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“[Manfred] Later Named Him Chairman Of The Finance Committee”

January 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

When it comes to the corporatocracy of major-league baseball, in which billionaires beg for welfare, few things can stun, but one of the first moves by new commissioner Rob Manfred is as jaw-dropping as any made by his predecessor, Bud Selig. He’s named New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon chairman of the league’s finance committee. You know, the same Fred Wilpon who’s managed to turn the goldmine of a NYC baseball team into tin (accruing massive debts in the process) and was knee-deep in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. From SNY (though the bold is mine):

Manfred removed Mets owner Fred Wilpon from the executive council, but later named him chairman of the finance committee, which is responsible for conducting hearings on league investments, changes in ownership, and stadium revenue and financing issues, among other things.•

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“Each Seat Is To Be Cooled”

January 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Qatar is the richest state in the world based on per capita wealth, which is the main reason the tiny nation was chosen to host the 2022 World Cup, despite desert climate and dicey politics. When awarding the Cup or the Olympics, organizers can’t be too choosy, as few countries can or will expend the ton of money it takes to stage such a global event. Maik Grossekathöfer and Juan Moreno of Speigel interviewed Albert Speer, the German architect overseeing the building (and, yes, son of), as well as Friedbert Greif, managing partner and urban planner, and other principals. Two exchanges follow.

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Spiegel:

Your office has developed the master plan for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The concept calls for 12 stadiums to be built in the desert, some of them within sight of each other. Each seat is to be cooled and the temperature at the center of the field is to be 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), even if outside temperatures rise to 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). And all this is to be built in a country that has as many residents as Augsburg, Germany (population: 276,542) Weren’t we just talking about sustainability?

Albert Speer:

But of course we were. Here, too, sustainability has been a priority from the very beginning.

Spiegel:

The insistence on an ecologically viable World Cup on the Arabian Peninsula doesn’t sound particularly credible. Just look at Abu Dhabi, which has announced its intention to build a new carbon neutral city — right next to a Formula One race track.

Albert Speer:

We intend to do things better and don’t want to be connected to projects like those in Sochi, for example. Qatar is planned so that most of it can be disassembled afterwards and that, in the end, is of a dimension that suits the country. The upper levels are modular and can be removed to make a total of 22 smaller football stadiums, which will then be given to developing countries after the World Cup. Individual modules can also be used for track and field stadiums with room for 5,000 people. And for the cooling, we have developed a concept that is based on solar power.

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Spiegel:

Still, one can wonder if it makes any sense at all for a World Cup to be held in a tiny desert country like Qatar.

Friedbert Greif:

What kind of a question is that? Of course it is legitimate for a country like Qatar, and thus, the Arab world, to get the World Cup. It is arrogant to believe that football belongs to us Europeans. Furthermore, I don’t believe that what the Russians are doing (eds. note: The 2018 World Cup is to be held in Russia) is any more efficient. Venues there are up to 2,400 kilometers (1,491 miles) from each other. The amount of resources and energy that are being wasted to bring spectators from A to B is crazy. Russia, in this regard, is the opposite extreme.

Spiegel:

Qatar isn’t a democracy, there is no labor union for immigrant workers and there have been numerous reports of people dying at the construction sites. In the past, the country was also a safe harbor for leaders of Islamist organizations.

Albert Speer:

I think it is fantastic that, with the help of media reports — and well in advance of the World Cup — people are taking a closer look. And that things are changing. Ahead of each of our projects, we ask: Is it acceptable? For many years we have had good business relations with Saudi Arabia. There is trust there, and people there listen to us as well. We really do have the feeling that we are doing something positive for the country and the people there. That is our benchmark. For Qatar as well.•

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“A 1950s Era Black-Market Pack Of Prophylactics”

January 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’s currently an online auction for a lot of three unopened boxes of sports-themed Champ prophylactics from 1950. The baseball figure is clearly supposed to be Ted Williams and the boxer Joe Louis, though neither was apparently a spokesperson for the condom company nor gave their permission for the cover design bearing their likenesses. Oddly, it was after his death when Williams’ head needed protection the most. Now I’m going to hell. A description of the Teddy Ballgame art from Baseball Reliquary:

This curiosity demonstrates the weird and wacky confluence of popular culture, business entrepreneurship, and baseball hero worship — a 1950s era unopened black-market pack of prophylactics whose colorful image bears an extraordinary likeness to that of the Splendid Splinter himself, Ted Williams.•

 

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“Others Reckon Markets Often Go Haywire”

December 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Tulowitzkis, like tulips, are prone to the irrational exuberance of marketplaces. The father of the modern baseball card just passed away, and an Economist piece reminds that speculation for this paper-based memorabilia packaged with bubble gum has proven no more resistant to bubbles than tech stocks or real estate. An excerpt:

Through the 1970s cards appealed mostly to kids interested in finding pictures of their heroes, or in completing a collection. Yet a subtle change was under way. Older aficionados, many of whom had been building their collections for decades, began swapping cards and hunting for especially rare and valuable specimens. One such cardhound, a professor of statistics named James Beckett, began polling traders on the prices they had seen or paid for particular cards. In 1979 he put together the first edition of what would become a regular price guide. In late 1984 the Beckett guide went monthly, the better to capitalise on soaring interest. Not long after that your correspondent took up collecting cards, just as that interest was turning into a speculative fervour.

Mr Beckett may not deserve sole credit for the baseball-card bonanza, but it is hard to imagine the mania having erupted without him. In the 1970s only aficionados knew that unique cards were fetching higher prices at trade shows and auctions. Beckett Baseball Card Monthly helped create a much larger market for the cards. Readers everywhere could see how prices were moving around the country, and decide to sell old memorabilia—or fill their attics with cards in anticipation of future price rises.

Economists have wrestled with the question of whether markets are “efficient” or not for more than half a century. Eugene Fama was awarded a Nobel prize in 2013 for pioneering work demonstrating that markets quickly incorporate new information and cannot systematically be beaten. Yet others reckon markets often go haywire. Robert Shiller, for instance, showed that market returns could in fact be predicted at longer time horizons. He also reckoned people are prone to certain behavioural tics, misjudgments that depart from rationality and which can drive markets to heights of ‘irrational exuberance.’ He was also awarded the Nobel prize, jointly with Mr Fama. Other economists have investigated ways in which markets can overshoot in one direction or another. “There are idiots,” Larry Summers once wrote in a paper on the subject. “Look around.”•

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“Perhaps It Was Inevitable That Professional Teams Would Turn To Emotion Metrics And Neuroscience Tools”

December 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m terrible at recognizing faces but really good at reading them. I couldn’t tell you, though, who was going to develop an excellent sky hook based on their smile or smirk and doubt anyone else can, but a couple of new NBA team owners believe facial-coding expertise is a vital part of franchise-building. From Kevin Randall in the New York Times:

“MILWAUKEE — When two financiers purchased the Milwaukee Bucks for $550 million last April, they promised to pour not only money and new management into the moribund franchise, but also the same kind of creative and critical thinking that had helped make them hedge fund billionaires.

