Deep Thoughts

Twitter Gone Wrong

2012-01-07T15:44:00.001-08:00

For the second time this week, two celebrities whom I follow on Twitter have used the forum to engage in personal battles. Keith Olbermann was one, Patton Oswalt the other. Once upon a time I enjoyed Olbermann’s MSNBC Countdown but he’d long grown insufferable and it’s been years since I have watched the show (now on another network). Until last week his content was mostly about baseball and largely forgettable and I’d only continued to follow him because, frankly, I’d forgotten I was. Suddenly he was involved in a flame war with some guy over who-knows-what, and with the click of a mouse, Olbermann was deleted from my feed.

The Oswalt situation was similar and different. One is that Oswalt is an entertaining tweeter. Two was the very nature of the debate. In the Olbermann argument he was angry about something a reporter was writing about him. In the second case, a comedienne in Los Angeles by the name of Barbara Gray was a witness to Oswalt’s onstage behavior and was sufficiently perturbed to blog about it. Apparently Oswalt had dropped in to do a set in the upstairs area of a Chinese restaurant where he could work on some new material in front of a presumably tiny audience. A woman attending the show with a couple of friends took it upon herself to take some video of the performance. There is no dispute that Oswalt was bothered and that he asked her to stop shooting. There is also no dispute that as she was leaving and after she left he made disparaging remarks about her.

I follow enough comedy to know that Gray is little-known while Oswalt is a star on his way to becoming a superstar. I have little doubt Ms. Gray’s blog post was made to draw attention to herself. It probably wouldn’t have worked. She’s got shy of 2,500 followers on Twitter and likely only slightly more traffic on her blog than I do on mine. Except that Oswalt got wind of Gray’s post, and retweeted it to his Twitter audience of nearly 600,000 people.

Oswalt eventually took to defending himself in 560 characters or less, then today posted his own rebuttal blog entry. It’s clear why he gave Gray the attention she was craving, as he was looking for a reason to address the substantive issues presented by his run-in with the audience member such as the right not to have your intellectual property appropriated by third-parties, the importance of a comedian’s having an avenue to try out new material before it’s ready for prime-time, etc. I’m sure he was also pissed at the girl and Barbara Gray. As a layperson, it’s hard not to side with Oswalt. He’s capable of earning tens of thousands of dollars or more for a polished performance but is out there for free. There are good reasons for that, a couple of which I mentioned. Patton does a better job of explaining it in his post.

I recently bought the download of Louis C.K.’s performance in which he humorously – but seriously – asks the audience to just sit for an hour and enjoy the show, not to Tweet it or photograph or videotape it. Mostly they oblige, though of course there’s the typical idiot that shouts something about eight minutes in. C.K. quickly dispatches him. As the uninformed observer it seems that sometimes the audience feels it’s okay to inject themselves into a comedian’s performance. I remember it happening in Eddie Murphy’s 1983 standup film “Delirious”, and the only time I’ve ever seen a comedic performer in a live, intimate setting (Joe Rogan at The Comedy Store in early 2004) a couple of drunken girls got loud and out of line. Rogan destroyed them verbally, so efficiently and humorously that I would have thought the whole thing staged if I didn’t know better. I wasn’t at the Palace last week, so I can only draw conclusions based on what I have read – more specifically the parts I read on which Gray and Oswalt are in agreement. Camera video wasn’t as ubiquitous in 2004 as it is now, but to me it seems that shooting video – then having the temerity to tell the artist that he will want to see it – is just a techy way for the observer to try and make him or herself part of the show. Since they are decidedly NOT the show, I have little concern for the way in which the person who IS the show chooses to react. You started up with a professional comic: What did you think was going to happen? On the other hand, it’s hard not to see Patton as a bit of a bully, not towards the girl with the cameraphone so much as Barbara Gray. He’s a major star and she isn’t. Yes her post was very critical of him, but that goes with the territory when you’re a celebrity. People are going to take shots, even when it’s done passive-aggressively under the “I think he’s the best” guise. I certainly won’t stop listening to or watching him as even if everything Ms. Gray wrote is taken as fact, it doesn’t add up to a whole lot. Still, I believe there are good uses for Twitter and bad ones, and I think Oswalt could have made all of his points just as effectively with a blog post, or a sidenote to the audience before starting his “practice” acts. 140-character flame wars just aren’t very interesting, even if you’re as funny and talented as Patton Oswalt.

Choking And The Boston Red Sox

2011-09-27T11:05:00.000-07:00

Choke is a term thrown around so casually in sports that the term has lost a great deal of its significance. Greg Norman pretty visibly choked in the final round of the 1996 Masters, as he hit a series of shots that were unbefitting one of the very best golfers in the world. Nick Anderson short-arming four free throws in the 1995 finals is another good example.

The Red Sox are not choking. They're running out a starting rotation befitting of a 100-loss team. Daiksuke Matsuzaka has been a bust, but save for his torn ulnar collteral ligament, would be a better choice than Kyle Weiland. Clay Buchholz, a very good starter, has been gone for a couple of months with a back ailment, forcing 45 year-old Tim Wakefield into the role of everyday starter when he has not pitched at a major-league level since 2009. John Lackey had a brutal year both personally and professionally and was busy posting a 6.40 ERA even when the Sox ran off 70 of 103 games in midseason. Kevin Youkilis has been injured and Jed Lowrie forced to take his place at third base; that's a pretty substantial dropoff. Jon Lester is pitching with an ailment the team refuses to disclose. In other words, the team that the Red Sox are running out this September is almost a totally different team than they had in June. If THIS iteration of the Sox played a 162 game schedule they'd do well to finish .500. While there may be some psychological component at work, isn't the more obvious explanation that on September 27th, 2011 the Red Sox are simply not very good?

Do Kid Gloves Work?

2010-08-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

About a month ago I wrote an article on Stephen Strasburg. At the time he'd been placed on the disabled list because of a sore shoulder, and while the Nats tap-danced and said it was purely a precautionary measure, one couldn't help but wonder if Strasburg, like so many great pitching talents before him, was going to be derailed before he could even get started.

Earlier this week, Strasburg threw a pitch in a game after which he winced and instinctively grabbed his forearm. It did not look good, and as it turns out it was as bad as it looked. He is expected to have Tommy John surgery and will miss most or all of the 2011 season. Joe Posnanski wrote a post on his blog earlier this week covering a lot of ground I did in last month's post, making the point that healthy baseball pitchers are the exception and not the rule. Most great talents, Joe wrote, never even make it to the major leagues. Of those that do, most find their way to career-ending injuries before too long. Some - like Bret Saberhagen - do a little of both. Then there are the very few, the freaks of nature within the freaks-of-nature subset that comprises ALL major leaguers who pitch 15 or 20 years and stay healthy. Naturally these are the ones we all remember - the Ryans and Clemenses - because they aren't gone for us to forget, but the fact is as it it was 80 years ago: Pitching is dangerous business.

That notion has caused me to rethink my position on what teams ought to do with their talented young (or old) arms. Stephen Strasburg was handled as carefully as an athlete can be handled, every professional pitch being monitored (though it seems he was ridden rather hard at San Diego State) and a plan devised to protect his pitching health. It did not work. All of the methods teams have employed for about the last 25 years to preserve pitching arms - pitch counts, more days' rest, less innings per start - seem to have failed, and not just with Strasburg. Guys get hurt, seemingly as often as ever. If that's the case, and it seems it is, then why bother? Under the current collective bargaining agreement the Nats are only going to have Strasburg under cost control for six years, after which he'll become a free agent and sell himself to the highest bidder. At least one full year of that time is now going to be spent while he recovers from surgery. Instead of taking extra care, then, why not take LESS? Pitch your guys every 5th day (or fourth). Pitch them as often and long as they're effective. Chances are they're going to get hurt no matter what, so why not just wring them out like a wet sponge? A few will stay healthy. Some will re-sign as free agents. In the meantime, a team can maximize its return and maybe get 1500 good innings while the getting is good. It seems to me too often teams are trying to save these guys for tomorrow but tomorrow never comes.

