Some Final Questions

 

It is my sad duty to report that Frederick C. Klein, author of the Fred Klein on Sports blog, former Wall Street Journal sports columnist, husband, father and general savant, passed away on the evening of December 26. 

It was his tradition to share an annual set of his burning questions on his birthday, February 2.  He was planning to do so again this year, and had written this in advance. This is his final column.

Thanking each of you on his behalf for your friendship and the attention you have given him and his words over the years. 

-        Mike Klein, Fred’s son, who introduced him to blogging in 2003.

 

Some Final Questions, from Frederick C. Klein

               --When was the last time I got up from a chair without saying “oof”?

               --When did I get to be a weather wimp? In Chicago I took single-digit temperatures in stride, but in Arizona I shiver every time they’re below 60.

               --When will we admit that our “wars” against gun violence, drugs and climate change are lost, and turn to dealing with the consequences? Whatever the polls show, entrenched interests prevail every time in situations like those.

               --Why has Wrigley Field survived for 110 years while the life expectancy of our newer stadiums for any big-league sport, usually paid for by the taxpayers, is about 30 years?

               --When did the accent in standard discourse start to fall on the first syllable of “in” words like insurance and install? That used to be country-folk talk.

               --Is there a contest among American sheriffs to see who can put the most stars on their collars?

               --Why do governments like Syria, Iran and Venezuela, which make war on their own people, expect international generosity when natural disaster strikes them?

               --Why are contributions to university athletics departments tax deductible? They’re in the entertainment business, pure and simple.

`              --Isn’t it remarkable that when I travel I spend more time packing my pills than my clothes?

               --Is it possible to open one of those little foil butter packets you get in restaurants without getting butter on your hands?

               --Did people in frontier Dodge City think that more guns would make them safer?

               --Can you name a perfect thing? I can—M&Ms.

               --Is there a bigger ripoff than those “tuneup” visits AC-repair outfits promote? You pay them to come and tinker with your unit and discover “problems” you can pay them more to fix. They violate a very-good rule: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.  

               --Was Sinatra better than Nat Cole? I can make an argument either way.

               --Is there a better name for a baseball pitcher than Janson Junk, of the Milwaukee Brewers?

               --Why would anyone pay for a large soft drink in a restaurant that allows unlimited refills?

               --Is there a better TV serial than “Rocco Schiavone” (“Ice Cold Murders,” actually), on Amazon Prime?  It’s about a grouchy Italian detective demoted from Rome to a small town in the snowy Alps. He solves murders but it’s mostly about him. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in some parts, darkly insightful in others.

               --Why does anyone still not know that all the world can see anything posted on “social media”?

               --Were you thrilled that the 2023 Stanley Cup final was contested by teams based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Miami, Florida?

               --Do people still read Mordecai Richler’s books? I hope so. His “St. Urbain’s Horseman” is a classic.

               --Are some web sites engineered so that when you click on one thing you get another? I think yes.

               --Isn’t it weird to get a Facebook “friend” request from yourself? And see that you and he have only seven mutual friends?

               --Aren’t drug ads informative? Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known I have a perineum.

               --Why are Russian athletes allowed to compete in international competitions while Putin makes war in Ukraine? Would Germans have been able to do this after Hitler invaded Poland and France?

               --Is any presidential poll taken before September ’24—after the national conventions-- worth looking at?

               --Which is the more-irritating ESPN personality, Stephen A. Smith or Pat McAfee?  “Both” is an acceptable answer.

               --Don’t you get the feeling that the presidential election will hinge on the price of gas on election day?

               --Is there a more useless computer feature than “autocorrect”? About the only word it reliably respells is teh.

               --Does any message from Norton not include a request for extra payments?

HANDICAPPING THE HALL, '24

 

               The Baseball Hall of Fame, American sports’ most-exalted shrine, has few formal requirements for admission. One is that the player, coach, etc., put in at least 10 seasons in the Major Leagues. Another is that he be retired for five years.  A third is that he pass the initial ballot muster of a sports writers’ committee whose standards are generous.

                There’s another requirement, though, and it’s just as important for being unwritten or even publicly acknowledged. The Hall’s annual major event is its new-member induction ceremony every July. With no inductees there’s no party so it’s imperative that somebody be elected each year.

               The golden door to the Hall is through the annual sports writers’ ballot for the recently retired. This requires a 75% favorable vote of an electorate that last year totaled 386, and getting that many sports writers to agree on anything is no mean feat. The wise men who run the Hall know that, so they created side or back doors to their shrine. Those have been the veterans’ committees operating with shifting labels over the years. The 75% rule also holds among those groups, but with memberships of 16 former players or other baseball lifers that amounts to 12 votes. When the scribes elected no one in 1971 and 1996, and the vets stepped up to fill the void—with eight electees in 1971. Most of the players people don’t think belong in the Hall were put there by the vets, and will continue to be.

               This year’s ceremony already has a speaker thanks to the vets. He’s Jim Leyland, a longtime coach and manager who piloted four teams—the Pittsburgh Pirates, Florida Marlins, Colorado Rockies and Detroit Tigers—to various levels of glory over 27 years (1986-2013). He’s well liked and admired in the game. His is a baseball family—Katie, his wife of 35 years, previously worked for the Pirates and their two sons had baseball careers.

               Chances are good he’ll have company on the podium because the writers could elect as many as four ex-players this time. They’re an especially interesting group because none of them won a World Series ring over a total of 69 years in the Bigs. Just two of them even got to play in one.

               The player most likely to succeed is Adrian Beltre, ex of the L.A. Dodgers, Seattle Mariners, Boston Red Sox and Texas Rangers. The native of the Dominican Republic best exemplified Woody Allen’s dictum that 80% of life is showing up. He showed up for 2,933 games over a 21-year career, the 14^th most among the 20,532 men who’ve played in the Majors since they were started in 1876.

               Third-baseman Beltre never reached baseball’s heights but piled up some sterling stats, headed by his 3,166 career hits. The 3,000-hit mark, sans steroids, is a Hall admission card, and he had an annex-full of other trophies. He won’t be a unanimous first-balloter, but he’ll be close.

               Todd Helton got 72.2% of the vote on last year’s ballot, his 6^th (of a permissible 10), and nobody’s gotten that close without winning the next year. The first baseman is unusual in two respects in the modern game—he played his entire, 17-season career with the same team (the Rockies) and ended up with a plus-.300 (.316) lifetime batting average. Rockies’ hitting stats have been looked down on by baseball mavins because of the light air at their mile-high Coors Field home, and the ballpark’s wide expanses, but his way was greased by Larry Walker’s election in 2020.

               Another first-ballot possibility is Joe Mauer, the Minnesota Twins’ catcher. No other catcher has won an American League’s batting title, but Mauer did it three times—in 2006, ’08 and ’09—and he ended his career with a .306 lifetime batting average. He was the AL MVP in ’09. Like Helton, Mauer played his whole career of 15 seasons with the same team.  Homegrown, the native of St. Paul was, probably, the most-popular Twin ever.

A model of consistency, he had only one plus-three full season earned-run average in his 16 seasons (1995-2010). Interestingly, he was a natural right-hander who taught himself to throw lefty after he broke his right arm twice by age seven.

Among the other ballot holdovers, outfielder Andruw Jones, a 58% poller in 2023, has the next- best chance, but it’s a big jump to 75. Gary Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez, big-time sluggers, have big-time drug-related problems, and Carlos Beltran was a key figure in the 2017 Houston Astros’ cheating scandal.

