OLYMPICS 'SI,' IOC 'NO'

 

               Let me say from the beginning that I like the Olympics. Indeed, I’m a big fan, having covered eight of them (Summer Games in Los Angeles, Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney; Winter Games at Calgary, Albertville and Lillehammer), and rank the experiences among my most memorable.  For color, excitement and quality of athletic performance they can’t be surpassed. Many a grizzled pro has been touched by the Olympic aura and known to shed a tear on a medals platform.

               What I don’t like is the International Olympic Committee, which puts together the events.  It’s a self-appointed, self-perpetuating body that’s responsible only to itself, and a bunch of boodlers to boot. Its allegiance isn’t to the athletes or to sport in general but to itself—it’s perks, profits and whatever it can plunder. The world would be better off without it.

               For proof one need look no further than Olympiad XXXII (don’t you love those Roman numerals?), set to begin next Friday (July 23) in Tokyo. Already delayed for a year, it’s an Olympics that few really want, proceeding amidst a covid pandemic that has reached crisis proportions in its host country. Foreign visitors have been barred and domestic attendance sharply curtailed. Competitors must be masked and observe social distancing when they aren’t on their fields of play, even among their teammates. They’ve been asked to show up, perform and get out, with mingling or loitering not encouraged. So much for the international amity the Games are supposed to promote.

 Spectators must be masked throughout their visits. No cheering or shouting will be permitted, although one no knows how those edicts will be enforced. Be advised, though, that prime game seats will be filled by the VIP throng that always accompanies the Games— IOC functionaries, sports’ federation bureaucrats and sponsors and their pals. It’s estimated they’ll be more numerous than the 11,500 or so men and women who will compete. There’s no room for athletes’ families but plenty for them, and in Tokyo’s best hotels. The latter perk is ever the case.

The opposition to these Games has been most pronounced in Japan, a wealthy country with a disciplined population but one that was slow to react to the pandemic. Distribution of vaccines was hindered by the government’s refusal to accept international efficacy tests, insisting instead on ones involving only Japanese, and at first it allowed only physicians and nurses to administer the shots. Vaccines finally are widely available but the national vaccination rate of less than 20% lags well behind that of other developed lands, and hospitalizations have risen sharply of late. Ashai Shimbun, the country’s leading newspaper, last month called for the Games to be canceled on public-safety grounds. So did the Toyko Medical Practitioners’ Association.

Local opposition also has an economic basis. Like just about every recent Summer Games Tokyo’s costs far exceeded expectations, reportedly about doubling its $15 billion initial budget. The IOC put up only $1.5 billion, leaving the Japanese government and private interests holding the bag, and the ban on most foreign visitors rules out much recapture through tourism spending.   By contrast, the IOC makes most of its income from the awarded-in-advance sale of TV rights—coming to about $4 billion this time around—and will make out fine if the Games go off on schedule.

IOC members also do all right in the pocket-stuffing department, with bribery instances and allegations attending every recent Games, usually involving the awarding of the host cities. In this one, the chairman of the Tokyo Organization Committee had to resign when a French investigation showed his group made a $2 million payment to a firm run by the son of a prominent IOC member. And that’s just the one that came to light. “Swag bags” at IOC functions are famous for their opulence. No IOC member ever exited an airliner from the rear, it’s said.

It’s no wonder, then, that the “show must go on” mentality that’s long animated the Games also has obtained in this one. Hey, the show went on in Munich in 1972 after terrorists kidnapped and killed 11 Israeli athletes, and merely hiccuped in Atlanta in 1996 after a bomb blast in an outdoor evening concert in Olympic Plaza killed two people and injured more than 100. What’s a little flu compared to that?

The same ethos governs the way Olympic competitions are run. Putin’s Russia made a farce of the 2014 Winter Games it hosted in Sochi by sending out a battalion of doped-up athletes to dominate the medals board. Then it tried to hide its misdeeds with a B-Movie scheme to swap “clean” urine for dirty by passing the samples through a hole in the wall of the Games’ testing lab. It later doubled down on that offense by hindering efforts of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to investigate it.

 A few sports federations, including the one governing track and field, booted the Russians from their events, but the harshest penalty the IOC could muster was to prohibit the Russian flag and anthem from its parades and victory stands.  Russian athletes competed In Rio in 2016 under those terms and will again in Tokyo under the supposedly neutral banner of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC).  Better for business if you keep ‘em in, don’t you know?