It was not enough to increase the franchise’s sales force or beef up the team’s analytics department — the Bucks were looking for a more elusive edge. So in May, the team hired Dan Hill, a facial coding expert who reads the faces of college prospects and N.B.A. players to determine if they have the right emotional attributes to help the Bucks.

The approach may sound like palm reading to some, but the Bucks were so impressed with Hill’s work before the 2014 draft that they retained him to analyze their players and team chemistry throughout this season. 

With the tenets of ‘Moneyball’ now employed in the front offices of every major sport, perhaps it was inevitable that professional teams would turn to emotion metrics and neuroscience tools to try to gain an edge in evaluating players.”

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“Red Klotz Made Losing His Life’s Work”

December 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

“You are what the scoreboard says you are,” pronounced Bill Parcells in a moment of Zen neatness, but it isn’t always so. In the case of the perfectly named Washington Generals basketball coach Red Klotz, losing was winning, serving as he did as the leader of the long-running, sad-sack opposition to the Harlem Globetrotters. In an excellent edition of “The Lives They Lived” in the New York Times Magazine, Sam Dolnick pays tribute to the late coach’s lonely victory. An excerpt:

“He was a 5-foot-7 dynamo with a sly grin and a textbook set shot. In his prime, he was one of the best shooters in the country and a member of the championship-winning Baltimore Bullets in the late ’40s.

But Red Klotz made losing his life’s work.

He was the owner, manager, coach, mascot and chauffeur (in a used green DeSoto) of the Washington Generals, a team he created to lose, night in and night out, to the Harlem Globetrotters. He also cast himself as the Generals’ star point guard, a snowy-haired old man in kneepads still sinking set shots well into his 60s.

The Generals would become the sorriest team in the history of sports — 14,000 losses and counting — but from the beginning theirs was a single-minded, almost existential mission, as ineluctable as mortality. To be born is to die; to be a General is to lose. Over the years, Klotz’s Generals lost in the Egyptian desert and on N.B.A. floors, at Disney World and the Attica Correctional Facility, in a Simpsons episode and in Hong Kong. They lost in front of Nikita Khrushchev and Barack Obama.

They should have lost on Jan. 5, 1971, too, inside a rickety gym in Martin, Tenn. They limped into town with a losing streak at 2,495 games. No one expected the night to end in any other way than with loss No. 2,496.

But the Globetrotters were off their game. Meadowlark Lemon, one of the team’s stars, couldn’t make a shot. The Generals, meanwhile, a collection of former collegians playing as the New Jersey Reds that night — one of several phony names used to give the impression that multiple hapless teams chased the Globetrotters around the court (and the country) — couldn’t miss.

The Generals were up 12 with just two minutes to go.

With seven seconds left, the universe regained its balance: Lemon scored to give the Globetrotters a 99-98 lead. Then Klotz answered from some 20 feet out: 100-99, Generals.

All part of the show . . . right? Surely the Generals knew the script: Let the Globetrotters make a last-second basket to win the game.

On cue, Lemon shot. Lemon missed. The game was over. The Generals — the Generals! — had won.

The sold-out crowd sat silent, stunned. For a brief moment in a small town in northern Tennessee, to be born was not to die. Then the booing began. People had not paid to see the Globetrotters lose.

In his book on the Globetrotters, Ben Green called the game a blow to American confidence, putting it alongside Lt. William Calley’s conviction in the My Lai massacre and the publication of the Pentagon Papers.”

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“If A Computer Was Used During A Game, It Would Be Most Helpful”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

From “Brave New Sports World,” Steve Hymon’s 1992 SI article about the future of AI in athletics, which is marked in equal measures by fear, awe and disbelief:

“In 1989, while doing work for a ‘certain’ government agency, [computer scientist David] Hillman was given the task of coming up with a practical application for neural-network technology, a type of artificial-intelligence programming that is capable of processing diverse streams of information. A fan of the Washington Redskins, Hillman decided to mix work with play, so he created a program that thinks like a defensive coordinator. Between plays of a game, the computer operator uses a mouse to input six pieces of data: down, yards to go, field position, score, quarter and time remaining. Then the computer spits out the probability of the next play’s being an inside run, an outside run, a short pass, a long pass or, when called for, a punt or a field goal attempt. For instance, the computer’s response to a third-and-three situation, with the offense on its own 35-yard line, the score 7-7 and 13 minutes remaining in the second quarter, is a 54% chance the offense will try an inside run, a 22% chance it will throw a short pass, a 12% chance of a long pass and a negligible chance of an outside run.

Initially, Hillman taped and charted three Redskin games from the 1989 season to serve as his data base; then he tested his program by watching several televised 1990 games and comparing the computer’s responses with the teams’ reactions. The results were good: In 70% to 80% of the plays, the computer correctly predicted what the Skins would do. In one game, the computer hit 95% of the plays. The second time he tried, using three Redskin games from the 1991 season as a data base, Hillman’s program nailed 76% of the Redskin plays in last January’s Super Bowl — which is pretty good considering that Washington coach Joe Gibbs is known for coming up with new offensive twists during the playoffs.

‘It’s still up to the defensive coordinator to make a decision,’ says Hillman. ‘But the computer can recommend that during certain situations a certain defense should be used.

‘And I feel like I’m just touching on this superficially,’ says Hillman. ‘With even more variables, such as field condition, the computer should do even better.’

Two questions come to mind. Could Hillman’s program be used in the heat of a game? Would it help?

‘If a computer was used during a game, it would be most helpful,’ says Stanford coach Bill Walsh. When asked whether a computer, perhaps a Wires, might one day call the plays, Walsh says hesitantly, ‘It’s so mind-boggling, I wouldn’t be able to respond.’ Then he switches the subject.

‘In the very near future, I think what will happen will be communication from the sideline to the quarterback through a microphone in the quarterback’s helmet,’ he says.

Walsh’s response is repeated to Hillman, prompting him to describe another scenario. ‘If you have a computer with a voice-recognition system of, say, 300 words, you wouldn’t have to use the mouse to input the data into the computer,’ he says. ‘You could simply tell the computer what the situation is. It would give you the answers, and from the coaches’ booth you could relay the information straight to the players on the field through the headphones in their helmets.'”

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“Mr. Berger Dumped Dozens Of Cases Of Unsold 1952 Cards Into The Atlantic Ocean”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Sy Berger didn’t invent baseball cards, but he pretty much invented the industry. In 1951, the WWII vet guided Topps out of the frontier, shifting the company’s focus from trading cards featuring American pioneers and cowboys to those spotlighting baseball players, making statistics and stale gum a staple of childhood and ultimately birthing a nostalgia market with Picasso-ish prices, Cubs valued like Cubists. Berger just passed away at 91. From his New York Times obituary by Richard Goldstein:

“Mr. Berger joined Topps in 1947 and was soon marketing cards featuring figures like Hopalong Cassidy and Davy Crockett before taking Topps into the baseball-card market in 1951.

Designing cards with the help of Woody Gelman, the creative director for Topps, Mr. Berger used photos the players had posed for during spring training — except for the 1953 set, with its images derived from oil paintings.