The One Where The Pistons Hit Rock Bottom

2010-08-07T19:34:00.000-07:00

Joe Dumars has become something of a whipping boy in Detroit, and I'm not sure that's fair. He took over a moribund franchise, won an NBA title in 2004, and got to game 7 of the finals the year after. They made it to the conference finals six straight season from 2003-2008. That's an awfully good run of success; about as good as one can reasonably hope for. I believe most of the criticism dates back to the 2003 draft when Dumars selected Darko Milicic with the second pick, passing on Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, and Dwayne Wade. Darko has been one of the great busts in NBA history, but if you actually followed the game seven years ago, you'd know that Milicic was pretty close to the consensus number two pick. The reports out of Europe were that he was a spectacular player, a rare breed of size and skill, that he was NBA-ready, and that he was just 18 years old and stood to get even better. There *were* a couple of teams that suggested they'd have taken Anthony if they had the Pistons' picks, but nobody - and I mean NOBODY had Bosh or Wade going anywhere other than where they did. Had Dumars taken one of them and let Darko slip by, he'd have been ridiculed by fans and opposing GMs alike.

Well, none of that worked out. Milicic just wasn't as good as advertised. First it was supposedly Larry Brown's reluctance to play rookies, then some other reason why he wasn't developing, and finally in his third season in Detroit nobody, including the Pistons's brass wanted to look at him anymore and he was shipped off to Orlando for Kelvin Cato and a draft pick. After making noise about wanting to return to Europe, the Minnesota Timberwolves this summer offered him $20 million over four years and he decided that America wasn't so bad after all. Milicic is still only 25 and does some things well - by NBA standards his contract amounts to a rounding error and I expect him to be a better player in the coming couple of seasons than Shaquille O'Neal, though that isn't saying much. Adding insult to injury, Carmelo Anthony turned out to be a star, Wade turned out to be the third best player in the game, and Bosh has been a perennial all-star. As my old friend Boomer Scott used to say, hindsight is 50-50.

It's hard to stay competitive year after year in the NBA, where the cap and draft work in the service of parity, and the Pistons have fallen on hard times the last two years. In 2010 they finished 27-55, and a quick perusal of the roster doesn't reveal an awful lot of talent. It appears as though it'll be a while before they're back in the Eastern Confrerence Finals. Which is why I shook my head tonight when I saw that the Pistons are close to signing Tracy McGrady. Once upon a time McGrady was one of the game's best and most complete players, leading the league in scoring in consecutive years while putting up outstanding rebounding and passing totals as well. Never the most durable of players, he began to break down physically around 2005 and has never been the same since. In 2009 he had microfracture surgery on his knee. The list of players who have had that surgery and come back close to 100 percent is one player long - Amare Stoudamire. Tracy McGrady is now 31 years old and his games played over the last four seasons are 71, 62, 35 and 24. He has not shot 40 percent from the field since the 2006-2007 season. In short, he is a washed-up basketball player. Perhaps on a contending team if McGrady were willing to play 15 or 20 minutes a game he might be able to help. The Pistons in 2010-2011 are not going to be that team. I understand a basketball team needs 12 men on the roster and that McGrady might come cheap, but it seems to me the job of a general manager is to construct a roster of players with a purpose - a long-term plan. The Pistons are a bad basketball team. Tracy McGrady isn't going to make them much better, certainly not good enough to qualify for the playoffs. By the time Detroit is a good team again, Tracy McGrady will be in a suit doing color commentary somewhere. His signing is proof that the Pistons are adrift - a rudderless ship. That, more than the Darko draft, is the most stinging criticism one can level at Joe Dumars.

On Delicate Machinery

2010-07-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

Their reputation is better now, but growing up in the 70s the Jaguar was known for being a beautiful, if temperamental automobile. Very few people bought them because the word was it'd spend half the time in the repair shop. Jags are fairly reliable now, according to JD Power & Associates.

There are but a handful of men on the planet who can generate the force and arm speed necessary to propel a baseball with the speed, accuracy and movement necessary to induce the world's best hitters to make outs. Unfortunately, major league pitchers are a lot like old Jaguars; they're rare and exotic and spend most of their time out of service. Up until about 30 years ago pitching injuries were looked upon as a necessary cost of doing business - something beyond a team's control that just "happened". Around then, most teams began using five starting pitchers instead of four, and actually tracking and limiting the number of pitches thrown each start. The thinking, obviously, was that these precautions would reduce strain on the elbow and shoulder and correspondingly, injuries. The jury is still out, but the evidence that exists suggests that pitchers are any no less likely to get hurt than they were in 1980.

Stephen Strasburg is probably the biggest and best pitching prospect in baseball history. He throws near one hundred miles-per-hour with movement and command. His curveball is genuinely knee-buckling. His change-up is thrown with near-perfect deception and tails sharply down and away from left handed batters. In a way it's not fair to even categorize Strasburg as a prospect any longer. On June 8 he made his major league debut and only struck out 14 in seven innings - including the last seven he faced. Ten days later he was only slightly less overpowering, whiffing 10 in seven innings. As of Tuesday he'd made nine starts and not come close to being roughed up in any of them. He has pitched 54 innings this season and struck out 75 men. His ERA is 2.32. These numbers are fairly staggering. The hype that surrounded Strasburg was unlike anything I'd ever seen in baseball - a game where busts are routine - and yet he managed to do something I'd have thought impossible. His performance did not justify the hype - they exceeded it.

Tuesday, Strasburg was scheduled to pitch. Apparently, he felt stiffness and discomfort in his shoulder while warming up in the bullpen, and the team wisely scratched him. An MRI revealed no structural damage. Naturally, the Nationals are playing it pretty close to the vest. General manger Mike Rizzo said Strasburg should be fine with a few days' rest and anti-inflammatories. And maybe he will. Maybe Strasburg will go on to pitch 5000 major league innings, retire at 45, and be inducted into Cooperstown at 50. Still, you have to wonder. The stiffness and discomfort in Strasburg's shoulder came from *somewhere*, and it seems a reasonable guess it came from throwing baseballs. It also stands to reason that throwing more baseballs will cause more stiffness and discomfort - or worse. The Nationals have done everything they could to protect Stephen Strasburg, carefully monitoring his usage patterns, pitches thrown, days of rest, and total innings. What they could not, and cannot protect their prized pitcher from, is the vagaries of the human body. Every generation a handful of pitchers come along who defy the odds and avoid arm issues for their entire careers. Greg Maddux did it. Roger Clemens did too. Before them Nolan Ryan's elbow gave out only after 7 no-hitters, 5400 innings, and 27 major league-seasons. Roy Halladay has never had an serious arm problem. But, the overwhelming percentage of pitchers simply aren't constructed this way. Many of them suffer career-ending injuries in the minors before we've even heard of them. Of the ones that make it to the show, most of them find their way to the disabled list, then the operating table, then to oblivion. Mark Mulder did it. Mark Prior did it. The list is endless - literally endless. The fact is that Stephen Straburg is a physical marvel. The fact is also that he's barely fifty innings into his major league career and has had to be shut down with "shoulder stiffness", which is MLB-speak for "there's something wrong with this shoulder and we either don't know what it is or don't want to tell you." When Jaguar made cars that suffered from design and manufacturing defects, they made changes and improved the product. You can't do much with the human body; you've got what you've got. Hopefully Strasburg will get back out there; it's really something to watch him pitch. Still, there's no way to escape the feeling that like so many pitchers before him, he's going to be spending a lot of time in the shop.

