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Two drivers, with different results: Stirling Moss, who crashed and burned, and Ray Harroun, who made it to the finish line. Who learned more about life from their experience?

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Life speeds in one direction, and how can anything ever be different? Then events occur. Similar traumas in the past haven’t caused a break, but this one takes hold. The brain rewires itself. All is different now. You can never return.

Moss in his career-ending run in 1962.

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In 1961, newly crowned Indianapolis 500 champ A.J. Foyt appeared on I’ve Got a Secret with Ray Harroun, who won the inaugural Indy 500 in 1911.

Robot Olympics, sure, they are numerous, but there have never been robots in the Olympics, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to change that at the 2020 Summer Games. If nothing else, it’s instructive to know that Japan, thought to be an unstoppable tech powerhouse just several decades ago, is now desperately trying to establish itself as a premiere player in robotics. In what areas will China not be able to sustain its momentum? From Eric Geller at the Daily Dot:

“Japan is set to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is looking for ways to turn it up a notch. His solution? Robots, of course.

According to Agence France-Presse, Abe expressed his interest in hosting an Olympic event specifically for robots as part of the international athletic competition in 2020.

‘I would like to gather all of the world’s robots and aim to hold an Olympics where they compete in technical skills,’ Abe said. ‘We want to make robots a major pillar of our economic growth strategy.’

Abe’s focus on robots for the Olympics came as part of a visit last Thursday to robot production facilities in the Japanese city of Saitama, where factories churn out robots that both assist humans and operate autonomously in a diverse array of workplaces, including daycare.”

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It’s different now that everything is a smartphone, but sometimes I’ll hear an older ringtone in an office or somewhere, and it stops me for a second because it’s similar to the one used on Homicide: Life on the Street, the great show David Simon’s journalism birthed. That was a sound that couldn’t possibly bring good news, a Greek chorus as an electric current, reminding anyone within earshot of the human churn rate. That show–and other Simon shows–stay with me even though I’m not someone who watches much television. I actually haven’t had a set in years.

It’s just so jarring to see the kind of people I grew up around, if in Queens, not Baltimore, on TV. I still sometimes think of the Homicide episode which opened with two dysfunctional middle-aged brothers being arrested for hiding their mother’s corpse so that they could keep collecting her Social Security checks, so left behind by society they were, so unable to fend for themselves in a modern world. Those characters make me recall the real characters who lived in the same building in Astoria as my family when I was a kid: People who didn’t quite fit into the scheme of things and accepted the margins, though there wasn’t much choice. They didn’t live as much as they eked. Those smartphones, with their customized ringtones, have the potential to deliver people from the margins, or they might move more people there. Time will tell.

Never have gotten to read Simon’s Baltimore Sun reportage, but whenever I see a piece of prose he writes here or there, he seems, in print, the hard-boiled philosopher, which is no surprise. Like someone who’s done the math, who knows the daunting numbers all too well, but still believes they can add up-or the equation can be changed. In a new Sports Illustrated piece, Simon opines on the playoff chances of his beloved Orioles. An excerpt:

“Anything that can happen, will. And in an infinite universe, it will happen repeatedly. The full implications of the second law of thermodynamics apply to the American League East just as soundly as to a million monkeys at a million typewriters. Eventually, and regardless of all prior history, the Baltimore Orioles are going to type the complete works of Shakespeare.

How do we know this?

Well, for one thing, there is no God. There is only science. If there were a God, he would be—as evidenced by all of modern baseball history—a devoted fan of the Yankees. And God, at least the Judeo-Christian version of Him rather than the Aristotelian unmoved mover, is said to be good. Ergo, there is no God.

So, alone in this cold and expanding universe, we are left to consider the random motion of atoms, of protons and electrons and quarks, as these elemental essences dance and glance their way through the hollow space of, say, a Camden Yards, a Fenway, a Yankee Stadium. There is no romance to the matter, no theology, no purposed narrative even—if by narrative you mean a tale with a moral, with cause and effect, fate or redemption, hubris or vindication. No one is making a point here; the monkeys just keep typing.

Entering play on Thursday, the Orioles were 10 games over .500, three up on a Toronto team that was dominant a month ago and also three ahead of a battered, shield-down Yankees Death Star. The O’s run differential is +24—encouraging news indeed when you consider that the oh-why-the-hell-not O’s of two years ago, the ones who won 93, were only +7 as they stole every one-run and extra-inning game.

The current Orioles, sitting pretty atop the once-vaunted AL East, are actually more legitimate in some ways than the 2012 team that went to the playoffs for the first time since Clinton was president, Lewinsky was a name known but to him, and the world was still debating whether all electronics would cease to operate properly at the stroke of the millennium.

In other words, all I am saying is give Pearce a chance. We can win this.

Why? Because the Yankees’ rotation is shredded and their lineup ordinary, and because Tanaka couldn’t pitch every game and now may not be able to pitch at all. Because Toronto’s batting order—topped with speed and stacked with power—is now hollowed by injury, so much so that talk of trading only for a front-line starter now yields to talk of trading for some of everything. Because Boston is as flat as Shane Victorino on the trainer’s table, awaiting another epidural. And the Rays? Where did those guys go?