The rest of the first-year slate is thin, led by Chase Utley, David Wright, Bartolo Colon and Matt Holliday.  They’ll get the 5% vote needed to stay on the ballot, with maybe one or two others. Stick around and you’ll get to see Ichiro Suzuki, maybe the best hitter-of-the-baseball ever, on the 2025 ballot. He’s a possible unanimous choice, and he, too, never played in a World Series.

 

                

              

              

MR. RELEVANT

 

               The National Football League’s most-remarkable story during my sports-writing tenure (1983-01) was that of quarterback Kurt Warner.  The native of Dubuque, Iowa, didn’t start for Northern Iowa U. until his senior year, and went undrafted professionally out of college. Except for a brief tryout with the Green Bay Packers he had no brush with the league for the three years he spent with the Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League, a minor circuit. Between seasons he worked as a grocery-store clerk, among other such jobs.

The St. Louis Rams signed him as a backup in 1998 but used him in just one game that year. Between seasons he was left unprotected in the draft that attended the Cleveland Browns’ return to the league, but wasn’t picked. He got into the Ram’s 1999 starting lineup at age 28 only after a late-preseason injury to the incumbent QB, Trent Green. Warner then led the Rams to the NFL championship, winning league and Super Bowl MVPs along the way. His 12-year NFL career would include another MVP award and a Super Bowl appearance with the Arizona Cardinals. He’s a member of the league’s Hall of Fame.

What was mind-boggling about the Warner odyssey wasn’t that he starred but that it took so long to happen. Even 25 years ago athletic talent almost never went unnoticed in this sports-crazy land, with scouts of various rank plotting the progress of likely youngsters from Little League-age on. To use a much-overused word, how the guy got to 28 without his potential being recognized was incredible.   

Now it’s 2023 and we have another Warner-like football player. He’s Brock Purdy, the San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback.  The parallels aren’t perfect-- Purdy was drafted after college in 2022 but as a seventh-round pick, 262^nd and last. That made him “Mr. Irrelevant”, the silly title given to the draft’s annual last pick because of a silly promotion by the coastal city of Newport Beach, California. It’s an “honor” that depends on the good nature of the recipient, if only because its several days of celebration culminate in the presentation of the Lowsman Trophy, a bronze depiction of a football player fumbling.  

 Purdy pre-NFL wasn’t so much a nonentity as a national-picture also-ran, albeit an honorable-mention one. He was a four-year starter at Iowa State U., winning most of his starts (29-17) but never doing enough to turn the right heads. Probably worse, he was (is) out of style at his position for his time, a dropback QB when superhero run-pass types such as Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson and Jalen Hurts are in vogue.

  If you lined up those guys in the playground with Purdy, and asked the typical fan to choose one for his team, chances are he’d pick one of them. If they lined up for a decathlon, the 10-event Olympic competition whose winner is widely recognized as the world’s best athlete, Purdy might well finish last. At a listed 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds he is unprepossessing physically, and his boyish mien makes him look younger than his 23 ages.

Differences in measuring quarterback excellence also produce quite-different results concerning Purdy. The two main devices are the official NFL one—called the Passer Rating—and another called the Quarterback Rating, or QBR.  The Passer Rating is the simplest, involving mostly the stats that appear in a typical game’s box score. The QBR is the product and possession of ESPN and purports to be far more inclusive, the result, the network says, of about 10,000 lines of computer code, whatever that means.

 I say “purports” because no one outside ESPN knows its formula for sure, the network guarding it like a national secret. Computer generated and video monitored, it’s said to weigh various stats by “holistic,” real-game importance; for example, a 40-yards-in-the-air pass completion is worth more for the QB than a screen pass and 40-yard run by the receiver. Similarly, a pass completion with a game on the line counts for more than one at “garbage time,” when one team leads by two touchdowns or more in a game’s final minutes.

The gaps between the measures are more than matched by their outcomes. The current NFL ranking puts Sam Howell of the lowly Washington Commanders on top (?!), while Purdy is eighth. Purdy is first in ESPN’s QBR, Howell is 21^st. Goofy, huh?  For the simple-minded like me, Purdy’s leading the league in both completion percentage at 70.2 and average yards per passing attempt at 9.4 yards is more impressive than either of the yardsticks. That last thing means the Niners average a first down every time Purdy throws the ball, much less connects. In other words, he’s a hell of a QB.

Obvious in both the Warner and Purdy cases is that the football scouts’ handbook had and still has large holes when it comes to talent evaluation. Purdy has assets that were hard to quantify—things like field awareness and the head to cooly process complex info under duress. Both of them fall under the heading of gridiron intellect.

  At an Arizona Fall League baseball game last month I talked with a man who said he’d coached Purdy in a kids’ football league when the lad was a 12-year-old seventh grader in the Phoenix suburb of Queen Creek. He averred he never saw a boy more into, and knowledgeable about, the sport. “His dad told me Brock would watch a TV game with a legal pad in his lap, taking notes about the plays. He’d have been an ace at 12 if his hands had been big enough to get around the ball,” the guy said.

That’s someone a good scout might have checked out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DEVALUATION

 

               In my columnizing days I covered the U.S. Open tennis tournament annually, and got a kick out of the way the New York crowds cheered for the underdogs in early-round play and, after some won, complained that famous players were gone. Much the same thing now is happening in all our major sports as playoffs expand and more teams are added.

               Exhibit A was the just-concluded baseball World Series. With the post-season tourney field newly expanded to 12 teams from 10 the finalists were a No. 6 seed, the National League Arizona Diamondbacks, and a No. 5, the American League Texas Rangers. The D’Backs came into the Series with an 84-78 regular-season won-lost mark, the third-worst record ever for a World Series contestant (the two worse were the 1973 New York Mets, at 82-79, and the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals, 83-78, who won). The Rangers brought a 90-72 record to the fray, setting the two-team win total at 174. That was the lowest such figure ever for the event.

People in Arizona and the Dallas area couldn’t have been happier, of course, but the rest of the nation was underjoyed. Television ratings for the five-game Series (won by the Rangers four games to one) were the lowest on record, with viewership averaging less than 10 million a game. By contrast, about that many people tuned in to the NCAA women’s basketball championship final last March between LSU and Iowa.

The TV numbers were the latest—and most vivid—recent example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. In answering public demand to expand their playoffs our sports major leagues have devalued both them and their regular seasons, our major entertainments and their main sources of revenue. The more games our teams play the less valuable each becomes. This invokes another popular saw, the Law of Diminishing Returns.   

Exhibit B (or, rather, 1A) is the National Basketball Association. It spread its playoff tent last season with a complicated arrangement of “play-in” games, and wound up with a final involving the Miami Heat, which had only the seventh-best won-lost record (44-38) in the Eastern Conference.

Schedule length in any sport is determined by commerce, not competition. They’re all too long, topped by MLB’s 162 games, but the NBA’s 82-gamer is the most problematic because its first half (the months of November, December and January) is played in the shadow of the National Football League, the undisputed champion of the airwaves. Until Christmas only aficionados pay much attention to the hoopsters, and then not really until the playoffs approach around March.

The NBA is trying to remedy that this season with an in-season tournament plucked whole from England’s soccer Premier League, the theft extending to its terminology (“group play” and “knockout rounds”, with a “cup” that goes to the winner). Running from November 3 through December 9, it’s being contested initially by six units of five teams each followed by a single-elimination go-around culminating in a final. All games save the final will count in the regular-season standings, with winning-team players pocketing $500,000 each.  That’s a nice prize even in a loop in which eight-figure annual salaries are common. So far the tourney has been met mostly with guffaws, but at worst it couldn’t hurt.