End Of The Road

2010-07-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

The Lance Armstrong story is, on one level an amazing one. An average tour rider through his early 20s, in 1996 Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer which had metastasized to his lungs, abdomen, and brain. Given only a 40 percent chance of survival, he underwent an aggressive and unusual form of treatment and by 1998 the cancer was in complete remission. Upon his return, Armstrong was a different rider; more powerful and with greater endurance that he had possessed before his illness. He won the Tour De France every year from 1999-2005. The story has served as the inspiration for the Lance Armstrong Foundation, whose most well-known element, Livestrong, has worked to empower and inspire cancer sufferers and their families as well as provide practical tools and information for those dealing with cancer. It seems the foundation has done some very good work, so let's try and keep the message separate from the messenger.

On another level, his story is incredible - not in the sense of amazing but in the sense of "not credible". Lance Armstrong won his titles in an unprecedented era of doping. He has adamantly denied ever having taken a performance enhancing substance. Nor has he tested positive. Yet, every single other top rider of his era has either admitted to or been found guilty of using everything from EPO - a chemical that helps reoxygenate the blood - to anabolic steroids. Accusations have been made against Armstrong from various sources, some less credible and some with no credibility at all, and nothing has stuck. You see, the entire sport of cycling has been so dirty for so long that there are no honest agents left. Lance Armstrong would have you believe that he was so much better than the rest of the field that he could play it straight and beat the cheats. I suppose that's possible. I suppose Barry Bonds was so much better than any other hitter who played the game of baseball that he didn't need to cheat either. Like Armstrong, accusations flew against Bonds for years. Like Bonds, the feds have chosen to get involved in investigating Armstrong. Whatever your opinion is of the feds, they are not ones to waste their time with meritless matters. They move slowly but with purpose. It will be interesting to see what they do over the coming months in this case.

I don't follow racing closely, but one can't help but know about Lance Armstrong. He is a celebrity as much as an athlete - more now that his career as a cyclist is drawing to a close. He dates A-list singers and actresses. He makes a personal fortune. Armstrong also comes off as smug and arrogant, and frankly someone I find hard to like or root for. Because he was stricken with a terrible disease over a decade ago it causes an uncomfortable feeling to be so harsh on him. Once you're past that, though, his story doesn't hold a thimbleful of water. I suspect Lance Armstrong has hustled the world into believing a lie. I suspect he is a very hard and tough man who would go a lot longer towards protecting his "reputation" than the average person. I also suspect that the feds have him dead-to-rights, and that he is heading down the road traveled by a whole lot of other sports "heroes" over the past decade. I'd say that I'd hate to see this happen to him, but that'd be a lie. I don't believe him, and I'm tired of having him shoved down my throat as the paragon of integrity. He bombed out of the Tour De France this year, finally succumbing to age in a sport not meant to be contested by 39 year-olds. Armstrong said he was riding in this year's event to raise awareness for his foundation. I don't believe that either; I think he was riding because he has a gigantic ego and an insatiable appetite for attention. In not too long, I suspect that his poor showing in France will be the least of his troubles.

Judgment

2010-07-11T04:50:00.000-07:00

Michael Vick, like most players in the NFL, has a very uncertain future. He is thirty years old - not at all young for a professional football player. His skills have visibly eroded. By any measure, his career has been a disappointment; as a pro he was never able to meet the lofty expectations that had been projected for him. In all of these ways, Vick is completely unremarkable.

Of course, there's more to the story than that. Though Vick was expected to redefine the quarterback position in the NFL, that position seems recalcitrant towards redefinition. However athletic the game becomes, quarterbacks are still depended upon to make quick reads, throw the ball accurately through tiny gaps 100 or 120 feet downfield, and keep their head when all about them are losing theirs. Athleticism helps, to be sure, and once upon a time Vick had more of that than any athlete we'd ever seen in an NFL uniform. The potential seemed endless; in just his second season he took his Falcons team into Lambeau in January and dismantled the Packers. From there, though, his career went in fits and starts. He ran the ball more often and more effectively than any quaterback in the game's history, but completed only about 55 percent of his passes. He didn't throw for many touchdowns, and he was intercepted nearly as often. By 2006 it was clear he wasn't developing the way a lot of experts had projected, though he was still earning a fortune through his various endorsement deals.

Vick's world was torn asunder in the spring of 2007 by allegations that he'd bankrolled a dogfighting operation. By the end of the year he'd received a 23 month prison sentence, of which he served 21. He was dropped by every single one of his sponsors, as well as his employer. Upon his release a contrite Vick said all of the right things. Jeffrey Lurie and the Eagles took a chance in 2009 and were rewarded with 13 pass attempts, 6 completions, and a few rushing yards. While I'm no expert, he looked to me like he'd lost a step in his time away from the game, something he could ill afford to do. It reminded me a lot of Mike Tyson a little; except that it took me seven or eight years to accept that the menacing heavyweight of the 80s was gone forever - with Vick it only took half a season.

In late May, there was a birthday party for Vick at a Virginia nightclub. The details are unclear, but Quanis Phillips - one of Vick's friends and co-defendants in the dogfighting case - was shot. Depending on the news story you read, Vick was involved in an altercation prior to the shooting or he was not. In any case, the party was for Vick, and at some point he was in attendance. He is, at the very least, guilty of very poor judgment; even being in the same place as Phillips constitues a violation of his terms of probation. With the World Cup, LeBronGate, and the fact that Vick no longer has the star power to keep a story alive for very long, Vick has sort of been back page news.

I really felt that Vick had gotten his act turned around. He'd been doing a lot of charity work and there seemed a genuineness in his eyes. He appeared a man who had done wrong and learned from it, and that may even be the case, but when you're on probation after having served time for felonies, there isn't any room for missteps. The Eagles have denied it, but in not too long they'll release Vick. They'll let him go because he's found trouble again. They'll let him go because he's failed public relations risk. Mostly, though, they'll let him go because he's just not a very good football player. He is not likely ever to play in the NFL again. He's blown through his fortune on bad investments and legal fees. The guy had everything; it's tough to be sympathetic. And I'm not.

Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman Scorned

2010-07-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

I'll start by saying I've got a few new posts in the works, but first a few thoughts on the LeBron James train wreck.

I have no idea what made James choose Miami. I mean that literally. It's certainly a beautiful place, especially in the dead of winter, there's a great nightlife, and of course he'll be playing with one of the NBA's five best players in Dwayne Wade, and a very good player in Chris Bosh (though it bears mentioning that Bosh is NOT a superstar and in my estimation is overrated). Whatever the rest of the flotsam the Heat fill their roster with, that's an awfully good start and barring injuries they rate to be one of the top teams. Vegas, whose job it is to know these things, currently has them as the favorite to win the title at +200.