The electrons dance away from the great as well as the good. Overall, this is no comfort whatsoever; to accept probability theory is to acknowledge that eventually the United States and the Russians must engage in a nuclear exchange or that your goodly wife will eventually screw the mailman or the yoga instructor. But it also means the American League East can’t forever be the home of predominance.

All right, you say, maybe Baltimore can win the division. Maybe Jimenez gets off the DL and reels off a half-dozen wins. Maybe Davis finds his stroke. Maybe the monkeys can produce a Cymbeline or a Titus Andronicus.

But for Hamlet or Lear, you’re thinking I’m going to need more simians and more keyboards. In the AL Central, Detroit is running away and showing no holes. And the Athletics are throwing up gaudy numbers. Here you sit, Simon, hermetically sealed in your 12-foot-wide South Baltimore row house, nattering on about the Orioles’ run differential? Really? The A’s have scored 163 runs more than their opponents—better than a run and a half more in every game. That’s a statistic that doesn’t smell of probability theory but stinks of certitude.

To which, I reply by discarding stats entirely. To hell with Billy Beane. Chew instead on more quantum mechanics—the uncertainty principle of which clearly states that any effort to measure quantities is disturbed by the very act of observation. In other words Heisenberg has Bill James by the ass.

Remember: Anything that can happen in an infinite and expanding universe eventually will. And despite some long years wandering amid the deep-space weight of baseball dark matter, Baltimore has now crawled from its black hole.”

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From the August 26, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

comiskey

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The worst idea for changing baseball this season–even worse than this–is the one which anchors Tom Verducci’s latest SI column. He suggests the sport should ban defensive shifts because they’re suppressing offense. What a ridiculous thing. It’s oblivious about the history of game, something Verducci actually knows well, which has always seen fluctuations in runs and run prevention, but even more than that, it’s ignorant of how information works.

Analytics in the sport has gotten rich, implementation of such knowledge has improved, so let’s handicap those who are using the numbers well? That’s a good way to keep baseball from growing and improving, to restrain its evolution. It’s similar (though obviously far less important) to the cockamamie notion that English should be made America’s “official language.” You know, we should somehow control and constrain language, as if that were possible. As William Burroughs said: “Language is a virus from outer space.” So, to some extent, are any living, growing things which use information, including baseball. Let them evolve. From Verducci:

“Support of an ‘illegal defense’ rule – or at least the consideration of it – is gaining some traction in baseball. Such a rule might stipulate, for instance, that you cannot have three infielders on one side of second base. A shortstop would be able to shift as far as directly behind second base on a lefthanded hitter, but no farther.

Is it time for such a rule? My gut reaction is that it is time to at least think about it. All-fields hitting needs to increase. But Maddon, himself a former hitting instructor, believes that it will take years for the counter-response to make an impact. He said the emphasis on using the whole field to hit must begin with organizational teaching in the low minors. ‘You can’t make the same impact with guys already at the major league level,’ he said.

So you may be talking about three years or more before you start seeing real change. Can baseball keep selling such a low-scoring, low-activity environment in the meantime?

Teams have figured out not just where hitters are most likely to hit the ball, but also that the second baseman should not be stationed so close to the first baseman, as he was for the past 100 years or more. It’s not just that a shortstop or third baseman is shifted to the right side against lefthanded hitters; it’s that the second baseman often can play a deep rover-type position in rightfield – it’s a matter of logic that the second baseman can play as far away from the first baseman as does the third baseman. More depth means more range, which means fewer chances for a hit to a hitter’s preferred field.”

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The German soccer team, triumphant at the just-completed World Cup, is called, with a mixture of awe and envy, “The Machine,” which suggests that the squad is somehow circumventing the natural order of things. Of course, that’s not the case. The real machines, however, are now competing at the latest RoboCup, AI’s version of the football competition, and the question is when will machines be able to kick us from soccer dominance the way Deep Blue did Kasparov in chess. Seems an absurd notion, for now. From a new Economist article:

“In the early years of RoboCup, there were huge differences in quality between the teams. No longer. The best of the little league routinely finish their ten-minute-long games with the low scores characteristic of well-matched human teams. Indeed, Dr [Manuela] Veloso’s squad came in second last year, after a penalty shoot-out following a 2-2 game.

Nor need only the players be robots. In a step that many of FIFA’s critics may admire, Dr Veloso and her team are developing automated referees. That will not stop some teams from exploiting decidedly human traits, such as fouling by forcefully bumping into another robot. But it may result in more effective enforcement of things like the maximum kick-speed rule.

What fascinates Dr Veloso most about RoboCup is the execution, during the game, of moves that had not been deliberately inserted into the algorithms controlling the robots. She is ebullient about an unexpected three-way pass and chip, worthy of a minor Messi and his Argentine teammates. Such unanticipated plays are examples of emergent behaviour, a hallmark of artificial intelligence at its highest level, and something she reckons RoboCup teams in all leagues will produce a lot more of with each passing year.

So is 2050 an unrealistic deadline for robots to beat the best humans at football? Half a century is roughly the time that separates ENIAC, America’s first electronic computer, from Deep Blue, the IBM machine that beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. Judged in that light, RoboCup’s goal does not seem absurd. Indeed, the question may be whether, come 2050, there are still any human football players around who have not been prosthetically enhanced in some way, making them cyborgs. RoboCup v RoboCop, anyone?”