The NFL also has extended its playoffs in recent seasons and beginning last year did the same with its regular season, going from 16 games to 17. That addition (about 6%) is equivalent to 10 more MLB games. Schedules change only in one direction (longer), and sports leagues loathe odd numbers (home-road equity, don’tcha know?), so another boost to 18 games surely will follow.   

In the NFL the main consequence of more games is more injuries, the unavoidable result of football’s bruising nature. After about week three of the schedule every player is nursing some sort of hurt, and more-serious, game-missing injuries are common. Football is unique in that its most-valuable players—quarterbacks—also are its most vulnerable, and this year fully one-third of its putative starting QBs have missed at least a game while healing. The big question each year at playoff time isn’t so much which team is best as which is healthiest.

As NBA basketball becomes faster and on-court collisions harder and more frequent, injuries become more common, and the too-long schedule more of a grind. The league has recognized this by going corporate, legitimizing star absences with what it calls “load management.“  That means it’s okay for players to sit out games from time to time for no other reason than rest.

As I reported in my blog of last May 15, the league’s dozen-best players (Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic, Luca Doncic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, Kawhi Leonard, Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, Ja Morant, Damian Lillard and Jimmy Butler) missed an average of 23 games each last season, or about 28% of their teams’ schedules. Theatrical plays notify patrons through program notes when leads are being replaced by stand-ins. NBA teams should do the same.

Indeed, they should go further by putting a warning on tickets saying the purchase price doesn’t guarantee the presence of either team’s stars. Fans bear the costs of schedule devaluation, as they do most things. But hey! It’s only your money if you give it to them.

 

 

FALL BALL '23

 

October and November are my favorite months in Arizona. One reason is that by this time the temperatures have abated somewhat from their sizzling summer highs. Another is the Arizona Fall League, the annual gathering of selected young baseball prospects seeking Major League futures. The young men play a six-week, 36-game schedule at six of the Phoenix area’s fine spring-training ball parks. It’s baseball at its purist and most accessible.

For reasons best known to itself, Major League Baseball moved the league’s start up by a week this time, incurring a Big Heat overlap. It also moved from a mostly day games to a mostly nights schedule, and changed the day-game starting times to 2:30 p.m. from 12:30. Neither of those changes were popular with the old timers who make up most of the league’s public, and attendance has fallen. Us codgers are used to being dissed, though.

MLB uses the Fall League to try out possible rule changes. There were a bunch of those last year, in the name of faster play, but few this time around. One changed the permitted time between pitches with runners on base to 18 seconds from 20, and it went off without much notice. The other was more interesting, permitting ball-strike challenges to pitchers, catchers and batters provided they be done immediately, without bench input.

 Each teams gets three per game, with successful appeals not counting. This took place only at Salt River Fields in Scottsdale, the only park wired for it.  When a challenge was called the strike-zone rectangle was shown on the park’s TV screen and the ball zoomed in, for good or ill. I generally oppose electronic interference in our games, but this one was handled with dispatch and was kind of fun. Look for it at your local big-league park.

 Putting on my scout’s hat (actually, the one I usually wear), I attended a goodly number of AFL games during the season’s first five weeks. I judged the general level of play to be a tad below that of some past years, with no flaming talents like those of Vlad Guerrero Jr., Nolan Arenado or Kris Bryant revealing themselves. Some of the kids could play, though, and will be appearing in the triple-decked stadia in due time. About 60% of all fall leaguers make it to the Bigs, and this crew should be no exception.

The best pitcher I saw was Ricky Tiedemann, 21, a left hander owned by the Toronto Blue Jays. Standing 6-foot-4, he has a mid-90s fastball and a nice array of breaking pitches, which he isn’t afraid to use late in counts. A third-round draft choice in 2021, he’s already made it to AA, and should be ready for serious promotion in a year.

The best hitter I saw was Dominic Keegan, of the Tampa Bay Rays. He’s a solidly built customer who has hit well at the college (Vanderbilt U.) and minor-league levels, and continued that pattern here with numerous multi-hit games. In one game I saw he got the only two hits the above-named Tiedemann allowed in a five-inning stint, and a double and home run at that.  He’s listed as a catcher, but his bio also mentions other posts, meaning it isn’t written in stone. But wherever he plays his bat should make him welcome.

My team, the Chicago Cubs, has two prime prospects here, Kevin Alcantara and James Triantos. The 21-year-old Alcantara is the better-known of the two, having come to the Cubs in the traumatic 2021 trade that sent All-Star first baseman Anthony Rizzo to the New York Yankees.  Alcantara is tough to miss in the field, standing a very skinny 6-foot-6. His height makes for a long swing and he can look bad whiffing, as he often does, but when he connects he shows real power, and he’s graceful afield. Also, he has a lot of shtick, including the nickname “The Jaguar” and a well-rehearsed home-run bat flip, so he’ll be fun when (if) he makes it to Wrigley Field.

               Triantos isn’t impressive physically but plays with intent and has been among the AFL batting leaders all season with plus-400 marks. In one game I saw he had four solid hits, including a single that sent the contest into extra innings. He’s a second baseman, which could be a problem because the Cubs have a long-term incumbent there in Nico Hoerner.  Any hitter like Triantos should find a place somewhere, though.

               The Chicago White Sox’s top AFL prospect is shortstop Colson Montgomery, their top draft choice in 2022. At a filled-out 6-foot-3, and left-handed batting stance, he’s a Corey Seager look alike, but he hasn’t been Seager-like here. Still, Montgomery showed  some moxie in a game Monday in which he came up in a tied ninth inning with the bases loaded and one out. With a 3-2 count against a lefty reliefer he fouled off four pitches, then drove a deep fly ball past a drawn-in outfield to drive in the winning run. The Sox need a shortstop, and his draft status alone ensures him a look.

               I like short players with pop, and Corey Rosier meets that description. He’s with the Boston Red Sox chain. He’s fast afoot and makes good contact with his short swing. Another good little guy is shortstop Nasim Nunez, a 23-year-old Miami Marlins prospect. He’s sharp in the field and his 52 stolen bases in 125 minor-league games last season adds to his attraction.

                At 6-3 and 230 pounds ,Aaron Sabato looks like the home-run hitter he is, currently leading the league with seven. One on Monday cleared the 410-foot mark in Glendale Stadium with room to spare. He’s with the Minnesota Twins.

               An interesting experiment here involves Reggie Crawford, a San Francisco Giants prospect. Drafted in round one as a pitcher, his 6-4, 235 frame also looks hitterish, and he was sent here to get some swings. Alas, a new Ohtani doesn’t seem likely, because Crawford has been sub-.200 at the plate all season, and never showed much in the games I watched.

               There’s still a week and a half to go in the season, so come on out if you can. A game is well worth the price of admission, which is 10 bucks. It’s a rare bargain these days.    

              

JOCK TALK

 

               Anyone in his or her ninth decade on this planet has regrets, and I am no exception. My main one journalistically is the time I spent in sports press conferences or locker rooms, taking down the words of coaches and players and, later, passing some along to my readers. Occasionally a quote would illuminate a subject, but the big majority of them were blather, verbal pablum designed to placate or mislead the multitudes. Artificial intelligence could have provided better content and, without doubt, soon will.

               The subject of sports blab is timely because the TV and radio folks have decided we want more of it. Interviews fill the airwaves and no place is microphone-proof, even the playing fields. Baseball in particular is enamored with that, allowing players to be mic’d and questioned while games are in progress and they are at work. I could live happily without that.