So LeBron had his reasons for bolting to south Florida, which he made kind of clear on his bizarre live show/press conference/whatever that was. You can make of it what you will. I have heard (and written) that because he's walking into a turnkey championship operation, the significance of the titles he may win will be diminished. What *can* be said with confidence is that James didn't handle the situation as well as he might have. Apparently he didn't notify the Cavs (or anyone else) of his intentions or decision, leaving them to find out like the rest of us on the ESPN freak show. The show itself was ill-conceived; after all it takes about nine seconds to make the announcement leaving a whole hour to fill with . . . . nothing. The past few weeks have revealed an arrogant, narcissistic side which James had heretofore been able to hide very well. It's easy to forget that James is just 25, and while that doesn't excuse the missteps, it goes a ways towards explaining them. After the announcement, the air more or less went out of the balloon, and I turned on a baseball game and that was that.

Or so I thought. My brother - a fan of sports but not a sports fan - called me sometime around midnight and told me Dan Gilbert had issued a written statement on the James situation via the team's website and that I HAD to read it. My first instinct was that someone had hacked the Cavs' site. That'd have made perfect sense; the statement read intelligibly enough but was just so vicious and personal that it couldn't possibly have come from the owner of an NBA franchise. I mean jeez, he called the guy a coward and shameful. He made a cryptic remark about death and heaven, the meaning of which I could not figure out. Surely Dan would issue a statement through the team or the wire service telling of the website's breached security, and that he wished LeBron the best and that while the Cavs were disappointed, they'd move forward towards their goal of bringing an NBA title to Cleveland. Well, I was half correct. News came from the AP wire service, alright. The statement was no hoax at all - in fact Gilbert's assault had gone even further in a phone interview, stating that people had covered up for James for way too long, then accused him of quitting during the 2010 second round series against Boston, specifically in games 2, 4, 5 and 6.

Some have credited Gilbert with having the courage to be so honest about his feelings. I suppose that's one way of looking at it. Another way would be that he was making a PR play, deflecting attention away from his own inability to re-sign his best player. Yet another would be that here was a forty-eight year old man with absolutely no emotional control.

One can speculate from now to the end of time about just what went on in Cleveland these past few weeks, but here are some facts. Dan Gilbert has owned the Cleveland Cavaliers since 2005, during which time LeBron James has been on his team. The best player other than James over that five year period has been . . . . I don't know. Maybe Mo Williams. Maybe Antawn Jamison or Anderson Varejao. You can play the James blame game all you like, but that's just not getting it done. LeBron was quoted a couple of days ago as saying he didn't want to be 31 years old with bad knees and no rings. Why wouldn't he feel like that. Gilbert's open letter to Cavs fans promised a title before James would win one with Miami, but that seems sort of silly given that (a) he'd just lost his best player, and (b) for five years he'd been unable to procure enough talent to win a title, so how was anything going to be different now? Another fact is that if he is to be taken at his word, Gilbert offered $120M to a coward and a quitter. If LBJ is as Dan says, he should be thrilled that he took his services elsewhere. He did not sound thrilled. He sounded jilted.

I do not know LeBron James personally. Three decades ago Gilbert was my little league travel coach and we haven't spoken since, so I don't really know him either. He strikes me, however, as a miserable man. In all the times they've showed him on television during a Cavs game I can't recall him smiling even once. He had an acrimonious split with his main business partner, which can happen to anyone, but at a bar mitzvah at the Townsend Hotel he threw a punch at one of his most recognizable former employees whose allegiances had remained with Gilbert's ex-partner. Last night he leveled a vicious and personal attack on another former employee who had the nerve to exercise his rights under the NBA collective bargaining agreement and sign elsewhere. This free agent process has taught us some things we didn't previously know about LeBron James. As far as Dan Gilbert is concerned, it merely reinforced what was already obvious if you paid attention to look.

How Sabermetrics Has Sucked The Fun Out Of Baseball For Me

2010-07-08T04:14:00.000-07:00

Back when I was 11 in the winter of 1981, I ordered a stapled together pamphlet out of the back of Baseball Digest. There was a man in Kansas selling these - an odd man who worked at the Stokely Van Camp pork and beans cannery. In his free time he studied baseball and because of his math background and steel-trap mind he would ask questions about the game that had never been asked in the 100 year history of the game. Was batting order important? Did managers matter? Was there a difference between a player who drew a lot of walks and a very similar player who did not? Then he'd set about testing his theories using the scarce data that was available to the public. You see, it was accepted as fact that the measure of a hitter's success was predicated upon three things; his batting average, hit home run total, and how many teammates he drove in. For a pitcher it was how many games with which he was credited with the win, weighed against how many in which he got the loss, his earned run average, and how many innings he pitched.

James called bullshit on all of it, and in great detail set out to show his work in his annual baseball abstracts. It was dry stuff, but James had a weapon at his disposal - humor. He could make even the most tedious things funny and entertaining. He had another, even more powerful weapon - the truth. You see, the night watchman at the pork and bean factory knew more about what made baseball tick than the men whose job it was to own, manage, and general manage those major league teams. Like anyone with new, different ideas in a staid, insular business, James was looked at as a freak by the baseball establishment through most of the 80s. He seemed content to play that role as it allowed him to write, often scathingly, about the talents (or relative lack thereof) of pro ballplayers and of the dumb decisions made by management simply because they didn't know what mattered and what didn't when assembling a team.

By the 1990s the tide was turning, but only a little bit. James's ideas, now having been in print for ten or more years, began to attract the attention of inside baseball people. What he had written had mostly proved to be true; a player's on base percentage was of far more value than his batting average. Power mattered more - much more - than speed. Home ballparks had enormous effects on player performance. As the century turned, general managers were increasingly young men with Ivy League backgrounds where just a generation before they'd been cigar-chomping ex players. The internet, and access to a wealth of baseball information, really accelerated the revolution, and these days James's formulas have been tweaked, other, more complicated formulas for, say determining defensive value, have popped up, and the Sabermetric world that Bill James pioneered has become part of the mainstream. James himself is now in the employ of the Boston Red Sox, proving that truth wins. Once attacked as kooky outsider, he is in most circles accepted as the man who changed the way baseball teams are run. One of his disciples, Billy Beane, has had a Hollywood film greenlit based on his time as General Manager of the Oakland A's. Brad Pitt is playing Beane. That's about as mainstream as it gets.

I have always loved Sabermetrics - the term coined long ago by James to define the scientific testing of baseball methodologies to either prove or disprove a specific generally-accepted beliefs. I bought into what he had to say. He showed his work, and built his case in the way a good lawyer would, leading you gently down a road until you arrived at the inescapable conclusion that whatever the conventional wisdom was, it may have been conventional but was anything but wisdom. Moreoever, he did it in such an entertaining and funny way that the abstracts made for great reads. James's sense of humor is equally as sharp as his critical mind and many times I'd find myself laughing out loud as he skewered this player or that for having terrible shortcomings that were being ignored by the traditional baseball community. I suppose I felt like I was "in" on something People -professional writers - would tout their tripe about how Jim Rice was the most feared slugger in the game when the evidence was overwhelming that there were any number of more productive players, and that Fenway Park was the real hero of Rice's career. There were a lot - a LOT of instances like this.

And so it was during a conversation with a friend for whom I have great respect when he made a point that almost knocked me over. I have known him a long time, and he is a smart man. He is a baseball fan in the same way I am; he appreciates the beauty of the game but he has always wanted to know more. While maybe not as much an acolyte of James, he nevertheless has questioned since he was a kid the conventional wisdom of baseball. The topic of Brennan Boesch came up. Boesch, as you are well aware if you live in Detroit, played his first game as a Tiger on April 23 of this year. He's a big, strong kid and has hit some balls as hard as any I have seen in more than 35 years of following baseball. He's now got 255 at-bats and is only hitting .341. He has seventeen doubles and twelve home runs. Boesch has been one of the most significant reasons the Tigers are in first place. He's hit about as well as Miguel Cabrera. That's saying something.

