I read a lot of stories about the Giants getting cold feet about Carlos Correa and the free agent stud shortstop bolting to the Mets in a somewhat unprecedented fashion, but I think our local fav, Grant Brisbee had the best piece about it.
First of all, and despite the group text, the Giants backing out at the 11th hour on a Scott Boras player does NOT mean the Giants will never sign a Boras-represented stud player…just ask the Mets about that. Something very similar happened recently, or – as Brisbee points out – about as similar as you’ll find to the Correa/Giants ordeal.
The Mets had a stud represented by Boras, got nervous about the medicals very late and backed out from signing him. Granted, Kumar Rocker was a draft pick (not a free agent) who couldn’t just sign with another team – a very key difference, one that comes with compensatory picks – there are a lot of pertinent similarities.
Per Brisbee:
This is relevant to your interests because of the obvious connections. It’s not just a Boras client; it’s a Boras client and the Mets. And it’s not just a draft pick gone wrong; it’s an exciting player getting yanked away from the fans because of a physical. The team couldn’t really respond how it wanted to, which made for asymmetric warfare with the most talented agent in the history of the game. The fans were alienated and bitter.
It’s not a completely identical situation, but it’s as close as you can possibly get, and it happened about 16 months ago. It’s both amusing and uncanny how similar these stories are.
But it’s more relevant to your interests because the long-term effects didn’t include an inability by the Mets to work with Boras. It didn’t affect the Mets’ ability to attract future free agents. Whatever negative vibes they irradiated their fans with went away as soon as the team started winning and spending money. Agents have a short memory. Players have a short memory. And while it doesn’t feel like it right now, fans have a short memory.
I needed that, Brisbee!
But Brisbee doesn’t let the Giants off the hook that easily. They may be taking a measured approach to major investments, but a measured approach won’t pan out with the big-time free agents. The market is set by illogical spenders.
Makes sense in a world without irrational actors. Except that’s not the world we live in. In this world, Steve Cohen takes the X-ray of Correa’s ankle and eats it, piece by piece, before swinging away on a vine and screaming, “Let’s Go Mets!” The Giants will always lose to someone like that. And Boras isn’t going to hold their hand while they figure it out.
And later:
This is a team that needs Screw It, and it needs it in abundance. This is a $3 billion franchise that’s being run like it’s a ward of McKinsey & Company. Hey, it might mean better short-term profit margins for the ownership group, and that kind of reasonable, sensible approach is pretty safe for the owners. But that doesn’t mean it will be entertaining for the fans, and baseball happens to be an entertainment business. Bryce Harper would sure be entertaining, but there wasn’t enough Screw It to get him here.
TOB: Phil wrote this prior to the morning of Christmas Eve. That is significant because another bomb in this story dropped just before we were set to publish:
This news certainly puts the Giants’ decision in a new light, doesn’t it? I can’t exactly say I told you so, but while I was pretty upset about losing Correa, I did want to see how the Mets’ physical went. Here’s an exchange on Twitter between 95.7 The Game host Mark Willard and me. The first three are right after the Correa to Mets news broke and the last was after the Mets’ physical news broke:
I get that everyone needs to react. Everyone needs a take. And privately I was pretty angry. But publicly, before going on the record ripping a team for something like this, don’t you think someone like Willard (and so many others like him; he’s not unique in this regard) should wait until they have full information?
I also saw insane questions like this, after the Giants signed outfielder Michael Conforto to a 2 year, $36M contract (which he can opt out of after 1 year):
I’m not saying I’m happy with what happened with Correa – I’m very unhappy. But there’s a very obvious difference here: about $314 million dollars.
Like, come on. This is so stupid and reactionary. These deals aren’t remotely the same. There is very little risk in the Conforto deal. There’s a ton of risk in the Correa deal. People need to chill.
Why Sign ANYONE to a 10+ Year Contract?
I thought baseball learned its lesson about super long contracts. Do we not remember how this went for the Angels with Albert Puljos? What about Cabrera with the Tigers? The second half of those long-term deals did not go well, the franchise players did not bring with them a World Series title, and they became a milestone attraction (as in, “come see Albert Puljos chase 3,000 hits”). And yet, per ESPN, super long contracts are all the rage. What happened?
Alden Gonzalez and Jesse Rogers do a nice job dissecting the trend.
(1) Luxury tax is based off of the A.A.V. of player contract (average annual value), so teams can limit a contract’s impact on the books by stretching it out over a longer period of time. “The contracts for Correa, Turner and Bogaerts all rank within the top 15 all-time in total value — but none are within the top 25 in AAV.”
