It doesn’t feel like an overstatement to say Ichiro Suzuki is the Michael Jordan of Japan. He rents out stadiums to train. There are signs at every table of his favorite restaurant demanding no photographs. The Japanese press has covered his every move for his 26 seasons of professional baseball. At 44, Ichiro is prepping his last tour of MLB. While he looks to extend his career (Ichiro has previously said he wants to play until he’s 50), his time is about done, so Wright Thompson attempts to look back at the obsessive rituals that have both made Ichiro a Hall of Fame player as well as perhaps a trapped individual.
The story is long, and completely worth your time. Thompson knows how to paint a picture, and there are so many fascinating nuggets throughout, including:
Japanese culture in general — and Ichiro in particular — remains influenced by remnants of bushido, the code of honor and ethics governing the samurai warrior class. Suffering reveals the way to greatness. When the nation opened up to the Western world in 1868, the language didn’t even have a word to call games played for fun. Baseball got filtered through the prism of martial arts, and it remains a crucible rather than an escape. (end)
He could choose the best players in Japan to help him but he doesn’t. He doesn’t need to get better at swinging a bat. What he needs, and what he seems to find in this rented stadium, is the comfort of the familiar, a place where he knows who he is supposed to be. (end)
These stories are funny individually, but they feel different when taken as a whole. Like nearly all obsessive people, Ichiro finds some sort of safety in his patterns. He goes up to the plate with a goal in mind, and if he accomplishes that goal, then he is at peace for a few innings. Since his minor league days in Japan, he has devised an achievable, specific goal every day, to get a boost of validation upon completion. That’s probably why he hates vacations. In the most public of occupations, he is clearly engaged in a private act of self-preservation. He’s winnowed his life to only the cocoon baseball provides. His days allow for little beyond his routine, like leaving his hotel room at 11:45, or walking through the lobby a minute later, or going to the stadium day after day in the offseason — perhaps his final offseason. Here in the freezing cold, with a 27-degree wind chill, the hooks ping off the flagpoles. The bat in his hand is 33.46 inches long. He steps into the cage and sees 78 pitches. He swings 75 times.
Up close, he looks a lot like a prisoner. (end)
His relationship with his father has defined him, for better or for worse. Ichiro has been in pursuit of baseball perfection since he was three. He’d had a baseball routine for 40+ years, and anyone who knows him wonders if he’ll be able to stop.
And while Ichiro and his father are not currently on speaking terms, Ichiro is still in some ways under his father’s thumb, or, as Thompson more eloquently puts it, “Ichiro now does to himself all the things he resents his father for having made him do.”
While there are some questions left open in this story, of which I’m sure TOB will address, this is one hell of a read. – PAL
TOB: Maaaaaan, do I love Ichiro. This story was sad, though; it’s not only a portrait of an aging ballplayer, seeing the end of the road, with no plan for life after baseball (Ichiro has previously said, “I think I’ll just die,” when asked what he’ll do after his career), a story we’ve seen before. It’s also, as Phil said, a portrait of a man who made it to the very top of his sport, after a lifetime of obsession with doing so, by sticking to the same routine, day after day after day. Ichiro did so to the point I have to wonder, as a person absolutely unqualified to say this, not just whether Ichiro has OCD, but how severe and debilitating his OCD might be. And it’s also the story of a father and son, and how the father more or less robbed the son of his childhood by forcing him into these routines, day after day, not letting him play with friends or be a normal kid, only to have it create one of the greatest baseball players ever. And it’s about how, despite that success, the son resents the father for it all, even while continuing those same routines to this very day.
And as sad as that all is, there are some fantastic Ichiro nuggets in here, as always. For example, Ichiro’s former teammate, Mike Sweeney, tells a second-hand story about an unnamed professional baseball player strolling through Central Park one day with his wife. The player saw a man in the distance, throwing a baseball 300-feet, and hitting balls against the backstop with the “powerful shotgun blast of real contact familiar to any serious player.” Curious, the player got closer, only to discover Ichiro, on an off-day, getting in his reps.
Or this one:
The Yankees clubhouse manager tells a story about Ichiro’s arrival to the team in 2012. Ichiro came to him with a serious matter to discuss: Someone had been in his locker. The clubhouse guy was worried something had gone missing, like jewelry or a watch, and he rushed to check. Ichiro pointed at his bat. Then he pointed at a spot maybe 8 inches away. His bat had moved. The clubhouse manager sighed in relief and told Ichiro that he’d accidentally bumped the bat while putting a clean uniform or spikes or something back into Ichiro’s locker, which is one of the main roles of clubhouse attendants. “That can’t happen,” Ichiro said, smiling but serious. From that day forward, the Yankees staff didn’t replace anything in his locker like they did for every other player on the team. They waited until he arrived and handed him whatever he needed for the day.
I will be sad when Ichiro retires, and I was very happy to hear the news that he had signed with the Mariners this week. I died laughing at this tweet, which shows Ichiro arriving in Seattle for the first time back in 2001, and again this week in 2018.
— Seattle Times Sports (@SeaTimesSports) March 7, 2018
It shows not only the vagaries of fashion over the last nearly 20 years, but it also shows a young man, grown into an old man, and all that entails. I hope, whenever he retires, Ichiro doesn’t “just die” as he suggested. But for now, as Wright Thompson says, Ichiro is like the rest of us: “out there, hungry for a chance to keep his routines in motion.”
1-2-3 Sports! Exclusive: An Interview With Gregg Popovich
This week, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich. “Pop”, as he’s known, has been the Spurs coach for 23 seasons, leading them to 5 NBA titles. He is a sure-fire Hall of Famer, one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time. Pop is also increasingly outspoken on social issues, including having been especially outspoken about President Trump, including calling Trump a “soulless coward” last year. 1-2-3 Sports! had the opportunity to speak with Coach Popovich in San Francisco this week. The conversation is reproduced here, in full:
TOB: Hey, Coach.
Popovich: Hey.
Unfortunately, Popovich is a busy guy. But we hope to find more time with Popovich soon. -TOB
PAL: Dammit, TOB; you have to ask Pop about wine. Make up some brand and ask him about the odd years, e.g., How about DeLillo’s 2011 cab, Underworld, from Paso Robles, eh?
See that? I literally looked at the bookshelf and made up a wine.
I need you thinking, TOB. I’m not roaming the streets of downtown San Francisco anymore. I need you at the top of your game, dude.
TOB: Hey, I’ve seen what he does to people who ask stupid questions:
I played it safe. Wisely.
How Are Jon Lester’s Yips Not A Bigger Deal?
No big analysis of a story here. I just want to pause to ask how the eff this isn’t a bigger deal? Jon Lester is top of the rotation pitcher for the Cubs, which is a serious contender again this year. Jon Lester can’t throw to first base. He can’t do a pick-off throw, and he has a hard time flipping it to first on the come-backer ground balls. He hasn’t been able to for years!
It would be one thing if Lester was a bust in the midst of a breakdown. He is not. As recently as 2016 he was 19-5. He’s been a serious factor for 3 World Series champions.
So we have a pitcher, which is the one dude in the game of baseball who pretty much always has the ball, who can’t throw 40 feet in one direction while making $27.5MM in 2018 (including a signing bonus). It’s become so bad that he’s now intentionally throwing the ball into the ground:
What.The. Shit? How isn’t this a bigger story? – PAL
Breaking: Sports Media Narrative May Have Been Wrong
Shortly after entering the league, a narrative began to form around San Antonio Spurs’ superstar Kawhi Leonard. The narrative centered around the fact Leonard doesn’t speak very much. Many joked that Leonard was a basketball robot; quiet, hard working, tough, talented: the Perfect Spur. But this season has been a peculiar one for Leonard. He’s been dealing with a quadriceps injury that has caused him to miss all but 9 games. More curious, the team has cleared him to play, but he won’t. There have been rumblings this season that Leonard has grown disgruntled with the Spurs, feeling perhaps they are trying to rush him back from his injury, especially concerning for Kawhi because he’s just over a year away from free agency, where he will make a lot of money, but less so if not healthy.
More recently, things came to a bit of a head. ESPN’s Jalen Rose reported that Leonard, the Perfect Spur, wants out of San Antonio. Then this week there were reports that Leonard turned down an extension offer from Jordan Brand, reportedly worth more than $20 million over 4 years. Suddenly, things doesn’t look so functional in San Antonio, where things have been functional since at least the late-80s, when they drafted David Robinson.
This was all enough to prompt the Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor to wonder if the Spurs’ dynasty is finally over. We thought they were done when the #8 seed Grizzlies knocked them out of the first round in 6 games waaaaaaaay back in 2011. Nope. We thought they were done when they (kinda) collapsed in the Finals against the Heat in 2013. Nope. They won the title next year. We thought they were done when Duncan retired before last season. Nope, they were the #2 seed last year and made it all the way to the conference finals. But this feels different, and if Kawhi really does want out, there’s just no way they can rise from the dead of that one.
But this finally brings to my point. Kawhi’s unhappiness has many in sports media kinda shocked because he’s not the basketball robot they had made him out to be. He’s a real human, with real emotions, and just because he doesn’t talk to them, it doesn’t mean he’s an emotionless machine who cares about nothing but winning basketball games. Rightly, the man wants to get paid, so he shouldn’t rush back before he’s ready, and he should get as much money out of shoe companies that he can. And no one should be surprised about that. -TOB
PAL: Who will be Leonard’s main employer? Who will pay him more: a shoe company or a NBA franchise? As good as Leonard is, he is not a part of pop culture like LeBron, Durant, Harden, and Curry are, so I think his primary employer will be an NBA franchise, i.e., he’s not getting more than 20MM a year from a shoe company.
Also, this might be a point in time where speaking up might help. If the notoriously quiet all-NBA player still feels he’s injured while the Spurs have cleared him to play, then he should speak up. If he doesn’t, then he risks being seen as a wimp to whom the Spurs are currently paying $18.8MM per year so he can personal concerns ahead of the team.
Of course he wants to get paid what he’s worth, but this is not a Tim Lincecum situation when he was winning back-to-back Cy Young awards while making 400K and 600K in those years. Leonard is undervalued, but not to an alarming degree…especially if he’s missed all but 9 games this year with an injury he’s had in the past.
Is he pissed because he feels the team is rushing him back, or is he pissed because LeBron is making almost twice as much as him? If it’s the latter, then moving forward he should follow LeBron’s lead and sign short-term deals and bet on himself while maintaining flexibility.
Video of the Week
That was a shot, right?
PAL Song of the Week: Night Ranger – “Sister Christian” (no fireworks)
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Draymond Green is good at basketball (11 ppg, 8 rpg, 7apg) on a great basketball team but he also drives me crazy with his antics. He is constantly complaining to the refs, sometimes cheap-shotting opponents, and one time he may have cost his team an NBA title. Along with David West, Green brings a real edge to a supremely talented, kinda soft, team.
All of that is to say that I have mixed feeling about the dude. However, I appreciate how he settled his bet with Evan Turner. Green went to Michigan State, and Trailblazer Turner went to Ohio State. The two had to settle a Big 10 bet after the Blazers thumped the Warriors this week.
Evan Turner comes calling for his $100 mid Draymond Green interview after Ohio State's win over Michigan State and gets his money!! pic.twitter.com/z1qIps4Ma4
TOB: Well, I have no mixed feelings on Draymond – I unabashedly adore him. I’m with you on this exchange, though. A man who timely pays his $100 bets, in cash, is a classy human being, and one worth being friends with.
Ya Boy is Back!
Brian Sabean, architect of three Giants World Series winning teams, along with one other pennant and three other division titles. He’s a Hall of Fame GM. But following the 2014 World Series, he was placed into somewhat of an emeritus status with the team – “promoted” to Executive Vice President, while his longtime assistant Bobby Evans was promoted general manager, in charge of the day-to-day activities. Things have been…less than smooth. Though it’s not clear that much of this is Evans’ fault, the Giants quietly announced this week that Sabean will return to more of a day-to-day role, and the Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly reports that the final word on decisions will be Sabean’s. So, see a lot more of Sabean in his box seats, and I can recreate this.
When your team nearly loses 100 games, you’re looking for any thread of hope to hold onto. I’ve gotten a few threads this offseason, and this is another. Let’s go, Sabey Sabes! -TOB
Look, I’m sorry. I know we’ve covered Steve Kerr a lot. But he keeps doing things worth discussing. This week we got a Kerr double whammy. First, in an attempt to connect to his team who he says is tuning him out a bit, Kerr let the players run the huddles in their game against the (terrible) Phoenix Suns.
The players seemed to love it, as did every normal human being. There was, of course, some backlash. A couple Suns players called it disrespectful. A few coaches reportedly didn’t like that Kerr was showing coaches are unnecessary. And the usual media suspects took the opportunity to make some #hottakes. But, by and large, Kerr’s move was praised, rightfully so. Most coaches are simply not secure enough to do this, and it was pretty cool to watch.
Later in the week, our country endured yet another horrific mass shooting. This time at a high school in Florida. Seventeen people were killed by a former student. Kerr, who has grown increasingly willing to speak out about politics, was asked about the shooting and had this to say:
This shouldn’t be hard at all, and yet here we are – nearly 20 years after Columbine, and nothing has been done. Hell, things have gotten worse. I lost hope on this topic after Newtown, when dozens of five year olds were killed. Five years old. And not a damn thing changed. But Kerr is right, there is something we can do. It’s a strange world we live in when an NBA coach is more eloquent and makes more sense than our politicians. -TOB
PAL: I’m now seriously considering if Kerr might be thinking about a life in politics after he’s done coaching.
“Where Were You When Oddvar Bra Broke His Pole?”
How is a folk hero made? That’s the question David Segal’s trying answer in his dissection of Norway’s version of “Miracle On Ice”.
So here’s what happened:
A man named Oddvar Bra is skiing the final segment of the men’s 4×10-kilometer cross-country relay at the 1982 world championships in Oslo. Surging up a hill, he passes and sideswipes the only person ahead of him, Alexander Savyalov of the Soviet Union.
Immediately, Bra realizes that the impact has had a terrible consequence. His right pole has snapped in two.
“Let him get a pole, man!” shouts the sportscaster for what is then Norway’s only national TV station.
As if on cue, someone in the crowd bolts into view and hands off a pole. His equilibrium restored, Bra battles Savyalov in a sprint to the finish line.
Let’s recap. A guy breaks a ski pole and keeps racing. Not exactly the moon landing, is it? And to be clear, this isn’t a come-from-behind story. Bra was actually leading after he broke his pole, because contact had knocked Savyalov to his knees.
Also, Bra didn’t win, at least not outright. After staring at an image of the finish for about an hour, the judges decided that he and Savyalov had tied for first.
There’s a statue of Bra in Norway for not losing. He’s a folk hero, and there are specific ingredients that must be used to create the perfect folk hero for the land he or she represents. Bra has all the prerequisites for a Norwegian hero:
Bra’s from the country. “To be a folk hero in Norway, you need to grow up on a farm and you need a country accent,” said Thor Gotaas, who is writing a biography of Bra and who studied Norse mythology as a student. “Norwegians don’t trust people from the city. They like people who have struggled, people who have suffered.”
Nordic Skiing is the Norway’s specialty. Their folk hero should be a Nordic Skier, obviously.