He pointed out that in a way, Sabermetrics have taken the bloom off the rose. I am waiting for Brennan Boesch to fail. I have looked at his minor league record, and there is simply nothing in it that would hint at the kind of success he's had so far as a big-leaguer. He didn't draw a lot of walks, nor did he hit for that much power. He is 25 years old - not old by any means, but old enough that his sudden success doesn't make a whole lot of sense, at least if you're a Sabermetric thinker. If Boesch continues to hit like this, I will be forced to re-examine some of my long-held beliefs about baseball. Well I don't wanna do that. So instead of rooting for this great story that Boesch has been, I wait for the law of averages to catch up. I am skeptical of guys who do not fit neatly in my mold. I will - or more specifically Bill's research - will probably end up being correct about Brennan Boesch. Sooner, rather than later, the balls will stop dropping. Pitchers will figure out where to attack and where to stay away. And all during that time I will have been like a petulant child parroting "toldja so", taking pleasure as his numbers become more and more pedestrian. I could have been being a fan instead, and wondered at the possibilities for Brennan Boesch. As a kid I'd instantly recognize him Detroit's own Fred Lynn. As a sabermetric guy I wait for the other shoe to drop. That's no way to be a fan, and it looks like the joke is on me. I have decided to put my bias away and just enjoy watching this kid hit. He crushes the ball in a way I've only seen a handful of other major leaguers do so. Ever. Perhaps he's figured something out age age 25. Whatever the case, from here on I'm going to try and view Brennan Boesch from the prism through which an eight year-old sees him. When watching the Tigers, I am going to turn off my critical brain and just hope. After all, it's hope that the game is really about. I have decided that I'd rather have fun than be right.

The New NBA Free Agency

2010-07-07T21:21:00.000-07:00

Back in the spring of 1966, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, pitchers for the Los Angeles Dodgers, held out in tandem. They demanded $1 million between them over three years. They eventually relented and signed individually. At the time, baseball still employed the archaic reserve clause by which a team held a player's rights in perpetuity, leaving the players with no leverage - their choice was not a choice at all: Play for what the team offered or don't play at all.

Four decades later the landscape has changed dramatically, not just in baseball but in basketball as well. Players are mostly free to sell their services on the open market, and salaries have skyrocketed. Trouble is brewing, however. Because of the salary cap, each team has more or less the same amount of money to allocate towards talent. While at first blush this would appear to be good for the competitive balance of the game, it turns out not to be just the opposite.

Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade, and LeBron James have been big news this summer. There has been talk of a "summit" and the possibility teaming up for the opportunity to play together in hopes of winning an NBA title. Bosh has signed with the Heat, and will play with Wade. James is going to make an announcement Thursday where he'll be spending his next half-decade. I suspect it won't be Miami, but I've been wrong before. If all three end up with the Heat, they clearly become the team to beat,and in doing so illustrate the problem with the salary cap. Since every team is restricted in the amount of money they can spend, dollars simply aren't a factor in a free agent's decision where to sign. Instead, it's purely a matter of where he wants to be. Want warm winters? LA or Orlando. Nightlife? New York or Miami. Want an instant shot at a championship? Well, if James signs the Heat tomorrow, that team looks awfully strong on paper.

But what of the Sacramento Kings or Milwaukee Bucks? How are they supposed to compete with what is in essence a pickup team comprised of the best players? They aren't. They can't. And in order for the NBA to maintain a whiff of legitimacy it needs a true, competitive market for player services. Unless cold winters are your thing or you're from here, how much of an impact will this new breed of free agent impact the Detroit Pistons? The answer is hardly at all. Chris Bosh was never - not for a moment - considering trading his Toronto winter for the nearly-identical Detroit one. James isn't on the Pistons' radar map either as it appears he'll either stay in his home state or shuffle off to South Florida. Year-over-year that sort of player behavior will leave the smaller markets in a pickle whereby the "haves" locations will get first dibs on the best players and the "have nots" will have no choice but to buy what's left. It's hard - very hard to win an NBA championship - and nearly impossible when the very best talent is doing the equivalent of dropping by the gym together, signing their name on the drop-in list, and shouting "we got next."

We are headed towards that - and worse. To a period where players will take LESS money to be part of a contender. As fans, there's an instinct to applaud it because the player is making decisions for love of the game rather than for something as cutthroat as money. Why that's the case I have no idea; in our personal lives WE certainly don't leave money on the table unless we were either so wealthy that there were other factors at work, or if we were just stupid. Yet here, where a player's decision is predicated upon wanting to win a championship, we deem it a noble goal when the fact is it's neither commendable nor detestable; it's just a person's work preference. The problem at the LEAGUE level is that over time, that preference is going to create a serious rift. One where the Carlos Boozers take off from Utah to Chicago because the Jazz can't offer enough to keep him there. Or where Bosh, Wade and James play together because they'll have a good time and obviously challenge the Lakers for the 2011 title. It has a very unprofessional feel to it, and David Stern is nothing if not a brilliant man. For the NBA's sake he is going to have to step in and unilaterally draft and enforce some rules that will get him into a nice brawl with Billy Hunter and the NBAPA. Competition is the long-term key to success in a professional sports league, and though the salary cap has worked very well in the NBA for nearly three decades, it is now being exploited by the players in ways that were not contemplated by either ownership or the players' association when it was implemented in 1984. Watch closely - this will end up the biggest problem the NBA has faced since the cocaine scandals of the 1980s.

The Nonsense That Is NBA Free Agency

2010-07-07T07:05:00.000-07:00

With more and more channels of television, satellite radio, and the internet, something's got to fill the airwaves during those interminable moments when, you know, no sport is actually being played. I get that. The NFL draft is a great example; an entire industry has been created to address in surgical detail who may be drafted where, what kid of impact this kid with zero downs of NFL experience is going to have upon his new team, and of course, which teams did best and worst. It's a little like handing out report cards on the first day of school, but hey, people watch it. And it I squint really hard, I can kind of make sense of what's going on. There's a narrative. A draft day definite. Players will be chosen no later than ten, or seven, or five, or two minute intervals, depending on the round. You can - if you care - sort of construct a rough puzzle of what you team might look like six months down the road. I mean, I watch tennis championship qualifying draws - who am I to criticize? Spencer Steel, that's who.

I have a friend - a very young man who loves the NBA. He called, or texted, or contacted me some other way asking how excited I was that July 1 was but a few hours away. Frankly, I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. I thought maybe it was his birthday or something but no, he was asking me how geeked I was for NBA free agency. Now, in the fairness of full disclosure, I do NOT follow the NBA with the religious fervor that I once did. In the old days I would build my evening around a mid-season tilt between the Kings and Warriors, making sure that no matter what my evening plans were, that I'd be home by 10:30 to watch Jim Jackson and Clarence Weatherspoon and the Kings' magical run to nineteen wins. I'm not "better" these days; just different. I don't watch as many regular season games on my satellite, choosing to do some light reading or actual socializing not constructed around two extraordinarily bad basketball teams. Good for me. So back to this geeked thing. Well, the answer is that I was not geeked at all, not because I don't care where James, or Bosh, or Wade ends up, but because there just isn't any drama in it. Teams will wine and dine these free agents. The players may even package themselves as a bundle (a very bad idea for the NBA, but that's for another column). Stories will be written quoting anonymous, but reliable inside sources stating that player X is very close to signing with Team Y. And here is where I get confused: At some point these guys will sign, either with their current teams, or with new ones. It will be a news story. Enough people pay attention to the NBA to first wonder why, say, LeBron decided to sign with the Bulls, then how that might affect the Bulls. But the news story will be quick; almost like the announcement of the death of a player - fast, final, and you'll remember where you were when you heard it. Then, even if you're really into the NBA, you'll talk about it for a little while, then move on to the next new sports topic. It won't contain any drama. When they start playing again in November, people will look at these men wearing their new laundry and wonder if they've locked up an NBA title. For six months, games will be played, and no matter anyone's opinion, the team's performance - not a talking head's idea of that team - will be the measure of their success.