‘We had a guy doing those paintings a mile a minute,’ Mr. Berger once told Sports Collectors Digest. ‘A little off-the-wall guy named Moishe.’

When the boys of the 1950s reached adulthood, nostalgia merged with speculation to make baseball cards a commodity, bought and sold for prices inconceivable in their youth. Mickey Mantle’s 1952 Topps card was selling for about $3,000 in the early 1980s.

Most of the early Topps cards were presumably thrown out by mothers cleaning their sons’ closets, and Mr. Berger dumped dozens of cases of unsold 1952 cards into the Atlantic Ocean. But Topps and latter-day competitors were selling millions of baseball cards annually by the time of the pricing boom of the late 1980s and early ’90s.”

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“Will Computer-Based Technologies Someday…Render Live Games Obsolete?”

December 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

The intersection of athletics and computers at the dawn of the World Wide Web was the crux of Donald Katz’s 1995 Sports Illustrated article about Paul Allen attempting to work his Microsoft mindset into the NBA. An excerpt:

Besides the thronelike easy chairs built into the wall along one side of the regulation basketball court and the Santa Fe-style high-desert oil paintings on the opposite wall, the distinguishing features of Allen’s arena are video monitors of the sort that can be seen everywhere on his estate. Each of the screens is electronically tethered to dozens of other monitors and computer systems inside the Allen compound. Simply touching a display on one of the screens can achieve high-speed access to satellites circling the globe and therefore to just about any sports event being broadcast anywhere in the world. Inside his plush 20-seat theater, equipped with a 10-by-14-foot screen,

Allen can view ultra-high-definition video images that less-privileged consumers won’t be able to see for several years. And if Paul Allen must miss a Blazer game because he’s out at sea on his 150-foot yacht, the team will tape the game at a cost of around $30,000 and beam it to him as a digital stream of private entertainment.

From any keyboard inside his home, Allen can also access computers strewn throughout the vast web of his futuristic business empire. He can send E-mail out to Blazer forward Buck Williams or to coach P.J. Carlesimo’s address in cyberspace. “I’m not using these —- computers, and I’m not readin’ no E-mail!” Carlesimo declared upon being presented with his laptop shortly after he was hired by the Blazers last summer. But since then P.J. has seen the light and joined his boss in what Allen has long called ‘the wired world.’ …

Allen, 42 and the 13th-richest American, has lately spent $1.2 billion of his $4.6 billion Microsoft-spawned fortune on a broad array of digital satellites, wireless communications outfits, multimedia software and communications hardware firms, futuristic research companies and high-profile entertainment ventures. Last March, Allen underscored the convergence of Hollywood and the digital media age through his investment of $500 million in DreamWorks SKG, the studio being assembled by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. And as Allen’s executives and research scientists work more subtly to merge economic power, advanced technologies and big-time sports, they are similarly defining a future in which the experience of sports will surely be changed.

Down in Portland, Allen’s Trail Blazer organization is managing the construction of a $262 million sports arena called the Rose Garden, which will be strewn with computers and wired with miles of fiber-optic cable. The 70 luxury suites inside the Rose Garden will be equipped with teleconferencing gear and be fed channels full of computer-generated sports statistics. The concourses of the Rose Garden will be draped with glowing video screens, and Allen eventually wants to feed stats and replays and stock quotes and weather reports and images of games being played in other places to a tiny screen located at every seat.

Not unlike other team owners who have invested in new stadiums and arenas over the past year, Allen is considering a virtual-reality entertainment center next door to the Rose Garden. An official Blazer “home page” already connects on-line fans to the team’s own Internet address. The Blazers’ staff includes a seasoned multimedia software developer assigned to create sports products that the Blazers can sell to other teams. “My mission,” team president Marshall Glickman proclaimed early in this past NBA season, “is to integrate Paul Allen’s world of computers and communications with my own world of sports.”

During the ‘information superhighway’ media frenzy that began toward the end of 1993, a Seattle Times reporter imagined a day in the not-too-distant future when a fan who got home late during a Seattle SuperSonic game could digitally fast-forward through the recorded action until he caught up with the real-time telecast. After a Shawn Kemp dunk, the reporter presumed, the viewer could click on the image of Kemp and call up his latest stats, read stories about Kemp from newspapers all over the world or connect with the Shawn Kemp Fan Club in Indiana. Another click would automatically order Shawn Kemp souvenirs or tickets to a coming Sonic game. The viewer could change the camera angle from which he or she was seeing the game, focusing on Kemp or watching the action from overhead.

And all of this, the newspaper article pointed out, could occur within the boundaries of Allen’s multimedia portfolio. “Once the high-speed digital channel is wired into people’s houses,” Allen says before finally nailing a three-point basket, “all of that– and more — becomes pretty easy to do.”

Early evidence indicates that many of the innovations now understood only by technologists like Allen will intensify our experience of spectator sports — just as audio CDs have enhanced the secondhand experience of a live symphony. The informational and visual options available to fans sitting at home or in the stands are already multiplying as sports become proving grounds for advanced digital technologies. But these technologies also raise a broad array of questions, from immediate concerns (Will computerized gambling soon be inextricably linked with big-time sports?) to new business issues (Will people pay for new services?). Then there are longer-term issues: Will computer-based technologies someday offer sportslike entertainment so enthralling and convenient and highly customized that games created from bits of the best of real sports and bits of the best sports fantasies render live games obsolete?•

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A Brief Note From 1933 About A Salesman

December 12, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the November 14, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Miss Patricia Royer of Cleveland, Ohio, who for nine years made her living fighting men of her own weight in the boxing ring, has entered Fenn College to study salesmanship. She was born in England.”

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“The Name Of The Team, I Mean I Never Even Thought About This”

November 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

When you’ve been successful as long as sports broadcaster Al Michaels has, when you haven’t had to worry about food and shelter essentially your whole life, when you’ve had a blessed ride, you have to be especially on guard against the gradual development of moral blind spots. The announcer guested recently on The Howard Stern Show and discussed two of the most pressing ethical quandaries facing the NFL today: brain injuries and the racist team name of the Washington Redskins (a debate he called “nuts” earlier this year). On the latter issue, Michaels doesn’t believe the term “Redskins” is the same as if the team was called “Blackskins” (oh, it is), and feels that since the majority of the fans (who are white) approve of the name which insults a minority, it should remain (it should not). His rationalizing and lack of empathy is stunning. An exchange follows.

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Howard Stern:

Do you agree with me that if a group of people, especially Native Americans, who have been shit on, they’ve basically been devastated as a people, if they’re offended by the term “Redskins,” why in God’s name would this guy, this owner [Daniel Snyder], who’s blessed with owning a team in the NFL, and he’s got more money than God, and he’s got a great life, why is this guy fighting so fervently to hold on to the name “Redskins”?

Al Michaels:

Well, I think he feels that the polls he’s taken, or have been taken, that most people are not offended by it…this is what I’m telling you what I think he sees. He also sees a fanbase, that when you score a touchdown you have 90,000 people at FedEx Field in Landover, Maryland, and they get up and they sing “Hail to the Redskins,” 90,000 people. So when you see this, and when you see a lot of people saying, “Oh, no, this is the tradition of the team, this is not a derogatory phrase…”

Howard Stern:

So where do you stand on this personally?

