MVP! MVP?

                Arch Ward was the sports editor of the Chicago Tribune from 1930 until his death in 1955, but his main legacy wasn’t anything he wrote or caused to be written. It’s the MLB All-Star Game, which was launched by his hand in 1933. From his desk in Tribune Tower, backed by his paper’s financial and political clout, he also created the boxing Golden Gloves tournament, the College Football All-Star Game and the All-American Football Conference, the last two of which made a splash before going defunct. His life’s work was nicely encapsulated in the title of a biography of him that was written in 1990: “Arch—A Promoter Not A Poet.”

                The point of that paragraph is to point out that newspaper guys have had a bigger part in shaping America’s sports structure than many people appreciate. One piece of that edifice are the Most Valuable Player awards that our big leagues hand out annually, and over which we fans can be counted upon to obsess.  They (one for the National League, one for the American) were created by the Baseball Writers Association of American in 1931, mostly to give those worthies something to write about during the game’s long off-season. That’s a preoccupation of sportswriters generally and the source of much of what still passes for news when the players aren’t tossing around balls in earnest.

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                In baseball the MVP idea was so good it spawned a cornucopia of other prizes. The Rookie of the Year awards came along in 1947 and the Cy Youngs, for best pitchers, in 1956, both also conducted under BWAA auspices. More recently have come the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards, the ones for “comeback” players, relief pitchers, designated hitters and managers, and the Hank Aaron Award for best hitter. Not surprisingly, commercial sponsors have jumped on board: Rolaids and the DHL delivery company have put their names on the relief-pitcher trophies, and Viagra backs the comebacker awards (tee-hee).

                The MVPs, however, stick out in that crowd, not only for their longevity but also for their ambiguity. The other prizes are pretty straightforward—the Cy’s go to the pitchers that the writers think performed best in the just-concluded season and the rookie one for the first-year man who did the same, even though there could be (and usually are) differences over whom that might be. The MV in the MVP, though, stands for “most valuable,” whatever that means, and instead of providing a clear definition the clever scribes left that to the individual voters. Since sportswriters like nothing better than to quibble, quibble they do, and the rest of us quibble right along.

                  If the award were simply for the best player in each league, it’ll be fairly easy to decide in many seasons. If I were a playground captain choosing sides for a game in this one, I’d pick Nolan Arenado, the Colorado Rockies’ third baseman, to lead my National League squad, and Mike Trout, the LA Angels’ centerfielder, to head the American League group. Both are power hitters with few peers, hit for average, are excellent fielders and are skilled in their sport’s subtler aspects.

Between the two of them I’d give the edge to Arenado because of his glove (five “gold” ones in his five Major League seasons to date).  Oddly, though, he’s never won an MVP and the best he’s done in any election is fourth. Trout, on the other hand, has won two (in 2014 and ’16) in his seven full campaigns.

But we’re not talking “best” player here (or are we?) we’re talkin’ “most valuable.” I guess that means most valuable to his team, but what does THAT mean? The measure seems to favor the best player on a league’s best team, or at least on a strong pennant contender, but it doesn’t always turn out that way; when Trout won the AL award in 2016 his team finished a non-playoff fourth in its division, and in 1987 Andre Dawson won with the Chicago Cubs, who finished in last place in theirs. Sure, Dawson had a monster year (48 HRs, 137 RBIs), but it didn’t do his team much good  ‘cause you can’t do worse than last.

Baseball has heeded such questions and has included in its stats of late a newfangled measure called WAR, which stands for wins above replacement. It’s based on how a player compares statistically to the hypothetical bench player or high minor-leaguer who would replace him if he were unavailable. Far and away the leader in the all-majors WAR ratings for the current season is Mookie Betts, the Boston Red Sox’s centerfielder, with a 9.8 on Thursday (Trout’s was at 9.0), and he’s a good bet in the AL MVP race. But how the score is calculated is a mystery to most fans, including me, and thus it isn’t widely cited.

Moreover, WAR is little help in this season’s NL MVP race, with the six leading position-player contenders (Arenado; the Arizona Diamondbacks’ first-baseman Paul Goldschmidt; Chicago Cubs’ infielder Javier Baez; St. Louis Cardinals first-baseman Matt Carpenter; Atlanta Braves’ first baseman Freddie Freedman; and Milwaukee Braves’ outfielder Christian Yellich) all ranking between 5.9 and 5.1.  Two NL pitchers, the Washington National’s Max Scherzer and the Philadelphia Phillies’ Aaron Nola, both have WARs of 9 or better, but how can any once-every-five-days starting pitcher be almost twice as valuable to his team as a top everyday player?  Huh? Huh?

So the MVP electors (two BWAA members in every league city) have their work cut out for them in the post-season. If it were a best-player election I’d pick Arenado. For “most fun” I’d pick Baez, who at any given moment can hit a home run, score from first base on a single or strike out on a pitch two feet wide. For steadiest I’d take Goldy, once again the anchor in his team’s erratic voyage.

 But ambiguity is a good thing, right?  Anything that gets people talking is good for the game, as the old-time writers knew.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

                I’d say that for people about my (advanced) age the old picture of a college coach was one not of a real coach but of an actor, Pat O’Brien. He starred in the 1940s movie “Knute Rockne, All-American,” about the Notre Dame football mentor who was legendary even then. It was a typical Hollywood biopic of the era, sketchy and idealized, but memorable nonetheless.