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I’ve mentioned before that Tom Landry, legendary coach of the Dallas Cowboys, was computer savvy in the 1970s (here and here), but the team’s faith in AI stretches back a decade prior, when original GM Tex Schramm invested in some hardware to help crunch numbers for the draft, hoping to remove confirmation bias and other human negatives from the equation. The opening of “Make No Mistakes About It,” Tex Maule’s 1968 Sports Illustrated article:

“The best computer in the world today is a small machine about the size and consistency of a ripe cantaloupe. It can digest, evaluate and extrapolate more data than the most sophisticated hard-metal device yet evolved and can do it quicker and better. The huge computer complex—a machine that takes up more than a thousand feet of floor space—has one advantage over the little one. It has a better memory.

Both types of machine are used in modern professional football, and next week they will be working overtime as the combined National and American football leagues meet to draft this year’s crop of eligible players. The little machines—the cantaloupes—rest in the skulls of the coaches and scouts of the game. The big one—the computer machine—accepts the data given it by the little ones, analyzes it, shuffles through its memory bank and returns black and white judgments to the brains for further evaluation.

In professional football the use of the computer has proliferated enormously during the last five years. The trend began with the escape of a general manager from a professional football team to a short term as an assistant to CBS Sports Director Bill MacPhail. It grew with the immigration of an Indian statistics expert to the U.S. and reached fulfillment when a young man who had made his living taking pictures of newborn babies in Milwaukee hospitals gave up his job to follow his hobby. The three together—led by the ex-CBS executive—easily developed the most intelligent scouting system in all sports.

Tex Schramm, formerly general manager of the Los Angeles Rams and now president of the Dallas Cowboys, decided upon computerized consideration of football players while he was associated with CBS. The Rams, during the years Schramm worked for Owner Dan Reeves and luxuriated in what was then by far the most efficient scouting system in pro football, consistently came up with the best draft in the National Football League and just as consistently lost to other teams that grabbed their discards. Deluged with fine young talent in those years, the Rams tended to drop ripening players in favor of bringing in the new ones.

‘While I was with CBS, I thought the whole thing out very carefully,’ Schramm said the other day. ‘I decided that I had undervalued experience and overvalued youth. And I decided, too, that I would have to find an objective method of deciding on the worth of a football player when I went back into pro football. The only defect in the Ram scouting system was that the people involved all had built-in prejudices of one sort or another. I thought we had to find a way to judge players without emotion. We used computers to figure scores and standings when I was in charge of CBS coverage of the Winter Olympics in 1958, and I discussed using computers to evaluate football players with IBM experts then. But I didn’t get a chance to put the idea into operation until 1962, when I was with the Cowboys.’

As examples of what Schramm means by emotional judgment, he admits that for years he has been partial to speed to the exclusion of other qualities when judging the ability of a player. ‘If a guy can run a 9.4 hundred,’ he says, ‘I’ll overlook a lot of faults. Some coaches have built-in prejudices against small colleges, and some coaches feel that a Big Ten player automatically is good. There are prejudices for and against regions and for and against individual coaches. These prejudices all lead to inaccurate judgments.’

Restored to football in 1960, when Clint Murchison bought the Dallas franchise, Schramm hired Photographer Gil Brandt of Milwaukee as his chief scout and installed a detailed and expensive scouting system. Because there were so many other details to be mastered, it was not until 1962 that he began to solve the problem of objective analysis. In that year the Cowboys were approached by a subsidiary of IBM, Service Bureau Corporation, which was trying to develop a market in handling pro football accounting systems. Schramm countered with the suggestion that SBC try to develop a method for applying computers to the multiple problems of scouting. Eventually SBC sent an Indian—Salam Qureishi—to Texas to look the situation over.”

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You know a really good way to get brain damage? Have another human being kick a soccer ball sixty yards really high into the air and then strike it with your head before it falls to the ground. How many times did we see that scenario during the just-completed World Cup, the goalie booming the ball past mid-field and some striker taking one for the team? 

The research of soccer players getting CTE is far behind such investigations in American football, and most of the science and tech that has entered the game is more about optimizing immediate performance than impact on long-term health. The 2014 tournament is certainly the one in which technology came of age on a global stage. From “The Science Behind World Cup Success” by Brielle Buis at Sports Illustrated:

“Science has a growing a role in the game, and if used correctly heart rate monitors, GPS trackers, and monitored recovery devices can make player regeneration more efficient. ‘Where many teams struggle is that you can’t half use science and kind of follow it but [also] kind of just go with your gut. It won’t work,’ says [Rutgers exercise science professor Shawn] Arent.

The evidence of teams already using technology can been seen throughout the tournament as players remove their jerseys revealing heart rate monitors strapped around their chests. Whether their teams are using the devices correctly is up for question, but according to Arent, ‘The teams’ knowing that the technology exists is a step in the right direction.’

In order to maximize the benefits of science, according to Arent, coaches need to fully buy into it and bring in a science staff, a performance staff, and a medical staff, because the best coaches in the world are really good at soccer but they aren’t trained in exercise science.

[FC Dallas head coach Oscar] Pareja realized the benefit of heart rate monitors to guide the team’s recovery in Texas, where the heat and humidity play a large role, but the affect of the temperature cannot always be seen by the naked eye. ‘We use heart rate monitors every time we step on the field, tracking the players training loads,’ he says. ‘You can see the difference in the training load data based on the weather and heat.’