(2) Great players get to free agency at a younger age. Players are eligible for free agency after 6 years of MLB service time. For a long time, that meant almost all the players entered free agency in their 30s, after rising through the minor league. That’s no longer the case. 10-year contracts aren’t as scary when the guys signing them are in their twenties.
“The past three offseasons have seen a total of 581 players become free agents before turning 30, according to research by ESPN Stats & Information. If you go back nearly a decade, to the three-year span from 2012 to 2014, that number was only 182. The game, in essence, keeps getting younger.”
(3) The universal DH doesn’t hurt either when teams consider the back end of these contracts for position players (and only position players are signing long-term deals).
(4) Crazy rich owners going crazy. Plus, they think they are close. That’s why the Padres, Phillies, and Mets are spending money like drunken sailors, and whether they are smart or not, that crazy sets the market price for free agents.
As you read about these recent FA signings, whether your team got or lost guys, this is an interesting breakdown of why these crazy long-term deals for hundreds of millions of dollars are not as scary to some teams. – PAL
One of the great things about the modern age is that fans in the ground sometimes capture moments in time like this from these angles. Can only imagine some of the stuff people saw the likes of Finney, Eusebio. Maradona, Pele, Cruyff etc do from the stands. Glorious Messi. pic.twitter.com/0iQB9Z9skC
Oh, the silent majesty of a winter’s morn… the clean, cool chill of the holiday air… and an asshole in his bathrobe, emptying a chemical toilet into my sewer…
Last week I shared a story about the globalization of soccer on display in the World Cup. In short, the professional leagues in Europe are so rich and powerful, that their preferred style of play has influenced coaching and soccer instruction across the globe, all the way down youth academies. Additionally, the best youth players leave their homes at younger and younger ages to develop and play in Europe. Big picture countries have less and less of a stylistic identity to how they play the game.
With perhaps one exception, per Rory Smith and Allison McCann’s interactive story in The NY Times (Smith and teams World Cup coverage has been excellent throughout): Corner kicks.
Stuart Reid has been tracking corner kick strategies for some time now, and he’s found that countries have trends when it comes to corners.
Per Smith:
The more corners he has dissected, though, the more he realized something. Soccer is now a resolutely globalized game. Ideas spread around the world in the blink of an eye, transmitted almost instantaneously along well-worn trade routes. And yet one area remains relatively untouched, and still proudly, defiantly local. Reid can, sometimes, tell where a team is from just from the way it attacks or defends its corner kicks.
There are practical explanations for quite a lot of soccer’s most enduring clichés. Northern European teams, for example, may well traditionally play a more direct style than those from the south of the continent because their fields tended to be wetter, muddier and generally less suited to an artful passing game.
Climate, average height of players, offensive and defensive philosophy (zone vs. man), and more: when it comes to corner kicks, a national soccer identity can be found.
There’s much more to the story, with really excellent graphics to show the different approaches. Excellent read! – PAL
The first time I read this story, I thought, “Wow, talk about bad luck.”
Camille Herron broke a record for a 100-mile run. Months later, it was revealed that the course wasn’t quite 100 miles in length. It was 716 feet short. A race director made a slight change to the course made three years prior for safety reasons. After Herron broke the record, the course was re-measured, and that’s when they found it coming up short.
Tough break. And that’s where I was going to leave it, but then I re-read the story, and I think this story – and how it’s told – is a good example of how we consume stories much of the time. A crazy tidbit and not much more. A quick nugget we can pass along in conversation.
But George Ramsay didn’t give us the basics beyond the headline (or maybe his editor cut it):
What world record did Herron break? A women’s record for 100-mile, the overall world record. What record? I assume it’s the overall world record, but it’s never flat-out written.
What was the safety hazard that caused the change to the course 3 years ago, and why in the hell wouldn’t race coordinators re-measure the distance after making a change to the course?
(To a lesser degree) Would her pace have been enough to break the record even with the extra 716 feet (don’t know – 200+ yards in a minute after 99+ miles of running is a pretty good clip)
Big picture: this lady ran 100 miles to break a record, only to have someone make it all for not because they didn’t measure the course. But the story stops short on several basic points that would flesh out this story beyond a headline. We got the who and the what, but it’s pretty light by way of the why, and how. Interesting story to share in terms of how we write about news, very little in the – PAL
What the hell? On November 5, Darrick Minner fought Shayilan Nuerdanbieke. Anyone close, knew Minner had a knee injury leading into the fight. Bets came flooding in on Nuerdanbieke winning in the first round, which he did.