Al Michaels:

The name of the team, I mean I never even thought about this, Howard, I didn’t until it came up. It’s not to beg the issue but at a certain point, something’s going to offend everybody, and if a minority is offended by something, do we now change everything people are offended by?

Howard Stern:

Look, you know me, I’ve got a pretty thick skin, but if it it was a team named the “Blackskins” or the “Jewboys,” I would be offended by it.

Al Michaels:

Well, that’s a whole other thing, too…

Howard Stern:

You think?

Al Michaels:

But the name of this team was the name of this team for over 50 years before people started to say this is now derogatory.

Robin Quivers:

Well, maybe the Indians were saying that, but nobody was listening. 

Al Michaels:

People say, and again this is what I’ve heard from people inside the Redskins organization, there are tribes, their teams are named “Redskins” on the reservations. 

Howard Stern:

So you think they should keep the name?

Al Michaels:

Look, I mean, I understand both sides of the issue here, but to me I never thought of it in those terms. I guess if it offends enough people then you do change it. Right now, I’m seeing the majority of people, Redskin fans, saying, “We’re okay with it.”•

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“The Hall Of Fame Is A Deeply Weird Place”

November 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

For years, Major League Baseball disappeared its urban, urgent and English origins and created some hokum about a leisurely game being birthed in the pasture by Union General Abner Doubleday. Thankfully, credit for the sport’s beginnings were reassigned to Alexander Cartwright, and at long last a historical wrong had been righted, right? Except that was Hokum 2.0. With the aid of Baseball in the Garden of Eden by John Thorn, Rob Neyer of JABO writes of baseball’s ongoing grapple with authenticity. An excerpt:

“Alexander Cartwright, as you might know, is in Baseball’s Hall of Fame. According to his Cooperstown plaque, he was THE FATHER OF MODERN BASE BALL and a) set the bases 90 feet apart, b) established nine innings as the game length and nine players per side, and c) organized New York’s Knickerbocker club, which spread baseball to the Pacific Coast and even Hawaii.

All of which might well merit inclusion in the Hall of Fame, if true. But little or none of it is true. Here’s a key passage from Thorn’s book:

So what may we reliably say that Cartwright did? In 1866, Charles A. Peverelly credited him thus in his book of American Pastimes: ‘In the spring of 1845 Mr. Alex J. Cartwright, who had become an enthusiast in the game, one day upon the field proposed a regular organization, promising to obtain several recruits. His proposal was acceded to, and Messrs. W. R. Wheaton, Cartwright, D. F. Curry, E. R. Dupignac Jr., and W. H. Tucker, formed themselves into a board of recruiting officers, and soon obtained names enough to make a respectable show.’ Up to and including the Mills commission, this was the full reported extent of Cartwright’s ingenuity.

The Knickerbocker game during Cartwright’s tenure (he departed for the Gold Rush early in 1849) was almost never played with nine men to the side, but instead by as few as seven or as many as eleven. The number of innings was unspecified, as victory went to the side that was first to score twenty-one runs in equal turns at bat. The length of the baselines was imprecise, although latter-day pundits have credited Cartwright with divine-inspired prescience in determining a distance that would yield so many close plays at first. Sometimes referred to in histories of the game as an engineer even though he was a bank teller, and then a book seller, Cartwright was further credited with laying out the game on a diamond rather than a square. Yet even this was no innovation in 1845…

And so on and so forth.

So how did Cartwright get elected to the Hall of Fame in 1938? Largely through the efforts of his son Bruce and especially his grandson Bruce Jr., the latter of whom actually invented whole baseball-related passages for posthumous insertion into Cartwright’s Gold Rush diary, the original of which is actually ‘devoid of any remark about baseball.’

The Hall of Fame is a deeply weird place.”

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“It’s A Huge Part Of This Business That Never Gets Talked About”

November 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Legendary baseball team owner Bill Veeck was, sure, a carny and a wreck, but he was also an innovator, as you can see in the above photo of him employing a decidedly lo-fi crowdsourcing technique to allow fans to manage a game. One business “innovation” he championed six decades ago, talking the government into giving an unnecessary tax break to owners of sports teams, has become a gigantic piece of corporate welfare in the modern age of multibillion franchises. It will pay huge dividends to new Clippers owner Stave Ballmer. From David Wharton at the Los Angeles Times:

“Baseball fans remember Bill Veeck mostly for his bizarre stunts.

The maverick team owner once signed a player with dwarfism, then sent the 3-foot-7 batter to the plate to draw a walk.

Another time, he let the crowd hold up placards to dictate in-game strategies to the manager.

But there is a legacy for which the late Veeck is less well-known. During the 1950s, the man who bought and sold three major league franchises over his lifetime was credited with persuading Internal Revenue Service officials to give him a hefty tax break on player salaries.

These deductions have survived, with periodic changes, into the present day. And they could greatly benefit Steve Ballmer after his recent $2-billion purchase of the Clippers.

‘It’s a huge part of this business that never gets talked about,’ said Dennis Howard, a professor emeritus at the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. ‘It changes your sense of what he’s really paying.’

Ballmer could seek as much as half of the purchase price of the team in tax benefits over the next 15 years, according to accountants and sports business analysts familiar with the financial aspects of team ownership.”

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“He Was Allowed By The Cuban Government To Leave The Country’

November 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports | Permalink

The most coveted international free agent in baseball right now is 19-year-old Yoan Moncada of Cuba, who seemingly didn’t defect, didn’t flee via flotilla, but was allowed to leave freely through the nation’s “front door” and can come and go as he pleases in the future. What does it all mean? Is it a political shift or a singular occurrence or is the story some sort of ruse? From Kiley McDaniel at Fangraphs:

“I was told by Moncada’s agent last week that he was allowed by the Cuban government to leave the country, that Moncada has a Cuban passport and can fly back to the country whenever he wants to. I haven’t been able to formally confirm this, but there’s no reason for the agent to lie about it, and multiple high ranking club executives told me this is how they understand the situation at this point as well.

Take a moment and let that sink in. Countless dozens of ballplayers and hundreds of normal citizens have risked their lives to leave the island on makeshift boats and under the cover of darkness. The government apparently just let one of their best ballplayers in a long time just leave on a flight to Central America. There’s been plenty of unfounded speculation about how and why this happened, with some prominent executives still unclear on how it was even possible.

There are no indications what this could mean for the next wave of players that want to defect. Players were defecting in the old style just months ago, so it’s not like people knew this shift was happening. It could also not be a shift at all, as the story could be much more complicated than we know right now. Or it could just be a one-time deal. We don’t know. I didn’t want to report this until I had something concrete, but teams are debating how many tens of millions of dollars they want to spend on this phenom and they still don’t know how this happened or what it means, so it seems reasonable to report the confusion.”