In a tournament in which teams play anywhere from three to seven matches, the heart rate monitors could reveal when teams should train on their off days and when they should recover. ‘I’ve realized just as important as training is, recovery is equally as important,’ says Pareja.”

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Candace Bergen working as a photojournalist at a 1976 Whitney Museum bodybuilding exhibit (“The Body as Art”), with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the star (of course). An outtake from Pumping Iron.

In a Q&A in OUI, a pre-Brazilian periodical about pubic hair, Arnold discussed the Whitney experience with Peter Manso, who also profiled the testosterone of Brando and Mailer. An excerpt:

Peter Manso:

Is there a broader acceptance of the body these days, as an offshoot of the sexual revolution of the Sixties?

Arnold Schwarzenegger:

Yes. I’ve been in America for only eight years, but there’s been a change and it’s getting better. It’s happening in Europe, too. People are more at ease with their bodies.

Peter Manso:

Being at ease is one thing, but whatever possessed you to pose for the Whitney Museum?

Arnold Schwarzenegger:

A woman from The New York Times had been doing a piece on body building. She came to the gym and asked if Corney and I would pose at the museum. I thought at once that it was a terrific idea. I’d always wanted to tell people that when I work on my body I’m thinking about classical sculpture, so I jumped at the chance to show off body building as an art form. After the show, a lot of people came backstage and said it was fantastic, that they’d never thought of body building as art before.

Peter Manso:

Didn’t you feel like a pet monkey performing for the East Side ladies?

Arnold Schwarzenegger:

No, I felt great because I was the first athlete to be in a museum displaying his work of art, which just happened to be my physique. Overall, it was a great success. What does piss me off, though, is when people try to trick me into going to parties. You know, rich people in Beverly Hills who want to make the gossip columns.•

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In the decade that the term “hooters” was coined, the 1970s, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders plunged into the modern breast era, donning outfits with necklines that just a few years earlier might have gotten a go-go club shuttered. GM Tex Schramm had been gradually trimming the former “Cowbelles” cheer-squad suits, but in 1972 the women really busted out. Coach Tom Landry, a computer geek and Jesus freak, was not pleased. From The Last Cowboy by Mark Ribowsky, via the excellent Delancey Place:

“The vibe in Thousand Oaks at summer camp in 1967 contained a strange brew of old and new currents. The Cowboys’ first winning season had taken the team so far that it accumulated almost mythical properties in Dallas and the exigency for a grander scope. Clint Murchison Jr. relocated the Cowboys’ offices again, now to the Expressway Tower, an opulent fifteen-story glass structure at 6116 North Central Expressway that Murchison built on property he had bought expressly for the purpose. He put the organization on the eleventh floor, its picture windows offering sweeping vistas of the city. He also rented out a ground-floor space to the Playboy Club, which catered to the same upscale, male-dominated crowd that Murchison hosted in the Cowboy Club at the Cotton Bowl during home games. Not for a minute did Murchison consider that his coach might be embarrassed to have as neighbors cleavage-displaying young women wearing bunny ears and cottontails. The Cowboys were the hippest party in town, and the juxtaposition fit. Neither did he mind if players repaired to the Playboy Club after a hard few hours at the practice facility, which was under a big bubble behind the building. Landry already had the squares’ allegiance; could it hurt if they were balanced by Hugh Hefner’s ideal of 1960s American manhood?

Tex Schramm, for one, saw no downside to that equation. Working from the same idea, he junked the Cowbelles that off-season and created a new cheerleading squad, one that would remind no one of high school girls in hoop skirts and sweaters. Instead, the Cowgirls were professional go-go dancers hired to shake their pompoms while wearing hot pants and tight vests, showing off ample racks and bare midriffs. When Landry learned of it, he nearly had cardiac arrest. Years later in his memoirs, he was still exercised, saying that while the Cowgirls ‘transformed sideline entertainment,’ and that it was an example of Schramm’s lust to foster ‘a high profile image of style, flair, and maximum visibility,’ it also ‘sexually exploited the young women by pandering to the baser instincts of men.”

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From the October 30, 1893 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“To-morrow night Fatty Langtry and Fatty Green will meet in Bleecker Hall, New York, and spar for the fat men’s championship of America. Langtry weights 325 pounds and Green 350 pounds.”

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Football is beautiful, but the World Cup is pretty much statistically meaningless–tremendous fun, but meaningless. Any tournament with a three-game first round and single elimination thereafter won’t tell us much, especially when we’re talking about a low-scoring sport contested on an expansive playing surface. Yes, the better teams tend to make it into the later rounds, but there’s no way this type of system is deciding which of them is truly best. And trying to handicap the semifinals and finals is a fool’s errand, as the FiveThirtyEight site just learned. The opening of its Brazil-Germany prediction piece

“On Tuesday, Brazil and Germany kick off the World Cup semifinals, where there are no real party-crashers to be found. Including A Seleção and Die Mannschaft, four of the top five teams in the pre-Cup Elo ratings are still active in the tournament. Sorry, Spain.

