN and company will notice more than the sideshows.

Burnett In Yinzerville

(Contrary to popular belief, only one of this blog's authors lives in Pittsburgh, and it's not the guy writing this post)

After two often ugly years, it looks like the Yankees have finally divested themselves of A.J. Burnett. He's going to Pittsburgh, along with $20M of a $33M contract, in exchange for two low-level prospects and the chance to not have A.J. Burnett pitch for the Yankees any more. The deal makes sense on a lot of levels. Burnett, his gutty playoff performance notwithstanding, was clearly done in New York. The fans and the media had turned on him, and his inconsistent performance wasn't what a pennant contender in the Boston/NY/Tampa/Toronto crab boil needed. Getting him out of the rotation and even partially off the books is a win. At the same time, Pittsburgh gets a guy who, regardless of anything else, is durable, and can set up at the front of a rotation that could generously be called "interesting". And, away from aforementioned crab boil and in the cozy confines of the NL Central - home to toothless lineups in Chicago and Houston - and in a pitcher's park, Burnett should experience what, at least superficially looks like a Comeback Player Of The Year-worthy season.
This will, of course, cause Yankees fans to go berserk. Roughly half of them will pillory GM Brian Cashman for trading Burnett away "just as he was getting good", and the other half will resurrect the spectre of Ed Whitson, sneeringly dismiss Burnett as "another guy who just couldn't make it in New York", and then go back to obsessing about whether Derek Jeter is the greatest player ever, or just the greatest Yankee ever.
You know. The important stuff.

Wakefield Retires

Yesterday, veteran knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield announced his retirement from baseball. Wakefield pitched in the big leagues for almost two decades, piling up 200 wins and a double fistful of big moments for both the Pittsburgh Pirates (yes, he pitched long enough to have been there back when the Pirates were relevant) and the Boston Red Sox. Wakefield was also the lone standard-bearer for the knuckleball for many years, soldiering on when many heirs apparent to this noble art (Charlie Zink, anyone?) fell by the wayside. All in all, not a bad career for a minor league infielder who switched to pitching after hitting roughly .195.

And, true to form with all things Wakefield-related, Jason Varitek couldn't handle it, and the announcement rolled all the way to the backstop.

About This Lin Fella

The great and interesting thing about Jeremy Lin is not, contrary to Darren Rovell's belief, that he is Asian. It is not that he is effusively Christian a la Tebow, it is not that he went to Harvard, it is not even that he was an Economics major and thus amuses my wife (whose background is in econometrics). It is not that he was an undrafted free agent, that he was cut twice, that he spent time in the D-League earlier this year while the Knicks struggled with All of these are wonderful angles to fill a few column inches and spark sports radio call-in debates with, but they're missing the point.
The great and interesting thing about Jeremy Lin is that he is the only remotely great and definitely interesting thing about the New York Knicks this year. The great and interesting thing about Jeremy Lin is that he plays basketball like his hair - all his hair, not just the stuff on his head - is on fire. The great and interesting thing about Jeremy Lin is that, in a league dominated by boring-ass isolation plays where one star runs around and four teammates stand and watch, he attacks the rim like he's a starving zombie and the backboard's made of brains. The great and interesting thing about Jeremy Lin is that he is actually fun to watch play basketball.
Is he great at it? His one transcendent game against the Lakers notwithstanding, no. He is certainly talented, but let's take it easy before we anoint him the second coming of Oscar Robertson. Nobody who turns the ball over as much as Lin does keeps up this kind of run for long. He's a good player who's had a good few games after he fell into the perfect situation - playing for a coach who loves to push the ball, has no other point guard alternatives, and who has his two big scorers sidelined with injuries. Of course he was going to get his shot, and to his credit, he took advantage of it. But it's only been a few games. It's been a few games without Carmelo Anthony, who's got the same relationship with the ball that Wallace and Gromit have with cheese. It's been a few games when opposing coaches haven't had game film of Lin playing against anyone except Dartmouth, and opposing players haven't decided that the way to make a name for themselves is to shut down the guy everyone's talking about. In short, he ain't seen nothing yet.
Mind you, as a casual basketball fan, I hope the Linsanity continues. I hope he adjusts and elevates his game, and that Anthony and the Knicks continue to make use of his talents. And I hope that for the simple reason that he's fun to watch. No other reason, no more complicated explanation, no ham-fisted attempt at socioeconomic analysis by guys who are trained to report on high ankle sprains are necessary.