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“Football Is A Moral Abomination”

November 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Malcolm Gladwell thinks American football is a “moral abomination,” and it’s hard to argue, though I wonder about his self-termed “intuition” telling him that European football (or soccer) “can’t possibly compare” in terms of brain injuries. Anyone repeatedly heading a soccer ball that’s been kicked from 50 yards away would seem to me to be at great risk, and that’s not even considering the repetitive heading that all pro soccer players practice from when their small children. Perhaps Jeff Astle was, in Gladwellian terms, an outlier, but probably not. Worthing thinking about, at any rate. From a new Gladwell interview conducted by Bloomberg’s Emily Chang:

“In a wide-ranging interview with Emily Chang, best-selling author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell continued his long-standing crusade against football with a harsh indictment. ‘Football is a moral abomination,’ he said and predicted that the sport — currently far and away the most popular and lucrative in America — would eventually ‘wither on the vine.’

The NFL recently revealed that nearly a third of retired players develop long-term cognitive issues much earlier than the general population. ‘We’re not just talking about people limping at the age of 50. We’re talking about brain injuries that are causing horrible, protracted, premature death,’ Gladwell told Chang, picking up a theme he first explored in a 2009 article for The New Yorker which likened football to dogfighting. ‘This…is appalling. Can you point to another industry in America which, in the course of doing business, maims a third of its employees?'”

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“There Is A Lot More Tech Than I Knew Changing Basketball”

November 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

In a Reddit AMA conducted by new Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer (who describes the acquisition as “not awesome and not bad” financially) and Harvard computer science professor David Parkes, the duo discuss the intersection of basketball and technology. An excerpt

“Question:

I was wondering what you feel the future is for technology in basketball?

Steve Ballmer:

There is a lot more tech than I knew changing basketball and the sports fan experience broadly. My favorite is the use of machine learning technology to process game videos from the celling to understand, categorize and analyze game play. One of the ML experts at second spectrum was a 6″9″ Hooper from MIT so so cool ML rocks! The tech can help understand almost anything. Harvard CS will use it and other technologies to transform so many fields and maybe even more for sports.

David Parkes:

Harvard researchers in the school of engineering and applied sciences and statistics are working on probabilistic models to predict the outcome of a particular matchup of two players on the court. Just this week in my class we discussed the use of Markov chains to predict the outcome of NCAA games. Harvard rocks!”

____________________________

Don Knuth, the “Electronic Coach,” in 1959:

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“Drunks Invariably Run Up To Grab His Beard Without Asking”

November 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

There’s really no representative person who raises a 340-pound log above his head. Case in point: Andrew Palmer, the seventh strongest man in America (or at least on the nation’s strongman-competition circuit), a mountainous software engineer who moonlights by moving trees with his limbs, while performing in a surprisingly subdued modern Herculean sideshow. An excerpt follows from “Carry That Weight,” Alex Pappademas’ very fun Grantland portrait of Palmer.

______________________________

There are no typical strongmen. Michael Caruso is also a microbiologist. The Bulgarian Dimitar Savatinov came to the sport after a stint as an actual strongman with Ringling Brothers, where his act, according to the web site Rogue Fitness, involved “laying [sic] on broken glass while a board on his chest had twelve performers dancing on it, bending iron bars, [and] holding and spinning seven girls on a  human carousel[.]“ Five days a week, Andrew Palmer works as a software engineer at a startup in Seattle. Before that he worked for Microsoft. He played high school football and was briefly the only 300-pound forward on the school soccer team. After college, he slowed down, gained desk-job weight. He started training for his first strongman contest — the 2008 NorCal Winter Strongman Challenge, in Concord, California — the way you might set your sights on a half-marathon. It was a reason to go to the gym. He figured he’d do it and go to the contest and get his ass kicked. Instead he came in second, just behind a more experienced strongman named Chris Grantano. That was how it started.

Palmer had some issues with depression when he was younger, and the lifting helps with that. It helps him sleep. It’s almost like meditation. It does what meditation is supposed to do — it takes him off the wheel of thought and experience for a little while. “When you’re grinding out reps,” he told me in Vegas, “you fall into a tunnel vision where there’s literally nothing but the movement. You’re doing that movement over and over, and then it stops, and you come back, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m back. I remember who I am again.’”

The trick is having an existence to come back to. Palmer likes having a circle of friends who don’t do what he does. In recent months, his Instagram feed has included blurry concert photos of Echo & the Bunnymen at the Showbox and Erasure at the 9:30 Club and EMA at a music festival in Portland. Palmer goes to a lot of rock festivals, even though whenever he’s in a crowded place with alcohol flowing, drunks invariably run up to grab his beard without asking, the way strangers feel entitled to touch a pregnant woman’s belly. Palmer likes a few beers, Palmer likes a hang. “I know guys who would never drink a beer except for the night after a contest,” he says. “More power to you, but I’m gonna drink beer more often than that. And if that means I don’t ever take top three at World’s Strongest Man, I’ll deal with that, because otherwise I could go crazy.”•

_______________________________

“C’mon, Andy!”:

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“He Led Several Lives, Apparently”

November 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

It was the strangest thing. In 1984, stories began to escape the San Diego Padres clubhouse about a trio of pitchers, Eric Show, Dave Dravecky and Mark Thurmond, who’d become devout members of the John Birch Society. A racist incident that postseason in the team’s clubhouse against Claire Smith, an African-American female sportswriter, brought more attention to the extreme politics of the Birchers.

It all began with Show, a sort of baseball Bobby Fischer, a troubled nonconformist and deep thinker who couldn’t fit into wider society let alone the claustrophobic confines of a bullpen or dugout. He was a self-taught jazz musician ravenous for philosophy, physics, economics and history, a seeker of truth who wandered into an Arizona bookstore and picked up a volume about the John Birch Society and became obsessed (though he always denied any racist leanings). Two stories follow about his odd life and lonely death.

__________________________

From “Baseball’s Thinking Man,” by Bill Plaschke, in the 1988 Los Angeles Times:

YUMA, Ariz. — Let’s play a game. What if some real smart people with a sense of humor–people who know nothing about baseball–one day decided to invent a very good baseball pitcher.

But after giving him an elbow and shoulder and all the usual stuff, what if they decided to get tricky?

What if they gave him a love for physics? A love for studying philosophers, historians and theorists? A love for writing classical jazz?

What if on road trips, while his friends are shopping and watching movies, he is in the basement of musty libraries trying to figure out why the Earth is round?

What if at home, while many players are at the ballpark several hours ahead of the required reporting time, he is still in his home, in his second-floor office, under a bright light, studying the effect of a new foreign government or ancient civilization?

What if, before he wins 20 games, he records and produces his own record album, and co-stars in a movie? Finally, just to throw everybody off, what if they made him an open, verbal member of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society? What if . . .

Forget the what ifs. Such a pitcher exists. His name is Eric Show.

His six seasons have established him as one of the National League’s best pitchers and most unusual people.

Yet, after six seasons, another question is probably more applicable.

Why?

Why has he no close clubhouse friends? Why does everybody in there look at him so funny? Why do some think he’s selfish and arrogant? Why did some even take to calling him “Erica”? And why do things always seem to happen to him?