With such evenly matched squads — and the ever-present specter of randomness — barring a huge blowout, the final four games of the World Cup are unlikely to provide much of a referendum on which side is truly the world’s best. But at the same time, the absence of a longshot entry boosts the chances that one of the remaining four teams is in fact the “true” best team in the field. More important, it also increases the odds that we’ll see a pair of exciting, close matches at the doorstep of the World Cup final.

IN DEPTH

Brazil was the World Cup favorite before the tournament began, and its championship chances still rank first according to the FiveThirtyEight model. Our official projections even say there’s a 73 percent probability that Brazil will beat Germany Tuesday and advance to the final. But those numbers don’t know that the gifted Brazilian striker Neymar will miss the rest of the tournament with a broken vertebra, an injury he sustained against Colombia in the quarterfinals. If we account for his absence (and that of his teammate Thiago Silva, who racked up two yellow cards and must sit out Tuesday’s match), Brazil’s chances of beating Germany drop to somewhere near 65 percent, numbers fueled in large part simply by the match’s location on Brazilian soil.”

Before we realized that the machines were our common enemy, we fought amongst ourselves. Deep Blue would eventually make us all pale in comparison, but in 1972, it was Red vs. Red, White and Blue, in one of the most thrilling contests ever witnessed. In dethroning Russian chess champion Boris Spassky, Bobby Fischer was his unorthodox self, playing like a supercomputer with its wires crossed. An excerpt from Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power, via Delancey Place:

“The first game of a chess tournament is critical, since it sets the tone for the months to come. It is often a slow and quiet struggle, with the two play­ers preparing themselves for the war and trying to read each other’s strate­gies. This game was different. Fischer made a terrible move early on, perhaps the worst of his career, and when Spassky had him on the ropes, he seemed to give up. Yet Spassky knew that Fischer never gave up. Even when facing checkmate, he fought to the bitter end, wearing the opponent down. This time, though, he seemed resigned. Then suddenly he broke out a bold move that put the room in a buzz. The move shocked Spassky, but he recovered and managed to win the game. But no one could figure out what Fischer was up to. Had he lost deliberately? Or was he rattled? Unset­tled? Even, as some thought, insane?

After his defeat in the first game, Fischer complained all the more loudly about the room, the cameras, and everything else. He also failed to show up on time for the second game. This time the organizers had had enough: He was given a forfeit. Now he was down two games to none, a position from which no one had ever come back to win a chess champi­onship. Fischer was clearly unhinged. Yet in the third game, as all those who witnessed it remember, he had a ferocious look in his eye, a look that clearly bothered Spassky. And despite the hole he had dug for himself, he seemed supremely confident. He did make what appeared to be another blunder, as he had in the first game — but his cocky air made Spassky smell a trap. Yet despite the Russian’s suspicions, he could not figure out the trap, and before he knew it Fischer had checkmated him. In fact Fischer’s un­orthodox tactics had completely unnerved his opponent. At the end of the game, Fischer leaped up and rushed out, yelling to his confederates as he smashed a fist into his palm, ‘I’m crushing him with brute force!’

In the next games Fischer pulled moves that no one had seen from him before, moves that were not his style.”

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I’m sticking with my non-scientific analysis that so many baseball pitchers are getting injured and requiring Tommy John surgery because they’re simply overthrowing. When I was a kid, you would have a Nolan Ryan here or there who could very easily bring a hellacious fastball, but most of the pitchers were able to succeed with more finesse than force. With the injuries piling up and today’s focus on defensive shifting and a pitch-to-defense philosophy, you would think teams would start to lay off the throwers who are clearly going full-tilt on every pitch and have likely been doing so since they were in grade school. Let’s just hope Masahiro Tanaka won’t be added to the growing list of TJ-surgery alumni. 

One devastating pitch was shelved almost league-wide over the last several decades because it was thought unfriendly to the arm. From “The Mystery of the Vanishing Screwball,” Bruce Shoenfeld’s New York Times Magazine article about the pitch that dare not be thrown:

“A pitcher’s typical menu includes a fastball, a curveball and a changeup as the meat and potatoes, with perhaps a slider, cut fastball or sinker as a side. The screwball is another dish entirely. Those who serve one have typically been looked upon as oddities, custodians of a quirky art beyond the realm of conventional pitching. Over time, the word itself has taken on the characteristics of both the pitch and those who throw it: erratic, irrational or illogical, unexpected. Unlike the knuckleball, which is easy to throw but hard to master, the screwball requires special expertise just to get it to the plate. The successful screwball pitcher must overcome an awkward sensation that feels like tightening a pickle jar while simultaneously thrusting the wrist forward with extreme velocity. Yet the list of master practitioners includes some of baseball’s greats: Christy Mathewson, Carl Hubbell, Warren Spahn, Juan Marichal.

In 1974, Mike Marshall of the Los Angeles Dodgers won the National League’s Cy Young Award by relying on the screwball. Tug McGraw used it to get to three World Series as a reliever with the Mets and Phillies. In 1984, Detroit’s screwballer, Willie Hernandez, was both the American League’s top pitcher and Most Valuable Player. The last great practitioner was Fernando Valenzuela, most famously a Dodger, who threw a wide assortment of pitches, none more prominent — or effective — than his screwball.

Today few, if any, minor leaguers are known to employ the pitch. College coaches claim they haven’t seen it in years. Youths are warned away from it because of a vague notion that it ruins arms. ‘Pitchers have given it up,’ says Don Baylor, the former player and manager, who now works with Angels hitters. ‘Coaches don’t even talk about it. It’s not in the equation.’