Bra’s a man of the people. He refused to race on skis that were manufactured outside of Norway.
He overcame adversity: Bra was winning national titles, but for years world championships and Olympic gold eluded him.
What’s also very cool about this story is how different the story would be interpreted from the perspective of a Soviet back in the day. Same details, very different feel. Their guy got knocked down. The Norwegian aggressor broke his pole, only to have a fan give him a new one, mid-race. Your guy then overcame the obstacles, got back on his skis and chased down the Norwegian with a last-second sprawl.
This one’s worth your time, folks. Beautifully written, funny and peculiar. – PAL
Yup, another Hall of Fame article, but Lindsey Adler revealed something to me that I’ve never considered: the steroid era in baseball is a finite chunk of time. The current drug testing and punishments were put into play in the spring of 2006, meaning for steroid era is thought to have begun in the late 80s and ended in the 2000s.
Right now we have the same arguments about Bonds, Clemens, and the others every time voting comes up. But that time will end. According to Adler, it will end with Alex Rodriguez (how perfect). He will be eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2022 and will be the last candidate to have become a star and put up Hall of Fame numbers in the sport’s doping era.
If Rodriguez lingers on the ballot for the maximum 10 years, it will have been more than a quarter century since Mark McGwire’s first appearance on the ballot opened the era in which we now live, in which Hall of Fame debates are largely exercises in anguished handwringing. His candidacy, of course, went nowhere for 10 years; he never even got close to the requisite 75 percent of votes for induction. He spent the first few years of his campaign floating around 20-ish percent, then fell each year by a few degrees until he received only 12 percent of the votes for his final year on the ballot. His campaign went nowhere again when the Today’s Game Era committee rejected him in 2017—the same year they voted in Bud Selig.
Let’s set aside whether or not you or I think Bonds or Clemens should be in the Hall of Fame for a paragraph. Adler is right that by keeping them out the voters are ignoring not just the players, but turning away from generation of people around my age. Our generation knows there were no more famous players than Clemens, Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa. Manny at the plate during the playoffs was a scary thing. These guys defined an era. There’s no way around it, and ignoring them blurs the a large chunk of time in the game the Hall looks to preserve. The steroid era was an incredibly exciting time in baseball.
Should Bonds, Clemens and the rest be inducted? To me and induction feels like a celebration. I don’t know if we need to celebrate these guys. They will be remembered, and they ought to be. They will be considered some of the greatest, whether they are inducted or not. But do they need a bust? Is that what’s required to confirm they were outstanding? At the moment, it seems obvious that the answer is no. What about in 100 years?
They are a part of baseball’s story and the chapters they helped author are some of the most vivid to a massive generation of baseball fans. Cooperstown would be smart to start thinking about how it addresses the steroid era. Ignoring is not the answer. – PAL
Four people voted FOR Clemens and NOT for Bonds. FOUR. That is INSANE. There’s more circumstantial evidence that Clemens took steroids than Bonds. Clemens’ trainer admitted he injected Clemens. Bonds’ trainer never did. Bonds is arguably the greatest hitter who ever lived. At least top 2. Clemens is probably in the Top 5-10 pitchers. Bonds could be an ass, but many who covered him daily have said he was complicated and could be warm and charming. I’ve never heard Clemens described as anything but an asshole. If you are voting for Clemens, there is ZERO reason to not vote for Bonds.
I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: Aaron, Mays and every other great player from that era has admitted to taking amphetamines to get their energy up and improve performance. Why is one performance enhancing drug ok, and another is not? And most importantly: guys like Hank Aaron were faced with a choice: take a PED or not. They took it. It’s asinine to think they’d be faced with a different PED and say, “No, amphetamines are where I draw the line. I have principals.” It was a different era and a different environment.
By the way, here’s newly inducted Hall of Famer Jim Thome as a rookie:
Huh. Whaddayaknow. He looks a little skinnier there than he did later in his career, doesn’t he?
Even his head. Oh, I guess because the two major steroid investigations happened to be centered around Bonds’ trainer and Clemens’ trainer, the Steroid Stink isn’t on Thome, huh? Which is not to say I think Thome shouldn’t be in. He should! Even if he took steroids. But we have NO idea who took steroids and who didn’t. And keeping people out who you THINK took steroids is unfair, when plenty more who got away with taking steroids without the whispers will make it in. As Buster Olney said this week:
It's as irresponsible to say that a player 'did it clean' as to say, without proof, that someone used PEDs. Because reporters can't know who was clean and who wasn't. You can only say 'He was never implicated' or 'He was never linked.'
Are the Warriors Hungry Anymore? Are They So Good It Doesn’t Matter?
Bruce Jenkins has been around. He’s been a sportswriter for the SF Chronicle since 1973. He’s covered some of the greatest athletes in sports history on a daily basis – Montana, Rice, Bonds, among others. Sports journalism today tends to be long. That can be engrossing, but in the wrong hands it is often meandering. But Jenkins is from the old school: Have a point, get to it, and get out, in 800 words.
This week Jenkins used his skills to ponder the Warriors’ weekend loss at the Houston Rockets. Jenkins ask the question, point blank: Having won 2 titles in 3 years, does Curry, and by extension the entire Warriors team, have the hunger required to win the title this year? Jenkins takes a quick tour of NBA history – exploring the greats who had that hunger, won, and were later usurped by players whose hunger had not yet been satisfied. For example, Magic and Larry begat Isaiah who begat Jordan. Early on, Curry struggled – first with injuries, then with losing to the Spurs in 2013, and the Clippers (even amidst the Donald Sterling scandal) in 2014, before breaking through the last three seasons. The team seems to at times float through games, confident they can shoot themselves back in it whenever they feel like it. And that’s usually true.
But the Rockets have that hunger. They have that Jordan 1991 hunger. Harden and Chris Paul have that Isaiah 1989 hunger. As Jenkins says, “But the Warriors are not hungry. Not yet. There’s an unsettling tedium to the season so far….The Rockets are coming, and they are famished.” I can’t wait for that series. -TOB
PAL: Don’t love to agree with TOB, but he’s right. Jenkins nails this with precise efficiency. I was just talking with a coworker on Wednesday about the Warriors. Savio and I would check in after every game the following morning. We’d know who had a big night and who didn’t. We’d if Steph was getting careless with the ball or not. This year we agreed that we’ve been “keeping an eye on them” and we’ll get back into it during the playoffs. The Warriors and their fans are not nearly as hungry this year, and – yeah – I’ll be tuning in if they play the Rockets in the playoffs.
You Know It When You See It
There have been a lot of stories about the Hall of Fame voting in the past week, but I think this one is my favorite. Perhaps the best Hall of Fame test is your initial reaction when you realize someone is being considered for the first time. Here’s a sampling of some dudes up for voting this year and my reaction:
Billy Wagner: That’s funny. No.
Fred McGriff: Great nickname – Crime Dog – but how did he manage to have such an ugly swing from the left side? I think he got to 400 home runs, right? No Hall of Fame.
Edgar Martinez: I mean, I guess.
Trevor Hoffman: I can’t argue it, but never impressed me. How come relievers aren’t held to the same harsh, part-time player, dig as designated hitters like Martinez are held to?
Vladimir Guerrero: Absolutely.
It’s that ‘absolutely’ that sits at the heart of David Schoenfield’s article. Turns out, Vlad’s numbers aren’t quite the making of an “absolutely” reaction.
He appeared on 92.9% of ballots. To be honest, Guerrero’s Hall of Fame résumé isn’t as cut-and-dried as that percentage might suggest.
He finished with 449 home runs and 2,590 hits, falling short of those automatic career milestones. His career WAR of 59.3 isn’t slam-dunk territory and isn’t even the best for a right fielder on this ballot (Larry Walker is at 72.6 and Gary Sheffield at 60.3). His run of dominance extends only 10 seasons, from 1998 to 2007. He was a terrible postseason performer, hitting just two home runs in 44 games. Heck, Jeff Kent, a second baseman, has more lifetime RBIs and is tracking at only 12 percent of the vote.
But he’s a no-doubter in my mind, and in the mind of 92% of the voters this his second year on the ballot. I agree with Schoenfield when he says Vlad’s damn the torpedoes approach to the game, and his backstory, planted him favorably in the minds of baseball fans across the country. Not a lot of players capture the imagination of a national audience, especially players that spent a good chunk of time in Montreal. To watch him was to watch a talent that was too great to mess with and reign in. My favorite anecdote pretty much sums it up:
In Jonah Keri’s book on the Expos, “Up, Up and Away,” he tells the story of when Guerrero was first called up to the majors in 1996. Manager Felipe Alou called the coaches together. “I’ll never forget that meeting as long as I live,” said Jim Tracy, who was Alou’s bench coach. “Felipe called the staff into his office. And with that deep-ass voice of his, I heard this message: ‘Leave him alone.’ That’s what he said. ‘There’s going to be mistakes. The ball’s not going to be thrown to the cut-off man early on. His plate discipline is going to be very raw at best. Leave. Him. Alone.'”
There’s so much back and forth around who belongs in the Hall and who doesn’t. There’s aura and there are the numbers. This was a fun, articulate argument about a player’s aura, and that represents the side of baseball I like to think about most. – PAL
Counter-Point: Edgar Martinez is a No Doubt Hall of Famer.
I have a counter-point to your Edgar reaction above. Perhaps because he played his entire career on the West coast you didn’t get to see him much, but he was fantastic. Everyone remembers Griffey tearing from first to third in the 1995 ALDS to beat the Yankees, but it was Edgar being Edgar, tearing a double down the left field line that allowed Griffey to score.
Edgar Martinez had a 12 year peak that rivals most hitters (Non-Bonds Division). Which brings me to my pre-emptive argument: Many argue Martinez does not belong in the Hall of Fame because he was almost exclusively a Designated Hitter, and thus played, not even half the game…he made 4-5 plate appearances a night, and that was it. But so what? The Designated Hitter, as stupid as it is, has been the rule for nearly fifty years now. Moreover, as Emma Baccellieri points out, do we ever keep a Hall of Fame-level hitter out of the Hall of Fame because he was atrocious on defense? No. I’ve literally never heard someone say, “Well he’s one of the greatest hitters to ever play his position, but he was such an awful defender. Defense counts, too, so he’s out.” By not being a negative on defense, Edgar helped his team on defense more than a terrible defender does. Edgar is close (70.4%) this year. I expect he’ll make it next year. -TOB
When your new boss pays you $100 million, you use his barber.
Tonya Harding Was This Close To Being A Real Life Rocky
Funny story: A few weeks ago Natalie and I were having dinner with a couple friends and Tonya Harding’s name came up. Our friends chuckled. Natalie asked, “Wait, who’s Tonya Harding?”
If you ever wanted to know the difference between being 28 years old and 35 years old today – Natalie’s question is as precise an indicator as you’re ever going to find.
For those of you older than Natalie, I don’t need to tell you who Harding is (and for the young folk, here’s the gist of the story). The feature film I, Tonya, released back in December (I haven’t seen it yet) profiles the person at the center of the most famous Olympic scandal, so it makes sense for Taffy Brodesser-Akner to meet up with Harding 23 years later. I like how she went about a profile about a person who is trying to leave her past behind while still clearly bitter about her past.
Let’s start with the name. Tonya Price. She recently married and took her husband’s name. For a serious reporter, Bodesser-Akner has to be accurate. Her name is Tonya Price, and so she really should refer to the skater by her current name. But this is a story about Tonya Harding. Tonya Price is also Tonya Harding. It turns out the name confusion is actually a perfect metaphor. “This is basically how this entire story goes,” Bodesser-Akner writes. “There are facts, and then there is the truth, and you can’t let one get in the way of the other or you’ll never understand what she’s trying to tell you.”
Price/Harding goes on to tell her version of the Tonya Harding story, and it’s a grim one. This lady did not have it easy. A very poor, abused, tiny, but powerful skater trying to upend a sport that essentially judges on feminine grace. But for perhaps a broken skate lace, Harding might very well have won gold, and all of a sudden hers is added to the pantheon of great american underdog stories. Rose up from nothing to win a gold medal in a stodgy, beauty pageant sport of figure skating. However, the lace did break, and she was found guilty of not reporting that she knew who did the deed on Kerrigan’s knee (Price still insists she only knew after the assault). The underdog story vanishes, all the scrapping and grinding – all those values we love to associate as somehow uniquely American – they will never be associated with Harding.
Over drinks in Washington, Bodesser-Akner wants to hear Price’s version of the story, and she gets it. The writer’s final take:
Here’s the thing: A lot of what she said wasn’t true. She contradicted herself endlessly. But she reminded me of other people I’ve known who have survived trauma and abuse, and who tell their stories again and again to explain what had happened to them but also to process it themselves. The things she said that were false — they were spiritually true, meaning they made her point, and she seemed to believe them.
…Here is something I’ll never understand, that you can be sitting across the table from someone who certainly did something bad, who appears to show no remorse for it and you can still feel the oxytocin rush of love and sympathy for her.
Interesting read, especially for us over the age of 28. – PAL
TOB: Longtime readers of the blog will not be surprised that I rooted for Tonya Harding over Nancy Kerrigan. At 12 years old, I didn’t even know the emotional and physical abuse she endured – I just saw the crap she took from the sports media and was drawn to her as the underdog. After the attack I was lukewarm, but still didn’t like Kerrigan. I felt vindicated when her infamous Disney World video surfaced.
This was your darling, America!
Anyways, I watched the 30 for 30 documentary about the whole thing, and it was pretty sad. I read this article, and it’s also sad. Tonya Harding/Price has certainly been treated unfairly, and poorly, by many people in her life. But as Phil notes, she’s unable to move on. I haven’t seen I, Tonya yet, but I am happy that Tonya liked it, and felt her story of abuse was finally told, even if others see the movie in another light.
Bill Simmons Should Retire
This morning, Bill Simmons posted his thought on last Friday’s Seth Wickersham article on the reported inner-turmoil with the New England Patriots. Simmons’ take is bad. It was so bad that I postponed our post and quickly wrote this up. As he did on his podcast, Simmons argues that many points in the Wickersham story shouldn’t be believed because they were “denied”. Oh, ok. The principals of a big story deny the veracity of the details and therefore the story is necessarily false? I take biggest issue with the following, though:
I know someone who spent time with Kraft last weekend; Kraft was more dumbfounded by the story than anything.
We couldn’t afford to keep both of them, Kraft kept saying. Why is this so hard to understand?
Let’s unpack this. First, Simmons uses an unnamed source, something he complains about in Wickersham’s article. In the same moment, he attempts to use his connections to give himself some authority. Then he quotes Kraft, without actually quoting him, and uses this “quote” to refute the report that Kraft ordered Belichick to trade Garoppolo. But does it, really? All that it actually says is Kraft was dumbfounded because they couldn’t keep both of them, and why can’t people understand that.How does that refute that Kraft was involved in a personnel decision? Doesn’t it more likely support Wickersham’s report? Other reports say Garoppolo was offered a large extension. If Belichick is in charge of player personnel decisions, that means he made the extension offer to Garoppolo. But if Kraft said they couldn’t afford both Brady and Garoppolo, then doesn’t it follow that Kraft vetoed Belichick’s attempt to keep both of them, and Kraft ordered the trade?