In 1984, his John Birch affiliation is uncovered when he is spotted passing out pamphlets at a fair, and black players think he doesn’t like them.

In 1985, he gives up Pete Rose’s record 4,192nd hit, but during the 10-minute celebration he sits on the mound, and now nobody likes him.

Last season, he hits the Chicago Cubs’ Andre Dawson in the head and must flee Wrigley Field fearing for his life. When he returns to that city this season, he has only half-jokingly claimed it will be in disguise.

Show, 31, enters the 1988 season in the final year of a $725,000 contract and at the crossroads of his baseball career.

Can he find enough peace to once again become the pitcher that won 15 games to help lead the Padres to the 1984 World Series?

Or will he continue twisting in the winds of discontent, like last season, when he went 8-16 despite a 3.84 earned-run average?

Either way, the Padres say he’s trying.

“There has been change in Eric just since the middle of last season,” Padre Manager Larry Bowa said. “In the clubhouse, away from the stadium. He’s really working at understanding and being understood.”

Show says he’s trying.

“As strange at it may seem, I have tried to be more a part of my baseball environment,” Show said carefully. “If I’m still off, it’s because I started way off.”

And whatever happens, only one thing is ever certain with Eric Show.

Something will get lost in the translation.

__________________________

From “Eric Show’s Solitary Life, and Death,” by Ira Berkow in the 1994 New York Times:

An autopsy released soon after by the coroner’s office said the cause of death was inconclusive, that is, there was no observable trauma or wounds to the body. A toxicology report would be coming in about two weeks. But in statements to the center’s staff, Show said that he was under the influence of cocaine, heroin and alcohol. He said he used four $10 bags of cocaine at about 7 that night, Tuesday night. “Didn’t like how I felt,” he said, adding that he then ingested eight $10 bags of heroin and a six-pack of beer.

The questions about Eric Show’s death are no less difficult to answer than the ones about his life. Why was he so hard on himself, such an apparently driven individual? Why was he so compulsive, or at least passionate, about almost everything he undertook?

Show (the name rhymes with cow) was known as a highly intelligent, articulate man with broad interests that ranged from physics — his major in college — to politics to economics to music. “Eric didn’t fit the mold of the typical ballplayer,” said Tim Flannery, a former Padre teammate of Show’s. “Most ballplayers were like me then; we had tunnel vision. We weren’t interested in those other things.”

Show was a born-again Christian who regularly attended Sunday chapel services as a player and sometimes signed his autograph with an added Acts 4:12, which discusses salvation as coming only from belief in Jesus Christ.

He was an accomplished jazz guitarist. Sometimes after games on the road, he would beat the team back to the hotel and play lead guitar with the band in the lounge.

He was a member of the right-wing John Birch Society, a fact the baseball world was surprised to learn in August 1984 as the Padres moved toward their first and only division title.

And he was a successful businessman with real estate holdings, a marketing company and a music store, all of which kept him in expensive clothes, with a navy-blue Mercedes and a house in an affluent San Diego neighborhood.

But other elements seemed to intrude. And ultimately, the contradictions of the best and worst in American life became a disastrous mixture that defeated him.

Beyond Statistics, Just Who Was He?

For most baseball fans, Eric Show was a decent pitcher who had once been lucky enough to make it to the World Series. But to the people who were close to him, he was, in the end, someone they did not fully know.

“He led several lives, apparently,” said Arn Tellem, his agent at the time of his death.

To Joe Elizondo, his financial consultant, and Mark Augustin, his partner in a music store, and Steve Tyler, a boyhood friend from Riverside, Calif., where both were born and raised, Show was a charming, devoted friend and a caring man. “He would give you the shirt off his back,” Elizondo said. “And he did. I once told him how much I liked a shirt he was wearing, and he said, “Here, it’s yours.” He’d stop a beggar on the street and learn he was hungry and run to a diner and bring back a hot meal for him.”

To others, though, Show could seem selfish or arrogant.

And there were the drugs. Some said Show’s drug problems began when he took injections to relieve pain in his back after surgery, and he sought more and more relief. Others wondered if he had been taking drugs before he reached the major leagues.

He may also have begun taking drugs simply because he liked the challenge of being able to handle the dreaded substance. …

His death evoked memories of two strange scenes in Show’s life, one in 1992 and the other last year.

In the spring of 1992, Show was in training camp in Arizona with the A’s. He had signed a two-year contract with them in late 1990, and managed only a 1-2 record with them in 1991. Following several mornings in which he had reported late for workouts, he showed up with both hands heavily bandaged.

He explained that he had been chased by a group of youths and had to climb a fence, and had cut himself. But what was not reported was that the police later told club officials that Show had been behaving erratically in front of an adult book store, and fled when officers approached. They finally caught him trying to climb a barbed-wire fence.

Last July, he was caught by the police when running across an intersection in San Diego and screaming that people were out to kill him, and then begged the police to kill him. He was handcuffed, and while in the back seat of the police car, he kicked out the rear window. He was taken to the county mental hospital for three days of testing. Show had admitted “doing quite a bit of crystal methamphetamine.”

It was one more startling development, one more contradiction for an athlete who, in reference to his John Birch membership, once said: “I have a fundamental philosophy of less government, more reason, and with God’s help, a better world. And that’s it.”

Always Looking For Answers

Actually, it wasn’t it. Show, as a John Birch member, also denied that he was a Nazi or a racist. In fact, he had a Hispanic financial adviser, a Jewish lawyer and agent, and black friends in baseball and his music world. People from his first agent, Steve Greenberg, to Tony Gwynn, a black teammate, agreed that he was no bigot. “He joined the Birch Society because he thought it would provide answers to how the world works,” Tellem said. “He was always looking for answers.”

Show once said, “I’ve devoted my life to learning.” Asked what he was learning, he replied, “Learning everything.”

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“There Is No Positive Economic Impact From Hosting”

October 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Olympics costs cities far more to host than it returns in revenue. Supposedly, the aura of the Games will make up for the shortfall, magically transforming any metropolis into a tourist magnet. Try telling that to the people of Montreal, which spent big on the 1976 Games and paid for it for next 30 years. In fact, that’s been the experience of most hosts over the last four decades.

In a post at The Conversation, Andrew Zimbalist, the Smith economist who’s long proven the financial folly of American cities building publicly funded stadiums for pro-sports teams, explains why authoritarian countries currently have a great shot at attracting the five-ring circus:

“The games’ promoters, however, claim the real payoff comes in increased tourism, foreign investment and trade. As my own research confirms, the difficulty with this assertion is that there is little evidence to back it up. London and Beijing, for instance, each experienced a drop in tourism when they hosted the summer games. That is, the increase in tourism for the Olympics was more than offset by a decrease in normal tourism, as people decided to stay away from the crowds and high prices. To be sure, the large majority of scholarly studies concludes that there is no positive economic impact from hosting.

There is growing evidence that the IOC has overplayed its hand. The number of bidders for the Winter Olympics has gone steadily down from nine in 1995 for the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City to just two in 2014 for the 2022 Games, and for the summer Olympics from 12 in 1997 for the 2004 games in Athens to three in 2013 for the 2020 games in Tokyo.