Further evidence that I'm right about Alex Morgan

Excerpted without further commentary from http://www.ussoccer.com/News/Womens-National-Team/2012/02/US-WNT-Defeats-New-Zealand.aspx

Scoring Summary: 1 2 F

USA 0 2 2

NZL 0 1 1

NZL -- Hannah Wilkinson 49th minute

USA – Alex Morgan (Megan Rapinoe) 88

USA – Alex Morgan (Abby Wambach) 90 + 3

A Great Catch

My wife used to be a baseball fan.
More specifically, she was a Cardinals fan growing up. She discovered baseball during the Whitey Herzog era, growing up in Missouri, and she was a fan of Ozzie and Willie McGee and Vince Coleman. She watched games, and she listened to night games on the radio as she was going to sleep.
Then Whitey got canned, and eventually Tony LaRussa came in, and she stopped being a fan. She'd watch baseball with me on occasion, and she'd occasionally come to the ballpark, and she was always happy to have my fantasy league run its annual draft out of our home (roughly once every four years), but she wasn't a fan any more. She could admire a great catch or a drop-off-the-table curve or a long home run, but that was pretty much as far as it went.
The last straw came this off-season; she'd said many times that the one thing that could get her to come back would be if Tony went bye-bye and Jose Oquendo got the managerial job instead. She was a big Jose fan growing up, and we once spent a very pleasant evening watching the documentary about the attempt to get Jose into the Hall of Fame. Putting Oquendo in the manager's chair would be a way for her to get back to the Cardinals of her youth, the team she loved and the way they played. And when they hired Mike Matheny instead, she emailed me with "I GIVE UP. GOING TO BECOME A PHILLIES FAN INSTEAD!!!"
She didn't, of course. Some lines can't be crossed. But a funny thing happened the other night. She came in while I was watching some countdown show or other on MLB Network - the 75 Greatest Catches That Probably Didn't Involve An Infielder Not Running Into The Stands, or some such - and she got into it. A Robin Yount diving layout? Junior going over the wall to rob someone? Tony Barron's face-plant*? And of course, all the Ozzie Smith plays. "I saw that game," she'd say. Or "I listened to that one on the radio."
And maybe, for a few seconds, she was a fan again.






*Most of the catches involving Phillies seemed to involve people doing bad things to their faces. See also: Rowand, Aaron.

The Toronto Raptors...

...are not good. I mean, really, really not good. OK, I'm just a casual NBA fan, but I watched a Raptors game the other night at a sports bar in downtown Toronto, and I noticed the following things:

• I was the only one watching the game.
• I had no idea who anyone - and I mean anyone - on the Raptors was. I mean, OK, I had vague memories of Ed Davis from his one season at UNC, but I thought a DeMar DeRozan was the sort of car Lamont Cranston drove. And a quick check reveals I don't know who any of the guys on their D-League affiliate are, either. Lots of directional Kentucky schools there, that's all I'm saying.
• They do a lot of running around and being surprised at where their teammates end up on offense. Look, I'm not the sort of guy who can sit down and diagram the subtleties of the Triangle offense, but it's pretty clear when the guy with the ball looks up, looks at where his teammate is supposed to be, gets a look of "what the hell?" and then starts looking around wildly to make sure they haven't all left the court like there's three seconds left and they're playing Florida State, something's gone wrong. 
• That happened about half the time. The rest of the time, they stood around and watched the aforementioned Mr. DeRozan, who did his noble best to win the game all by himself.
• When the Washington Wizards make it look easy to dissect your defense, you don't have a defense.

I know their best player's out. But it's rare to see a professional sports team not owned by Peter Angelos or coached by one of the Ryan brothers that looks that genuinely disorganized in play, whose players look so surprised to see what their teammates are doing, and whose genuine effort get frittered away in a million different directions. I'd love to see them do well, if for no other reason than that their logo has fossils in it, and I'm all about any kind of fossil that blogging under the name "Murray Chass". But damn, right now, it's hard to watch.

What's a Sixer, Anyway?

Back in those heady days when everyone was scrambling to get ready for the truncated NBA season, the conventional wisdom on the Philadelphia 76ers went something like this:
"They're young and they play hard, and Doug Collins won't burn out until next year. But they didn't add any stars in the offseason, so they're screwed."
Now we're roughly a third of the way through the schedule, and the Sixers have one of the best records in the league. They're efficient, they play defense, and they run fresh legs out there for all 48 minutes, and the end result so far has been a lot of wins. Yes, they've played a home-heavy schedule thus far, but you have to win the home games, too, and they've been doing that at a pretty impressive clip. No, they didn't add any stars, but it looks like they've figured out how to use the guys they've got - the Thaddeus Youngs and Spencer Haweses of the world - in ways that let them succeed, instead of trying to force them to be players they're not.
Maybe it's an illusion. Maybe the rest of the league will catch up to them. Maybe the lack of a go-to shooter (besides mugger-defeating sixth man Lou Williams) will do them in. Maybe they'll just run into their bete noire, Miami, too early in the playoffs. It doesn't matter. They've been winning and they've been fun to watch, and for the first time in years Philly fans are excited about the Sixers.
And they've proven one other thing: there's more than one way (i.e. spend lots of money) to get better. If you've got good young players, emphasis on the young, there's a good chance they'll be better this year than last. Sometimes, that little bit of improvement year to year adds up, especially when it's coming from the Evan turners and Jrue Holidays and Jodie Meekses of the world. Good young players can get better, if you coach them and you let them, and you don't demand perfection immediately or ship them out. Sometimes, that's all it takes.