Many of baseball’s best hitters have never seen a screwball. This spring, I spent time in nearly a dozen clubhouses asking about the pitch. ‘Maybe in Wiffle ball,’ David Freese, the Angels’ third baseman, said. ‘But I’ve never sat in a hitters’ meeting and heard, ‘This guy’s got a screwball.’ It doesn’t come up. I’m not sure I even know exactly what it is.’

As a result, the pitch has taken on somewhat mythical properties.”

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Despite what you reported tonight, the Brazilian soccer team was not actually “massacred in every sense of the word” by Germany. Thankfully.

We will avenge our murdered husbands.

We will avenge our murdered husbands.

Father is covered in blood and dishonor.

Father is covered in blood and dishonor.

I declare war upon Germany.

I declare war upon Germany.

Wait, what?

Wait…what?

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The Houston Astros organization has great data-even if it isn’t as proprietary as the team would like–and it aims to apply Moneyball-ish predictive analytics to the business end of baseball, hoping it will help drive ticket sales in addition to driving in runs. From Steve Zurier at BizTech:

“Data analytics has done some heavy hitting for major league baseball teams over the past decade, but many team officials say they are just scratching the surface of the technology’s potential. While there’s been much fanfare about the use of Sabermetrics and predictive analytics on baseball operations at the Oakland Athletics and Boston Red Sox, teams are also starting to use analytics on the business side.

Ray Ebert, senior director of information technology for the Houston Astros, says new owner Jim Crane wants analytics applied to just about every part of the business.

‘We are certainly using predictive analysis to evaluate players,’ says Ebert, who’s been with the Astros for two years. ‘But we’re also applying analytics to run what-if scenarios so we can convert single-game ticket buyers into season ticket holders and keep the season ticket holders we have.’

Ebert, who applied some of these principles when working previously with the San Diego Padres, has a positive outlook on the Astros’ future, despite the team’s recent losing record.

‘The best part of this approach is that it changes the dialogue between the business analysts and the IT staff,’ Ebert explains. ‘In the past, all people on the business side ever wanted from us was to keep the website up and running and email available. Now, we are getting into the nuts and bolts of the business.’

While Ebert admits that it’s too early to report results, he says just the mere fact that the IT staff and business analysts are having the conversation is a step in the right direction.”

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On the road to the development of the modern bicycle and the great wheel craze of the 1890s–a mania so powerful that biking survived even the eventual rise of the automobile–there were some false starts. One such example was the Aeripedis, or Pedomotive Carriage, British inventor’s G.R. Gooch’s cumbersome 1842 “walking machine,” which supposedly made the act of ambulation markedly easier, reducing effort and stress. It was the Segway of its day, manual though it was, and even less successful. By 1850, Gooch himself had all but given up on his creation. From an article in the July 5, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

 

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From Simon Kuper’s Financial Times piece about Dutch football, that brilliant orange, a brief history of how a coach and player drove the Netherlands to become an unlikely powerhouse:

“Dutch football wasn’t any good until 1965, when the semi-professional Amsterdam club Ajax hired a coach named Rinus Michels. Together with Ajax’s teenage prodigy Johan Cruijff, he cracked the secret of football. It’s no coincidence they did this in 1960s Amsterdam, a place where everything was being reinvented. Meanwhile a neighbourhood kid named Louis van Gaal (Holland’s coach today) watched their training sessions.

Football, Cruijff and Michels decided, was about the pass. Dribbles, warrior spirit, fitness and so on were mere details. A team has to pass fast, into space, with players constantly changing position, and everyone thinking like a playmaker. As Cruijff said, ‘Football is a game you play with your head.’

That means you need to talk about football, and sometimes quarrel about it. When Cruijff became a coach, he complained, “The moment you open your mouth to breathe, Dutch footballers say, ‘Yes but …’’ However, that was his own fault. He had turned Dutch football into a debating society. Holland’s great captain Ruud Gullit told me, ‘In a Dutch changing room, everyone thinks he knows best. In an Italian changing room, everybody probably also thinks he knows best, but nobody dares tell the manager.’ And in England, I asked? ‘In an English changing room, they just have a laugh.’

Because the Dutch think about football, they keep developing. They always used to want the ball. But here in Brazil they prefer the opposition to have it. Then, the second the Dutch win it, they break en masse. ‘Omschakeling’ – ‘changeover’ – they call it. ‘We’ve been playing reaction football all tournament,’ says Van Gaal.”

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ANGELOS CASTRO SELIG

Baseball has enjoyed great financial success during the uninspired tenure of Commissioner Bud Selig, but that’s mostly because changes in technology smiled on the game, creating huge demand from regional cable corporations for a quantity of family-friendly entertainment. It’s long ball meets long tail, as in many cities there actually aren’t a lot of fans watching those telecasts, but the checks clear just the same–for now, anyhow. As Selig steps down, Charles P. Pierce of Grantland examines his legacy, which more than anything announced the end of an independent figure in the commissioner’s office. That’s both good and bad: Kenesaw “Mountain” Landis’ freedom allowed him to project his racism onto the game, yet a truly conscientious person in the position could be a voice of reason concerned with issues beyond short-term wealth. From Pierce:

“In The Hustler’s Handbook, Bill Veeck wrote prophetically that, ‘In these days of corporate ownership, the Commissioner has become of particular importance to the hustler. Corporate ownership brings company men, company policy, and company cards with little holes in them. Corporate ownership, in short, brings committee-think, and with ComThink comes the banishment, discouragement, and attrition of colorful characters. The hustler is dependent upon colorful characters, because color is what is salable. Corporations don’t want to be regulated. They don’t want a Commissioner with any powers … The hustler needs a Commissioner who will throw his weight against the stuffiness, the routine, the deadly boredom of the executive suite. He needs a Commissioner who will help baseball, in spite of itself.’