               Just as TV action replays have been teaching tools for athletes, so has the constant playing of interviews; jocks just out of school know just what to say, and when. The best examples of this can been seen in the telecasts of the NFL and NBA college-player drafts. After every early-round pick a microphone toter will thrust his tool in the face of the chosen player and ask for his reaction. Invariably, the kid will express delight with the team that chooses him, no matter how woebegone, and promise to “work hard” to make it better.

 Indeed, the subject of hard work is probably the most overworked in sports. Yes, big-time jocks put it a few daily hours in the weight room or on the running track, but most of their practice consists of things others do for fun, like shoot baskets or play catch. Moreover, no exercises would mean much unless the athlete is in the top .01% of the population in natural abilities. As a 5-foot-8, 135-pound high schooler of ordinary physique I could have bounced a basketball every spare moment between ages 5 and 18 and never sniffed a college hoops scholarship, much less an NBA spot.

In listening to jock talk it’s good to note the way athletes speak of their situations. Rather than employing the conventional “I” or the royal “we”, they prefer to use the word “you.” They rarely lack for ego, but “you” introduces the common touch, implying that anyone would do the same. Ian Happ, a Chicago Cubs outfielder, illustrated this a few weeks ago in describing his team’s late-season, win-or-die throes (they died). “You have no choice [but to win],” said he typically. “That’s what you’ve got to do.”

Flat-out statements of fact are avoided, however obvious they may seem, mitigating any blame that may attach to them. David Ross, the Cubs’ manager, described a starting pitcher’s very bad outing thusly: “He kind of lost command a little bit out there.” And hey, if it was just a small problem, it might be easily corrected.

Similarly, athletes often couch their own subpar efforts (over par in golf) in terms of “struggle”; for instance, a basketballer who has just missed his last dozen shots will confess to “struggling” from the floor. The reasoning here is clear: struggle is noble and can lead to better things, while failure not only is pathetic, it also may be terminal.

A common excuse for an athlete who is struggling is that outside factors may have “distracted” him from his tasks. This can be counted upon to elicit a sympathetic response, even when the distraction may be the TV commercials he’s shooting on game days or the battery charge he faces.

The sports world is so committed to euphemisms it uses them to describe praiseworthy performances. When a jock plays well his fellows and the sportscasters who ape them will say he “stepped up” or “came up big.” More-questionable praise for one who gave his all in a game is that he “sold out” for his team. Benedict Arnold’s descendants might take heart from that one.

   Setting goals is another subject that’s usually addressed circuitously. Asked how he’d like to perform an athlete will shy from the grandiose—“I want to play great and win!”—and focus on something more easily obtainable, like “I want to be consistent” or “I just want to stay within myself.” The retort to the latter—“Where else are you going to go?” always remains unsaid.

Ego concealment is rampant, never more so than when money is involved. A jock who jumps one team for a better deal with another will pooh-pooh the money angle, saying “All I want is a ring”—the bauble members of championship teams receive. Once the guy gets his ring he might complain it had too few diamonds, but that’s another matter. One good thing about the nine-figure contracts top players are getting these days is that we no longer have to hear their nonsense about “feeding their families.”

Journalists contribute to the blather glut by passing it along mindlessly. Print beat writers—who qualify as reporters—might plead that they are fulfilling their duty to objectivity by relaying what the combatants have to say, but TV commentators and print columnists, who are licensed to speak in their own voices, have no such excuse. Ditto bloggers, who answer to no one. As a TV watcher I turn on a mental mute when most jocks speak, and as a reader I skim past just about anything in quotes. We’d all be better off if journalists use their eyes (and brains) more and their ears less.

                

THE WICKED FLOURISH (continued)

 

               It’s baseball playoffs time again and the Houston Astros are in them. No surprise there—they’ve qualified for seven consecutive postseasons now. That’s the second-best such record extant, behind only that of the 11-straight Los Angeles Dodgers, a bigger-payroll team. And if they were asked, the Dodgers might opt to swap records with the ‘Stros, because the Houstons have won two World Series (in 2017 and ’22) during their streak, to the Dodgers’ one (in 2020).

               You might think that such excellence would be celebrated widely, but cheers are pretty much limited to in or around the East Texas metropolis. The Astros go about their business wearing a scarlet letter, albeit a “C” instead of Hester Prynne’s “A.” The “C” stands for cheater, which is what the team was for all of its championship 2017 season and a good-sized chunk of the next, before its misdeeds came to light.

               Short memory is a lamentable modern condition, but I’d wager that most folks—or, at least, most baseball fans-- recall what the Astros did.  That was to carry out the most egregious scam in the history of American team sports. Some Astros’ brains devised a computer program that doped out the signs of rival catchers and named it “Codebreaker.” It then set up video systems in their home and some other ballparks that would beam the stolen signs to their team’s dugout. From there the scheme went low-tech: the pitches were relayed to batters by bangs or lack therof on a dugout trash can, silence meaning a fastball and one or two bangs, variously, meaning a curve or changeup.

               Almost equally mind-blowing was Major League Baseball’s response to the wrongdoing. The Astros were allowed to keep their ill-gotten 2017 trophy and fined a few draft choices and a piddling $5 million, which is the cash maximum the game’s owners allow themselves to be penalized no matter what they do. Worse, a review ordered by Commissioner Rob Manfred wrote a report calling the program “player driven and executed” even though it named for blame only one player, Carlos Beltran, who at age 40 was in his last season anyway.   A coach, Alex Cora, was suspended, along with manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow.  For one (1) year each.

               Such leniency should have been expected; it’s well known in other contexts that firing or otherwise penalizing managers or execs is cheaper and easier than doing the same to players. Further, our team sports have a complicated relationship with rule-breaking; as the jocks put it “if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’.”  Baseball outfielders can be counted upon to signal catches after they trap line drives, and all good football offensive linemen have a few artful holds in their bags of tricks. Sign stealing is a feature of both baseball and football, and it’s okay if done with the naked eye instead of electronically.  On another level, the taking of performance-enhancing drugs is treated as an individual offense, with no responsibility attached to the takers’ teams.

               The Astros’ sins were of a different order—obviously planned and carried out by a team’s leadership with the intent of securing a competitive advantage over a long period of time—and if that’s not condemned nothing is. But after their brief penance manager Hinch reemerged as manager of the Detroit Tigers, coach Cora popped up to manage the Boston Red Sox and player Beltran, hired and later quickly fired to manage the New York Mets, now is in that team’s front office.

               The only cheater still out of baseball is GM Luhnow, and one can deduce that’s mostly a function of his personal unpopularity. An engineer and management consultant by trade, he came into baseball in 2003 as a data analyst with the St. Louis Cardinals, having no baseball background and evincing open disdain for those who do. That image was magnified when he became the Astros’ GM in 2011, already carrying the nicknames “The Accountant” and “Harry Potter.” His claim to ignorance of the sign-stealing plot is ludicrous given the fact he was the only top Astros’ exec with the technical chops to put it together. Over the last few years he’s busied himself with soccer teams in Mexico and Spain, but he’s said he’s had feelers from several MLB clubs.  No one would be surprised to see him back in the Bigs soon.

               Baseball man or not, Luhnow’s path to building the ‘Stros was tried and true. The team tanked seasons 2011 through 2014, averaging just 58 wins (and 104 losses) a year but accumulating prospects and prime draft choices. Except for a stutter during the plague year of 2020 it hasn’t had a losing season since, meaning it knew what to do with the players it acquired.