Simmons also draws a terrible comparison to Kraft allowing Belichick to bench his “beloved” Drew Bledsoe in favor of 6th round pick Tom Brady, and allowing Belichick to release or trade other players, like Jamie Collins. That comparison is laughable. First, Bledsoe got hurt, and wasn’t available until the playoffs, and by that time they were on a roll with Brady. Second, Bledsoe never won a Super Bowl. Brady has won five. You think Kraft felt the same loyalty to Bledsoe as he does to Brady? No. Kraft has said Brady is like a son to him. Brady has said Kraft is like a second father. You think Brady is like Jamie Collins, Simmons? Get outta here, man. Seriously, it’s time to retire from writing. You’re rich and lazy. Your writing is lazy and dumb. You’re so far from objective that it’s painful. -TOB
One of the greatest things about baseball is that you can never run out of time. You can and will run out of chances, if you don’t make good on them, but you can never say, “Geeze, things might have been different if we had more time.” 27 outs. That’s what you get. That’s what the other team gets. Theoretically, a baseball game could go on forever. A team could simply never make 27 outs. But there’s another way a baseball game could go on forever – extra innings. Again, theoretically, a baseball game could go on forever, as long as neither team leads after each complete inning after the ninth. It’s sort of wild when you think about it, and that brings us to this great Sam Miller article.
Sam opens the article by invoking the great Eli Cash:
On Sept. 5, Hanley Ramirez flared an 0-2 fastball into shallow center field. Toronto Blue Jays center fielder Kevin Pillar charged in but couldn’t catch the ball, and Mookie Betts — who took off almost on contact — raced home from second to score. With that bloop single, Ramirez and the Boston Red Sox won the longest game of the 2017 season, after 19 innings, 544 pitches and exactly six hours of play. What this article presupposes is: What if they didn’t?
What follows is an excellent exploration of the stages players, and fans, would go through if a baseball game went 50 innings. My only issue is this – the game he chooses to piggyback off of is a regular season game. Though it had some playoff implications, it’s still just 1 of 162 games. What I want to know is how MLB, and the networks, would react if a playoff game went that long. In the regular season, the players, managers, and even the league may eventually decide to call it a night and come back the next day. But in the playoffs? In the World Series? In a Game 7? What do they do?
In Game 2 of the 2014 NLDS, the Giants and Nationals played 18 innings, in a game in D.C. It was a day game (well, it was day here), and Phil and I watched the game at McTeague’s, a bar here in SF where we watched most of the Giants’ 2012 and 2014 playoff runs. I’ll never forget the bewildering and disorienting feeling walking out of the bar after the game and realizing it was still daylight. I’ll also never forget the intensity of every single pitch in the bottom half of innings 10 through 18. With one swing, the game could end.
MLB was lucky it was not a later game. Many MLB playoff games begin at 7pm, even 8pm EST. That game lasted 6 hours and 23 minutes, and it was on a weekend. Imagine it was a Tuesday night, and began at 8pm EST – it would have ended at almost 3 am. What would MLB do in that case? What would they do if it went another 6 innings? Miller’s article points out that, unlike in prior eras, MLB no longer has a curfew. The current record holder for longest MLB game in the modern era is a 1984 game between the Brewers and White Sox, but that game was paused due to curfew, and later resumed. Would MLB stop a playoff game and resume it later?
And what of the long lasting effect on the clubs? In a playoff series, it would almost certainly be a pyrrhic victory. You might win that game, and even the series but it’s going to so thoroughly screw up your bullpen and your rotation going forward that you’d have no shot in later rounds (of course if this happened in the World Series, there’s no such concern).
The other interesting aspect of this is the long term effect of the players themselves. Miller invokes what he calls the Something Important phase of an extremely long game. The Something Important phase is where fans and players realize that history is in the making (which I buy wholeheartedly, after having sat through that 18-inning Giants game mentioned above – very few things could have dragged me away). Miller discusses a college baseball game from 2009 between Texas and Boston College. It went 25 innings. Texas’ closer threw thirteen innings of shutout ball. As Miller relates:
Around the 15th or 16th inning, Austin Wood, Texas’ senior closer, was approaching 100 pitches of no-hit relief. He approached head coach Augie Garrido: “Don’t you even think about taking me out of this game.” He would end up throwing 13 scoreless innings in relief, 169 pitches, a performance that can only happen if the limits of the game get so badly extended that unthinkable possibilities can fit within them. “When a player breaks through to that level, it changes his life,” Garrido said at the time. “… Now he knows something not many people know: You really can be anything you choose to be. … And if he gets a sore arm in the next 10 years, it’ll be my fault.”
And, was Wood’s career affected? You betcha.
“His professional career ended three years later, after shoulder injuries, and plenty of people think Garrido’s decision was unforgivable. Wood has defended Garrido, first by saying there was no connection between that game and his injuries, but ultimately concluding that it doesn’t matter if there was a connection: “If you offered me anything in the world, I don’t think I would trade it for the experience of playing in that game,” Wood told the Austin American-Statesman later. “It was that meaningful.”
Man. It’s hard to understand that statement. We don’t know that this game cost Wood his career. But he essentially says even if it did, he’d do it over again. 13 innings and 169 pitches are worth an entire MLB career? I wonder if he’d say the same thing had Texas lost.
Anyways, go read the article. It’s fantastic. -TOB
PAL: Such a fun read, folks. TOB nails the summary above, but one other comparison Miller provides is that of endurance dancing. It was a brief craze in the 1920s, and after watching some video on it, I concur with Miller: it’s the most miserable thing I’ve ever watched.
Also, TOB and I did not watch this game together (but we watched most of them at McTeague’s). I actually heard the Belt homer on the radio while sitting on a porch. Kind of cool to experience the greatest of baseball feats (game-winning playoff homer) over the radio. Thought the connected backyards, you could hear the neighbors all but jump up when he hit it, then lose it when it went over the fence.
Please Don’t Speak Ill of Canadians, Eh.
This is so damn funny. Some San Jose Sharks players were asked to name their least favorite road trip. Tomas Hertl, Justin Braun and Tim Heed all named Winnipeg, citing the fact that it’s cold, it’s dark, and the hotel wifi is slow. Honestly, that’s pretty inoffensive. Well, the prideful city of Winnipeg disagrees. The CEO of Economic Development Winnipeg was trotted out to correct these Sharks:
Spiring also noted the Sharks players have their facts wrong. Winnipeg is actually the second most sunny city in Canada with an annual average of 2,353 hours of sunshine, just below Calgary at 2,396. As for temperatures, Braun’s home city of Minneapolis is much the same as Winnipeg. Winnipeg’s average temperatures range between –12 C in the winter months to 26 C in summer. Minneapolis has an average of –9.1 C to 23.2 C. Hertl is from Prague in the Czech Republic, where the temperature range is –3 C to 25 C. And Heed’s home of Gothenburg, Sweden, where winter temperatures average –3 to 3 C and summer temps average around 20 C.
That’s super funny. But, I’ll allow the retort so long as it ends there. Oh, no sir. It will not end there. Winnipeg Jets coach John Hockeyguy stepped in to give the Sharks a little whatfor.
A great moment during Paul Maurice's media availability this morning. This was his answer when asked by @WFPJasonBell about the video of San Jose players complaining about #Winnipeg. A fantastic perspective from the coach. pic.twitter.com/Ofxu3yGE7G
The coach began by noting he hadn’t heard the comments. Perhaps a reason not to comment? Nah. Where’s the fun in that? Coach Hockeyguy then proceeds to lecture the Sharks players, and every player in the NHL, about how petty it is to whine about the cold and the dark and the slow wi-fi, when by god, they’ve got a good life.
PAL: I love when coaches insist they “didn’t read” the story on which they’re being asked to comment. They usually make it about 1.5 sentence before they can’t contain themselves, and they take a “where are we at in the world today” stance. Guys, you aren’t generals in a war. You’re not giving away strategic positioning. You tell extremely talented athletes when to go in the game and when to come out of the game. No one will think less of you if you admit that you’re keeping tabs on the insignificant details.
Real Worms Vs Fake Worms
This article crystalized what we’ve known for years: sports stories can be – and oftentimes are – created out of nothing. The qualifications to what makes a sports story newsworthy have become blurry at best. Most of our news is provided by companies that earn large chunks of their revenue from advertising. Advertisers want eyeballs and clicks-thrus, and stories that generated the most clicks will be reported and posted – newsworthy or not.
This is why you know LaVar Ball, father of Lakers rookie Lonzo Ball. LaVar drives clicks and eyeballs. He says crazy things in a bombastic tone. Like this:
This was not the first time LaVar said that. But let’s be honest, sports dads say some pretty absurd stuff, they just aren’t sitting on a TV set while saying it. He’s a dad. Dads are more or less crazy about their kids’ sports (TOB: Careful…). A dad’s commentary about his son’s basketball abilities hardly seems like news. But ESPN helped make it one, and they’ve done this before.
A few years back, our old pal John Koblin wrote a piece for this here website about ESPN manufacturing a sports story out of thin air. It began, in that case, with ESPN football pundit Ron Jaworski issuing the empty but hot-sounding statement “I truly believe Colin Kaepernick could be one of the greatest quarterbacks ever” (my, how times have changed!); other ESPN properties treated this statement as news and other ESPN pundits reacted to it, leading eventually to Kaepernick (then with the San Francisco 49ers and not yet famous for kneeling during the national anthem) being asked to comment on it, and ESPN treating his comments both as newsworthy in and of themselves and also as the basis for the weird meta-story that an ESPN employee (Jaworski) had said something controversial. The playbook for this sort of thing goes back farther than that, as Koblin noted—at least as far back as when the network staged its own phony intramural culture war over Tim Tebow and sustained, for whole entire years, the entirely fictional story that either Tebow’s football ability or his performative religiosity were matters of genuine controversy anywhere outside the folie à deux between ESPN and its own viewership.
On and on we go. ESPN’s take on vertical integration.
LaVar Ball is not new. He’s just the soup du jour, and we say, ‘Mmmm. That sounds good. I’ll have that.’ Here’s the playbook tailored to the Ball family. Note: LiAngelo just left UCLA (he was a freshman), and LaMelo was a junior in high school.
An ESPN reporter seeks out—in Lithuania!—a noted blowhard and wrings a controversial take out of him (despite the blowhard’s best efforts to temper and walk back that take pretty much as it is leaving his mouth). ESPN spends the following days performing air-raid drills behind it, spawning a succession of follow-ons: Lonzo Ball is asked to, in essence, choose between his coach and his dad, and his tepid choice of athlete-interview boilerplate itself becomes a story; hysterical NBA coach’s union president Rick Carlisle says ESPN has betrayed its covenant with the doofuses who donate ten seconds of distracted “gotta get stops” talk to its between-quarters interviews, and that’s a story; Steve Kerr has takes about ESPN devoting multiple reporters to the LaVar Ball Beat when it has laid off talented people who do actual smart work, and that’s a story. Walton cracks a joke about it in a postgame presser, and that’s a story.
Why is ESPN bankrolling this and shoving LaVar Ball in our face, day after day after day? We click on it. We watch their First Take segments, then listen to their podcasts that comment on the First Take segment, and…hell, I’m writing about this non-story at this very moment. The non-story is now a story about whether or not it’s a worthy story. It’s not like they have the choice to run highlights all day (we don’t use ESPN for that anymore).
For a company that’s gone through two rounds of layoffs in the past year or so they are fishing for the clicks. Instead of digging for worms, ESPN has been manufacturing plastic ones for years now. LaVar Ball will go away just as soon as he stops landing us fish. – PAL
TOB: Yes, thank you. It’s time we please stop the anti-Lavar backlash. ESPN is the problem! And here it is in a nutshell:
The Lakers have a problem now, in ESPN’s formulation. ESPN reporters think the Lakers must do a better job of preventing LaVar Ball from making, to ESPN reporters who follow him to Lithuania, stick a microphone in his face, and ask him for his opinions on issues related to his famous sons, statements that those ESPN reporters may then parse for their most incendiary content and package as inflammatory on ESPN’s various platforms.
Video of the Week
Everyone is talking about the Vikings around the watercooler these days. #BringItHome
The most successful athletes today – Tom Brady, Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo – are doing something the past greats never did: they have transcended eras. Lebron James’ has averaged over 25 points per game in 13 seasons (astounding), whereas Jordan’s dominance lasted 10 seasons.
Pete Sampras won his then record-breaking 14th Grand Slam at 31 years old, running on fumes, then never played again. This year, Federer (36) and Nadal (31) split the 4 Grand Slams. Nadal has 16 Grand Slams to his name, while Federer has collected 19.
You can see where this is going, and you can fill in the blanks for Brady vs. Montana, Messi and Ronaldo vs Maradona and Pele. There is no exaggeration when I say we are seeing individual feats in sports that have never been seen before, and it’s in large part due to the fact that athletes are performing at the highest level for much longer.
Does longevity tip the scale in LeBron’s favor in comparison to Jordan? Is Brady truly better than Montana, or has he just done it longer? Chris Almeida puts it this way: “While it’s clear that our standards for recovery and decline are being distorted, it’s unclear how this generation of athletes will change our comprehension of greatness.”
At the highest level, more time = bigger numbers, and so the numbers established by greats of past eras will fall by the wayside. But, as Almeida points out, greatness is not limited to addition:
For as strongly as greatness is linked with statistics and head-to-head matchups, those have never been solely what the concept is about. Greatness is about dreams and images, and in that respect Michael Jordan is something that no athlete who succeeded in 2017 — not LeBron, Serena, nor Cristiano Ronaldo — is: monolithic, spotless, mythic. He represents the model of dominance in sports as it’s always been understood.
I did NOT like this article. I considered a full-on Phil-Style Breakdown, but I’ll just say a few things:
This is NOT new. Medicine (of legal and illegal varieties), Medical Care, Nutrition, and all sorts of other ways athletes have learned to take care of their bodies, especially as the money in sports have soared, have had athletes playing at elite levels far later for the last decade or two. Saying 2017 is the year this broke through is a strong overreach.
Saying Derek Jeter was elite across generations? OH COME ON. It’s such a strange choice as an example and really took me out of the piece. Jeter was NOT elite for long, and baseball is not a sport where this is new. Jeter was above league average (I’m being generous here) for fifteen years or so, which has been the on the low end of the baseball standard for Hall of Famers for decades. Willie Mays, for example, was elite (not just above average) for just over twenty years, until age 40. DiMaggio was elite for thirteen seasons, until age 36, but he lost three seasons to World War II. His career began nearly eighty years ago. This is not new for baseball.
As I’ve said here before, I love Federer. But you’re not payig attention at all if you say, “There is no reason to expect a sudden decline.” A year ago, Federer looked possibly done. He took many months off, won two Majors, and then looked toast again. I would never bet against him, but don’t be surprised if he never wins another Major.
“[W]hat LeBron has already done is less interesting than what he seems to be capable of, or where he might harness those capabilities.” UGH. More overreach. LeBron has had an amazing career, and the fact he seems as good as ever is crazy. But does anyone think he’s going to get BETTER? He might ride his peak into an extended plateau…but up? I just don’t buy it. And if the argument is “what’s more interesting is how he might continue to do what he does at an advanced age”, ok, fine. Maybe if he sees no drop-off another five years, that’d be nuts. But it wasn’t long ago people argued LeBron looked toast (the 2015 Finals, for example). He’s human, and for elite athletes, the end often comes quickly.