It was clear folks had inside info. A bunch of betting sites stopped taking bets on the fight, the line swung pretty wildly within hours, and investigations were launched pretty quickly.
Minner’s trainor for the fight was James Krause. Krause used to fight, and bets on a lot of fights, which was somehow OK in the UFC until now. Krause also had a UFC gambling podcast, and said that he bets on every fight.
If it seems like a blatant contradiction that someone with such a direct hand in manufacturing the outcome of fights would be allowed to bet on the results of those fights, well, the UFC finally agrees with you. After the promotion allowed this sort of thing for years—a loophole that led to grim headlines like “UFC Fighter Who Bet and Lost on Himself Gets Cut on His Birthday”—UFC Chief Business Officer Hunter Campbell sent a memo to the roster in October announcing that “fighters, training teams, family members, and others that have access to inside information” would no longer be allowed to gamble on fights.
I can’t believe something so stupid was going on in the UFC. Of course, as Patrick Redford points out, finally banning such practices won’t stop trainers and fighter from betting on fights, especially when the fighters earn such a small percentage of the cut.
UFC fighters are not unionized, get only a 16 percent revenue cut as of 2019, and don’t have real healthcare. If a fighter on the fringes of the roster only makes $22,000 for appearing in a fight, that is not nearly enough to stop them from taking a dive and earning more money doing so.
We all know that a league can get into trouble real quick as soon as viewers question the validity of the outcome. We’ll see how a relatively young professional league handles it. – PAL
This week, The U.S. Men’s National Team finished second in its World Cup group, advancing to the Round of 16. This was, for most observers, what was expected. Although it was by no means a guarantee, anything less would have been seen as a failure. Is this fair? I don’t know. Lots of very good teams have suffered a worse fate this World Cup (Germany chief among them). But the U.S. has advanced out of its group in 3 of the last 4 World Cups it played in, so we have come to expect it. And while this is a very young U.S. team (average age approximately 24), it’s also the most talented U.S. team ever. So they met the expectation. But what’s most exciting is how they did it.
In their first game, they dominated Wales in the first half. The goal they scored was brilliant, with a great through ball from Christian Pulisic to Timothy Weah, ending in a calm and smooth finish for the 1-0 lead.
Wales was desperate in the second half, but the U.S. still largely controlled…until the U.S. committed a dumb foul in the box in stopped time, allowing Gareth Bale to bury his penalty. The U.S. had what felt like a sure victory turn into a bitter draw.
Four days later, the U.S. played England. England is considered far deeper and more talented than the U.S. But you wouldn’t have known that watching the game. The U.S. controlled the game, particularly in the midfield, with Weston McKennie, Tyler Adams, and Yunus Musah flying all over the field. Pulisic had a shot hit the crossbar and England had a couple near goals, but the game ended 0-0. This time, the draw felt like a win. Here’s what the Ringer’s Brian Phillips said to sum that game up:
I don’t care all that much that they didn’t win the game. (I do care that the U.S. remains undefeated against England at the World Cup.) I care that they played their hearts out and looked their best on the biggest possible stage. What’s the secret to happiness that particle physicists are hiding from the rest of the world? Maybe the answer lies in the nature of the particles themselves. Maybe some particles are just fun. Maybe some particles are simply a thrill to look at. Maybe one glance at these joyful particles is enough to put anyone in a happy frame of mind.
Isn’t it the same, after all, when you watch a soccer game? Sometimes you watch two evenly matched teams and one of them somehow has an extra dash of energy, flair, pizzazz, boldness. They’re not better, exactly, but they’re freer. They’re more fun. They’re carbonated water and the other team is tap. They’re a hot air balloon and the other team is a Toyota Celica. They’re Wario and the other team is Toad. These are the joyful particles, and when you watch them, you get to experience, for 90 minutes, the bone-deep happiness that particle physicists apparently feel all the time.
Did the match change anything? Well, yes and no. No, in the sense that the U.S. will, more or less as expected, have to beat Iran on Tuesday to qualify for the knockout rounds. England, meanwhile, just has to avoid a four-goal loss to Wales. I’ve been seeing reports that non-soccer fans were bored and disappointed by this game, which is understandable —it’s tough to turn on a heavily hyped sporting event the day after Thanksgiving, see a scoreless draw that doesn’t dramatically alter the larger competitive landscape, and not feel a little let down. You probably have to be a longtime fan-slash-nerd to be deep enough in the context to get it.