               The team knows when to hold, as it has with the infielders Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman, lineup anchors who have been in Houston for 13 and eight years, respectively. Under Luhnow’s successors it has shown it can identify hitters, such as young-vet stars Kyle Tucker and Yordan Alvarez. It’s had good success developing pitchers, and when in need it can pop for veteran help, as it did in August when it assumed more than $50 million in salary obligations to reacquire the Hall of Fame-bound pitching ace Justin Verlander, whom it had let go to free agency the year before.

               This year’s Astros lack the oomph of previous editions, having snuck into the playoffs via two last-games wins, but once in them there’s no telling how far they might go.  Virtue may not be rewarded in sports but talent always is, and there’s still no lack of that in Houston.

                             

              

                

                 

                

BS HIGH

 

               When it comes to the corruption surrounding sports in the USA I’m not easily appalled, but that barrier was breached the other day when I watched an HBO documentary titled, appropriately, BS High. It was about “Bishop Sycamore High School,” a non-existent entity created by a Columbus, Ohio, conman who recruited some 50 football hopefuls and put together a schedule of games highlighted by a contest with rich and mighty IMG Academy that was televised nationally by ESPN. 

               As journalism, the production was lackluster. The game in question took place two years ago (on August 29, 2021) and the circumstances surrounding it had previously been published and aired, albeit to an Ohio audience smaller than that of HBO’s.  Key facts were missing or presented blurrily. The producers raised issues they did not later address, and their ire was directed mostly at Ohio authorities for allowing it to happen rather than at the (much) larger context in which it occurred.

               Further, it glorified its central figure, one Roy Johnson, who pulled off the scam without any credentials as a coach or educator and with a checkered past. The cheeky Johnson was interviewed extensively on camera, alternatingly laughing and snarling, but clearly enjoying the attention he was receiving.  Attention, after all, was what his play was all about, and he accomplished it in spades.

               In a scheme that predated the IMG game by a couple of years, Johnson cast his net among local African-American boys who had those sports “dreams” we hear so much about but had been passed over by college-football recruiters.  Using the “sports academy” model that has become ubiquitous in this land, he told the young men (and their parents) that his “school” would give them the gridiron exposure they need to crack the collegiate big-time.

If the subject of academics arose it was glossed over in Johnson’s pitch, and later. BS High never had any classrooms or teachers, and the documentary produced no complaints on that score from the recruits or their parents. And why should it? As one young “student” put it, the deal was “you come, play ball and move up.”

  That view echoed a similar one voiced a few years before by Cardale Jones, then a starting quarterback for Ohio State U.  right there in Columbus. “Why should we have to go to class if we came to play football?” he asked.

At any rate, having charged tuitions variously described in the show as $12,000, $16,000 or $20,000 (who paid, how much and how was never spelled out) Johnson assembled a team a few months before the 2021 season. It practiced on a rented field with the players living in hotel rooms he never paid for and eating whatever he could scrape up. One ploy he cheerfully admitted to was ordering 25 prepared chickens from a grocery store and then not having them picked up until just before closing time, after they’d been marked down.

By that time he’d assembled an eight-game football schedule against high schools that, apparently, asked few questions. The first two games resulted in losses by scores of 38-0 and 19-7. The televised IMG game, from a field in Canton, Ohio, connected to the NFL Hall of Fame there, was so ludicrously one-sided—final score 58-0-- it wound up exploding the whole scheme. Even though most of its players were older than the high-school norm, Johnson’s team lacked talent and plan, and several of his players suffered on-field injuries.  It didn’t have enough helmets to go around, so players swapped them as they ran on and off the field. The thing should have been whistled before the 60 minutes expired. The stink it generated resulted in BS High’s last five games being cancelled, and its players dispersed.

               It was fitting that ESPN and IMG Academy were hooked in the scam. ESPN, ever hungry for programming, has fed the professionalization of high-school sports by featuring prep games on its stations. IMG Academy, in Bradenton, Florida, is the model U.S. youth-sports factory. IMG was created  in the 1960s as International Management Group by Mark McCormack, the visionary lawyer/agent who, with golfer-clients Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, revolutionized jocks’ commercial ties, generating income that far exceeded their on-field earnings. The firm now is an octopus with international tentacles across the sports spectrum.

               IMG got into the ed biz in 1987 by buying the Florida tennis school run by Nick Bollietieri and quickly expanding its offerings to seven more sports (football, basketball, baseball, soccer, golf, track and field and lacrosse).  Its 1,000 or so current students, in grades six through 12, attend academic classes in the morning and spend afternoons in intensive sports training under professional eyes. Its teams criss-cross the country playing games and its golfers and tennisers play national tournament schedules.

               Full tuition for boarding students is about $90,000 a year, or $70,000 for day students. Scholarships are available, but the place is there to make money so not every student gets one. While the aim of most-students’ parents is a college scholarship of some sort, the economics of that aren’t clear—just a one-year, full-tuition payment exceeds the money value of many such “rides.” Chalk up the rest to parents’ desires for vicarious thrills, the surrender of colleges’ educational missions to their entertainment arms, and our general sports craziness.

               HBO’s search for villains in its documentary began and ended with Johnson; the producers waxed apoplectic over the fact that Ohio criminal law has no penalty for deeds such as his. That left retribution, if any, to the civil courts via lawsuits, a number of which Johnson is facing.

Equally to blame, though, were the parents who turned their sons over to the conman and paid to do so. If any of them thought to visit the “school” to check on his educational claims (a subject not addressed in the show) they must have bought into the “just play ball” reasoning. Not without cause, though.   

                             

              

TENNIS ANYONE?

 

In my columnizing days I looked forward to the U.S. Open tennis tournament, which takes place every year around this time. It meant two weeks in glorious Gotham on the Wall Street Journal’s dime, my favorite way to travel. Wife Susie or one or another of my kids often would join me for a few days, using tickets to which I had access. Sometimes a New York friend, too.

While I loved visiting the city (living there hadn’t been quite as big a pleasure), I also loved the tennis. I was an avid player then, so I had a feeling for the sport, and the Open offered total emersion. I best liked the first week, when the side courts were active and unfamous players would have it out in early-round matches.  I was something of a tennis maven, able to hold forth on that 43^rd-ranked woman from Sweden or that tall, lefty Australian junior, and whatever the court the tennis was excellent. As Charles Barkley said about the NBA, there are no bad players in the U.S. Open.

But no more. Now I barely watch the sport— maybe a set here and there on TV during the Grand Slam tournaments, almost never a match start to finish. The main reason is that the stylistic differences that used to flavor competition no longer exist. Just about every top player plays the same, baseline-rooted game, and while small differences in ability are decisive at the elite level they’re hard to discern with the naked eye. It’s difficult to tell the players apart if they aren’t wearing different-colored clothes.

 Evidence of the change has been easy to see. Wimbledon’s grass courts used to show wear in sideways-T-shaped patterns on each side of the net, one path along the base line and another down the center to the net. In recent years only the baselines paths show wear. Gone is the so-called “big game,” the serve-and-volley style that brought glory to the likes of Jack Kramer, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras and Martina Navratilova, along with the puncher-boxer matchups that made for memorable duels.  The great rivalries of recent-decades past—McEnroe-Borg, Sampras-Agassi, Navratilova-Evert—were of that nature. Now it’s all boxer-boxer, for better or (by me) worse.

