The Debatable Land

Department of Sports Journalism

If Furman Bisher (great name!) is typical of the sports staff at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution then, you know, newspapers probably do deserve to die.

Baseball used to be a game played with nine men to a side, two managers, four umpires, and the major-league season always opened in Cincinnati. Come to think of it now, that would be sort of like “Gone With the Wind” opening in Valdosta. But Cincinnati had a deal, see.

The first “major league” baseball game was played in Cincinnati on June 1, 1869. The locals, the Red Stockings, eked out a 48-14 victory over Mansfield, whoever Mansfield was. So, several years ago — even the league office isn’t sure when — it became a custom that every major-league season opened in Cincinnati. Nobody played before the Red Stockings, now shortened to Reds. It was just that way. That’s how baseball is, very long on tradition. It just gets into a habit it likes and stays there.

Well, not any longer. Money can change any habit. Eight springs ago the Mets and Cubs opened the season, not in Cincinnati. Guess where? Tokyo. That Tokyo, the guys who gave us Pearl Harbor. Some people don’t like you to bring that up, trade with Japan is so hot. But I’ve got a long memory. I saw what a few bombs can do to our property.

I've said it before but it bears saying again: 90% of the best sports-writing in America never appears in a newspaper.

[Hat-tip: the lads at Fire Joe Morgan.]

Cricket and Baseball II

Ross responds to my gentle tweaking about baseball and cricket here. He makes some fair points. But thinking about it just now, it occurs to me that there's another major difference between British sports and their American counterparts that sets British sports apart. Namely, participation.

With the obvious and notable exception of basketball, it's notable that very few people actually play the major American sports. Sure, kids play American football and baseball in school and some - a minority obviously - will do so in college but very few adults actually play these sports. I know that there are adult hardball baseball leagues and there are still some independent leagues in which small towns play one another, but for the most part adult Americans are reduced to either watching sports or playing a watered-down version of them, such as softball or flag football (a sort of American football version of touch rugby). Now there's nothing wrong with that and given the physical difficulties and demands imposed by the gridiron game and baseball respectively it's not, perhaps, a great surprise.

But it is a difference and an important one at that. In Britain, by contrast, the parks are stuffed with people playing soccer in the winter and cricket in the summer. Rugby too, obviously. None of these games are presumed to be the preserve of children or professional athletes with next to no tiers in between. At the most casual level many, perhaps even most, offices have a staff soccer or cricket team that will play at least occasionally and, generally speaking, also play the game properly and according to its proper rules. Social or occasional cricket and social rugby clubs also continue to thrive; my brother is organising a cricket match in Paris for his friend's stag party next month; other friends are members of cricket clubs that travel for overseas tours each year and so on and so on. Perhaps it's the American circles I moved in, but I can't recall ny of my friends (in, admittedly, Washington) playing real baseball.

Why is this significant? Well, I think it matters because it's a great unifying force. The world's best are, in the end, merely better at playing a game we play ourselves. The 40 year old turning out for his village cricket side is still connected, however tenuously, to the cricket played by the game's greatest stars. The carpenter or butcher or lawyer still trotting out to represent his home town's rugby club is in a similar position.

What this also means, of course, is that the pleasures of cricket or rugby or soccer are, like those of golf or tennis actually, still there to be enjoyed on a participatory as well as spectating basis. Saying this isn't meant to denigrate American sports, merely to observe that this is another area in which the United States ended up proceeding along a different path. Still, in a definite sense I think this participatory element matters: it pools ownership of the sport and its history and rituals and connects us all, whether brilliant or hopeless, to those who've gone before and those at the top tier of the sport. Equally, broadly speaking the principles of the game remain the same, regardless of the level its played at and, again broadly speaking, it seems to me excellent and beneficial that a sport is open to more people than simply the very best athletes.

From a practical perspective too, I think there's much to be said for a game that can still be enjoyed even when it is not played at a particularly rarified level. Obviously there's an element to which this is the case in America too, but there's no real equivalent, as best I can recall, of village cricket let alone the sense that watching (as well as playing) the sport at that low level can still be an enjoyable element, let alone the highlight, of your weekend.

Now of course there are millions of Americans who take part in sporting activities every weekend. But what they don't, generally speaking (and I use the term generally advisedly), I think, do is participate in team sports and the team sports they ignore most especially, seem to be the great American sports.