And if you were, then you could see that yes, the match did change something—or at least had the potential to do so. It had the potential to change the identity of this team. We’ve been an untested, inconsistent, ambiguous proposition for a long time. Now we’re a team that can hang with England at the World Cup. Maybe we lose to Iran on Tuesday and the England game turns out to be an anomaly. But maybe it’s the start of something.
The U.S. had two points, trailing England (4) and Iran (3) heading into its finale against Iran on Tuesday. The U.S. was in an unenviable position – needing a win against a team that only needed a draw. Iran could sit back on defense, crowding the box and frustrating the Americans, knowing that they didn’t need to score to advance out of the group and send the U.S. home (again). The game began much like the Wales game. Here’s Defector’s Billy Haisley:
Probably the first step to being a great team is believing you are a great team, and the U.S. came into Tuesday’s match dripping with self-belief. Once again the Americans put together an excellent first half. The U.S. played confident, domineering soccer, zipping the ball around the pitch, gashing Iran down the flanks with scything runs from fullbacks Sergiño Dest and Antonee Robinson, and all around playing like a team that knew it would win. Pressure on the Iran goal built steadily, almost inevitably, throughout the first half hour.
If the U.S. seemed energized by the prospect of achieving the victory it needed to advance to the knockout rounds, then Iran seemed nervous about losing the draw it needed to go through. The Iranians defended decently but couldn’t plug all the holes the Americans were constantly ripping into their defense from all sides. Even when they had the ball themselves, Iran hardly ventured forward in the first period of play, and they didn’t take a single shot compared to the U.S.’s nine first-half attempts on goal.
When the game started, I badly wanted an early goal. At the 11 minute mark I said to myself, “It’s early. There’s still time.” At the 25 minute mark I said, “It’s early, there’s still time.” At the 35 minute mark I began to panic internally: “We cannot be scoreless at the half I can’t take it. I can’t take Algeria 2010 again.” And then, magic:
Watch that play slowly. Pulisic begins his run before McKennie has even lofted the ball across to Dest. Then, as he sees Dest rushing onto the ball, he turns on the friggin afterburners, beats two defenders, and finishes. What a run by Pulisic. What a ball by McKennie. What a pass by Dest.
The second half was excruciating, as Iran was desperate for a goal. Though they had a few chances that had me gasping, they never got it. The U.S. held on and advanced.
The U.S. was the better team in all three games it played, which is something we are not used to saying. Here’s Haisley:
Rooting for a national team of the U.S.’s caliber is sort of a funny thing. The team isn’t (yet . . . ?) good enough that fans can rightly demand passage into the World Cup knockout rounds and expect a win or two there, nor is the team bad enough that any old performance at a World Cup is good enough. Where you place expectations, then, and what constitutes success or failure, isn’t always clear.
The only thing you can really ask of a team like this is progress. Markers of progress aren’t always found simply in the team’s record in big tournaments, and to accurately assess the USMNT’s status, it’s important to have a holistic view that takes into account things like the number of European-grade players the country is producing, the leagues and clubs the players play at, the roles they have there, the national team’s performances outside World Cup play, and, yes, granular things like a gorgeous technique on a shot or neat passing and pressing sequences within important, maximally competitive matches.
That’s the great thing about this USMNT. The progress of these players is right there before your eyes, in the clubs that sign them and the transfer fees they command and the in-game gestures and actions they’re capable of and even the draws and wins they earn in the World Cup. The USMNT has grown so much that it’s already manifested in the results the team gets where it matters most. American fans can trust that now, and can enjoy the ride watching how far they can take it. Because if you thought this team was good, you’ve just been proven right.
So, what’s next? The Netherlands. A big name with some very good players. But this is not the Netherlands of 2010, with Robben, Sneijder, and Van Persie. They are beatable. And this U.S. team can do it. -TOB
PAL: Damn, I wish this team had a finisher up top. I think it was on the Bill Simmons pod that I heard them analyzing the team, and one of the points stuck out: having young legs in a tournament played in the desert is not a bad deal, especially against an older team like The Netherlands. I takin TOB’s angle from the Iran and applying it here – we need a first half goal, because I think we have tendency to run out of gas at that 60-70 minute mark (before the subs come in). And yes – I used “we” multiple times this response. Let’s go!
Beam Team Comin’
The Sacramento Kings have wandered through the desert for most of their existence. The team arrived in Sactown in 1985-86 and made the playoffs just twice in its first 13 seasons, losing in the first round both times. There was then an 8 season Renaissance of sorts, with the team peaking from about 2001-2004, where they finished 3rd, 1st, 2nd, and 4th in the Western Conference, the apex being the 2002 season, where they were robbed of an NBA title by crooked officiating.