I don’t follow tennis a lot, but doesn’t the staying power of Federer, Nadal, and the Williams Sisters speak more to how weak the generation behind them has been? Does anyone think Serena Williams now could beat Serena Williams at her prime? I sure don’t.
I also don’t get his point about men’s tennis and how it will change our perception of tennis greatness in the future. Even against their own peers – Federer, Nadal, and Djokovich sit 1-2-4 in the career Major titles list – that’s insane. Federer is a few years older, but more or less three guys from the same generation gobbled up every title for a decade or so. Yes, they are great. But it also seems like a very top heavy era, as opposed to anything to do with longevity.
“The most interesting part of Brady in 2017 is the idea of him excelling in 2022.” Stop saying that!
If it wasn’t clear, I did not enjoy this article.
Iron Sharpens Iron
Mike Davis once took the Indiana Hoosiers, an 8-seed, to the NCAA Tournament’s championship game, in only his second year as a head coach. So the man knows something about coaching winning basketball. His career never really took off after that early success, though, and he’s presently coaching at small school Texas Southern. The team is 0-13 so far this year. So, why are they a favorite to make the NCAA tournament? The answer is in the schedule. As they are finally set to begin conference play next week, here are the teams Tigers have played so far: Gonzaga, Washington State, Ohio State, Syracuse, Kansas, Clemson, Oakland, Toledo, Oregon, Baylor, Wyoming, TCU, BYU – 9 of the 13 were against Top 50 opponents. All 13 were on the road.
Wait, what? Davis believes in sharpening his team by playing tough, non-conference road games. He believes it gets his team ready for conference play, and thus a better shot at winning the conference and then making the NCAA Tournament.
Davis talks about the Tigers third longest home game winning streak in the NCAA as well as his scheduling philosophy #TigerNationpic.twitter.com/tHUvNO0Fs4
— Texas Southern University (TSU) Athletics (@TXSOTigers) November 9, 2017
It’s hard to argue – under Davis, Texas Southern has made the tourney three of the last four years. In fact, Davis says he will ALWAYS schedule all his non-conference games on the road:
Economics also come into play. In 2016, Texas Southern made $900,000 in paydays for non-conference road games. Meanwhile, as Davis puts it:
“To have a home game you’ve gotta pay the officials $4,000-$5,000. The people [working the scorers’] table are another $2,500. So in order to have a home game, we’ve gotta clear $10,000. We’re not gonna clear $10,000. And I don’t want to waste my time playing NAIA teams. If we play a lower team, nobody’s gonna come in and see that. The math is simple.”
Again, I can’t argue with that. Davis’ stated goal is to win a national title at Texas Southern. This seems crazy to me, but then again, Butler almost won a few years back, and who would have seen that coming? -TOB
This crowd has gone deathly silent, the Cinderella story, outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper and now, about to become the Masters champion. It looks like a mirac- it’s in the hole! It’s in the hole!
The “Cinderella” sports trope is well-worn, especially in college basketball, where an underdog team can catch fire for a couple days and become a big story for the tournament. But in football? College football? The blue bloods tend to win, and it’s very difficult to break in to that group. It’s so difficult, and there is so much money at stake, that coaches tend to be very conservative in their assistant coach hires. They spend big money to hire coaches who have proven themselves at the highest levels, or at least for guys who have proven themselves at a half-rung below. They have way too much money to lose if a hire goes poorly.
But Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy is not most coaches. First of all, he’s a man. He’s 40!
(No, I’ll never stop playing that in my head every time I see his face or hear/read his name, and we’re at the ten-year anniversary)
But Gundy set himself apart when he hired his current offensive coordinator, Mike Yurcich, in 2013. Gundy’s three previous offensive coordinators had been plucked away (all for head coaching jobs) after two or fewer seasons in Stillwater. Gundy was tired of the turnover, and decided to try to find a good coach at the lowest levels of football in order to engender some loyalty. So, he started looking on the internet:
Gundy went online and looked up offenses that excelled both with rushing and passing numbers. He then narrowed the search to no-huddle, tempo-based offenses similar to Oklahoma State’s. Next, he found coordinators who also coached quarterbacks. The last step, the trickiest, was identifying lesser-known coaches who might stick around even after successful seasons.
Gundy found Yurcich, the offensive coordinator for Shippensburg University, a DII school in Pennsylvania. It took some effort, but Gundy got some Shippensburg gamefilm. It took some more effort, and Gundy got ahold of Yurcich. The two met at a hotel in Pennsylvania, and spoke for three hours. The next day, Gundy called and offered Yurcich the offensive coordinator job for Oklahoma State:
“Mike, here’s the deal,” he told Yurcich. “I’m going to offer you the job, and I have a three-year contract that pays $400,000 a year.” Silence. Three seconds, four, five, six … Gundy worried that Yurcich had been caught in a snowstorm. “Are you there?” he asked. “Yessir.” “Well, do you need to talk to your wife?” “I don’t need to talk to anybody.”
Yeah, no kidding. I love this story. And to top it off, it has a happy ending. Gundy got a lot of flack for the hire, from fans and the administration, but he stuck to his guns. Yurcich has done so well he’s been in the mix for some head coaching jobs. Gundy seems happy for him, and vows to conduct a similar search when Yurcich does leave. Gundy doubts he’ll have much competition, as most coaches don’t have the guts to make such a hire. It’s hard to disagree. Also, I’m starting to think Gundy is a hell of an offensive coach. -TOB
PAL: Perhaps as important, let’s get an update on Gundy’s mullet. This thing has been going on for quite some time now. He just looks like a mullet guy, doesn’t he? This may have started as a joke, but it’s not any more. I mean look at him. Here he is in the week leading up to their bowl game against Virginia Tech. This is a guy that loves the 80s:
Is that a fake tan?
Here he was as a player:
I mean, this guy was trouble.
And here is the car I bet he has somewhere in his garage:
You can all but hear Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood blasting as he peels out of gas station.
TOB: And that reply, folks, is why Phil gets paid the big bucks by Big Sports Blog. Bravo!
The Most Controversial Anthem Protest Yet
Yes, it’s an Onion article. Yes, it’s mildly amusing. Yes, it’s short. Yes, it was an excuse to post that photo. You should go read it.
PAL Song of the Week: My Morning Jacket – “Holding On To Black Metal”
Tweets of the Week
Today UCLA QB Josh Rosen said he would look at the NFL after the bowl game and when asked about what makes him want to play in the @Cactus_Bowl when other high profile players have skipped bowl games… he had this great answer. #UCLA#CactusBowlpic.twitter.com/fArs2leCix
David here it is, my philosophy is basically this, and this is something that I live by, and I always have, and I always will: Don’t ever, for any reason, do anything, to anyone, for any reason, ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you’ve been, ever, for any reason whatsoever.
First and foremost, I implore you to click the link below and read the entirety of this story. It’s so well done. The writing, photography and videos bring you on a fascinating journey that picks up where most end on Mount Everest. Writer John Branch describes it better than I ever could:
Where most of those stories end is where this one begins, long after hope is gone — the quiet, desperate and dangerous pursuit, usually at the insistence of a distraught family far away, to bring the dead home. The only search is for some semblance of closure.
Here are the numbers: About 5,000 people have summited Everest since 1953. Nearly 300 have perished on their attempt. Of those, about 200 bodies never have been recovered from Everest.
Most of the bodies are far out of sight. Some have been moved, dumped over cliffs or into crevasses at the behest of families bothered that their loved ones were someone else’s landmark or at the direction of Nepali officials who worry that the sight of dead bodies hinders the country’s tourist trade.
A lot of variables go into the decision of recovering a body or leaving the body on top of the world. First, it’s expensive (in some cases more expensive than the original expedition). It’s also extremely dangerous. Rescues don’t typically happen when the climber is in danger because every other climber’s life is in peril as well with a finite of supply of oxygen.
There are also questions of religion and transcendence. This story follows the recovery efforts of two West Bengali climbers, both Hindu, who believe in reincarnation. Leaving a body on Everest would be to deny a loved one’s soul the opportunity to pass through to their next life.
More practically, dying on Everest can make it very challenging for family members to receive death certificates and life insurance benefits in certain parts of the world.
There are about 50 other fascinating points in Branch’s story as he tracks two recovery efforts, so just click on the link below already and have a look for yourself. – PAL
Earlier this week, it struck me that I should see if Shohei Ohtani is available in my baseball keeper league run through ESPN.com. I was hoping ESPN added him to the system so I could pick him up before our rosters lock in February, ahead of our draft. He was not. As luck would have it, I stumbled on this article later that day about how fantasy sports services are planning to treat Ohtani, a 22-year old from Japan who signed with the Angels. The kicker is Ohtani expects to be both a pitcher and a hitter, likely serving as a DH a couple days a week – an excellent pitcher, Ohtani can also swing the bat.
This is more complicated than you’d expect. Traditionally, fantasy sports have not counted pitcher at-bats. Players are either in a hitter pool, or a pitcher pool. The hitting stats for National League pitchers (or AL pitchers when playing in NL parks) are not counted for or against the fantasy player. Ohtani presented a unique challenge. How should fantasy sports treat a player who expects to be both a good pitcher and a good hitter? There appear to be two approaches the companies are taking.
Yahoo and CBS are splitting Ohtani into two players – you can either draft Ohtani the pitcher or Ohtani the hitter. Or, I suppose, you could draft both. But the point is there will be two Ohtanis. This comes mostly down to ease for the software engineers.
The other approach is interesting, and CBS has hinted they will use it: There will only be one Ohtani, and he’ll be eligible both as a pitcher and a hitter, but his hitting stats will only count when you don’t start him as a pitcher. This makes sense – why would Ohtani’s hitting stats count, but not any other pitcher? You’d be giving Ohtani owners an extra hitter in the lineup each time he starts.
The second approach makes the most sense to me, but the first approach creates for a very interesting draft strategy. Ohtani the pitcher would go fairly early – but how would owners treat Ohtani the hitter? Ohtani the hitter might not be draftable – it’s possible he only DHs twice a week, in addition to his weekly start. If he is a phenom, then those at bats might be worth it. But who is gonna risk it to find out? Rowe. The answer is Rowe. -TOB
PAL: I mean – you’re play a game with “fantasy” in the title. Why wouldn’t you want to draft this guy?
Houston Hittin’ Switches
The Houston Rockets are 25-4, and looking like a real threat to the Warriors in the West this season. The Warriors have been alternately banged up (Steph, KD, and Draymond have all missed significant time), and when they haven’t been hurt they’ve been unfocused, says coach Steve Kerr. The Rockets, though, are hungry – and talented. They don’t seem to have any weaknesses, and run Coach D’Antoni’s offensive system to perfection – they lead the league in offensive efficiency, and they take an astouding 43.2 three-pointers per game, by far the most in the league (by contrast, the Warriors are 8th in the league, taking 30.6 threes per game, and the Rockets take almost ten more threes per game than the Nets, who take the second most threes in the league at 34.0 per game). But what makes the Rockets a real threat to the Warriors come May is the Rockets surprising defensive performance. The Rockets are a surprising 7th in the league in defensive efficiency, an improvement from 17th last season, allowing 4 fewer points per 100 possessions than last season.
At the heart of their defensive improvement is a strategy akin to their offensive strategy – take something that works and take it to its extreme. On defense, for Houston, this means switching every single screen, even those off the ball. They’ve created a roster of long, strong, athletic, and versatile players who can guard almost every possession in a pinch, preventing teams from taking advantage of mismatches after a switch. In this article, Dylan Murphy highlights the defensive play of Ryan Anderson, who we’ve profiled here before. Anderson has long been known as a stretch-four who can shoot the 3 and rebound a bit, but is not known for his defensive abilities. Murphy, though, argues that Anderson has become an excellent defender by defending smart. Historically, when a big gets switched onto a smaller player, the big backs off to avoid a blow-by, and then tries to use his length to contest a shot if the offensive player pulls up. But when Anderson gets switched onto a smaller player, especially a 3-point shooter, he crowds the player, making him uncomfortable, and forcing him to either take a well-contested three, or funneling him into the rest of the defense in the player tries to drive. Here’s an example of Anderson (and Capela) using this strategy after being switched onto Steph Curry back on opening night:
Curry seems very uncomfortable, and in both cases ends up taking (and missing) well-contested shots (the Anderson possession, in particular, reminds me of Kevin Love’s defense on Curry at the end of Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals). As Murphy points out,
“Although his feet aren’t moving as quickly as Curry’s, Anderson is not trying to play angles in space. Just touching Curry’s jersey gives him a frame of reference and cuts down on how far he has to slide. Despite each Curry move, Anderson doesn’t overcommit his feet. Reaching out for a touch keeps him grounded, and does not allow Curry to toss him around in space. When Curry decides to fire, the contest is right there.”
Contrast that with the way most bigs defend someone like Curry:
While Curry will be able to blow by a player like Anderson if he chooses, Murphy notes that most players, especially shooters as good as Curry, will not choose to do that all game. As Murphy argues, this is a team set up to give the Warriors a real run in May. Should be fun. By the way, the Athletic is running a 20% off sale with a free trial right now. Check it out. -TOB
Mike Trout is the best baseball player of his generation, but he has only made the playoffs once in his career (where the Angels got swept) because the team around him has been so unbelievably bad. despite a Top 10 payroll. In his 6 full seasons, Trout has averaged just over 6.1 WAA – a simple to understand stat; using all sorts of metrics, WAA measures how many wins a player created for his team over a league average player. A single-season WAA of 6.1 is extremely good, and Trout has had a couple seasons over 8.0. In other words, the team has utterly wasted his talent, averaging just 84 wins in his career. Even worse, they’ve averaged only 77 wins the last two years.
Sad Trout.
Rebuilding a bad team is a difficult task…but the Angels have been so bad, and Trout is so good, it makes things a bit easier. In August, the Angels traded for left fielder Justin Upton, who post a very good 3.5 WAR last year. For the season, Angels left fielders posted a WAA of -0.3. Last week, they picked up Ian Kinsler, who was a 0.1 WAA last year, the lowest of his career. Very average. But he replaces Angels second basemen who combined for a -3.0 WAA last year. Then they picked up former Reds shortstop Zach Cozart, who they’ll move to third, where they collectively had a -2.0 WAA last year. Add it up, and they can expect to improve by ten wins, even if Kinsler doesn’t have a bounce back, and that’s before you take into account their signing of two-way Japanese star Shohei Ohtani (see above).
Happy Trout
That’s far more than the Yankees can expect to improve in their trade for Giancarlo Stanton (6 WAA), and the Angels did it simply by turning their extreme weaknesses into mere mediocrity. -TOB
PAL: When measured by way of WAR, I thought this quote summarized the the premise of the story perfectly:
That’s why it’s so important to understand where the Angels are starting from: These two unremarkable moves [Kinsler and Upton], paying the going rate for competent big leaguers, could very well improve the Angels as much as trading for Stanton improved the Yankees.