Potential bids for the 2022 Winter Olympics from Krakow, Stockholm, Munich, Davos, Lviv and Oslo were withdrawn in 2013 and 2014. This leaves only two authoritarian countries, Kazakhstan and China, in the hosting competition. Many analysts have concluded that democratic governments can no longer get away with wasting billions of dollars on dubious Olympic glory.”

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Old Print Article: “Gamblers Hunted As Rothstein Lies At Point Of Death,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

October 26, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

While the early twentieth-century mobster Arnold Rothstein has entered into American culture in everything from The Great Gatsby to Boardwalk Empire, he most infamously left his mark on major-league baseball. The “Brain,” as he was often called, transformed the often chaotic world of crime into a corporate-type affair, becoming the first “legitimate businessman.” One Rothstein deal saw him and other gamblers entice members of the 1919 White Sox to throw the World Series, a scandal which nearly killed the sport. And then there was the unintended consequence of the fix which occurred when Kenesaw “Mountain” Landis, a federal judge, was subsequently named baseball’s first commissioner with the imperative to clean up the game. In addition to other policies, Landis was steadfast in not allowing players of color to participate in the league, keeping the sport segregated. It’s no sure bet the game would have been integrated without Landis, but there was no way it was happening with him. The following article from the November 5, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reports on the murder of Rothstein, not shockingly a gambling-related crime.

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“The Computer Solidly Supports The Way Cook Says Baseball Should Be Played”

October 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Long before Moneyball, Earnshaw Cook was, in Frank Deford’s words, the “scholar-heretic” of baseball, a statistician who proved the game’s strategy was backwards. Many of his innovations are common knowledge in the sport today (e.g., sacrifice bunts are usually unproductive), though others are still strangely not implemented. For instance: If you’re in a pivotal post-season game played under National League rules, why not use a relief pitcher who matches up well with the opposing lineup at the beginning of the game, and then pinch hit for him the first time he’s to bat so that you get an extra plate appearance by a good hitter? Then you can insert your “starting” pitcher. Makes sense. Many other of the stat man’s strategies have been disproven, but his underlying message that the sport was being played more from tradition than wisdom was correct.

Deford profiled Cook in Sports Illustrated for the first time in 1964, and while that piece doesn’t seem to be online, here’s the opening of his 1972 portrait, “It Ain’t Necessarily So, and Never Was,” which ran just prior to the publication of Cook’s Percentage Baseball and the Computer, when the numbers whiz went digital:

For more than a decade Earnshaw Cook, a retired Baltimore metallurgist, has been trying to convince baseball’s bosses that playing the sacred percentages is, to be blunt, dumb baseball. In 1964 Cook brought out a 345-page book, Percentage Baseball, that was full of charts, curves, tables and complicated formulas that sometimes went on for the better part of a page. The book dared to suggest that either: a) baseball is not using the best possible odds on the field, or b) mathematics is a fake.

Nothing has happened since to convince Cook that ‘a’ is wrong and ‘b’ is right. ‘As in the world around us,’ he says, ‘baseball offers a completely balanced, highly complicated statistical system, demonstrably controlled in all its interactions of play by the random operations of the laws of chance. As such, it becomes a fascinating illustration of a process readily susceptible to reliable mathematical analysis. Baseball also furnishes a classic example of the utter contempt of its unsophisticated protagonists for the scientific method.’

That last sentence is Cook’s way of saying that the national pastime thinks he is as nutty as a fruitcake. Since 1964 nobody has dared test out his conclusions even in, say, a winter rookie league. Oh yes, the managers in 1964 were named: Berra, Bauer, Pesky, Lopez, Tebbetts, Dressen, Hodges, Lopat, Rigney, Mele, Kennedy, Hutchinson, Craft, Alston, Bragan, Stengel, Murtaugh, Keane, Mauch and Dark. They all stayed faithful to the memory of Connie Mack—but only Alston is still managing at the same major league shop.

Cook has had some nibbles from the baseball Establishment. The Houston Astros approached him shortly after his book came out and inquired if he thought he could apply his figures in such a way that he could make judgments about minor league prospects. Cook said he would try. He checked the player records Houston sent him, and said that his evaluation indicated the two best prospects were named Jim Wynn and Rusty Staub. This was not bad figuring, as Wynn and Staub are probably still the two best players ever to wear Houston uniforms, but Cook never heard from the Astros again. He also got feelers from the Cubs and Phillies, but nothing came of those.

Ignored, Cook went back to his numbers, and this April his second volume on the subject, Percentage Baseball and the Computer, is scheduled for publication. Basically, it is 207 pages of computer proof that everything he wrote eight years ago was qualitatively correct. Well, not quite everything. The computer has found that Cook’s percentage lineup—with the best hitter leading off, the second best batting second, etc.—is, over a season, 12 runs less effective than the traditional lineup.

Otherwise the computer solidly supports the way Cook says baseball should be played.•

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“No Member Of A Front Office Is Worth As Much As Even A Half-Decent MLB Player”

October 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

The Economist has an interesting baseball piece in wake of the Los Angeles Dodgers poaching the Tampa Bay General Manager Andrew Friedman, arguing that superstar chief executives aren’t as valuable as they’re made out to be, that the supply of them outstrips the demand, and that clubs left in the hands of mediocre GMs (e.g., Ruben Amaro Jr. of the Phillies) are the result of poor ownership decision rather than scarcity. It’s a broadside against the Great Man Theory, suggesting that while setting up a good organization and process are hallmarks of a talented exec, the organization then becomes bigger than the individual leader. An excerpt:

“Hiring the talented Mr Friedman is hardly the worst or most wasteful decision in recent Dodgers history. The gap between what he is paid and what he will contribute pales in comparison with what the club is squandering on Andre Ethier or Brandon League. And Mr Friedman’s sterling reputation may help Los Angeles to attract elite researchers and scouts, who are the real sources of competitive advantage, from other clubs.

But far from the $100m a year or so that Mr Morris suggests that Mr Beane deserves, no member of a front office is worth as much as even a half-decent MLB player. The reason GMs make less money than players do isn’t because owners are blind to the contributions of an elite executive. It’s because there are far more people capable of running an MLB team at a high level than there are people capable of playing for one, and less scarcity leads to less value. The only front-office decision that really matters is the owner’s choice to embrace modern management techniques. Once a club chooses to take the plunge into the 21st century, there will be no shortage of brainiacs ready, willing and able to implement that strategy.”

 

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“The NFL Was Looking For Artists To Pay Up To Perform At The Game”

October 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

Speaking of not being paid for popular content, the NFL actually had the audacity to request that potential Super Bowl halftime acts pay the league for the high-profile slot. Thankfully, Katy Perry, who got the gig, and the other performers said “no.”

Being the star of the content doesn’t pay as well in most cases anymore and not just in the music industry; you’re expected to take less–or pay for the privilege–and figure out how to leverage the visibility in other money-making ways. The real “leads” are the event, the spectacle, the happening. You can be replaced. From ESPN:

“Pop star Katy Perry will be the halftime performer at Super Bowl XLIX, according to multiple reports.