Since the 2006 season, though, it’s been all desert. 16 seasons. Zero playoff appearances. Only twice in those sixteen seasons did they even finish 10th in the Western Conference. They’ve had terrible owners, terrible management, and twelve mostly terrible head coaches (12 in 16 seasons!). They’ve had a few good players, but not enough to make the team competitive or even entertaining.
Last year, the team was kinda fun, with point guards DeAaron Fox and Tyrese Haliburton leading the way. But the team still stunk and Fox and Haliburton, as good as they were, didn’t seem to mesh. The team made a deadline deal sending Haliburton and Buddy Hield to Indiana for Domantas Sabonis. I was PISSED. Haliburton was looking and continues to look like a superstar.
But something funny has happened over the last month of this early season. Everything is clicking in Sacramento. After an 0-4 start, the Kings righted the ship and then reeled off a 7-game win streak. It was their longest since 2004. And they didn’t just beat up on cream puffs. Victims included the Lakers, Nets, Spurs, Grizzlies and oh yeah – the Warriors. They put up 153 (!!) on Brooklyn.
And it wasn’t just the wins. The team was fun. They still aren’t defending a ton, though they’re better than last season. But the offense is electric. Fox and Sabonis are unleashed. Kevin Huerter, Malik Monk, and Terrence Davis are bombing 3s. By the end of their streak, their offense for the season was the most efficient in the entire NBA, and in fact the most efficient ever.
Kings fans, who have been wandering the desert in search of a cup of water for 16 years suddenly felt as though they’d been dropped into a 5-star hotel’s pool. Text messages among my friends are flying back and forth nightly. We friggin deserve this and we’re enjoying every minute. The fans are bananas.
the energy at these Sacramento Kings home games could power a continent.
My buddy Murph lives about 4-5 miles away from the arena and can see the beam from his house. It’s the coolest thing. Check Kings Twitter after a win and you will see the beam memes out in force. It’s cool as hell and it’s really fun again to be a Kings fan, which is hella tight. -TOB
Assessing a World Cup
I had to write about this article separate from my other USMNT story, because it didn’t really fit into it as a narrative. But I really enjoyed the article and in particular this passage about how thin the margins for error are in a World Cup and why those razor-thin margins make it difficult to assess a World Cup performance:
The trouble with assessing a World Cup campaign, whether in real time or in hindsight, is that four years of work boil down to the smallest margins: a bounce here, a runner not tracked there, a foul not spotted, a sprint started a fraction too early or too late, a ball that does or doesn’t cross the line by an inch.
If Clint Dempsey’s shot doesn’t squeak through Rob Green’s arms and trickle over the line against England in 2010, it’s entirely possible the U.S. doesn’t survive the group stage. It certainly wouldn’t have if Donovan had not summoned his last reserves of energy and made a trailing run in extra time against Algeria. Donovan’s goal produced an iconic moment in USMNT history, something of an inflection point for the sport stateside.
If John Brooks doesn’t head home one of his three national team goals late on against Ghana in the USMNT’s opener four years later in Brazil, the Yanks never make it out of the group. Conversely, if Chris Wondolowski gets just a little bit more of his right foot around a ball dropped into his path by Jermaine Jones’s header and gets the shot on target, the Americans likely beat Belgium to reach the quarterfinal.
If a referee’s whistle rings out in Ulsan, South Korea, when Torsten Frings clearly blocks Berhalter’s close-range effort from going into the goal with his hand, the Americans surely reach the semifinals at the 2002 World Cup. Then again, if the USA doesn’t eke out a win over Portugal and a tie with South Korea in the group stage, it would have exited early.
If. If. If.
Those three World Cup campaigns were all remembered as successes. They very nearly weren’t. But they also could have yielded more glory still. These are the margins at this unforgiving tournament, at this fickle and cruel mega-event.
This young United States men’s national team learned this lesson the hard way the past 10 days. They had their chances for a win against Wales. Against England, too. They could have had this thing sewn up before playing Iran but had to settle for ties instead. Their vulnerability felt acute during several moments against Iran as the USMNT desperately defended a 1-0 lead.
If—that word again—any of Iran’s chances make it into the American net, this golden generation is suddenly a disappointment. Instead, they have been certified as 48-carat.
This is a really great point. I often think about that Wondo miss against Belgium. What is the present of American men’s soccer if he buries that easy goal and the U.S. makes the quarterfinal by beating a then-Soccer World super power?
1-2-3 SPORTS! 