The Greatest Game of All

Today, being perhaps the best day of the year*, is a good moment to consider Ross Douthat's assertion that John Rawls was right. We do not speak of philosophy, of course, but of something much more important: sport. More specifically, Rawls' belief that "baseball is the best of all games."

There's something to this, for sure, though really it would be better rendered as "Baseball is the best of all American games" - a sentiment with which it would be hard to quibble, much though I also admire and enjoy college football (Go Blue!).

Ross elaborates:

One could go on to note the perfect balance that baseball strikes between team effort and individual performance, a balance at once deeply Christian and deeply small-d democratic. Or its paradoxical nature, which inspires quantification and romanticization in equal measure, and offers food for statheads as well as novelists, conservatives as well as liberals,  historians as well as business writers. Or …

No, enough. No argument, however self-evidently powerful, will persuade those deluded souls – and they do exist! – who would argue that the qualities that Rawls and Kalven considered strengths are actually weaknesses. Those who would claim that baseball’s physical ecumenism – the sport’s ability to find a place for Chone Figgins as well as Vladimir Guerrero, for John Kruk as well as Bo Jackson - makes it ultimately inferior to basketball or football or soccer as a test of athletic ability. Those who would assert that the skills that baseball requires are too idiosyncratic to be interesting – that whereas everyone can appreciate the physical strength required to be an offensive lineman, or the speed and agility required of a small forward, only a crank or an obsessive can get worked up about how well a paunchy middle-aged man flicks a curve or spins a knuckleball. Those who would aver that baseball’s clocklessness, its out-of-time quality and its inclination toward eternity, just means that the games take too damn long.

Such people are beyond the reach of reason. Also, they’re communists.

To which, again, one can say that this is all very well and good yet also, in any reasonable final analysis, insufficient. Britishers and Australians exiled in the United States of America can love baseball (and we do!) while acknowledging that it is, in the end, merely making do with what's available. Even so, it's my experience that members of the Commonwealth are more open to enjoying American sport than the Americans, isolationists to the bitter end, tend** to be to appreciating the glories of the world's grandest game. Indeed, what is baseball but a simplified, abbreviated form of cricket?

Americans, again in my experience, tend to scoff at this sort of talk. But at the risk of arguing from authority, let me cite Thomas Boswell, the Washington Post's veteran and well-regarded baseball columnist. Boswell had the good fortune to attend the fifth day of the 1984 Lords test between England and the West Indies. The following day - which happened to be July 4th - he made this quasi-treasonous admission:

"I came with an open mind but a suspicion that I would despise the world's slowest team sport... However, instead of coming away a mocker, I now suspect it's lucky for me that I don't live in England. There's a cricket nut trapped somewhere deep inside me; stop me before I become addicted again.

Why wouldn't I get the habit? Cricket is, in many ways, baseball raised to the nth degree. Almost every basic tendency or theme of baseball is mirroried or exaggerated in cricket.... I am titillated by the thought that cricket might be a heightened form of baseball.. If anything, cricket's bowling is even more complex than baseball's pitching, just as cricket's batting is a more encyclopedic sort of acquired skill than hitting a baseball..."

Might be a heightened form of baseball? Nay lad, 'tis.

(I can't find the column online, alas, but you can read it in this collection of Boswell's columns.)

*Why so? Well, there's 24 hours of test cricket today. Since 2pm (UK time) we've been enjoying the fourth day of the West Indies vs Sri Lanka in Guyana; in 20 minutes New Zealand and England take to the field for the fifth day of their test in Napier while, right on cue, 4am sees day one of India vs South Africa in Madras. And all of it, thanks to Mr Murdoch, can be seen on SKY Sports. A blissful, if punishing, schedule leavened only by the prospect of enjoying afternoon tea three times in a singler 24 hour period...

** eg, Sir John Paul Getty

Three Yanks and you are out?

So, yes, the bloody New York Yankees came a cropper. Smirk all you like. They remain my American League peeps.

It is, as I explain, all Dubya's fault. Give me death before you give me more Boston gloating...