The villain is technology, which has changed tennis more than any other sport. Starting about 1980 the wooden racquets that always had been standard in the game began giving way to ones made of first, metal, and ultimately, graphite. The new materials created weapons that were stronger, lighter and more flexible than before. They also allowed larger racquet faces, from a former nine inches across to 10 to 12 inches, with corresponding increases in the size of “sweet spots,” the face areas for optimum shot results.

  Those things made tennis easier to play, which was good for recreational players, and boosted the power of the pros’ games. At first it was supposed that big servers would benefit most at the expert level and, indeed, service speeds have zoomed. People oohed and aahed at 100 mph serves in Kramer’s day but now top women players routinely register triple digits while the best men exceed 130 mph.  Returners, however, countered by stepping back a pace or two, and the new racquets permitted them to blister back their deliveries almost as fast as they came in. That made net-rushing unprofitable.

What’s happened in tennis has been paralleled in other sports, but with fewer consequences. Pole-vaulting heights climbed radically with the 1960s switch from bamboo to fiberglass poles, and the advent of high-tech clubs and balls have allowed the golf pros to conquer space, but both sports have proceeded much as before, only over greater distances (PGA Tour courses used to measure about 6,800 yards, today about 7,500 is the norm).  In tennis, the whole serve-and-volley game has been a casualty, probably a permanent one.

The predominance of the baseline style has changed tennis in another important way, with longer rallies making for longer matches. This comes through strongest at tennis’s biggest showcases, the Grand Slam events (Wimbledon and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens). There, the men play best-of-five sets singles matches instead of the best-of-three format of the women, and the other men’s tournaments. Best-of-three setters usually are concluded in about 90 minutes while best-of-fivers that go all the way typically run about 165 minutes (two hours, 45 minutes). 

Oftimes, though, four- or even five-hour contests take place, sometimes punctuated by contestants cramping and/or barfing. That’s inhumane. Murphy’s Law made its certain appearance in 2010 at Wimbledon when John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played a fifth set that went 138 games (70-68) in a match that spanned more than 11 hours over three days. Wimbledon didn’t allow a fifth-set tiebreaker then and the fossils that run the place took eight more years to institute one.  Such is the state of tennis governance.

Five-setters can be tough on spectators, too. In my trips to the French Open, whose gritty clay (dirt) courts permit the longest rallies, I learned that the seasoned match-goer watches the first set of a men’s singles match and goes to lunch during the second. If the sets are even after two, he or she might sip another glass of Beaujolais before returning to the stands.

Men’s tennis in this century has been dominated by three players—Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic—who have won 20, 22 and 23 Grand Slam titles, respectively. Federer, now retired, is best known for his grace, Nadal for his athleticism.  Djokovic’s main strength is stamina, as attested by his astonishing 37-10 career won-lost record in five setters. They’re running marathons out there, and when the men’s Slams grind to conclusions he’s usually been the last standing, a man for his time if there ever was one. Usually, I’ve been watching the highlights on Sports Center.

 

 

NEWS & VIEWS

 

               NEWS-- COLLEGE CONFERENCE ALIGNMENTS CHURN

               VIEW— ITS ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

               The tectonic plates of big-time college sports are on the move again, leaving carnage in their wake. The U’s of Oregon and Washinton have left the PAC 12 for the Big Ten, following the earlier switch by UCLA and Southern Cal. Arizona State, Arizona and Utah moved from the PAC 12 to the Big 12, filling the holes left when Texas and Oklahoma fled that conference for the SEC. Clemson and Florida State are said to be mulling leaving the ACC for the SEC, Cal-Berkeley and Stanford are talking to the ACC. You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

Left in the dust are the 64-year-old PAC 12, now all but defunct, and whatever vestiges of regionalism the other conferences embodied. The Big Ten, once a prime source of Midwestern identification and pride, now stretches from sea to shining sea, and with Cal and Stanford the ACC (which stands for Atlantic Coast Conference) would, too.  Traditional ties, such as those between Oregon and Oregon State and Washington and Washington State, have been torn asunder. Making the moves more head scratching, the severing of Cal and UCLA was approved by the same Board of Regents that governs both.

Another likely casualty is the NCAA, a mere spectator to the above proceedings. The conferences now have the power, and can be counted upon to use it. The NCAA used to be potent politically and in the courts, but no more. Its decades of countenancing exploitation and hypocrisy finally brought down its shame amateurism, and through court-approved NIL (name, image, likeness) payments college athletes are able to be paid by check. The organization now exists mainly to run a basketball tournament.

Behind the moves is money. The key word is “content,” which is what the schools’ sports arms provide to television and streaming operators. That’s the same thing the professional leagues sell. The PAC 12’s collapse followed immediately on the league’s failure to secure a TV contract that would have satisfied its members. Big-time college sports are businesses pure and simple, separate from and often conflicting with the schools’ educational missions. Contributions to university athletics departments shouldn’t be tax-deductible.

 NEWS—THE U.S. WOMEN’S SOCCER TEAM BOMBS AT THE WORLD CUP

VIEW—IF YOU WERE SURPRISED YOU WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION

The two-time defending champs’ elimination in the round of 16 was regarded as shocking, but it shouldn’t have been. The team’s pre-tourney games, all in the U.S., resulted in narrow wins, and it had lost twice in its only previous foreign venture (to WC host country New Zealand) this year. I watched its first WC game against Viet Nam, which turned out to be the worst team in the 32-country field, and found its 3-0 win unimpressive, remarking to wife Susie that it would be in trouble against better units. Its next three games, against the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden, all resulted in ties in which it scored a total of one goal.  Its eliminating loss to Sweden came in a penalty-kicks shootout.

It's news-media bad form in the U.S. to criticize female athletes or teams, but the soccer team’s pre-tourney hype in this land went beyond praise, to adulation. This was from a press corps that had little apparent knowledge of the women’s game beyond these shores. Thanks largely to the federal “Title 9” legislation of 1972 that vastly broadened women’s athletic opportunities, the U.S. long dominated women’s sports around the world. The rest of the world, however, has caught up on just about all fronts; for example, none of best basketball players extant (Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid and Luca Doncic) are Americans, and the best baseball player (Shohei Ohtani) is Japanese.

No doubt there will be a lengthy post-mortem of the WC debacle, with coaching and team organization getting most of the blame, but old-fashioned big-headedness shouldn’t be overlooked. Future team members should be advised not to read their press clippings.

NEWS— THE BALTIMORE ORIOLES SUSPEND TELEVISION BROADCASTER FOR PASSING ALONG A FACT

VIEW—WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

Kevin Brown’s sin, in chatter before a July game against the Tampa Bay Rays in Tampa, was to point out that the resurgent O’s had beaten the Rays three of five times there this season after losing 18 of 21 from 2020 through ’22. It’s the kind of tidbit that’s included in every team’s pre-game press notes, including the O’s before the game in question. But mouthing it on O-paid air was a no-no.

The incident was only an extreme example of the state of play-by-play sports broadcasting on both radio and TV. Broadcasters are not independent observers but employees of their teams, expected to promote them.  Even the best of them—Vin Scully, Harry Caray, Jack Buck, Jon Miller—are or were “homers.” It was just that their teams allowed them to describe the games before them, including, sometimes, the bad with the good.

These days, homerism has morphed into cheerleading, with nary a discouraging word allowed. I subscribe to MLB’s Extra Innings package, which gives me access to just every about game that’s televised, and to most of the boys (and sometimes girls) in the booths home teams are the good guys, foes the villains. Home players are referred to by first names or nicknames, like pals, foemen by family names. Home guys succeed by merit, foemen by chance. Every crew of umpires or refs has it in for the broadcasters’ employers; non-stop, one-way bitching over calls is the rule.  Best choice to avoid the blather: watch with the sound off.     