O’Brien often played Catholic priests so his characters inevitably had that tinge. His Rockne also was part Army drill sergeant, but in a benevolent sort of way.  Usually wearing a plain, gray sweatshirt, with a whistle hung around his neck, he was gruff but approachable and took an individual interest in his players. His wife, played by the sweet-faced Gail Page, sometimes had the boys over for milk and cookies after practice.

Cut now to the present, where a quite-different picture predominates. If a movie exemplifies today’s big-time coachly breed it’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” about the hell-bent pursuit of success and profit. Today’s top practitioners are more CEOs than Mr. Chips, pulling down seven-figure salaries, flying around in private planes and holding forth in regal offices behind a half-dozen secretaries and a dozen assistants. Rules are bent or broken when convenient, violations are deep-sixed. Occasionally, there are bodies to be stepped over.  You’d entrust your children to Paul Manafort before one of them.

If that rhetoric sounds excessive, you haven’t been reading the sports pages lately, or in recent years. The words “college sports” and “scandal” have become inseparable as universities pull out all stops in attempts to enhance their entertainment enterprises, and their education missions be damned. One much-admired state school (the University of North Carolina) for almost 20 years maintained an academic shell department whose purpose was to keep its athletes eligible without the bother of having to learn anything. Another (Penn State) turned a blind eye to a serial sexual predator on its football staff to avoid rocking a winning boat.  Still another (Louisville) employed strippers and prostitutes to entertain basketball recruits and kept on the coach (Rick Pitino) under whose regime the practice went on, at least until it came out that his team was buying players in the underground market where many other schools also shop. That last business still is playing out in a continuing FBI investigation.

The current poster boy for college-sports depravity is one D.J. Durkin, the third-year head football coach at the University of Maryland. He’s been suspended since an ESPN investigation revealed that he and some assistants routinely mocked and intimidated players whose body weights or practice performances didn’t please them. The piece followed the death of a 19-year-old Maryland lineman who died of an apparent heatstroke after running ten 110-yard sprints in very hot weather at a team practice in late May. The boy’s family lawyer says the team didn’t call emergency services for almost an hour after the player collapsed.

It’s interesting, I think, that in 2016, at age 37, Durkin was given a five-year, $12.5 million contract at Maryland despite having no previous head-coaching experience. A New York Times story about his suspension said he was hired in part because of a recommendation from Jim Harbaugh, the highly regarded U. of Michigan head coach for whom Durkin worked as an assistant. “I always get a smile when I think of D.J. because I think of the foam coming out of the side of his mouth, snot bubbles percolating when he’s really intense,” the paper quoted Harbaugh as saying. “He’s a great competitor.”

Durkin also had worked for Urban Meyer, Ohio State’s exalted football coach who’s also sidelined for his belated firing of an assistant coach who was accused by his wife of spousal abuse over a several-year period, and lying at a press conference when asked about his knowledge of the episodes. After being suspended for the first three games of this season (owie!), Meyer issued a classic nonapology apology: “I’m sorry we’re in this situation,” said he. Only the next day, after he was widely criticized, did he express sympathy for the victimized wife.

The coverup culture extends to the so-called minor sports whose success or failure have little bottom-line impact on their institutions. Kathy Klages, a former Michigan State U. gymnastics coach, last week was accused by police of not reporting what she knew about the horrendous predations of Dr. Larry Nasser, the MSU team physician who is serving a long prison sentence for sexually molesting numerous female gymnasts under the guise of treatment. Showing that male athletes aren’t immune to such things, more than 100 former Ohio State wrestlers now say they were groped by Richard Strauss, their team doctor for 20 years before his 2005 suicide.

That situation has received heightened attention because Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, an OSU wrestling assistant coach from 1986 through 1994, has denied any knowledge of what went on, despite direct challenges from several wrestlers he coached. You’ll recall that the former Congressman Dennis Hastert, speaker of the U.S. House from 1999 to 2007, was imprisoned in 2015 from charges related to his molestation of boys while he was a high-school wrestling coach decades earlier.

The possibilities of abuse in college sports stem from the power coaches wield. The athletes involved mostly are aged 18 to 23 and living away from home for the first time. They owe their special (scholarship) status on campus to their coach-overseers, with their parents often absent, no union or agents to protect them and school administrators looking the other way, at best.  Even the option to transfer is encumbered by rules not affecting other students. And it’s on their performance that the jobs and sometimes very high incomes of their coaches hinge.

The Washington Post recently ran an article reporting that since 2000 40 college athletes have died doing “conditioning” for their sports, a period in which the National Football League, known for its physical rigor, had no such fatalities. Dozens more have been seriously injured; in 2011 13 U. of Iowa football players were hospitalized for up to a week, some with temporary paralysis, for tissue breakdowns caused by an over-the-top, off-season workout session.

                The university investigated the case and issued a long report but found no reason to fault any of its coaches or trainers. Much the same thing happened after three U. of Oregon footballers suffered the same fate in 2017, or two more at the U. of Nebraska earlier this year.

 Nothing to see here folks, move on, the schools said. Just business as usual in college sports.