Obviously, having a once-in-a-generation talent like Mike Trout on your team is an advantage, but I’ve never really thought about him as a differentiator in terms of how the team can be built to improve. They don’t need more great players to get better. They need less terrible players. That should be a comparatively low bar to meet.
A League of Her Own: Mamie Johnson (9/27/35 – 12/19/17)
Did you know three women played in the Negro Leagues? I did not, and so it was very cool to learn about Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, albeit from an obituary.
After being turned away from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (the league fictionalized in A League of Their Own), the then 17 year-old Johnson joined the Indianapolis Clowns. And she wasn’t just marketing ploy to sell tickets. As the only woman to pitch in the Negro Leagues. “Peanut” posted a 33-8 won-loss record in three seasons, not to mention batted .270, and crossed paths with the likes of Hank Aaron and Satchel Paige along the way.
During the offseason she attended NYU and later earned her nursing degree (she was a nurse for 30 years after her playing days were over). She’s gave speeches at the Library of Congress and the White House, she’s featured in not one, but two, exhibits at the Baseball Hall of Fame, and has what looks like a great stocking stuffer of a book:
Ooh the Crunch Enhancer? Yeah, it’s a non-nutritive cereal varnish. It’s semi-permeable, it’s not osmotic, what it does is it coats and seals the flake and prevents the milk from penetrating it.
Portrait of a Broken Down, 38-Year Old, Former NFL Star
I’ve seen, and read, profiles of aging NFL stars before. Their memory is gone, they can barely walk, their families describe them as mercurial, politely. But I’m not sure I’ve ever read one this sad. Larry Johnson was the best running back in the NFL for about a year or two. He set an NFL record for carries in a season, with over 400. His shelf life, for an elite player, was incredibly short. He only went over 1,000 yards twice (1,700+ yards rushing and over 2,000 all purpose yards in both of those years), and otherwise was a mediocre back who either split time or suffered injuries. He retired in 2011, after a combined six carries in his final two seasons.
Larry Johnson is just 38 years old. Larry Johnson is not well. He routinely has suicidal ideations, and says he has come very close to going through. His memory is so bad, he makes highlight videos of his playing career so that he can remember, and so that his 7-year old daughter will know – know he’s not a monster, know that he’s sorry when he lashes out when she can’t figure out her math homework. His memory is so bad that he doesn’t remember two full seasons from his NFL career. It’s as if they didn’t happen for him. He’s sure he has CTE, and believes he won’t know his own name by age 50. He feels a kinship with Aaron Hernandez, as frightening as that is – like Hernandez, Johnson has a history of violence, and has been arrested a number of times for domestic violence. Johnson says, “his decision to publicly describe his darkest thoughts is meant not as a way to excuse his past but rather a way to begin a conversation with other former players who Johnson suspects are experiencing many of the same symptoms.”
His daughter is his saving grace. He says she’s the only reason he hasn’t acted on his darkest, violent impulses. But it’s the scenes with his daughter that are the most heartbreaking.
They’re in the living room now, Papi and Jaylen, surrounded by walls undecorated but for the blotchy spackling compound behind them. That’s where, a few years ago, Johnson punched through the drywall. Jaylen was there, and Johnson says he sent her upstairs before making the hole. The way he describes it, the best he can do sometimes is to shield her view. “Did you think it was something that you did?” Johnson recalls asking Jaylen afterward, and the girl nodded. “I had to explain it: It’s never your fault.”
Or worse, the aforementioned homework scene:
Johnson has high expectations for Jaylen, and he believes the universe was making a point when it gave him a daughter. How better to punish him for shoving or choking women than to assign him a girl to shepherd through a world filled with Larry Johnsons? “My greatest fear is my daughter falling in love with somebody who’s me,” he’ll say, and he believes if he’s honest and tough with Jaylen, she’ll never accept anyone treating her the way her father treated women. With the sun filtering between the blinds, Johnson plays with her curly hair as she slides a finger across her sentences. “All people,” Jaylen reads aloud, and her father interrupts. “No,” he says. “Why would it say ‘all people?’ It . . .” He stops, sighs and presses two fingers into his eyelids. She looks back at him, and he tells her to keep reading. He rubs his hands, massages his forehead, checks his watch. He’ll say he sometimes forgets she’s only in second grade. They move on to her page of math problems: twenty-seven plus seven. “How many tens?” he asks her. “Two.” “And how many ones?” “Seven.”
“No,” he says, visibly frustrated until Jaylen reaches the answer. Next: fifty-seven plus seven. She stares at the page. “So count,” he says. “Count!” Thirteen plus eight. Again staring at the numbers. Johnson’s worst subject was math, another trait Jaylen inherited. But his empathy is sometimes drowned out by more dominant emotions. “You start at thirteen and count eight ones,” he tells her, and in the kitchen, a watch alarm begins to beep. Jaylen counts her fingers. “No,” her dad tells her, again rubbing his face. The beeping continues in the next room. “No!” Abruptly, he stands and stomps out of the room without saying anything. Jaylen’s eyes follow him, eyebrows raised, and listens as her father swipes the beeping watch from a table, swings open the back door and throws it into the courtyard.
That is brutal to read (and a reminder to check my own tone when frustrated with my children). Larry Johnson is no saint. He has admittedly done some terrible things. And as the article notes, “Will she remember this, or has Johnson shielded her from something worse? Is he managing his impulses as well as he can?” But I can’t help feel bad for him. And worse for his daughter.
In the article, Larry Johnson says, ““What would it be like for this to be the day for people to find out you’re not here?” It’s a profound thought for all of us, but coming from Johnson it is deeply sad. After reading this article I can’t help but think of him as a ticking time bomb, and this begs the question: is today the day we hear some awful story about Larry Johnson, whether it’s something he does to himself, or someone else? -TOB
PAL: As disturbing as this read is, nothing came off is shocking or new. We’ve read versions of this story quite a bit in last five years. While Johnson says sharing this story is not meant excuse his past, I can’t help but wonder if it’s an attempt to excuse what he hasn’t yet done.
Blue is Fa$ter:
When the difference between gold and no medal whatsoever can be measured in hundredths of seconds, speedskaters preparing for the 2018 Winter Games will try (or believe) anything. This year’s trend: blue is the fastest color.
It’s hard to believe – if everything else is exactly the same – that color dye could impact the time it takes to skate around a rink, but the risk in ignoring a technical advantage is greater than the risk of believing a myth. Andrew Keh examines this funny dance between faith and science playing out right now in speedskating.
“With any new piece of equipment, there is an assumption that it has been tested, tested again and tested some more. At ice rinks, laboratories and wind tunnels around the world, the top countries are engaged in a hush-hush arms race, a different sort of cold war.”
While South Korea skaters have historically worn blue, competitors from Germany (combo of black, orange and red) and Norway (red, always red) are joining the party this year, tossing aside their typical colors. The trend has competitors, coaches, and researchers talking.
Dai Dai Ntab, a sprint specialist for the Netherlands: “It’s been proven that blue is faster than other colors. Every Olympic season, everybody is trying to find the hidden gem. This year it’s the blue suits.”
Renzo Shamey, professor of color science and technology: “I have come to a point in my life that I have sufficient confidence in what I’ve done and what I know, but at the same time I’m not so arrogant to dismiss claims people make. Having said that, based on my knowledge of dye chemistry, I cannot possibly imagine how dyeing the same fabric with two dyes that have the same properties to different hues would generate differing aerodynamic responses.”
Mike Crowe, the coach of the Canadian team: “I look at that as the oldest trick in the book. It’s just gamesmanship, really (on the part of Norway). Make them doubt. Make them wonder.”
Likely, the reason for the blue suit is far more obvious. Give this article a read to find out. I mean – come on – when are you going to read a speed skating story if not now?- PAL
TOB: Blue is the fastest color? Someone tell that to the Cal football team.
Why the Giants Might Need to Stand Pat on a 98-Loss Team, or a Lesson in the MLB CBA
Don’t tell my wife, but I signed up for The Athletic last week, when I was devouring every detail of a possible Giants trade for Giancarlo Stanton or signing of Shohei Ohtani, or both, that I possibly could. Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s some sort of tax write-off, boo. Well, spoiler alert: the Giants whiffed on both Stanton and Ohtani. After reaching a deal with the Marlins for Stanton contingent on Stanton waiving his No Trade Clause to go to SF, Stanton refused. The kicker here is that Stanton reportedly told the Marlins before any trade talks began that he would only accept a deal to a small number of teams (rumored to be the Yankees and Dodgers), but the Marlins engaged the Giants and Cardinals, anyways, and reached agreements with both. The Marlins then went to Stanton and told him to choose the Giants or Cardinals or he’d be a Marlin for life. Stanton, knowing the new ownership group was desperate to shed his $295 million in future payroll, gave them a big f-u and said no. The Marlins predictably caved and sent him to New York for peanuts. Ohtani then shocked everyone and chose the Angels. But I digress.
Once the dust settled on that, the question for the Giants became: What now? Do they go after free agent JD Martinez? Try to trade for an available, expensive, aging star like Andrew McCutcheon or Jacoby Ellsbury? Or trade for a young star like Marcell Ozuna?
This is the part where I finally get back around to shelling out for the Athletic, which recently announced they had hired longtime Giants beat writer Andrew Baggarly. Baggarly is very smart (two-time Jeopardy champion, y’all!) and a good writer. In this article, Baggarly makes a very strong argument that the 98-loss Giants very well may, and probably should, stand pat because of the Competitive Balance Tax, or CBT. The CBT is a progressive tax for teams who go over a designated payroll threshold. The tax progresses the higher a team goes over the threshold, and also progresses for teams over the threshold in successive seasons. This year, the threshold is $197 million. Baggarly makes it simple:
A first-time payor gets taxed at a rate of 20 percent. A three-time payor gets levied at a rate of 50 percent…. On top of the base tax on the overage, you pay an additional 12 percent on every dollar that exceeds the CBT by more than $20 million. Then the league levies an additional 45 percent on every dollar that exceeds the CBT by more than $40 million….The penalties for teams that exceed the CBT include stingier draft pick compensation, too. Teams that lose a qualified free agent receive a compensation pick after the first round — unless they were into the CBT, in which case they get a pick after the fourth round. Teams that sign a qualified free agent from another club must forfeit their third-round pick as compensation — unless they were into the CBT, in which case they lose their second- and fifth-round picks, as well as $1 million from their international signing bonus pool.
The Giants have been over the CBT threshold three years running now, and so their penalties are high, but the team can reset those penalties if they get under $197 million threshold next year, heading into a monster free agent class after 2018 headlined by Manny Machado and Bryce Harper (hey, let me dream, ok?). The problem for the Giants is they are going to have a devil of a time getting under the threshold at this point. As Baggarly points out:
Well, you might not like this. They already have 11 players under guaranteed contracts that add up to just more than $150 million toward the total payroll for CBT accounting purposes. Their five arbitration-eligible players project to cost an additional $15 million. It would be another $6 million or so if they were to fill out the roster with players who have fewer than three years of service time.
That’s $171 million. More than a bit of wiggle room before you get to $197 million, right? Except payroll calculations also include a raft of expenditures not limited to but including: contributions to benefits plans, player medical costs, workers compensation premiums, spring training allowances, All-Star Game expenses, contributions to the postseason players’ pool, meal and tip allowances and even moving and travel expenses.
Baggarly estimates the total, then, to be $185 million, leaving them $12 million to work with. In other words, look forward to a lot more bad baseball at AT&T Park in 2018. Then, uh, good luck luring a marquee free agent next Winter. -TOB
PAL: And if you want to understand it from the Marlins front office, check this out from Michael Baumann. “This is not a baseball trade. This is a liquidation of assets.” The investment group that bought the team this year is immediately in debt, to the tune of $400MM.
Video of the Week
PAL Song of the Week: Buffalo Springfield – “Burned”
There were four Heisman finalists in 1997 (there is no preset number of finalists). Three will have Hall of Fame busts in Canton, Ohio. Can you name the four without looking?
Peyton Manning, Randy Moss, Ryan Leaf, and – the winner – Charles Woodson. He remains the only (primarily) defensive player to win the award in its 80+ year history.
Let’s just take moment to truly admire Randy Moss in this pic.
Winning the Heisman obviously takes one hell of an individual performance over the course of a college football season, but it’s also about timing and moments. November heroics and incredible highlights travel better across a country (and voters) than really good stats. The former are emotive, while the latter are logic. If we’ve learned anything in the past year, it’s that people vote with their guts and not their heads.
Since seemingly the dawn of time, Peyton Manning has been everyone’s favorite, and he was the favorite to win the Heisman in 1997. Through the words of the finalists, their college coaches, and former teammates, hear how Charles Woodson took a what felt like a formality of an award from a golden quarterback in Chris Low’s oral history of perhaps the most stacked Heisman contest.
Before we get to Peyton and Woodson, I just want everyone to enjoy this college highlight from Randy Moss and his best quote from this story.
Moss, from Marshall, was not going to win the Heisman, and he knew it, despite being the most dominant player of the bunch (26 touchdowns as a wide receiver!). The dude who made news for breaking his parole and only one year of college football under him was not competing with the senior, all-everything Manning, and he wasn’t going to compete with Michigan’s hype machine behind Woodson. His take on his trip to New York, courtesy of Michigan Safety (and Woodson teammate) Marcus Rey:
Then Randy walks in and said, ‘None of us is going to win, so we might as well get through this ceremony, hang out tonight and tear it up in New York City.’
As if I needed another reason to love Randy Moss.
Now, back to the Manning – Woodson competition. It was Manning’s to lose from the start of the season. Manning returned for his senior season at Tennessee. He surely would have been a high first-round pick after his junior year in a draft that featured an astonishing two quarterbacks taken in the first 98 picks (Jim Druckenmilller at the 26th pick to the Niners and Jake Plummer to Arizona in the second round). I would say he would’ve been the number one pick, but the St. Louis Rams got Orlando Pace, a Hall of Fame left tackle.
The one scab on Manning’s college resume coming into his senior year victory lap was that he couldn’t beat Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators. He came up short again in ‘97, with a pick-six to boot in a 33-20 loss in September. That opened the door just a crack early in the season for Woodson.
Most remember that Woodson did it all at Michigan. Shut down defensive back with seven interceptions. Wide receiver with 3 touchdowns. Punt and kick return good for another touchdown. The Wolverines also went undefeated that year and split the National Championship (before the playoff or BCS) with Nebraska (Nebraska was number 1 in the Coaches poll, while Michigan was number 1 in the A.P. poll.
Perhaps as important as the stats and success was the fact that Woodson had not one, but two “Heisman Moments”. First, a one-handed pick in October against Michigan State that, as Lloyd Carr puts it, put Woodson “on everyone’s radar”.
Second, and an electric punt return for a touchdown against Ohio State in the last conference game of the season.
All of this leads to a lot of back-and-forth between the peanut gallery of coaches, former teammates, and broadcasters in this article. Enjoy some of the best comments below:
Keith Jackson on Woodson: The game was changing, and I think people realized his brilliance and weren’t afraid to do something out of the norm — and that’s voting for a defensive player. But he was more than just a defensive player. He was the most impactful player in college football, and that’s why I voted for him.
Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmeron Woodson: I thought it had maybe gone from a lock to a closer race because Woodson had a big game against Ohio State and returned a kick and caught a touchdown pass. I knew it might be close, but didn’t want to think so. But what do I know about that world?
Manning teammate Jeff Teague, on Woodson winning: We were well-stocked, food- and drink-wise [back at Tennessee]. It never crossed my mind, not for one second, that he wasn’t going to win. We were just there to watch him get it. It was a party. When it went down, it was just a stunned silence. A few guys stood up and threw something. But, really, it was just kind of quiet.
Teague on Brian Griese’s assessment that Woodson was the better player (Teague and Griese were teammates on the Broncos): Brian still can’t see through the maize and blue and be objective on that subject. Brian’s a great guy, but he’s blinded by that ugly helmet.
A fun read looking back 20 years on the eve of what most think will be am anticlimactic Heisman ceremony. Then again, they thought the 1997 ceremony would be anticlimactic, too. – PAL
TOB: I have always had a rebellious streak, and so it should be no surprise that I did not like Peyton Manning as a 15-year old kid. I have always distrusted anyone the media universally liked. I couldn’t stomach the Gameday stories about Peyton and how much film he watched, how he was the first one in and the last one out, and about how gosh darn smart he was. I’ve also always been pro-Michigan. And Charles Woodson was cool as hell. So, yeah, I was rooting hard for Woodson over the Golden Boy.
I don’t remember many Heisman ceremonies, but I remember that one. Heading into the ceremony, I was resigned to the fact that Peyton would win. I was ready to bitch and moan. I was 15, so it meant a lot more to me than it does now. It seemed important in a way that it no longer does. And the kicker is – I didn’t even get to watch. As a kid, we went to Saturday night mass, and my parents made me leave after the show had started, but before they announced the winner. I remember getting home, expecting the worst, and being shocked to hear that Chuck had won, Peyton had lost. I took great joy in that, and I took great joy in this article. Sometimes sports surprise you, and sometimes, it’s great. Peyton never winning the Heisman will always bring a smile to my face.
PAL: You’re on the ‘Chuck’ level with Woodson?
Which Block Was Most Dope?
Last Thursday, in one NBA evening, we saw three amazing blocks. I couldn’t decide which block was dopest, so we’re putting it to a vote. The contenders:
I have been on the fence on whether the NCAA four-team playoff should be expanded. I was watching the Conference Championship games last weekend, and it occurred to me that we, kinda, already have an eight-team playoff. There were 10 teams with a shot at the playoff. In the SEC, Auburn and Georgia playing in the title game, and Alabama (who did not win its division and was idle). In the Big 10, Wisconsin and Ohio St., playing each other. In the Big-12, Oklahoma, playing TCU in the title game. In the ACC, Miami and Clemson, playing each other. And USC, playing Stanford in the title game. It wasn’t a true playoff – as it was, SC and Ohio State won but were left out. Still, unless you are Alabama, you’re not making the playoffs without winning your conference championship game. So, it’s kind of a playoff.
But then I read Dan Wetzel’s proposal for an eight-team playoff and I can’t find a problem. In fact, it sounds awesome as hell. His plan:
Scrap the conference title games.
The five power conference winners (determined by each conference on its own) gets a spot.
Three at-large bids. If a non-power five member is ranked top 10 or 15, it gets a spot (I’d add you could limit this to the top ranked non-power five member).
Play the first round in early December, and go from there.
Here’s how this year’s playoff would have looked.
I love it. As Wetzel points out, in the current system Alabama lost its season finale and somehow earned an effective bye to the semifinals, while the team they lost to (Auburn) had to play Georgia, in Atlanta. Sees fair.
Some may argue there’s no reason to include the non-power 5. But, I like it. Who doesn’t like rooting for an underdog? And while they might not be the 8th best team, the 8th best team rarely has a reason to argue they are the best team in the country, so who cares. Do better than 8th next time. Anyways, I’m all in. Eight is great! -TOB
PAL: I guess I’d care if I were on the eighth best team. What if the eighth best team is more deserving than the the top-ranked non-power 5? You’re telling me USC isn’t more deserving than UCF this year…wrong question to ask TOB. I love the automatic bid for a non power 5 conference gets at first blush, but the only problem is UCF didn’t play very good teams. And what I mean by that is they played maybe two marginally good teams all season. Here’s UCF’s schedule in this undefeated season (and the opponents CBS ranking, which goes to 130):
Florida International (#70)
Maryland (#82)
Memphis (#16)
Cincinnati (#107)
East Carolina (#109)
Navy (#56)
Austin Peay (not on CBS top 130)
SMU (#59)
UConn (#114)
Temple (#79)
USF (#23)
Memphis (#16)
I’m sorry, but that schedule in no way holds up to USC’s schedule this year (ending the regular season ranked 8th), or any a Power 5 conference schedule. I find it highly, highly unlikely UCF would have gone undefeated playing in the Pac-12, and I highly doubt they lose 2 or fewer games in the Pac-12. They played 2 teams in the top 25, and 4 teams ranked outside of the top 100! We try to make the case for the little guy, but the little guy has to play real games (I know this is hard due to scheduling being done so far in advance).
I don’t love the idea of automatic bids to power 5 conference champs (what if a 3-loss SEC team wins its championship while a 1-loss Pac-12 team loses), but it’s the better than what we have now. With that said, the either ditch the conference championship games or make them mean something. Just don’t guarantee an at-large to anyone. Play it year-by-year.
Fear and Loathing in Carson, California
The subheadline to Kevin Clark’s story says it all:
The Los Angeles Chargers are playing in a tiny soccer stadium in a city that doesn’t seem to want them. There’s no way they’ll be able to fill a full-size arena, but they’re already on the books to be shared residents with the Rams in 2020. Somehow, the best solution might be to just stay where they are.
The Chargers left San Diego, have no fans in L.A., and can’t even fill a 30,000 seat soccer stadium. This is a great article exploring what the Chargers did wrong, the obstacles they face in setting down roots in L.A., why they should just own being the little-brother-team by staying in that soccer team, and what it’s like to attend an NFL game in a small stadium where no one gives a crap about the home team. Fantastic read. -TOB
PAL: Comparing the Chargers in Carson City to U2 giving away albums we didn’t want on our phones in the first place such a great analogy, and Clark’s writing only gets better from there. Highly recommend this story.
Don’t Be A Jackass At Your Kid’s Game
Typically not a fan of self-help or advice columns. In appealing to the masses, they oftentimes are diluted to the lowest common axiom. With that said, there’s some interesting stuff in this guide on how to behave at your kid’s game.
First off, we’ve all heard that the chances of your kid going pro are infinitesimal. But how about some cold hard facts? Here are the probabilities of high school athletes that go on to play NCAA sports:
And here are a couple tips for all you parents out there.
“If you haven’t encountered game-day maniacs, well, I’ve got some bad news for you: it’s you.”
“If you have the means to afford a private shooting coach for your little baller, you have the means to fund a college savings account. Let the ball game be a game, and nothing more.”
Learn how to ref…hell, try being one – “Once you experience the behavior of parents from the perspective of the people who are working diligently to make the games happen, you’ll behave yourself on game day.”
And if none of that persuaded you to chill the f*&^ out, how about two videos of parents losing it and looking like losers of the worst kind.
TOB: Clearly, I am, and will continue to be, a very level-headed sports dad.
Also, one in EIGHT high school lax bros/bras plays in college? Looks like my boys are getting pinneys and lax sticks for Christmas!
Herm Edwards at ASU is Going to Be Fun (For Everyone Else)
Herm “YOU PLAY. TO WIN. THE GAME.” Edwards has not coached in ten years, He spent the last decade as a talking head, and not a particularly analytical one. He is mostly a guy they go to for discussion on player behavior. So, it was with incredible shock to the rest of college football when ASU was rumored to, and then did, hire Herm as its next head football coach. The introductory press conferece was…hilarious. First, Herm explained how he’d run his offense, and in doing so pinned our country’s problems, at least in part, on the fact that “we don’t huddle anymore in our society.” Uh, ok. Next, he got all weirdly religious when a reporter identified himself as from Devil Digest, and in the process seemed to suggest he has NO IDEA that ASU’s mascot is the Sun Devils. I’m not kidding. Check it out:
A day later, Herm was presented with a game jersey and could not believe how small it was, and thought it was a “girl’s” jersey.
Look, he’s right. Those things are crazy tight these days. But it does NOT HELP with the perception that he’s completely out of touch. As a fan of a conference opponent, I am delighted. Should be a fun 10 months (no, I don’t think he’ll be the coach for even one full season). -TOB
I know, I know. It’s a story as old as professional sports. But this one was especially egregious, and I’d never heard it before. Really, it’s kind of amazing. Bill Wirtz was the longtime owner of the Chicago Blackhawks. Wirtz was especially cheap. We all know of the NFL’s old blackout policy – NFL games were blacked out on TVs in the home team’s home market if the game was not a sellout by a few days before the game. The thinking was this would encourage fans to go to games. (The NFL scrapped this policy a couple of years back, likely when they realized TV money is more lucrative than fans in seats). But Wirtz, for decades, took it a step further. He didn’t allow local fans to watch ANY home game on TV, even if it was a sellout. His thinking was it created some exclusivity for ticket holders – the only way to see Blackhawks games was to actually go to the game. This is an unfathomably bad business idea, but that was Wirtz.
In 1992, the Blackhawks were really good. Balfour. Roenick. Chelios. They ended up making a run to the Stanley Cup Finals. In the leadup to the playoffs, the Hawks were a hot ticket. Wirtz had a brilliant idea for the playoffs: Pay Per View. He called it HAWKVISION.
For the low, low price of $16.95 per game, Chicago fans could finally watch their team’s home games from the comfort of their own home. I looked it up, and the team played 9 home games that playoffs. To watch them all at home, you’d have to pay $152.55 – adjusted for inflation, that is $270 today. Could you imagine paying that much to watch, say, the Warriors home playoff games on TV? And if that wasn’t bad enough, he brought it back for the following season, this time charging $29.99 per month, an inflation adjusted $53 today. Per month! To watch the home games for ONE team. HawkVision did not return after the 1994 lockout, but Wirtz’ tv policy did. Chicago fans could not watch the team’s home games on TV until 2007, when Wirtz died. Needless to say, the fans hated Wirtz, and booed the team’s attempt to eulogize Wirtz.
It was such a nice idea: The Bavarian Bierhaus, a Wisconsin bar, has long offered free beers to all patrons from the moment the Packers game begins until the moment the Packers first score. With Aaron Rodgers at quarterback, that’s usually been pretty quick. The Packers usually score on their first or second drive. The promotion gets people in the door, and then they stay for the game. It’s a nice way for the Bierhaus to differentiate itself from other area bars. But last Sunday, it backfired. Aaron Rodgers broke his collarbone a few weeks back and he’s been replaced by Brett Hundley.
Hundley is no Aaron Rodgers. Last week the team got shutout, the first time that happened since 2006, which means the Bierhaus served free beer the entire game: from kickoff to final whistle. Owner Scott Bell estimates they gave away as many as 300 beers. Bell had a good sense of humor about it – saying everyone had a good time, and were even apologizing to him for taking his beer. Amazingly, the Bierhaus will continue the tradition this weekend. Karmically speaking, the Packers will return the opening kickoff for a touchdown. -TOB
There are the first ballot Hall-of-Famers. There are the multiple Super Bowl champs. There are those with Hall of Fame careers as players and as coaches or front office personnel. These are exclusive clubs within pro football, but perhaps the most exclusive club of them all is that of players who appeared in exactly one NFL game. These men are, as Ben Shpigel puts it, “Football versions of Moonlight Grahams”. He profiles six members of this club for his article, and it’s a pretty fascinating read.
Some, as you could guess, played only one game because of injury. Some finally made it into the game, only to have a change in management, which doesn’t bode well for the guys right on the edge. Some made the best of their opportunity, and some live with the regret of what they did with the moment. Some hold onto excuses, while others look back to that game as proof they made it to the summit.
It’s really interesting to learn how each of the guys view that game in the context of their respective lives.
Mark Reed has been an engineer at 3M for 30+ years. He made his one and only appearance in an NFL game as quarterback for the Baltimore Colts. He completed 6 of 10 passes for 34 yards and an interception. He likes to tell his co-workers that he had a career 60% completion rate.
The real value of his time in the NFL came to Reed when, as a young father of two, he went back to school to finish his engineering degree. He remembers his coach telling him the difference between winning and losing is infinitesimal, a lesson that proved true for his life as an engineer. “Everything that I learned from the N.F.L. as far as hard work and intensity, I basically took that to the classroom.I was just bearing down.”
It’s not that these guys were on a team for only one game. In most cases, they spent multiple seasons on various NFL teams’ practice squads waiting for their moment. Martin Nance’s moment came on 12/31/06. He started for the Vikings, had 4 receptions, and made a good impression on the team going into the off-season. That year, the team drafted bulked up on receivers and tight ends in the draft. With new investments at Nance’s position, it came as no surprise he was cut.
He reunited with Roethlisberger in Pittsburgh and waited for his next chance for over 2 years while on the practice squad. When star receiver Hines Ward was injured going into the 2009 Super Bowl, Nance was prepared to make it back onto the field on the biggest of stages. Ward ended up playing, and while Nance wears his Super Bowl ring with pride, he could see his time as a player was up.
Shortly thereafter, he went to graduate school at University of Michigan, snagged an internship at Gatorade, and has had a successful career in marketing ever since. He considers himself lucky to have left the game in relatively good health.
‘“I don’t walk around and wonder if I had a career in football; my body reminds me,” he said. “I know there are guys who are in more difficult situations than me, but I still consider myself strong and capable. I consider that a blessing.”’
Not all of the athletes featured made such a smooth transition, and you should tap the link below to read each of their stories. – PAL
What’s the Point of Youth Sports, Part II: “Checkbook Baseball”
Here’s part II of the 3-part series from the Star Tribune. This “chapter” digs into the club sports epidemic, and its rippling effect. There are a lot of variables at play here: the cost (a lot), the perceived need to participate in order to keep up with other kids in the community, and the cottage industry club sports has become.
It wasn’t that long ago club teams were the exception to the rule:
Barely 20 years ago, clubs and organizations devoted to a single sport were few. Today, it’s become increasingly rare for an athlete to join a high school team in the most popular sports without having extensive, and often expensive, training from a club program.
Clubs offer the promise of exposure. A better chance to play in college is central to the sales pitch. Regional tournaments comprised of “select” teams are the most efficient way for recruiters to see the most talent in one place.
Yes, unless you’re really, really good – in which case, your talent transcends any system – club teams is how you are recruited. Again – and I want to emphasize I played at a smallD-II school – but even at that low level, this is how I was recruited.
However, this trend doesn’t just impact players bound for collegiate athletics. If every high school volleyball player is at it 10 months a year, then the the ripple effect impacts anyone who even wants to play varsity. At some point, you need one of the top players, and if all of the top players in your community are busting ass most of the year, then you either need to follow suit or face the reality that you simply might not make the high school team.
“It’s staggering,” Storm said with a chuckle of incredulity in his voice. “It’s gone from only elite kids trying to play in college basketball to a situation where a kid says ‘If I want to make varsity, I better find an AAU team.’ ”
This ecosystem is how you produce the highest yield of exceptional players, i.e., D-1 athletes, but most simply aren’t that. So what is the impact on the majority of kids who simply want to partake in the high school athletic experience?