(An aside: That Veeck was never commissioner, even for 15 minutes, is proof that, if there indeed is a God, He doesn’t have a healthy enough sense of the absurd, not even if you count the platypus.)

By all the standards that drove Veeck up the wall, Selig has been an enormous success. He leaves baseball an $8 billion industry, with the average franchise valued at nearly a billion dollars. There has not been a serious labor problem in 19 years. There have been 22 new ballparks built or utterly overhauled while he’s been commissioner, and the revenue-sharing money is well into nine figures a year. He has managed the drug hysteria. He will go down in the official history as a stern drug warrior who nonetheless was willing to compromise for a settlement. There seems little doubt that Selig is headed for a big afternoon in Cooperstown one day.

But the long view of history is going to say that, with Bud Selig, the office of the commissioner of baseball finally, completely, and probably perpetually became a management position. For a long time, at least theoretically, and in the dreams of people like Bill Veeck and Charlie Finley and others who would not be welcome in the world of Corporate Partners, the commissioner’s office also seemed to have a kind of ombudsman’s function. It was somehow supposed to sit in a place between management and labor, and between the game and the paying customers, in which place it was hoped the commissioner would arbitrate disputes, and that out of that arbitration would come solutions that would benefit everyone in the game, including those who devotedly followed it.”

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The photo finish is such an ingrained part of horse racing that it’s easy to forget that it didn’t exist for most of the sport’s history. The earliest mention of its use that I can find is an August 8, 1935 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article by W.C. Vreeland, a sportswriter and champion of the equine game, who urged for the installation of an “electronic eye” at every track. The story:

Saratoga–From the time the racing season opened, in the middle of April, I had advocated a ‘camera eye’ to judge the finishes of all race courses in this State. After considering the advantages of such an arrangement which positively and accurately tells which horse pokes its nose in line with the winning post in front of his opponents, the members of the State Racing Commission have decided on an ‘electric eye,’ which will be adopted on Oct. 1.

The electric eye is a motion picture machine which makes a photo of horses in action, and at the same time makes a picture of a split-second hand moving across the face of a dial. The two pictures are made on the same film so that there can never be a question of what race is being filmed.

The horses appear along the top of the film, and the moving clock hand along the bottom. The actual picture of the race is never recorded in full, only the last furlong or sixteenth pole because the finishes only of races are matters of dispute. 

The camera must be placed high above the race course on which it is to be operated. It is installed far behind the judges’ stand so that the horses will appear all one size in the eye of the camera. The camera itself is equipped with a developing mechanism which is set in motion at the same instant that the camera starts recording.

The film is automatically developed, washed, dried and printed in less than five minutes’ time after the race. The electric eye will cost each racetrack about $300 a day. The commission recommends that each racetrack in the State adopt it as part of the ‘placing’ of the horses as they finish past the winning post.”

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I don’t know if information wants to be free, as in not having a financial cost, but I do know that it wants to be free, as in unfettered. The more data that’s mined and concentrated, the bigger the leaks will be. In a relatively unimportant example, the Houston Astros’ next-level computer database (which I blogged about earlier this year), has been compromised. From Barry Petchesky at Deadspin:

“Two years ago, the Houston Astros constructed ‘Ground Control’—a built-from-scratch online database for the private use of the Astros front office. It is by all accounts a marvel, an easy-to-use interface giving executives instant access to player statistics, video, and communications with other front offices around baseball. All it needs, apparently, is a little better password protection.

Documents purportedly taken from Ground Control and showing 10 months’ worth of the Astros’ internal trade chatter have been posted online at Anonbin, a site where users can anonymously share hacked or leaked information. Found below, they contain the Astros front office’s communications regarding trade overtures to and from other teams, as well as negotiations—a few of which actually led to trades.”

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It looks like the U.S.A. has finally fully embraced the world’s game during this year’s World Cup, and that’s largely due to globalization and ESPN’s investment in the sport. There’ve previously been great individual soccer moments in our country’s history, from Joe Gaetjens’s goal against England in the 1950 World Cup to our women’s team triumphing in 1999, but the only earlier period where football (the one where players primarily use their feet) seemed to have permanently earned a place in the American psyche was when the New York Cosmos dominated the North American Soccer League during the 1970s and 1980s. It turned out to be a false start, but for a brief, shining moment, giant stadiums, including Giants Stadium, were teeming with crazed soccer crowds. Even though the league soon lost its lustre, it did get children to start playing the sport en masse, an important step in our development.