When Morons Attack

It's the baseball play-offs. Hurrah. Let's Go Yankees! But that also means it's time for America's sportswriters to be even dumber than is customarily the case. For the sake of your sanity as well as for proper hilarity, trot on over to the lads at Fire Joe Morgan. Recent highlights include: how your mother probably has a better understanding of the value of "wins" than the average Hall of Fame voter, why yes of course you'd be better off packing your team with people who aren't very good at baseball come the play-offs because, hey, they're plucky! And gusty! and, today, yet another welcome takedown of America's worst gasbag, Mr William Plaschke who is still, mystifyingly, employed by The Los Angeles Times and who thinks Vladimir Guerrero has some 'splaining to do [bold, in what follows in Plaschke, regular type the FJM commentary]:

Guerrero just keeps smiling and swinging and disappearing.

This is just an odd way to talk about a guy who has carried the Angels' offense on his back for so many years now. I mean, come on. I know Plaschke's talking about the playoffs, but honestly: Vlad's EqAs with the Angels over the past few seasons are .327, .318 .335 and .334. He's a yearly MVP candidate. Now you're angry that he smiles too much in the playoffs? You're a pretty dicked up guy, Bill.

It happened again in the Angels' 4-0 loss to the Boston Red Sox on Wednesday in the first game of the division series.

Would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that what Josh Beckett did two days ago was one of the best post-season pitching performances by anyone, ever. 19 straight retired. No extra-base hits. No walks. And that doesn't even begin to convey his utter dominance.

Guerrero hacked at 11 of 14 pitches and managed two singles. Even though that was half of his team's output against Josh Beckett, it wasn't enough to make a dent in Guerrero's October angst.

You're criticizing a guy for going 2-4 in the face of one of the all-time great playoff games by a pitcher. Think for just one goddamn second about that.

In four seasons since joining the Angels, he has dragged them into three postseasons, but stumbled once they arrived.

In 14 postseason games, he has one extra-base hit. He has driven in runs on exactly three hits. He has twice as many double-play grounders (two) as home runs (one).

He has a career .204 postseason average, more than 100 points lower than the October average of former Angels hero Troy Glaus, whose void he needs to replace for the Angels to return to that glory.

His playoff numbers are atrocious. They also represent 54 at bats. In his other 1701 at bats as an Angel, he has been splendiferous, wonderbarfuelous, and a whole bunch of other made-up words. Which do you trust more? Don't answer that. I know what you're going to say because you are an insane person. He is one gajillion times the player Troy Glaus is (unless we're talking about super-roided up Glaus).

Why you don't want political journalists to write like baseball hacks...

Via Kevin Drum, I see that, in one of his regular plangent calls for a better press corps, Brad DeLong has highlighted an extraordinary suggestion from one of his readers. Namely that:

I repeat my previous suggestion for the "baseball test." A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball.

I assume that Professor DeLong's reader does not intend reducing the quality of political coverage in this country but it seems unavoidable that this is indeed what he is proposing. I mean, has this chap ever read Bill Plaschke? Or Murray Chass? Both these men are members of the Baseball Writers Association of America (though typically, being stuffed shirts, they decline to cast Hall of Fame ballots).

Here's Chass listing some of the things he didn't want to hear about this season:

Statistics mongers promoting VORP and other new-age baseball statistics.

I receive a daily e-mail message from Baseball Prospectus, an electronic publication filled with articles and information about statistics, mostly statistics that only stats mongers can love.

To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense. For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out. I asked some colleagues whose work I respect, and they didn’t know what it meant either.

Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know.

I suppose that if stats mongers want to sit at their computers and play with these things all day long, that’s their prerogative. But their attempt to introduce these new-age statistics into the game threatens to undermine most fans’ enjoyment of baseball and the human factor therein.

This man, ladies and gentlemen, is the senior baseball writer for The New York Times. It's not clear to me why he's so proud of his ignorance, but there you go. Still, you might think someone would have a word and suggest that learning about the value of statistical analysis might help Chass write about one of the two biggest changes in baseball these past twenty years (the other being the internationalisation of the game).

Not to be outdone, here's a representative sample from Mr Plashke, poet laureate to the unfortunate Los Angeles Times. The story is headlined, if you can believe it, There's Trust In His Eyes:

Around the hotel table sat Dodgers executives discussing trades.

In the corner sat the old scout watching television.

Around the hotel table they were talking about dumping Milton Bradley and wondering whom they should demand from the Oakland A's in return.

In the corner sat the old scout who has never worked with radar gun, computer or even stopwatch.

Around the hotel room table, someone mentioned an unknown double-A outfielder named Andre Ethier.