 

  

 

   

 

 

              

NFL WORST

 

               I’m told that the state motto of Alabama is “Thank God for Mississippi.” By that gauge the Arizona Cardinals must have emitted a collective groan when the notorious Daniel Snyder sold the Washington Commanders, nee Redskins. That left the Cards as the clear choice for worst organization in the National Football League and, maybe, in all American pro sports.

               That’s saying a lot, you say? Well, the Cardinals are that bad. For instance, what other team’s lineage includes Al Capone?

               More about Capone later, because the Cards’ “now” is plenty bad enough. Their won-lost record last season was 4 and 13, which wasn’t the league’s worst but it was close, and extended a losing tradition that dates to the team’s founding. The club was among the 14 original members of what in 1920 was called the American Professional Football Association, along with the Akron Indians, Muncie Flyers and Chicago Bears. The loop changed its name to the National Football League two years later.

                In their 103 years of existence in Chicago (1920-59), St. Louis (1960-87) and Arizona (1988-present) the Cards have won just two NFL titles—in 1925 and 1947—and the first of those still is contested by folks in Pottstown, Pennsylvania (current population about 23,000), who believe their late and lamented Maroons were cheated by scheduling manipulations. The Cards’ all-time record of 581-790-41 includes the NFL lead for losses. Their winning percentage of .426 ranks third-lowest among the 32 current teams, ahead of only the Jacksonville Jaguars and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, relative newcomers both.

               It’s a foregone conclusion that the season that begins next month will worsen those marks. Since the end of last season the team has had its best offensive player—wide receiver Deandre Hopkins—in effect quit, its best two defensive linemen-- J.J. Watts and Zach Allen—leave via retirement and free agency, respectively, and its defensive leader, safety Budda Baker, ask to be traded before reneging.

 Quarterback Kyler Murray, the recipient of a five-year, $250 million contract in 2021, is a sourpuss whose work ethic has been questioned. He’s a smallish guy who likes to carry the ball, meaning he’s injury prone. He missed the last six games of 2022 with a hurt knee and it’s anybody’s guess when he’ll be combat-ready this year.

The Cards start the season with a new head coach but the former one hasn’t exactly gone away. Kliff Kingsbury (four-season AZ record 28-37-1) was fired only a year after he was given a six-year contract extension at $5.5 million per, and the Cards have to keep paying him until he finds a new job. He recently was seen enjoying the beaches in Thailand.

Players thinking of joining the team might heed a recent survey by the NFL Players Association that ranked it last in the league in five of eight “quality of employment” categories, including food service, weight room, locker room, training facilities and treatment of families. Its overall rank among the 32 teams was last, by a lot.

               And upstairs in the front office, all is not well. The team has a new general manager after the old one left for still-undisclosed health reasons after serving a suspension for extreme DUI. The team was named in ex-Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores’ racism lawsuit against the league, for firing black head coach Steve Wilks after just a season on the job (2018) so it could hire Kingsbury.  It’s also being taken to arbitration by fired former vice president Terry McDonough, who charges President Michael Bidwill with a Snyder-like list of beastly executive behaviors aimed at himself and other team employees. Bidwill denies all.

                The Cardinals are one of five NFL teams that are, essentially, family businesses, headed for decades by nepots (the others are the Bears, New York Giants, Pittsburgh Steelers and Cincinnati Bengals). The founding father was Charley Bidwill, who bought the team in 1933 for a reported $50,000, including $5,000 in cash and $45,000 in assumed debts.

 A lawyer and businessman, the basis of Bidwill’s fortune was Sportsman’s Park, a Cicero, Illinois, horse track that closed in 2002. In Illinois and elsewhere racing is a political business, dependent on state legislatures for operating dates. Bidwill was splendidly placed for that, being the son of a Chicago alderman and the brother of a state senator. Reputedly and reportedly, his partner at Sportsman’s was Capone. At the gangster’s death in 1947 Bidwill bought the track outright from Capone’s lawyer, Edwin O’Hare.

When Bidwill died later that same year control of the team, and the track, passed to his widow, Violet. When she died in 1962 they went to the couple’s adopted sons Bill and Charles Jr., the latter nicknamed “Stormy” for his bad temper. The two didn’t get along and in 1971 they split, Bill taking the Cardinals and Stormy the track. Bill in 1988 took the team to the Phoenix area. His son, Michael, runs it now.

The Arizona move didn’t improve team fortunes-- it’s had but seven winning seasons in its 35 there. The sole high spot came in 2008 when it made its only franchise trip to the Super Bowl despite a 9-7 regular season won-lost record. The Cards’ original Arizona home was Arizona State U’s Sun Devil Stadium¸ from where it annually trailed the NFL in attendance. A new stadium, opened in 2006, cured that, but nothing else.

If a vote were taken, Arizonans would remove the Bidwills by a landslide margin. Tsk, tsk, in the NFL an owner needn’t succeed to prosper—Snyder, who bought the Skins for $800 million in 1999, got $6 billion-plus when he sold, and the Cards must be worth at least that. Not a bad return on Charley’s $50,000, huh?

 

              

                             

 

A MAN FOR HIS TIME

 

               Major League Baseball’s GEY (Great Experimental Year) is about half over, with mixed results. The biggest change— the addition of a pitch clock—has been a success, reducing average game times to two hours 38 minutes from 3:04 last year, all from the elimination of dead time. Ditto for the new-found limits on pitchers’-mound visits, which should be cut back further or eliminated altogether. Fewer pitching twitches and, maybe, bigger bases have triggered an increase in stolen bases, also good.

               The rest, not so much. Increasing offense was the second aim of the GEY, through limits on infield shifts, but the effects of that have been minimal, the all-game batting average for the season’s first half hitting .248, up just five points from last year’s full-season mark. Virtually unchanged has been the strikeout rate at 8.7 per team per game, against last season’s 8.8. For five straight seasons strikeouts have exceeded hits in MLB, and this year should make it six. Nobody’s cheering that.

               The continuing K epidemic probably is beyond rules jiggering. That’s because the pitchers have gotten far ahead of the hitters, with no end in sight. Thanks mostly to better coaching from the ground up, and to Tommy John surgery, which has taken some of the risk out of throwing hard, today’s hurlers can put speed on and do tricks with baseballs oldtimers could only dream of.  Triple-digit deliveries used to be rare but now they’re commonplace; breaking balls literally “fall off the table,” to use the announcers’ cliché.

               Batters have not been exempt from blame for the strikeout siege. Since that cute Nike TV commercial of 1991 declaring that “chicks dig the long ball,” home runs have dominated the game’s offensive landscape, jumping from .8 a game in ’91 to a high of 1.39 in 2019, a 73% increase. They’ve since tailed off a bit, but the fact their numbers have stayed high despite improvements in pitching testifies to the continuing desire of batters to hit them. While it might make sense to choke up on the bat a bit, the better to put wood on the more-elusive pitches, the batters’ mantra seems to continue to be swing for the seats, and strikeouts be damned. Back in ’91, batters struck out at a rate of 17% of official times at bat. Last year the rate was 25%.

               So here we are in 2023 and a “new” type of player has emerged. He’s the type whose entire game is the long ball. I put “new” in quotes because guys like that long have been around. The prototype is Reggie Jackson, who for 21 seasons (1967-87) terrorized foes of, consecutively, the Oakland A’s, New York Yankees and Los Angeles Angels, enroute to 563 career home runs and a Hall of Fame spot despite what seemed like a lot of whiffs. In retrospect, though, Reggie was quite restrained at the plate, striking out 26% of the time, just a jot higher than today’s “everybody” average, and his lifetime BA of .262 is about 20 points higher than today’s.