One of the things that makes sports such great entertainment is that it's an unscripted reality show. Tension builds during a game, or series of games, or a season. If Armando Galaragga has thrown six perfect innings, we'll turn on the game in the seventh with a nervous anticipation on each pitch as the event unfolds. If you're busy doing something else and happen to find out that a pitcher threw a perfect game a couple hours after it's over, you have an entirely different experience than had you been watching the game play out in real time. Back in the summer of 1996, there were two NBA free agent signings that took surprised me in such a way that fourteen years later I remember where I was when I heard about them. One was Shaquille O'Neal leaving the Magic for Tinseltown. The other was Allan Houston - who had just that season become a terrific NBA player - bolting Detroit for the Knicks. It was a jolt in the way that such a thing can be jolting - the smart money was on both players re-signing with their respective teams, and when that didn't happen it was weird, but it was over in an instant. And so it seems to me that the process by which NBA - or any other league's players - switch teams has none of the elements of what makes sport so compelling. It reminds me of the newer forms of Strat-O-Matic baseball where, after you've assembled your team, the computer plays all 162 of your games in a quarter of a second, and spits out your team's overall result. Though I'm mildly curious where these guys end up, wake me in October and tell me who's where.

On Being Human

2010-07-01T06:58:00.000-07:00

Roger Federer, the greatest tennis player of all-time, lost in the Wimbledon quarterfinals yesterday to a guy named Tomas Berdych. Berdych, it should be noted, is no clown. At age 25, he has a big, big game and has featured in the top 10. If there was a criticism leveled at him it was that he found ways to lose matches he should have won, especially in the majors and against top-class opponents. The not-so-hidden subtext is that Berdych was a head case who choked. I do not have an opinion. Once I saw him take a two sets to love lead in the Australian Open against Roger Federer, only to lose in five and the match frankly wasn't really even close. It looked to me like Berdych tightened up. It also looked like Federer started playing great tennis. In any case, it didn't matter - Federer won, steamrolling over the rest of the draw until he ran up against a brawny Spaniard whose brute force, incredible talent, and indomitable will proved too much even for the great Federer.

Tennis is a funny sport. Every generation there are a couple of guys so much better than the competition that everyone else is really there just to fill out the draw. It's uncommon for the seventieth best golfer to win the PGA Championship, but in tennis, with the exception of the French Open which attracts clay "specialists", nobody you never heard of has or will win the US Open. The game just isn't designed for it. You've got to win seven best-of-five matches, and as you get towards the business end of the tournament you're usually going to have to beat three top-10 guys in a row. From 2005 until this year's French Open Roger didn't blink. Twenty three times in a row he got to the semifinal or BETTER in the majors. You can state that a lot of different ways, but this is my favorite one because it's so simple: He made the final four 23 straight times.

Then he didn't. In Paris last month, he lost in the quarterfinals to an eccentric and powerful player in Robin Soderling. The French is an unusual tournament; it's played on red clay and through the long history of tennis there have been many magnificent players who never had any kind of success playing on it. Pete Sampras, whose major titles record was surpassed by Federer just last year, got to the semifinals just once, at the peak of his powers in 1996, after which he never advanced past the third round again. Federer has done better at Roland Garros to be sure, and if not for Nadal would probably have three or four titles there. He did win it in 2009, becoming just the third player in the modern era to have won all four majors, so it's not that Federer has been a clay flop by any means. However, it's the grass major played just a few weeks after the French where King Roger has truly held court. From 2003 to 2009 he played in the finals at Wimbledon EVERY year, and with the exception of 2008 where Rafael Nadal refused to give in the fading light, defeating Federer 9-7 in the fifth, he won. That's six titles in seven years - some heady stuff. Sampras won the event seven times in eight years. Both had games suited for success on grass; powerful, skidding serves and brilliant volleying skills where they'd flick away opponents' weak returns for easy points.

It's worth talking about Pete Sampras here. Sampras was inarguably the best player of the nineties, and until Federer came along he was often talked about as the best ever. Who knows; he still might be? Sampras didn't win every tournament he entered, but he won a whole lot, and cruised six consecutive times to the year-end number one ranking. Like Federer, Sampras at his peak made the game look so easy that it was almost impossible to envision how he could ever lose, then or in the future. He was simply too good for the competition. In 2000 he defeated Patrick Rafter in an exciting Wimbledon final to break the previous record for major championships. Two months later he blasted through the draw at the US Open and entered the final against a 20-year old Russian kid with a ton of game, but who experts and Vegas didn't think had even a one in four shot of beating Sampras. Marat Safin blew Sampras off the court in that final. Worse, he made Sampras look bad in doing it. The following summer Sampras played a wildly entertaining match on Centre Court against another 20 year-old - this one from Switzerland. Again the younger player prevailed in one of the most entertaining matches ever played, a kid named Roger Federer. Sampras never won Wimbledon again. Mostly repeating the previous summer, he had a successful North American hardcourt swing and made the finals of the US Open against yet another 20 year-old, this one a brash Aussie by the name of Lleyton Hewitt. Expected to dismantle Hewitt, exactly the opposite happened and after a tightly-contested first set Sampras didn't just look bad, he also looked OLD - at the time he had just turned thirty. In 2002, Sampras wasn't just bad, he was awful. By August he not only hadn't won an ATP event all year, he'd reached only one Masters level semifinal and his record was littered with first and second round exits. At Wimbledon - always his most successful surface - he lost in the second round to a guy named George Bastl who was currently ranked 145 in the world. The gig was up; where not long ago the notion of Sampras as just another tour player was unthinkable, now it was undeniable.

Then, for two weeks in September, Pete Sampras found the magic again. Seeded 17th at the US Open, he won his first two matches with ease. In the third round he was pushed - hard - by the big serving Canadian-Englishman Greg Rusedski, winning 6-4 in the 5th. In the next round he beat an outstanding young player in Tommy Haas. That was where it was supposed to end, as his quarterfinal match was against YET ANOTHER 20 year-old, an American with the biggest serve anyone had ever seen. Despite having played a good tournament to that point, and despite being a three-time US Open champion, Sampras was installed as an 8-5 underdog. The match was not close. Andy Roddick never had a chance. Sampras cruised through his semifinal match, then defeated his old rival Andre Agassi to win the 2002 US Open. He never played another point on the ATP Tour. At age 31 he was, and remains, the oldest man ever to have won that tournament.