In the corner, the old scout jumped.

"Wait a minute!" shouted Al LaMacchia. "I know Andre Ethier!"

In a gait slowed by years of climbing bleachers, LaMacchia walked over from the television to the table.

With Dodgers executives staring at him in amazement, the old scout began to sell.

He was on the phone, and it sounded as if he was crying.

"You're writing something about an old fella like me?" said Al LaMacchia.

He's 85, and he's been scouting for 51 years, and he can't believe anybody still cares.

I tell him I am writing the story because the Dodgers still care.

For the first time since Fred Claire was their last world championship general manager, the Dodgers are listening to their older scouts again.

They are reading reports scrawled in aging penmanship. They are evaluating players based on dusted-off instincts.

I should make it clear that I have not changed the punctuation. Plaschke really does write in one sentence paragraphs. Even if you can ignore the sheer gawd-help-us-ness of the writing, you might want to be bear in mind that the story is, essentially, a fraud.

As the invaluable firejoemorgan.com noted, Andre Ethier was so unknown that he was the Oakland Athletics' Minor League Player of the Year in 2005. Perhaps Plaschke thinks Billy Beane was employing the old Purloined Letter Strategy?

Chass and Plashke are not unrepresentative figures. There are, of course, diligent beat writers sprinkled across the country, but in general terms the quality of sports writing in this country's daily newspapers is appalling. Much of it is sentimental pap drenched in cheap perfume. That's bad enough, but to make matters worse baseball writers are proud of their ignorance. Most of these fellows still talk as though batting average and wins and RBIs were a meaningful measurement of a players' ability or contribution. You do not need to be a stathead to realise that these are junk statistics.

There's a wider point to be made here too, however. The political blogosphere is still, in some ways, catching up with the sporting blogosphere. Sports fans crashed the big media gates some time ago. In any major league city or any significant college town the chances are that the best, sharpest, most detailed and comprehensive coverage of big league baseball or college football is to be found online, not in the traditional mainstream media.

To give just a few examples: Bronx Banter beats the NYT's Yankees coverage every day.; John Perricone's Only Baseball Matters is required (and provocative) reading for San Francisco Giants fans. In college football, Brian Cook's Mgoblog does a better job covering Michigan football than any newspaper, while Sunday Morning Quarterback provides better and more useful college football analysis than ESPN and Sports Illustrated combined. The point isn't that these blogs are especially good, but that there are dozens more just like them. 

Now in some ways it is easier for bloggers to cover sports than it is for them to record politics. After all, the sport is delivered to your home. You're limited only by your Tivo capacity and the number of hours you 're prepared to spend on your site. Nonetheless, we can see something of the same beginning to happen to the political blogosphere too.

Magazines and newspapers embracing blogging is one thing (and my bet is that blogging will have an even greater impact on the style of reporting as time goes on an as more readers leave the inky edition behind); more significant, it seems, is the rise of enterprises such as Josh Marshall's Talking Points mini-empire. Who knows how many similar ventures will find the space and the backing they need? The point is that the market is responding to demand, eliminating a market inefficiency.

The big papers and the TV stations will still matter, but there'll be more and more original, accessible and dependable reporting online. That's a good thing, I believe, just as the boom in new voices and fresh perspective afforded by the internet has massively improved sports fans' ability to find worthwhile coverage of their favourite teams. It's happening; it's just a question of how quickly...

Bonds and 756: No real need for an asterisk

Even political bloggers and policy wonkers seem to feel the need to write something about Barry Lamar Bonds. Matt Yglesias says he must be the best ever; Brian Beutler - being a self-respecting Dodgers fan - must and does decline to endorse that opinion; Megan McArdle is infuriatingly non-commital while Dan Drezner reminds one that Tom Glavine should receive more respect for winning his 300th game (though of course the "wins" statistic is one of the most misleading and useless in all baseball; this is the only explanation for its continued existence)

Clearly this is one of those situations that can only be judged by a foreigner. That being the case, it's quite clear that Bonds get into the starting line-up for your All-Time baseball team.