“Parents say, ‘We have to do it. There’s no way we can’t,’ ” Lakeville South volleyball coach Stephen Willingham said. “I call it FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. If I go to play basketball, while in the meantime 15 or 20 classmates go play winter volleyball, am I going to miss out on that training? What’s going to happen next fall? Am I going to make the team? People are fearful of stepping away from a sport and not being able to catch up.”
Let’s talk dollars here. Just how much is this? Last week I quoted a dad saying that he didn’t even want to think about how much he’s put into his kid’s youth sports. Here are some numbers to digest:
The costs of playing for a for-profit club go toward paying for coaching, facilities, tournament fees, administrative costs and travel, which eats up a significant portion.
At Northern Lights [Volleyball], the single-season cost to play for the program’s top level is $4,775. For the beginners, it’s $2,230. A season of play for Midwest Speed, the state’s top softball club, runs about $3,600. The Minnesota Baseball Academy, which runs the Minnesota Blizzard Elite program, charges $3,150 annually for players ages 12 to 18.
Often those fees don’t include camps and clinics.
“It’s a business,” Klinkhammer said. “We refer to it as ‘Checkbook Baseball.’ ”
I wonder, is there any greater force in the known universe than a parent’s fear of coming up short on providing his/her child every advantage to succeed?
And – to be clear – this isn’t about the Joe Mauer’s of the world. For no other reason than Catholic upbringing within St. Paul, I played against Mauer from sixth grade through my senior year in high school (his sophomore). Guess what: he was special when he was 10, he was special when he was 13, and he was special when he was 16. The scouts and USA Baseball found out about him because he was plainly special.
Here’s a lesser known example: Marty Sertich. We grew up in the same town. I spent many hours skating in his backyard rink (hell, I broke his garage window with an errant shot, and his dad, a US Olympic hockey player…maybe 5’7” didn’t even bat an eye). Marty was a year younger than me. From mites to high school, there was not one game in those ten years – not one – where the short, skinny kid with incredible hands and vision wasn’t clearly the best player on the ice. It was inarguable to anyone at the rink. He was undersized, but he won the coveted Mr. Hockey award in Minnesota, played a couple years of Junior hockey, then won the Hobey Baker at Colorado College – the college hockey equivalent of the Heisman. The rink in Roseville has a big painted sign over one of the goals that says “Marty Sertich 2005 Hobey Baker Award Winner”
The explosion of club sports isn’t for the Joe Mauers or Marty Sertiches of the world. Nope, it’s for the folks whose greatest fear is that their kid might be Mauer or Sertich if they only have the right coaching and exposure, but their kind of talent transcends systems.
I have a niece and a nephew going through the hockey club circuit in Minnesota. I don’t know a ton about scouting young talent, but I know they are good. Very good. They are also very young. I have no idea what becomes of this talent. Lost in all of this is…you know..puberty. We all played sports with kids that were Babe Ruth or Wayne Gretzky at 12, and then they didn’t grow another inch or acquire another skill. You blink, and you find yourself playing in high school wondering whatever the hell happened to so-and-so.
Here’s what I believe when it comes to my niece and nephew: the time they have spent with their dad at open skating and on the backyard rink has far more to do with how good they are than whatever club team they are on. They are good because they love to play, they love to spend time with their dad, and he knows enough to drill the fundamentals while keeping them laughing and having fun. It has much less to do with whatever super select team they are asked to play on (and their parent are asked to pay for). – PAL
TOB: My feelings here are mixed. First, the costs are outrageous. Nearly $5,000 for volleyball!? That’s not a knock on volleyball – I’d say that no matter the sport charging $5,000. Second, whether participation in clubs sports is “good” depends to me where the pressure comes from. If the parents have a grand scheme to get their kid a college scholarship and throw $5,000 a year for eight years (which is how many age levels Northern Lights volleyball has) at a volleyball club, well, congrats. You just spent $40,000 in hopes of getting a scholarship worth not much more than that, and pressured your kid into something he or she likely now hates. But if the kid really wants to play a club sport or wants to focus on a sport, I find it difficult to look down upon that. Hell, as an 11-year old I had a grand scheme to give up all other sports at age 13 to focus on basketball, and no adult put that idea in my head.
But what bothers me is the keeping up with the joneses. The Marty Sertiches of the world will probably benefit by focusing on a sport, though probably not as early as many kids do (I’ve read elsewhere coaches and experts think specialization should not occur until 16 at the earliest). In a perfect world, those kids would do so and everyone else would play multiple sports throughout the year like we all used to. Instead, “normal” kids are feeling the need to specialize, when they shouldn’t. Then they miss out on playing other sports, their parents spend a ton of money, and they risk getting burned out on the sport (as we saw in last week’s installment).
I don’t know what the solution is. The nuclear option would seem to be instituting a rule whereby participation in a club sport makes you ineligible for your high school’s team in that sport. Would that kill high school sports? Probably. It would certainly drain talent, which would lower interest, and then maybe high school sports start to disappear. What a bummer that would be. As the Beach Boys sang – be true to your school, let your colors fly.
The World Series Has Turned into Early 2000s College Baseball
On Wednesday, Phil and I both, separately, went to the Warriors game. The game began as Game 2 of the World Series was winding down. When I got to Oracle, it was 3-2 Dodgers, when Marwin Gonzalez hit a dinger in 9th off Kenley Jansen on an 0-2 pitch.
In the 10th, Altuve hit a dinger. 4-3.
Then Correa hit a dinger. 5-3.
Then Puig hit a dinger for L.A. 5-4.
Then the Dodgers got a two-out run on a walk-wild pitch-single, their first non-home run hit of the night. I repeat: the Dodgers scored 4 runs in 10+ innings and their first non-home run hit of the night came in the 10th.
In the 11th, Springer hit a two-run dinger. 7-5.
Then Culberson hit a dinger to make it 7-6 AND ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?
Here’s the thing: I didn’t watch the game. I followed on MLB’s app. But when I got home, every sportswriter was raving about what a wild, amazing game this was. Funny, it feels like so many other games this postseason. For example, the AL Wildcard game. Game 5 of the Nationals/Cubs NLDS. Most of that Yankees/Indians ALDS. The ball just won’t stay in the park. Dinger after dinger. No lead is safe. Look at this graph:
Flyballs are carrying out of the park at unprecedented rates. It’s a fascinating graph. The rates were slowly rising for decades, peaked at the height of the Steroid Era around 2000, began a steady drop and then…boom. All-time highs beginning 2014. Dingers are fun, sure. But what makes a dinger fun is that it doesn’t happen that often. In the playoffs, especially, runs should be at a premium. When home runs are hit as often as they are being hit, it just sorta feels inevitable. It’s like a sugar rush – it’s great in the moment, and then you feel empty. Please, MLB, fix the ball. It’s gotten out of hand. -TOB
PAL: It’s also worth noting the temperature at game time was in the 90s. The ball carries in that kind of heat. Obviously, that doesn’t explain the broader trend, but I wanted to add that bit of info.
I love the College World Series comparison. In 1998, both LSU and USC hit 17 home runs at the CWS. SC needed six games, while LSU needed just four. LSU averaged over four home runs per game!
It was bad for college baseball. The bats they were using simply needed to be modified. While they should’ve just gone back to wood bats, there was too much money at stake from bat makers to quit cold turkey on aluminum or carbon bats.
Since big leaguers are already using wood bats – yes – we need to take a look at the ball. As TOB says, runs should come at a premium in the playoffs, and home runs should not be the primary way teams are scoring. I wish I could say Tuesday’s game was an outlier, but it’s clearly a trend.
Kill the Frat
Frats are bad. To me, this is not a particularly hot take. But former and current frat guys are very defensive about the benefits of frat life, and I enjoy every opportunity to shine a light on how stupid and dangerous frat life really is. In this case, the subject is Tim Piazza, a sophomore at Penn State, who died this past February following a frat initiation. The name of the frat doesn’t matter, they’re all the same. And Tim is certainly not the first frat guy to die – that’s been happening, more or less at least once per year (there have been sixty in the last eight years), since frats first took hold on American college campuses. But Tim’s story is especially heartbreaking because the house was extensively equipped with security cameras that captured the entire thing. Tim’s story also highlights the dangers of unintended consequences.
“Hey, man, what the hell. Stick to sports,” you’re probably muttering right now. But in this case, the author gives me just enough cover to pretend that I am:
When I talked with people about Tim Piazza’s death, many brought up an earlier Penn State crisis, the Jerry Sandusky scandal, in which the longtime assistant football coach was convicted for a decades-long practice of sexually abusing young boys, and the university’s head coach, Joe Paterno, was abruptly fired. Both cases gestured to a common theme: that of dark events that had taken place on or near the campus for years, with some kind of tacit knowledge on the part of the university. There is also the sense that at Penn State, both the fraternities and the football team operate as they please. To the extent that this is true, the person responsible is Joe Paterno. It’s hard to think of a single person with a greater influence on a modern university than Paterno, who died in 2012. Because of his football team—which he coached for half a century—Penn State went from an institution best known as a regional agricultural school to a vast university with a national reputation. He was Catholic, old-school, elaborately respectful of players’ mothers—and eager to wrest their sons away and turn them into men, via the time-honored, noncoddling, masculine processes of football. To say he was a beloved figure doesn’t begin to suggest the role he played on campus. He was Heaney at Harvard, Chomsky at MIT. That he was not a scholar but a football coach and yet was the final authority on almost every aspect of Penn State life says a great deal about the institution. He was also a proud Delta Kappa Epsilon man and a tremendous booster of the fraternity system, and—as was typical for men of his generation—he understood hazing to be an accepted part of Greek life.
In 2007, he gave the practice his implicit endorsement. Photographs had surfaced of some members of the wrestling team apparently being hazed: They were in their underwear with 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped to their hands. “What’d they do?” he asked during an open football practice that week. “When I was in college, when you got in a fraternity house, they hazed you. They made you stay up all night and played records until you went nuts, and you woke in the morning and all of a sudden they got you before a tribunal and question you as to whether you have the credentials to be a fraternity brother. I didn’t even know where I was. That was hazing. I don’t know what hazing is today.” He wasn’t upset that the wrestlers had engaged in hazing; he was scornful of them for doing it wrong. Looking back at the past two decades at Penn State, we see a university grappling with its fraternity problem in ways that pitted concerned administrators against a powerful system, and achieving little change.
Joe Paterno: the gift that keeps on giving. But the hold frats have on campuses like Penn State are truly baffling. In the wake of Tim Piazza’s death, Penn State trustee William Oldsey told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Piazza’s death was not an indictment, but an endorsement of Greek life at Penn State because, get this, “This is a good enough system that it attracted a kid of the high caliber and character of Tim Piazza.” OH FUCK YOU, DUDE.
The details of Tim Piazza’s death are heartwrenching. I reproduce the timeline here in full because each new detail is as shocking as the last, and I simply couldn’t pick-and-choose what to omit. It’s long, but I urge you to read:
So here is Tim, reaching for his good jacket—in a closet that his mother will soon visit to select the clothes he will wear in his coffin—a little bit excited and a little bit nervous. “They’re going to get me fucked up,” he texts his girlfriend, and then he pulls closed the door of his college apartment for the last time. He has been told to show up at exactly 9:07. Inside, the 14 pledges are lined up, each with his right hand on the right shoulder of the one in front of him, and taken into the living room, where they are welcomed into the fraternity with songs and skits. And then it is time for the first act of hazing in their pledge period: quickly drinking a massive amount of alcohol in an obstacle course, the “gauntlet.” Court documents and the security footage provide excruciating detail about what comes next. About an hour after the gauntlet begins, the pledges return to the living room, all of them showing signs of drunkenness. At 10:40, Tim appears on one of the security cameras, assisted by one of the brothers. The forensic pathologist will later describe his level of intoxication at this point as “stuporous.” He is staggering, hunched over, and he sits down heavily on the couch and doesn’t want to get up. But the brother encourages him to stand and walks him through the dining room and kitchen and back to the living room, where he sits down again on the couch. And then Tim tries to do something that could have saved his life. He stands up, uncertainly, and heads toward the front door. If he makes it through that door, he may get out to the street, may find a place to sit or lie down, may come to the attention of someone who can help him—at the very least by getting him back to his apartment and away from the fraternity. He reaches the front door, but the mechanism to open it proves too complicated in his drunken state, so he turns around and staggers toward another door. Perhaps he is hoping that this door will be easier to open; perhaps he is hoping that it also leads out of the fraternity house. But it is the door to the basement, and when he opens it—perhaps expecting his foot to land on level ground—he takes a catastrophic fall. On the security footage, a fraternity brother named Luke Visser points toward the stairs in an agitated way. Greg Rizzo clearly hears the fall and goes to the top of the steps to see what’s happened. Later, he will tell the police that he saw Tim “facedown, at the bottom of the steps.” Jonah Neuman will tell the police that he saw Tim lying facedown with his legs on the stairs. Rizzo sends a group text: “Tim Piazza might actually be a problem. He fell 15 feet down a flight of steps, hair-first, going to need help.” (Rizzo, who was not charged with any crimes, told the police that he later advocated for calling an ambulance.) Four of the brothers carry Tim up the stairs. By now he has somehow lost his jacket and tie, and his white shirt has ridden up, revealing a strange, dark bruise on his torso. This is from his lacerated spleen, which has begun spilling blood into his abdomen. The brothers put him on a couch, and Rizzo performs a sternum rub—a test for consciousness used by EMTs—but Tim does not respond. Another brother throws beer in his face, but he does not respond. Someone throws his shoes at him, hard. Someone lifts his arm and it falls back, deadweight, to his chest. At this point, the brothers have performed a series of tests to determine whether Tim is merely drunk or seriously injured. He has failed all their tests. The next day, Tim’s father will ask the surgeon who delivers the terrible news of Tim’s prognosis whether the outcome would have been different if Tim had gotten help earlier, and the surgeon will say—unequivocally—that yes, it would have been different. That “earlier” is right now, while Tim is lying here, unresponsive to the sternum rub, the beer poured on him, the dropped arm. A brother named Ryan Foster rolls Tim on his side, but has to catch him because he almost rolls onto the floor. Jonah Neuman straps a backpack full of books to him to keep him from rolling over and aspirating vomit. Two brothers sit on Tim’s legs to keep him from moving. This is the moment when Kordel Davis arrives and attempts to save Tim’s life, only to be thrown against the wall by Neuman. Davis disappears from the video, in search of an officer of the club. By now Tim is “thrashing and making weird movements,” according to the grand-jury presentment. Daniel Casey comes into the room, looks at Tim, and slaps him in the face three times. Tim does not respond. Two other brothers wrestle near the couch and end up slamming on top of Tim, whose spleen is still pouring blood into his abdomen. Tim begins to twitch and vomit. At this point, Joseph Ems appears “frustrated” by Tim, according to the grand jury. With an open hand, he strikes the unconscious boy hard, on the abdomen, where the bruise has bloomed. This blow may be one of the reasons the forensic pathologist will find that Tim’s spleen was not just lacerated, but “shattered.” (Ems was originally charged with recklessly endangering another person, but that charge—the only one brought against him—has been dropped.) Still, Tim does not wake up. Forty-five minutes later, Tim rolls onto the floor. The heavy backpack is still strapped to him. He rolls around, his legs moving. He attempts to stand up, and manages to free himself from the backpack, which falls to the floor. But the effort is too much, and he falls backwards, banging his head on the hardwood floor. A fraternity member shakes him, gets no response, and walks away. At 3:46 in the morning, Tim is on the floor, curled up in the fetal position. At home in New Jersey, his parents are sleeping. Across campus, his older brother, Mike, has no idea that Tim is not safely in his bed. At 3:49 a.m., Tim wakes up and struggles to his knees, cradling his head in his hands; he falls again to the hardwood floor. An hour later, he manages to stand up, and staggers toward the front door, but within seconds he falls, headfirst, into an iron railing and then onto the floor. On some level he must know: I am dying. He stands once again and tries to get to the door. His only hope is to get out of this house, but he falls headfirst once again. At 5:08 a.m., Tim is on his knees, his wounded head buried in his hands. Around campus, people are beginning to wake up. The cafeteria workers are brewing coffee; athletes are rising for early practices. It’s cold and still dark, but the day is beginning. Tim is dying inside the Beta house, steps away from the door he has been trying all night to open.