The opening of a 1977 People article by Ira Berkow about Shep Messing, the Cosmos’ deft and sometimes daft goalie during the NASL’s heyday:

“In 1973 the struggling North American Soccer League needed some exposure. New York Cosmos rookie goalie Shep Messing took his obligation literally—he posed nude for Viva magazine’s centerfold. ‘It was publicity; I made some money, but it was a goof,’ Shep admits. ‘It’s something I wouldn’t do now.’

He doesn’t need to. Soccer is booming. Messing and his Cosmos teammates, who used to play ‘the immigrants’ sport’ in front of 600 loyal fans, are now packing 60,000 into the new Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey. Playing alongside renowned foreigners like Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer and Giorgio Chinaglia, the flamboyant Messing, a Harvard graduate from Long Island, has helped keep the Cosmos at the top of the 18-team league. His 60-yd. kicks and ferocious attacks on every round object that approaches the goal have made Shep one of soccer’s most valuable players. 

Yet his biggest contribution to the sport may be as its reigning sex symbol and all-round eccentric. ‘You have to be a little nutty to want to be a goalie,’ Messing says. ‘Who else would want to face a free kick at 90 mph?’ In one confrontation during a penalty kick, Messing suddenly stripped off his jersey, waved it wildly and screamed. His rattled opponent then booted the ball two feet over the goal. As if to prove his theory that ‘goalies are always doing something weird to hang on to their sanity,’ Messing has showed up for games dressed in funereal black. Last year he wore skintight shorts; this season he is favoring baggy outfits. 

But Shep insists that at 27 and after ‘brutal’ battles around the goal—which have resulted in surgery on his thigh, knee, elbow and shoulder—he is toning down his act. ‘At first I thought the reputation would be marketable, promotable,’ he says. ‘In retrospect, that wasn’t accurate. But I’m finding it’s harder to change an image than to build one.'”

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Great interview by Tyler Cowen at American Interest with Ralph Nader, the consumer watchdog and politician who’s mostly been right and occasionally colossally wrong, tied to the latter’s publication of Unstoppable, a book about finding political common ground in a divisive age. In one exchange, Nader decries the corporatization of sports, which he believes has made us passive spectators. I suppose this might be true of athletics, but I don’t think in a broader sense that the average person has ever participated more in society than right now. Of course, a participatory culture is only as good as its participants. An excerpt:

Tyler Cowen:

Do you think we need a more communitarian culture to push back against the corporate state and its abuses? I’m very struck by something in your book The Seventeen Solutions, for instance, where you talk about how America needs a new tradition of sports. Sports, you say, shouldn’t be something corporate-run that people watch on television, but something they do themselves, something that creates community, something that brings people together. Is that kind of social cohesion a necessary first step?

Ralph Nader:

Yes. We’ve become too much of a spectator culture, spending the better part of each day in front of screens. One of the consequences is that the few more athletic kids play while the rest watch, and the lack of physical activity leads to obesity. It’s not just youngsters; adults conform with the purposes of corporate advertising. The processed food producers and some other corporations, like pharmaceuticals, get rich when Americans get fat.

Corporations are also extremely adept at commercializing childhood and maneuvering around or undermining parental authority. They urge children to nag their parents at a young age to buy junk food, soft drinks, and violent video games. You see fewer kids out in the street now, just playing. These old games we used to play, like hopscotch—kids today wouldn’t even know what you’re talking about. But they do know a lot about video game violence and the heroes and villains involved.

So I think we do need a broad recognition of the need to bring the neighborhoods and communities into more participatory sports. Just a hoop, and throwing the ball into a hoop—anything to connect human to human rather than let kids wallow more and more in virtual reality. The whole electronic world is affecting us in ways we have yet to discover. That amount of time spent day after day in front of these screens can’t not have an effect on the human mind, and probably not a healthy one.”

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Chicago–Joseph Mikulec, who claims that he left Croatia, in Austria, February 5, 1906, on a 25,000 mile walk practically around the world, for a purse of $10,000 offered by an Austrian magazine if he finished the journey within five years, will be the guest of the local Croatian colony on Sunday. He will leave Sunday night for Springfield, part of his task being to visit the capital of every state in the Union. So far on the journey Mikulec has worn out forty-four pairs of shoes and is nineteen days ahead of schedule.”

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Joseph Mikulec, globe trotter:

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Thinking about silicon taking jobs from carbon reminded me of an 2012 Wall Street Journal article by Pia Catton about the possibility of introducing robotic jockeys into horse racing, a sport that’s always been fascinated with gadgets. An excerpt:

“The idea that seems to have the most potential is the notion of replacing jockeys with robots. In fact, it is already happening: After years of controversy surrounding child riders, camel racing switched to lightweight remote-controlled machines. The guidance that a jockey provides to a horse comes through shifts of weight and control of the reins and whip.

John Cisneros, a former jockey and assistant to trainer Mike Harrington, said horses wouldn’t pay attention to a nonhuman. ‘Horses are much more agile than camels,’ he said.

Even if the jockey makes a mistake in judgment, Reed said, that is part of the race. ‘Sometimes they’re the hero, sometimes the goat.’

However, it isn’t unthinkable that these functions could be performed by a machine, even though there is no telling whether robots will ever replace jockeys. But if they do, there might be one group that is silently pleased by the idea: the trainers.

‘I’m a proponent of remote-control robots—where the trainers could work the joystick from the grandstand,’ joked [trainer Gary] Contessa.”

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