Would Bonds have hit 756 without using steroids and other dubious training methods? Perhaps not. But it's never been quite clear to me why using steroids is considered an artificial enhancement whereas other medicinal aides to preparation (and, just as importantly, recovery) are not considered so terrible. The widespread use of "greenies" in baseball - that's amphetamines to you and me - may be considered a natural response to the sport's gruelling schedule (especially the travel) but it's also, surely, the case that it contributed to higher career figures for many players than would otherwise have been the case. Yet no-one calls for asterisks in this instance, do they? But steroids are still considered beyond the pale, presumably because they're seen as a free-ride: take these pills ad improve without having to do any work. As far as the public is concerned steroids offer unearned rewards. There's not enough blood sweat and tears for our taste and it offends our notion that sports ought to be a better, idealised, version of real-life and, consequently, an arena in which the concept of "something for nothing" doesn't exist. (Yet here too there's a strange inconsistency: if Tiger Woods has laser surgery on his eyes - helping him read greens etc - no-one considers that "cheating" yet taking drugs to help improve power off the tee would be an affront to everyone's tender sensibilities...)

Alas, that's not the way the world works. Sport is not impervious to human nature. That we seem to need to be reminded of this over and over again demonstrates the human minds' capacity for wishful thinking and self-delusion.

As for the question of who is the greatest: one needs to assume, in these hypothetical situations, that players from the past would be able to take advantage of modern training methods and technological advances. This is not an especially foolish assumption. Secondly, it's fairest to compare players against the standards of their own era. Here Bonds comes out ahead of Aaron but behind Ruth (Ted Williams is also ahead o fAaron in most of the important statistical categories). The Babe, remember, hit more home runs some years than entire teams - it was as though he were playing on Lilliput.

Against that, one may reasonably suppose that Bonds would have proved capable of feasting in a pitching pool that did not include specialist relievers or LOOGYs, let alone black or foreign pitchers.

Even so, most detailed statistical comparisons declare Ruth the narrow winner, though I think I'm right to think that Bods has now accumulated more batting Win Shares than anyone in baseball history.

But perhaps the most telling indicator of how tough it is to reach 755 home runs, comes from the fact that a modified version of the PECOTA statistical projection system says that despite becoming the youngest player to reach 500 home runs, Alex Rodriguez has just a 46% chance of reaching 756.

When baseball meets love...

A friend emails from San Francisco to report this story from the ballpark:

Tonight I caught a foul ball, hit by Rich Aurillia. It wasn't a hard catch, it was right to me, but still... I caught it clean, bare-handed, in the upper deck.

I immediately gave the ball to the seven year old kid in the next row, and his eyes went big as saucers. He couldn't believe it.

My girlfriend was too busy yelling abuse at Rich Aurillia for "working" the count to two strikes on a pitch that she thought was way outside to acknowledge anything else.

I am conflicted about her response. She had a point.

Seems like you're onto a good thing, Ben. What do you comment folk say?

The Numbers Don't Lie, Do They?

Player A is hitting a nifty .358/.427/.797. His OPS is 1.222 and he's crushing a Home Run every 8.2 times he has an at bat.

Player B isn't doing too badly either. He's hitting .338/.527/.805. His OPS is an insane 1.332 and he's biffing a Home Run every 7.0 at bats.

You've probably guessed that one of these players is Alex Rodriguez, officially off to The Best Start To A Baseball Season Ever. That takes care of Player A.

So who's Player B?

Step forward our old friend Barry Lamar Bonds who, despite turning 43 in July, could stake a decent claim to being the National League's Most Valuable Player through the first month of the season. Yes, of course it's only May, but were he to continue at this pace (a conceit too-beloved by baseball writers admittedly) he'd pass Hank Aaron's home run record weeks before the All-Star break.

I'm not a drugs expert by any means, but do recall that the effects of steroids wear off (eg, Ben Johnson's failed comeback after his first drugs ban). Assuming that common sense suggests Bonds would be a fool to be taking performance enhancing drugs this season (it seems reasonable to think he has taken them in the past) given that one would have thought it a certainty that he'd be tested, how does one explain his current form?

True, it is just 30 games, so the usual caveats about smallish samples apply. But still, people, come on. This is remarkable. Could it be that, at 42, he really is still this good?

Barry Bonds is still Barry Bonds of course and being Barry Bonds seems to mean being a jerk. But that ought not to prevent one from appreciating just how remarkable a baseball player he remains. Hell, even if he were juiced up to the eyeballs these would be pretty eye-popping numbers for a 42 year old... But what if he's clean?

Dan Drezner and Matt Yglesias have a Bloggingheads segment on Bonds, here