Which brings us back to Roger Federer. I heard a tennis writer comment following his semifinal loss that Federer hadn't lost much if anything from his peak, but rather it was just the other players catching up. This seems like semantics to me - and false - but it is also an instructive lesson on how little we learn from historical analogues. Roger Federer turns 29 in August. In the modern era, no top player has been able to retain the peak level of performance that he enjoyed in his mid-twenties. They hit a wall. It's a fact of life; an immutable truth as certain as death and taxes. Sampras did it the same way, causing a sort of five stages of grief for tennis fans. There was denial (no way has he lost anything), then anger (it can't be Pete; must be a certain kind of opponent that's troubling him). Bargaining followed (okay, let him win just THREE more), then depression (what's the point of even following tennis anymore?), and finally acceptance (he's NOT the same player; let's move past it and try and appreciate his greatness). Sure, Federer "looks" like the same guy - same stylish on-court attire, sharp European looks, and hair that movie stars would envy. Inside though, is a different story. He's piled on the miles, put in thousands of hours practicing and playing, and losing just the tiniest fraction of fast-twitch muscle reflex that makes no difference to the weekend warrior but all the difference at the margins of human ability where the top tour pros live. I still believe Federer will continue to be a factor at majors and even pick up a few more of them in the next couple of years if he gets hot and has a favorable draw here and there. But as far as that stretch he put together from 2003-2009 - well - that guy is gone. Perhaps now we can begin to appreciate the madness of just what a show Roger put on those years; that a man was so good at a sport that (a) we were ridiculous enough to expect him to appear in and win just about every major final, and (b) he followed suit.

More Tiger

2009-12-16T23:43:00.000-08:00

Why is anybody surprised that Tiger Woods is an inveterate cheater? He spent 13 years creating a completely blank slate, giving us nothing to go on. All we knew about him was that he was better than anyone else that played golf, was even a little better than THAT in the majors, and that he swore a lot.

I guess it's just human nature to imbue people with characteristics in one area of their lives on account of the fact that they possess them in another. On the course Woods is mentally tough-as-nails and the picture of discipline (minus the frequent expletive or club-toss) and so non-golf companies like Accenture felt he was the right face for their marketing campaigns. Thing is, life doesn't often work that way. A surgeon may be skilled and meticulous in the operating room but keep his home a mess or be a terrible investor. It's for this reason that despite what Phil Knight says, Tiger Woods will NEVER AGAIN be the marketing magnet that he's been for most of the last decade. Tiger's golf game was shorthand for a whole bunch of qualities that attracted corporations who had little or nothing to do with golf, but as it turns out he isn't what he seemed - and what he has shown himself as is something that would repel, not attract, these sorts of advertisers. Time will pass, and he'll be a credible pitchman for all things golf - as it should be since he is, you know, the world's best player. As for Gatorade, consulting businesses, watch companies and the like, he can forget it. I've no experience whatsoever in marketing or advertising, but I'll bet dollars to donuts against anyone who thinks otherwise.

Tiger's Contrite, Haughty Apology

2009-12-02T17:16:00.000-08:00

We'll never know the specifics, though they hardly matter. And Tiger Woods owes nobody an apology except his wife Elin, though I've never quite understood the "sorry I forgot about our marital vows and balled numerous other pieces of ass" notion. No, what pains me here is that Woods DID bother to apologize through his website, yet still came off as a smug jerk chastising the media for having the temerity to take an interest in the indiscretions - and odd circumstances involving an SUV, fire hydrant, and sand wedge wielding wife at 2:30a - of arguably the world's most famous person. Have a read:

I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart. I have not been true to my values and the behavior my family deserves. I am not without faults and I am far short of perfect. I am dealing with my behavior and personal failings behind closed doors with my family. Those feelings should be shared by us alone.

Although I am a well-known person and have made my career as a professional athlete, I have been dismayed to realize the full extent of what tabloid scrutiny really means. For the last week, my family and I have been hounded to expose intimate details of our personal lives. The stories in particular that physical violence played any role in the car accident were utterly false and malicious. Elin has always done more to support our family and shown more grace than anyone could possibly expect.
But no matter how intense curiosity about public figures can be, there is an important and deep principle at stake which is the right to some simple, human measure of privacy. I realize there are some who don't share my view on that. But for me, the virtue of privacy is one that must be protected in matters that are intimate and within one's own family. Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn't have to mean public confessions.
Whatever regrets I have about letting my family down have been shared with and felt by us alone. I have given this a lot of reflection and thought and I believe that there is a point at which I must stick to that principle even though it's difficult.
I will strive to be a better person and the husband and father that my family deserves. For all of those who have supported me over the years, I offer my profound apology.

If you're counting at home, that's one paragraph of apology, three that are thinly veiled shots at the media as if this mess is their fault, and a final apology. Woods has controlled his image so carefully through the course of his career that we know literally nothing about Eldrick the person. Joe Posnanski alluded to this and did so brilliantly. I know he's the best golfer on the planet. He has a bad temper on the golf course and gets away with a lot more than a lesser PGA light would. That's been the extent of my knowledge of him, until these past few days when I've come to find out that he's human and fallible just like the rest of us. I've made mistakes in my life - plenty of them. When I've been wrong I've just said so, made amends where possible, and moved on from there. Not much else you can do. Yet here we have a man who at the moment when one would expect contrition and nothing else, there's plenty else - an attack on the media with an apology sandwich on each end. This leads me to believe that Woods is an incredibly self-centered, pampered asshole who not only thinks he's above it all, he'll let you know it.

Jason Kendall Is The Worst. Baseball Player. Ever.

2009-06-28T12:30:00.000-07:00

After watching Jason Kendall ground into a double play this afternoon I wondered how badly he sucks. I know about ten years ago he was one of the best young players - let alone catchers - in the game, and that he suffered a gruesome ankle injury. He recovered from that, though and came back to produce a pretty awesome 2001 season. His batting average fell off the next year, and following that the power disappeared, and by 2005 he was totally awful, even leading the league with 27 GIDP rendering him that much worse.

Well 2005 was four seasons ago, and that's a long time in baseball terms. He "surged" in 2006 with a mediocre season driven mainly by a .295 batting average, but since then . . . I mean holy shit has he been bad. Since the beginning of the 2007 season major league teams have had the temerity to give him 1,190 at-bats during which time he has hit .241 and slugged .308. This year in 208 at-bats he is hitting .226 and slugging . . . . .269. Oh, and he's doing it for the Milwaukee Brewers who, as I write this, are in first place in the tepid NL Central. I know catcher is generally accepted as a defensive position, but by any of the metrics I've seen Kendall is an abysmal backstop. I haven't looked at the Brewers' depth chart and who they've got stashed away in the minors but it seems to me that *anyone* is a better option than Jason Kendall.

Kendall is kind of a litmus test: If you're a general manager and Jason Kendall is your starting catcher then you have failed. If you're paying him five million dollars, as Doug Melvin and the Brewers are, then you've failed miserably. And if the Brewers are nosed out by the Cards for the division title, one won't have to look very far to find the culprit.

Too Bad Fewer Sportswriters Aren't Like Drew Sharp

2008-07-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

Here's Sharp's article, which is essentially a ball-washing of Marian Hossa for taking a one-year deal to play for the Wings, apparently because of his desire to win a Stanley Cup where he feels Detroit is his best chance to do so.