NFL Hall of Fame

Real quick -- there were people on local sports radio this afternoon suggesting that this Super Bowl loss might somehow reduce the chances of Brady and Belichick reaching the Hall of Fame.

This is utter nonsense.

Look, I hate the Pats. But even I know that nothing short of an O.J. Simpson-esque rampage is going to keep either of those two guys out of the Hall of Fame.

Move on.

Watching Super Bowl 45 With Dad

I caught more of the Super Bowl this year than I thought I would. My connection out of LaGuardia - an iffy proposition on the best of days - ran late, and I got a few minutes of long-distance viewing of a monitor showing the second quarter as I waited, and waited, and waited a bit more for the chance to board.
Last year's game, I watched in a hotel bar in Dedham, Massachusetts. I was up there with my father on some family business. Winter wasn't screwing around, not last year, and much of our evening had involved pushing various cars out of various iced-up parking spaces on a cul-de-sac in Jamaica Plain. Dad had done great violence to his MCL, though we didn't know that yet. We did know that we were tired, and dusty, and bone-deep exhausted. So I drove us through the slush and the snow back to the hotel. We showered, cleaned ourselves up as best we could, and went down to the hotel bar for dinner. No restaurant there, just a bar that served food, and a room that got made up for breakfasts. Five or six televisions, though, and we positioned ourselves where we could both see one, ordered steaks and drinks (diet soda for him, a beer for me), and took our time.
The next day, he could barely walk, and business made us climb way too many flights of stairs. But that was the next day.
Behind us, at another table, a fistful of Russian businessmen were trying to take in the game. The intricacies of football weren't quite intuitive to them, so one of the waiters basically spent the entire evening camped out at their table, explaining the complexities of down and distance, and the cover-2, and why many people consider Ben Roethlisberger to be a douchebag. They got some of it, I'm pretty sure. Enough to enjoy the game. Which, ultimately, is what mattered.

Yinzer-free Super Bowl Pick

God, I hate the Patriots.

So does (almost) everybody around here ("here" being western Pennsylvania).

It's not just that they knocked the Steelers out of the playoffs several years running. It's not just Spygate*. It's not just that their most zealous fans are jagoffs (a Pats fan and former neighbor named his dog "Bruschi"). It's not just the lack of sportsmanship that leads them to run up the score against inferior opponents.

It's all of that.

Giants by 3**.

* Read this article on Scott Pioli's behavior after coming to the Chiefs and tell me that the Patriots aren't still cheating in every way they can manage. Is this the behavior of a man who expects his opponents to operate fairly?

** Not that I'm going to get to watch it live; I'm coaching three youth futsal*** games this evening.

*** this

Unscientific Ranking of Most Popular Topics at Super Bowl Week

1. Peyton. Peyton Peyton Peyton
2. Rob Gronkowski's ankle.
3. Will this game make Tom Brady the greatest quarterback ever? (No.)
4. Will this game make Bill Belichick the greatest coach ever? (No.)
5. Peyton. Peyton Peyton Peyton Eli Peyton.
6. Gosh, Indianapolis is nice.
7. Is Eli better than Brady?
8. Peyton Peyton Peyton. Irsay Peyton.
9. Hey, Madonna's older than she was in 1986.
10. TEBOW!
11. Peyton Peyton Redskins Dolphins Peyton.
12. Wait. The Giants are playing in this thing, too?

On Filtering From the Comments Section

There's a particular kind of commenter on sports blogs who's got a very clear idea of what posts do and don't belong on a given blog. (We don't have any of those here, of course. We barely have any commenters at all, but we love the ones we do.) They'll carefully read stuff that, by title alone, is guaranteed not to interest them, just so they can then comment that this particular post doesn't belong. Advanced cases will generally phrase these posts with "Normally I love your work, but-". Hardcases prefer, "I thought this was a [name of sport] blog, not name of thing they disapprove of]". Often there are proud announcements that because of this one post which they perceive to be off-topic, they're leaving the site (most of whose content they appear to like) and never, ever coming back.
The latest incarnation of this particular sort of bloggy puritanism is over at Hardball Times, where bloggers are getting roasted for following the Brian Cashman pajama bottom story. They feel, and they may be right, that it's not a baseball story; Craig Calcaterra and DJ Short and the folks who write for the site feel that since Cashman is the GM of the Yankees it's baseball-related and they'll put it out there for folks to see, which is also a reasonable position. What's not reasonable, though, is the attempt by a few people to deliberately work themselves into a lather as an excuse to try to dictate content.
Hey, kids, here's an idea instead. See the title of a post you don't like, don't click through and read it. Then, you don't feel morally obligated to point out how offended you are by it, and the folks who are interested can read and discuss it in peace. You get to concentrate on the part of the site you like, and everyone wins.
Or, to put it another way, if you've got six things on your plate at the local Chinese buffet but you hate seafood, there's absolutely no reason for you to go get a double handful of crab rangoon and then bitch about how since you don't like 'em, they shouldn't be served. Your reaction to any given bit of posting is appreciated, not required, and the choice not to read something is just as the choice to read it.
And really, everyone ends up happier that way. Even Brian Cashman.