Around 7 o’clock, another pledge wanders into the living room, where Tim is now lying on the couch groaning, and the pledge watches as he rolls off the couch and onto the floor, and again lifts himself to his knees and cradles his head in his hands, “as if he had a really bad headache.” The pledge lifts his cellphone, records Tim’s anguish on Snapchat, and then—while Tim is rocking back and forth on the floor—leaves the house. A few minutes later, Tim stands and staggers toward the basement steps, and disappears from the cameras’ view. The house begins to stir. Some fraternity members head off to class, and in the fullness of time they return. And then, at about 10 a.m., a brother named Kyle Pecci (who was not charged) arrives and asks a pledge, Daniel Erickson (who was also not charged), a question that seems to both of them a casual one: Whatever happened to that pledge who fell down the stairs at the party? They come across Tim’s shoes, and realize that Tim must still be somewhere in the house, so they look for him. The search reveals him collapsed behind one of the bars in the basement. He is lying on his back, with his arms tight at his sides and his hands gripped in fists. His face is bloody and his breathing is labored. His eyes are half open; his skin is cold to the touch; he is unnaturally pale. Three men carry him upstairs and put him on the couch, but no one calls 911. Fraternity brothers with garbage bags appear in the footage and start cleaning up the evidence. Brothers try to prop Tim up on the couch and dress him, but his limbs are too stiff and they can’t do it. Someone wipes the blood off his face, and someone else tries, without luck, to pry open his clenched fingers. Clearly the brothers are trying to make this terrible situation appear a little bit better for when the authorities arrive. But they do not use their many cellphones to call 911. Instead one brother uses his phone to do a series of internet searches for terms such as cold extremities in drunk person and binge drinking, alcohol, bruising or discoloration, cold feet and cold hands. Where is Tim right now, as his body lies on the couch? Are his soul and self still here, in the room, or have they already slipped away? He has put up a valiant, almost incredible fight for his life, but by now he has lost that fight. When he was a little boy, he used to make people laugh because he got so frustrated with board games; he didn’t like playing those games, with their rules and tricks. He loved sports, and running, and playing with his friends at the beach. But his body is cold now, his legs and arms unbending.
Finally, at 10:48 a.m., a brother calls 911—perhaps realizing that it would be best to do so while the pledge is still technically alive—and Tim is delivered from the charnel house. Soon his parents will race toward him, and so will his frantic brother, who has been searching for him. They will be reunited for the few hours they have left with this redheaded boy they have loved so well, and at least it can be said that Tim did not die alone, or in the company of the men who tortured him.
Fourteen of the frat guys face a total of 328 criminal charges (though a judge threw out charges of involuntary manslaughter). The actions of these guys is truly disturbing and shows a callousness that is frankly incomprehensible to me. But in this we also see the unintended consequence of the zero-tolerance policies put in place. In the 1980s, parents of dead fraternity members began suing fraternities and winning huge amounts of money. Insurance companies refused to insure the frats any longer. So frats created a joint council and pooled their money to self-insure. Then, the frats banned hazing, and a host of other activities that everyone associates with frat life: underage drinking, drinking games, etc. They also set absurd rules that would be impossible to enforce. For example, “During a party, alcohol consumption must be tightly regulated. Either the chapter can hire a third-party vendor to sell drinks—and to assume all liability for what happens after guests consume them—or members and guests may each bring a small amount of alcohol for personal use and hand it over to a monitor who labels it, and then metes it back to the owner in a slow trickle.”
The national fraternities then indemnified themselves, so that the individual frat members would be the ones responsible in the event someone got hurt or killed while being hazed, or even while just partying. This is diabolical. And so what we see in the actions of Tim’s fellow frat members is the response to, as the author puts it:
“Liv[ing] under the shadow of giant sanctions and lawsuits that can result even from what seem like minor incidents. The strict policies promote a culture of secrecy, and when something really does go terribly wrong, the young men usually start scrambling to protect themselves. Doug Fierberg, a Washington, D.C., lawyer whose practice is built on representing plaintiffs in fraternity lawsuits, told me that “in virtually every hazing death, there is a critical three or four hours after the injury when the brothers try to figure out what to do. It is during those hours that many victims pass the point of no return.”
We see this clearly in Tim Piazza’s death. Just before the party that killed him began, the fraternity president texted the pledge master, “I know you know this. If anything goes wrong with the pledges this semester then both of us are fucked.” We see it in the reluctance, even outright refusal, to call 9-1-1 when Tim Piazza’s dying body was found, even with another fraternity member begging they do so. We see it the next day, when fraternity members were texting each other:
“Between you and me, “what are the chances the house gets shut down?” “I think very high. I just hope none of us get into any lawsuits.”
It’s sad, isn’t it? These fraternities, and their members, did terrible things, and lots of people died. So we made rules to try to stop it, but things didn’t stop, and we just throw up our hands and accept it as a part of growing up, for (mostly) white, affluent kids from the suburbs, anyways. But it doesn’t need to be like this. This stuff happens because the traditions keep being passed down, despite the national organization’s lip service to ending them. So, kill the damn frats. There will be no one to pass the traditions to, and kids like Tim Piazza won’t die, slowly, while their friends pour beer on them and assault them, refusing to get them the medical attention they so desperately need, for fear of the “house” getting “shut down”. -TOB
PAL: Terribly sad story. And I agree – there’s no need for this greek institution on college campuses. Regardless of their stated intent, they are the setting for needless deaths and dangerous binge drinking. This isn’t a fun sports story.
While poor choices and binge drinking are not unique to the greek system on a college campus, I can appreciate the environment frats create can lead to people not acting in the best interest of an individual in dire straits. No one wants to be responsible for “shutting the house down”, which, on the other side of thirty, is just absurd. I can understand the thinking, and the environment that breeds this logic, but it’s just absurd.
My real beef with this story concerns the Joe Paterno connection.
Before I jump into that, let me state this clearly: I am not a Paterno apologist. I believe he knew what Sandusky was doing within the football complex – surely enough to make it stop taking place within the football complex – and he did nothing. Criminal.
With that said, for writer Caitlin Flanagan to make the leap that Paterno was somehow implicit in Piazza’s death is outright ridiculous. Let’s go back to the portion about Paterno TOB quoted in his writeup (emphasis mine)
To say he was a beloved figure doesn’t begin to suggest the role he played on campus. He was Heaney at Harvard, Chomsky at MIT. That he was not a scholar but a football coach and yet was the final authority on almost every aspect of Penn State life says a great deal about the institution. He was also a proud Delta Kappa Epsilon man and a tremendous booster of the fraternity system, and—as was typical for men of his generation—he understood hazing to be an accepted part of Greek life.
In 2007, he gave the practice his implicit endorsement. Photographs had surfaced of some members of the wrestling team apparently being hazed: They were in their underwear with 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped to their hands. “What’d they do?” he asked during an open football practice that week. “When I was in college, when you got in a fraternity house, they hazed you. They made you stay up all night and played records until you went nuts, and you woke in the morning and all of a sudden they got you before a tribunal and question you as to whether you have the credentials to be a fraternity brother. I didn’t even know where I was. That was hazing. I don’t know what hazing is today.” He wasn’t upset that the wrestlers had engaged in hazing; he was scornful of them for doing it wrong.
Paterno says, “That was hazing. I don’t know what hazing is today.” For her to draw the conclusions as to how we felt (“he wasn’t upset…he was scornful of them doing it wrong..”) is quite a leap. Was he asked if he was upset? Is there a quote from him clarifying if he meant he was scornful for them doing it wrong? She is attaching feelings that, as presented, we don’t know to be Paterno’s, in order to connect the dots between one historic scandal and the death of young man at a frat house.
Also, Paterno wasn’t the final authority, goddamit. He was a powerful football coach, perhaps powerful to an unprecedented extent, but he was not the final authority on the greek system, and for anyone to suggest that without also explicitly criticizing actual leadership at Penn State is, well, making a leap and providing an incomplete account.
Paterno did irrevocable harm by standing by as rape and sexual abuse of minors was taking place within his football program. I have no loyalty or appreciation for him. Still, Flanagan uses him to broaden the web of an already tragic story that upon which doesn’t need to be expanded. The greek system full of dangerous loopholes. She doesn’t need to sensationalize it by adding Joe Paterno where he simply doesn’t belong.
TOB: I dug a little into Paterno’s quote. Some context here. First, it should be noted this was the Penn State wrestling team, not a frat. Second, photos of the wrestling team’s hazing were sent to the team’s coach and a local paper, and that’s what got them in trouble. Paterno is asked about the hazing and says:
“What’d they do?” he asked. “When I was in college, when you got in a fraternity house, they hazed you. They made you stay up all night and played records until you went nuts, and you woke in the morning and all of a sudden they got you before a tribunal and question you as to whether you have the credentials to be a fraternity brother. I didn’t even know where I was. That was hazing. I don’t know what hazing is today, you put it on a Web site ‘ “ Paterno said the environment of the country is changing and said even he has to be aware of what pictures he allows himself to appear in. “I’m down there on a vacation and a pretty little girl comes over to me in a bikini and wants to get her picture taken with me with her boyfriend,” he said. “I’m scared to death. You know what I mean? I mean ‘ I get my picture taken with a cute kid and the whole bit, put it on a Web site, there’s that dirty old man.”
What Paterno is really criticizing is the fact they took photos in the first place. So, yeah, he’s saying they hazed wrong. Either she framed it poorly, or it was edited poorly. I see why you had a beef, but I think she was ultimately correct.
More importantly, though, I understand her larger point. She’s saying this is a university completely out of control, with leadership rotten to its core, that cares about all the wrong things. Preserving the greek system…while kids die! Preserving the football team…while kids gets raped! Hazing happens at campuses all over; what’s concerning here to me is the response. William Oldsey, a university trustee, saying that Tim Piazza’s death is an endorsement of the Penn State greek system is just so gross. I don’t think she’s blaming Paterno. I think she’s arguing Paterno is symptomatic of a rotten core.
PAL: I misspoke on the Wrestler/Frat element. However, she does not present it as explicitly as you do within her story. The context you provide is absent from her story, and that’s part of my critique. If you’re going to make that connection, there can be little-to-no inference on the reader’s part. It needs to be explicit, because it’s that serious. She presents an incomplete connection without qualification, and is relying on the reader to use what they know of Paterno with regards to his ambivalence in the Sandusky tragedy to make the leap with regards to Piazza. This matter is too serious to be this loose.
This Doping Scandal is Different (?)
Readers, I regret to inform you there is another steroid scandal brewing, one that calls into question the legitimacy of an American sports institution. It involves some of the very best athletes in the sport.
You guys, the Iditarod is full of dogs that are juicing.
Well, they aren’t juicing so much as they are being juiced.
A doping scandal has hit the world’s most famous dog-sled race, the 1,000-mile trek through Alaska that ends in Nome each March. Four dogs on a team run by Dallas Seavey, a four-time champion and the most dominant musher in the sport, tested positive last spring for high levels of Tramadol, an opioid pain reliever.
Why would anyone partake in doping dogs? Oh, the winner receives 75K? Gotcha. But mushers are different, folks. They do this for the love of the sport. And mushers stick together. None of Seavey’s competitors believe he did it. Quite the contrary, in fact.
The thought that another musher would taint Seavey’s dogs sounded unlikely to his competitors. The sport is a tight and insular one, in constant need of sponsors and promotion, and setting off a doping scandal would hurt the sport as much as it would damage Seavey. And Tramadol would be a strange drug choice; it is not commonly used in the world of dogsledding. Royer said she had never heard of it.
That reasoning led some to speculate that outsiders who protest the Iditarod and similar events might be involved.
Well, that kind of makes sense. Yeah, why would he dope his dogs while knowing they will be tested after the race. And it doesn’t even sound like Tramadol would even be the drug to use anyway? This is dog-sledding after all. Just hard-working, everyday Americans with an appreciation of that Jack London Alaska…
And that’s how it happens, folks. How many times have we read about doping scandals? How many time (be honest) have you thought the excuses made sense? How many times have those excused proved complete hogwash?
He wanted to win. $75K is a good amount of money. He’s competitive, he wanted to win, so he gave the dogs that had been busting ass for god knows how long a little extra.
He did it. Right? Right. Right? It does make sense that those who believe the sport is animal abuse would look to damage it in a way that makes the dogs even that much more the victim…DAMMIT, I fell for it again! – PAL
This is really well done. Last week, Jared Goff threw an interception. On the run back, he made an incredibly smart and athletic play to make the tackle and preserve the shutout.
Lolololololol. Let’s take that frame by frame, all pics and captions courtesy of some guy named Beefjurky.
The apex predator, Goff, locks in on his prey, Tyrann Mathieu, a much smaller human. Once Goff locks in there’s no hope for escape.
Goff, the superior athlete, strategically dodges the entire slew of lead blockers with an agile twirling leap.
Goff, the genius, is now in place and just has to wait for his prey to fall right into his trap.
Mathieu, the fool, has fallen right into his trap. See that white horizontal blur in the middle of that group of men? That’s Goff’s fucking arm of death. Once that thing comes up, it is GAME OVER.
Goff looks pitifully as his prey comes crashing down to Earth. The smug victor doesn’t even move, showing that he barely even used a fraction of his full power.
Goff’s job is done. Mathieu is down and will now go to lick his wounds among his other wimpy bird friends, to perhaps lose again another day. Jared slowly but calmly rises, because alpha predators like him are in no rush to be anywhere.
Even his head. Oh, I guess because the two major steroid investigations happened to be centered around Bonds’ trainer and Clemens’ trainer, the Steroid Stink isn’t on Thome, huh? Which is not to say I think Thome shouldn’t be in. He should! Even if he took steroids. But we have NO idea who took steroids and who didn’t. And keeping people out who you THINK took steroids is unfair, when plenty more who got away with taking steroids without the whispers will make it in. As Buster Olney said this week:
1-2-3 SPORTS! 