               A couple of current players stand out as exemplars of the all-or-nothing ethos. One is Joey Gallo. A bearded giant, standing a listed 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds, he has made a living in baseball despite a career .198 batting average over nine seasons (2015 to the present) with the San Francisco Giants, Milwaukee Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers and, now, the Minnesota Twins. He’s consistent in that regard, not hitting more than a full-season .200 since 2019. He stood at .183 for ’23 at the All-Star Game break.

               Gallo has power, though, with 192 home runs to his credit. He’s at times been a part-time player, so that figure might not be overly impressive, but it works out to a robust 38 homers a season on a 162-game basis. But the other side of his weighted ledger is equally wowing—228 strikeouts a year. It’s cold enough in Minny without him fanning the breezes.

               Based on those numbers Gallo would get the “new guy” award, but he loses out because he’s a good outfielder, having won Gold Gloves with the 2020 and ’21 Twins. The other fellow I have in mind can make no such claim. He’s Kyle Schwarber of the Philadelphia Phillies. After being drafted No. 4 in 2014 by the Chicago Cubs, he came up in ‘15 as a catcher, his primary position at Indiana U. When it quickly became apparent that wouldn’t work in the Bigs he was tried at first base and left and right fields, with similar results. He now splits his time between designated hitter and left field, the position where he can do the least harm afield. He can catch a routine fly, and isn’t bad coming in on balls, but is slow afoot and lost when one heads over his head. One thinks he ought to wear his batting helmet out there.

               At the plate is where he earns his keep, a left-handed hitter cutting a Ruthian figure at a thick-middled 6-feet tall and 230 pounds.  His .228 lifetime BA isn’t terrible by current standards but it’s headed south, reaching just .184 so far this season. His home run totals are just fine, though, numbering 221 to date and working out to a round 40 per 162-game average, which in the eyes of his employers over-balances his strikeout rate of 185.

               Unlike most one-dimensional players, Schwarber has done well in the game’s honors department, winning All-Star Game places in 2021 and ’22 and a starting spot on the U.S. team that was runnerup (to Japan) in last year’s World Baseball Classic. He won a World Series ring with the 2016 Cubs and helped the Phillies to the 2022 Series. He’s being paid a reported $20 million this year and is on the books for the same figure in 2024 and ’25, not bad for a fellow of 30.

Steve Jobs could have had Schwarber in mind when he said “Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.”

 The trick, of course, is to find the right thing.

              

                

                

KNUCKLEBALL PRINCESS

 

               I’m retired and, thus, have time to spare. I fill it partly by surfing the internet for interesting stories. I found one the other day on the MLB.com website. Its headline read “Knuckleball Princess.” Couldn’t pass up that one, huh?

               It turned out that the headline was out of date. The story’s subject, Eri Yoshida, is a Japanese woman of 31 years who as a 16-year-old became the first member of her sex to play professional baseball in her homeland.  The “princess” label was appropriate then but not so much 15 years later. But as they say in the newsbiz, if you have a good line you use it every once in a while.

               What was immediately newsy about Ms. Yoshida is that she had taken her act to the U.S. by appearing in something called the Empire Professional Baseball League, a minor league unaffiliated with Major League Baseball that has five teams based in upstate New York, one of which is called the Japanese Islanders. That’s despite the fact that all but six of that team’s rostered players appear to be Americans. The “whys” of those last couple of things are illusive; my attempts at elucidation failed. But I’m satisfied the EPBL is real, so this piece can continue.

               The New York gig represents a comeback of sorts for the woman, a 5-foot-1, 115-pound right-hander with a knuckleball speciality. She learned the pitch in her Yokohama hometown at age 14 from a TV show on Tim Wakefield, who rode the delivery to a 200-win career that spanned 19 MLB seasons (1992-2011), 17 of them with the Boston Red Sox.

She’d pitched in a men’s U.S. minor league before, beginning in 2010 as a dewy eyed 18-year-old with the Chico Outlaws of the California-based Golden Baseball League, also unaffiliated. Her three seasons with that club were interesting, to say the least. It reportedly had high points, including a four-inning stint in which she surrendered but one hit. But if she could be good she also could be horrid, giving up a total of 81 hits, 57 walks and 28 hit-batsmen over 78 innings, with a 7.62 earned-run average. Back to the drawing board she went, pitching for and coaching Japanese women’s teams. Still, she says she has “a dream in [her] heart” to succeed among men in the land of baseball’s birth, so she’s trying again.

The idea of women beating men at sport’s heights has enduring appeal even though it has little grounding in fact. Sexual politics is a cause, as is our love of underdogs of all sorts.  Exceptions are eagerly seized upon-- in 2014 Mo’ne Davis, a 13-year-old girl playing on a Philadelphia team, pitched a shutout in the Little League World Series, busting 70 mph fastballs past bewildered boys. The crowd went wild, and Sports Illustrated put her on a cover, along with a story that revealed her ambition to star in either MLB or the NBA.

But while girls usually mature (i.e., go through puberty) earlier than boys, and in the Little League-eligibility ages of 11 through 13 often are taller and heavier, boys mostly have passed them by the mid-teens and by adulthood have a sizable edge in “lean body mass” (i.e., muscle). That’s the basis of male athletic superiority.

Plenty of women can beat plenty of men in plenty of sports, but at the elite level in which both sexes compete in the same events over the same courses (e.g., track and field and swimming), men’s records are about 15% better than women’s, across the board. That’s also about the difference in average driving distance on the PGA and LPGA tours, which is why the women pros compete on shorter courses than do the men. Yes¸ 29-year-old Billie Jean King beat 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in their hyped Battle of the Sexes in 1973, but a truer tennis test came 19 years later when Jimmy Connors, then aged 40, handily beat 35-year-old Martina Navratilova despite getting only one serve per point in his service games and letting Martina hit into the doubles’ alleys.   

 That said, however, Ms. Yoshida’s continuing experiment bears notice. If a woman ever does play in baseball at a high level it well might be as a knuckleball pitcher, whose soft, no-spin offerings depend on unpredictable air currents for their motion. The delivery is as much an intellectual exercise as a physical one, something that’s rare in sports. It’s hard to hit but not hard to throw; the trick is getting it around the plate consistently. Jocks of both sexes are take-charge types, out to impose their wills on foes. The k-ball requires just the opposite.

Pat Jordan, a pitcher turned writer, explained it best is his excellent autobiography “A False Spring.” He wrote, “A knuckleball pitcher has no control over the peregrinations of the ball. To be successful he [or, uh, she] must first recognize this fact and decide that his destiny lies only with the pitch, and throw it consistently no matter what.”

Getting stats from the obscure Empire League ain’t easy, but early returns on Ms. Yoshida there were not great. In her first three innings she gave up five hits, four walks and two hit-batsmen, and seven earned runs.

 It might help if she were bigger than 5-1, 115. I can think of no man that size who made a splash in the game (“Wee” Willie Keeler stood 5-4 and weighed 140). She’s just 31, though, and that’s young for a knuckleballer. Hall of Famer Phil Niekro, the model for the type, pitched until he was 48 and was just getting started at her age. You go, girl!  

And oh yes, at last sighting Mo’ne Davis was an infielder on the women’s softball team at Hampton U., in Virginia.