Allen Kee/ESPN ImagesKaty Perry, who recently appeared on ESPN’s College GameDay, reportedly has committed to Super Bowl XLIX.

The game will be played Feb. 1, in Glendale, Arizona.

The Wall Street Journal reported in August that Perry, Rihanna and Coldplay were asked if they were interested in playing the Super Bowl. The newspaper also had reported that the NFL was looking for artists to pay up to perform at the game, which draws massive ratings.

Perry, in an appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay on Saturday, said she’s ‘not the kind of girl to pay to play the Super Bowl.'”

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“What Made The Expos Special?”

October 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

Baseball doesn’t make me happy or sad regardless of won-loss records, which could make it seem like I’m not really a fan, but I am. It’s just a wonderful distraction, and I love it for its lack of consequence. It was a different thing to me as a kid, but that’s what it is now and evermore.

But one point that does pain me is the way MLB ran the Montreal market into the ground, seemingly salting the infield dirt on the way out. Such a beautiful and strange city–and unis! And I will always have the childhood memory of seeing Donald Sutherland, that Expos fan, at Shea Stadium for a Montreal road game, when I was too young to fully appreciate who he was. (Little Kiefer, I believe, was there with him.)

Last Spring when my Mets faced the Toronto Blue Jays in Montreal, it was a test run of sorts for something that had all but been given up on until recent years: the game’s potential return to North America’s un-Paris. In a piece in The Walrus, Adam Gopnik writes about his intensely personal connection to the bygone ballclub. An excerpt:

“What made the Expos special? First, and most important, it was their look, their logo. Jerry Seinfeld said, memorably and accurately, that when we root for pro sports teams we’re really rooting for clothes, since the players have no real connection to the teams, and they change allegiances at the flick of an additional zero. But to say that we are rooting for laundry is to say, in another sense, that we are rooting for flags. Team colours—the Dodgers blue, the Yankees pinstripe, even the Maple Leafs maple leaf—are the heraldry of the cities in which they play. Since cities are the largest unit for which we can credibly claim the emotions—love, attachment, patriotism—that nationalists annex to nations, the laundry our hired athletes wear assumes an outsize symbolic importance. The uniforms of teams become the flags of towns.

All of this to say, simply, that the Expos had a great flag. Their tricoloured uniform and cap—red, white, and blue in neat pinwheeling form—remain hugely popular to this day, long after their demise. A circus cap, a bowling team logo—everything that was said against it was part of what gave it charm. It was the rare heraldic symbol that refused to take itself entirely seriously. And yet, truth be told, from a pure design perspective it wasn’t all that hot. It was a kind of triple pun: a stylized evocation of a ball and glove, which also spells out M-B-E, perhaps indicating ‘Montreal,’ ‘Baseball,’ and ‘Expos,’ but also seeming to suggest C-B, the initials of Charles Bronfman, the majority owner and Seagram heir. Still, the logo didn’t have to be articulate to be affecting. Whatever it meant, it meant Montreal.

The team’s colours were the same as those of the Canadiens: Montreal, like Luke Skywalker’s Tatooine, was a planet with two suns, and the Habs were always much the brighter. But where the Canadiens’ colours evoked turn-of-the-century amateur athletic clubs, on the Expos they had a pleasingly elementary look, like a kindergarten’s collective ideal of a baseball cap. The Expos always acted as the happy-go-lucky younger brother to the Habs’ grim older one, burdened as the Canadiens were with the eldest sibling’s duty to win, and win again. The Habs were serious; the Expos were not.

In those days, the Habs were more of a church than a club. Tickets to the Forum were as hard won as tickets to an audience with the Pope, and the atmosphere inside the arena was quiet, brutal, and expectant. I still recall, having somehow found a ticket for a game in 1971, jumping up and down when Claude Larose—Claude Larose!—scored; a man one row back asked me, in French, never to do so again. No one had trouble finding a seat for the Expos, and no one minded when you jumped up and down, even if it was for no reason at all.

And then there was a certain magic to the choice of the name, which was part of the legacy of Expo 67 itself, and redolent with the charm of a certain moment in Montreal history. The hangover of Expo 67 was more than merely positive—Expo was the last great world’s fair, the finale in a great sequence that began in the mid-nineteenth century and briefly turned mercantile cities into celebratory ones. Even in the mid-’70s, the nationalist pop band Beau Dommage could still sing of Expo positively: ‘En soixante-sept tout était beau / c’était l’année d’l’amour, c’était l’année d’l’Expo / chacun son beau passeport avec une belle photo’ (‘In sixty-seven everything was aglow / it was the year of love, it was the year of Expo / everyone had a beautiful passport with a beautiful photo’). Everything at Expo worked, and everything was wonderful. The Expos name carried that triumph onto the ball field.”

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“It Should Come As Little Surprise That Fielding Has Proved To Be Baseball’s Next Analytical Frontier”

October 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

When ten teams out of thirty reach the playoffs as they do in baseball, not every club that makes the grade will be tremendous. So while neither the Orioles nor Royals boast any of the sport’s best players, it’s not a shocker that they’re still playing. It’s almost likely it would have happened to them or a couple of star-less teams like them.

But it’s still fun to figure out how they did it. The Economist chalks up their postseason presence to great defense, which is a little behind the curve, but I’m just happy that publication is covering baseball at all. It certainly is a part of the story, especially with the Royals. (I would say Buck Showalter is the is the O’s greatest “secret” weapon.) With the Pirates making it to October the last two seasons thanks to dramatic defensive shifting and the Royals doing so this year with great gloves, catching the ball has never been more in vogue. Of course, it’s still not easy to rank an individual player’s defense even with all the advanced stats and endless amount of video, so the teams with the best analytics and coaching can earn a few extra wins. From the Economist:

“It should come as little surprise that fielding has proved to be baseball’s next analytical frontier. Offence is almost mindlessly easy to measure: since every hitter gets roughly the same number of opportunities, faces a similar quality of opposition, and is entirely responsible for the outcome of his at-bat, all one has to do is count the results. Pitching has historically been somewhat harder to assess, since its effect on run prevention has to be disentangled from that of defence. But the advent of statistics like FIP has made it fairly straightforward to analyse pitchers based only on the factors under their control. Fielding, in contrast, is devilishly tough to evaluate quantitatively. The number and difficulty of the balls hit to each position vary wildly from team to team over the course of a season. Moreover, the visually spectacular plays likely to be voted Web Gems—leaping, diving or throwing off-balance—are often the product of poor initial positioning or circuitous routes. “Making it look easy” is in fact the highest praise for a fielder. It is also the best way to ensure that one’s skills never get noticed.

For most of baseball history, these obstacles have led teams to misjudge defensive contributions and to underweight the importance of glovework, particularly at ‘bat-first’ positions like first base and left and right field. But the advent of video scouting firms like STATS and Baseball Info Solutions (BIS), followed by the development of the SportvisionFieldf/x system that digitally tracks batted balls in real time, has at last enabled clubs to give defence its due.”

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