His article, titled "Too Bad More Athletes Aren't Like Marian Hossa", goes so far as to say that Hossa's "altruistic sincerity is in stark contrast to his basketball and baseball brethren." This statement is ridiculous for two reasons. First, it makes the unstated assumption that while basketball and baseball players are avaricious pigs, hockey players are always willing to take one for the team, yet I challenge Mr. Sharp to cite one other NHL player to pass up tens of millions in guaranteed money for a shot at a Cup. Yes - in fact hockey players care so little about money that the NHL has the distinction of being the only major sports league to cancel an entire season due to a labor dispute. Look, on rare occasions a player will do what Hossa did (evil greedy NBA star Danny Manning took a short-term short money deal with the Suns in 1994, as did Karl Malone and Gary Payton with the Lakers in 2003 but who's counting?) but in nearly all cases professional athletes will do what's best financially for themselves and their family - and that includes the NHL.

The second part of Sharp's argument implies that there is something morally superior about sacrificing dollars for a shot at winning when there most certainly isn't. Look, athletes and civilians make job decisions for all sorts of reasons. Some take the last dollar because they have a dozen mouths to feed; others because it gives them psychic satisfaction. Others take less money to stay in a city because they've settled in and its become home: Maybe their wife is from there or their kids were born and raised there and they don't wish to uproot them. They've made friends and contacts and are comfortable. Not all athletes are in equal demand; some have to go where the job is being offered. Some, like Hossa, go where they think they've got the best shot of winning a championship.

2008-06-19T21:05:00.000-07:00

Back when the Best Player Ever was figuring out what college to attend, a man named Nick Price for a two year period got as hot as any golfer had ever gotten in my lifetime. After winning the 1992 PGA Championship, Price rattled off ten wins over the next two seasons including both the 1994 British Open and PGA Championships. Yet as brightly as Price's star shone, he missed the cut at the 1993 Masters and 1994 US Open without so much as raising an eyebrow. You see, it was understood in those days that no matter how good a golfer, the nature of the game was such that domination was impossible, and failure to be expected some of the time.

Tiger Woods has changed all that, and no other golfer has paid the price more than Phil Mickelson. Mickelson is one of the outstanding players of his generation but has spent his peak seasons competing against a demonstrably superior opponent. While it's been easy to criticize Mickelson over the years for his weight, his catastrophic failure at Winged Foot, or his too-cute strategies (two driver, no drivers, five wedges, etc.), he can only be seen as a failure when viewed through the prism of Tiger Woods, which is grossly unfair. Judging by the withering assaults lobbed at him, one would have thought he shot 100-100 at Torrey Pines last week. Though he was never a threat, he did finish a respectable 18th, and the notion that he should have contended merely because he grew up in the city where the tournament was being held and had played the course a lot as a youngster is simply ridiculous.

Larry Jones And The Quest For .400

2008-06-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

Chipper Jones has had quite a first half of the season, hitting over .400 as he approaches 250 at-bats. Naturally the talk-show tards have turned their attention to whether he can be the first player since Ted Williams in 1941 to average 2-for-5 for a full season.

I understand drive-time radio thrives and survives on stuff like this, but it's something of an affront to any sentient being to suggest that Chipper can actually hit .400. Through June 17 he has batted 7136 times in his career and gotten 2213 hits for an outstanding .310 career mark. He is 36 years old and in his 15th major-league season. There is 64 games worth of evidence that shows he is a .400 hitter, and 1895 other games that place him some ninety points short. If you wish, believe he's going to do it; I'll stay grounded in knowledge that in the 67 years since Williams, only George Brett in 1980 made a real run at .400 into September. They're comparable hitters, but Brett was seven years younger at the time than Jones is now. I'd be surprised if Chipper ended up at .350, as there just isn't any evidence to suggest he can sustain this overperformance over a full season's time.

The almost-as-stupid question that follows the Jones discussion is whether or not anyone will EVER hit .400 again. Assuming the game of baseball is played generations into the future, and that it resembles the game that has been played for the last century or so, the answer is yes, yes a thousand times yes. First off, it's been done, so it's doable. Second, in addition to Brett's 1980 there was Rod Carew in '77 and Tony Gwynn in '94, both of whom were just a couple of hits shy albeit Gwynn's season ended in August with the players' strike. We aren't talking about someone breaking Cy Young's career win total here - baseball in 2008 looks more or less like baseball in 1941, except with a lot less white people.

Finally the discussion inevitably turns to what kind of hitter it will take to hit .400. After properly genuflecting before the "intense media pressure" you usually hear the radio host posit that it would require a fast switch-hitter (ignoring the obvious fact that the last guy to actually do it was a very slow left-handed batter) who gets in "the zone" (wherever that is). You know what it's going to take for a guy to hit .400? It's going to take an awesome batting average guy, someone who already hits .330 or .340 getting lucky and dropping the extra hit a week that will make the difference. Ichiro comes to mind, except that he's 35 years old and his future is behind him now. Helton had a shot with his ability and the bandbox he hit half his games in pre-humidor. Albert Pujols is a career .328 guy who is (alleged to be) age 28 - he has a chance. Boggs had a shot at it, and in fact did bat over .400 over a 162 game period covering two seasons. Gwynn was probably the most likely of any of the modern players to have achieved it, but we can only guess what might have been in '94. That season he was still at the peak of his hitting abilities and seemingly getting the breaks that may have allowed an outlier BA season, except of course for the bad break that ended the season a month and a half early.

One guy who isn't doing it is Chipper Jones. Soon enough the laws of probability will catch up with him, and .400 will be but a distant memory. There's no shame in that, and one benefit of the attention that has been lavished on Sir Lawrence this first half of the 2008 season is that lots of people have taken notice of what a marvelous talent and all-time great this guy has been. The PED era lost guys like Chipper Jones who continued producing at their outstanding career rates only to be blown by and forgotten because of the juicers. Now that those clowns are gone or hiding or not using as much it's as is a layer of filth has been removed from an automobile, revealing a beautiful, natural finish. Chipper is that finish, and is steadily making progress towards being the best 3B in the game's history. Even if he only hits .342 this year.

Let's Talk About Consistency

2008-06-14T06:22:00.000-07:00

A Detroit Free Press writer named John Paul Morosi poses the question: Should Marcus Thames be an everyday player? He notes that the Tigers are 7-0 this season when Thames homers. Morosi claims that the issue of whether Thames should start is one that has been discussed by Tigers observers for two years, but that the skeptics have cited mediocre defense and that "he has not consistently excelled against right-handed pitching."

Marcus Thames is 31 years old. In his career he has had 647 AB against righties, hit .229 with a .288 OBP and a .476 SLG. Why, the skeptics are right! He has not consistently excelled against RHP in quite the same way that the Detroit Lions have not consistently maintained excellence since 1957 or that Adam Morrison has not consistently played at a Hall Of Fame level since entering the NBA. What Thames has been - consistently - against RHP, is a very bad baseball player.

I have noticed this word "consistent" popping up from time to time as writers and commentators feebly attempt to explain why a player or team hasn't been more successful, confusing inconsistency with just not being very good. You know who hits consistently? Joe Mauer, whose 2008 BA of .329 is right in line with his .315 career mark. Guess who else is consistent? Brandon Inge. He's currently batting .221, sports a .242 BA since the start of 2006, and a .240 career mark overall. What's happened is that in sportswriter-speak, "consistent" now means "more often" instead of "tending to be arbitrarily close to the true value of a parameter estimated as the sample size becomes large"

Marcus Thames can't hit lefties - and he has shown this over his career with GREAT consistency. He'll fool most of the lesser lights with just enough power that they forget when Marcus isn't hitting a HR he is making out after out after out. Against lefties he's 259/332/521, which is quite good; so good in fact, that it could not more clearly demonstrate Thames's usefulness as a platoon player and that the debate over whether he is an everyday starter isn't really a debate at all.