Some sports, such as basketball, ice hockey, soccer, skiing, boxing and tennis, are so thoroughly international they don’t need the Olympic platform.  Most of the others stage annual world championships whose titles equal Olympic gold in achievement if not acclaim.  If they seek a bigger stage those activities could combine their events every four years and sell a TV package.

But yeah¸ I know, that probably ain’t gonna happen, so we must hold our noses to enjoy the Games. I suppose it’s possible for the IOC to reform itself, but its scam is too successful for that. Such is life.

   

 

 

NEWS & VIEWS

 

 

NEWS:  A noted track athlete was suspended when a performance-enhancing drug was found in her system. She blamed it on a burrito.

VIEWS: Ay, caramba!

Shelby Houlihan, who holds the American women’s records in the 1,500- and 5,000-meter runs, last month was handed a four-year competitive ban when she tested positive for nandrolone, a hairy-chested steroid favored by weightlifters, after a December race. It eliminated her from contention for this year’s Olympics.

Houlihan reacted with dismay and made a list of everything she’d eaten during the week before the test. She said the likely culprit was a burrito she’d purchased at a food truck near her Beaverton, Oregon, home that might have contained pork raised in Mexico. Some Mexican meat producers are said to use steroids to beef up their animals.

Her contention, rejected by a sports court, caused many eyes to roll, but it had been tried before, and successfully. In 2015 Duane Brown, an offensive tackle for the Houston Texans of the National Football League, beat a 10-game league drugs rap when he produced restaurant receipts indicating he’d scarfed at least 10 hamburgers and two steaks during a pre-test trip to Mexico. Apparently, size counts in such matters.

Further, the burrito defense isn’t the most unlikely ever offered. In 2011 several members of the North Korean women’s national soccer team said their positive pre-Olympic tests stemmed from a native deer-musk remedy they’d taken after being struck by lightning.  American bicyclist Tyler Hamilton said his elevated testosterone level was due to his having absorbed a “vanished twin” into his body in utero.

American sprinter Dennis Mitchell claimed his 1998 ban stemmed from his having had sex with his wife four times the night before the positive drug test. “It was her birthday,” he explained. Another American sprinter, Lashawn Merritt, made an opposite claim, saying he’d taken a penis-enhancing product called ExtenZe just before his 2010 test. “Any penalty I have received will not overshadow the embarrassment and humiliation I feel,” he lamented.

NEWS: Major League Baseball announces a crackdown on pitchers’ use of sticky substances on baseballs.

VIEW: Get a grip!

               Finding itself in an era of pitcher domination, MLB last week instituted 10-game suspensions for pitchers found to be doctoring balls, and said it would actively enforce the ruling. The backdrop to the declaration is several years of declining batting averages and soaring strikeout rates. Not long ago a batting average of .230 and a 100-a-year strikeout pace gave position players tickets to the minors. Today such stats are, um, average.

               Another impetus for the move is the newish baseball stat of “spin rate”, which measures a delivery’s rotations and is much on the lips of the game’s TV and radio announcers. High spin rates allow pitches to better retain their velocity and “break” more sharply. Having a better grip on the ball helps with that. A lot.

               Doctored baseballs go back to the game’s earliest days, with enforcement against them waxing and waning over the years. One notable (and confessed) diamond physician, Gaylord Perry, played hide and seek with the umps over a 21-year career (1962-83) that resulted in 314 wins and a Hall of Fame berth. Apparently, today’s pitchers haven’t needed to be as creative as Perry in fashioning their potions; a browse of the internet reveals that commercial products with names like Spin It, Spider Tack and Gorilla Gold are readily available to stickum seekers.

               The first week of the ban created some interesting displays; Oakland A’s pitcher Sergio Romo dropped (and quickly raised) his pants when approached by umps for an on-the-mound inspection. The first pitcher to be ejected was the Seattle Mariners’ Hector Santiago, in a game last Sunday. He squawked loudly, claiming his only stick-aid was sweat mixed with legal resin.  Expect to hear that defense repeated in days to come amid much sturm und drang.

NEWS: Several pro-team athletes say “no” to covid vaccines.

               VIEWS: Just say “yes.”

               While our professional sports are joyfully kicking the traces of about a year and a half of restrictions caused by the covid virus, rearguard actions are being waged. Among the recalcitrant are Anthony Rizzo and Jason Heyward of the Chicago Cubs. Due to their stances and those of unnamed others, the Cubs say they are unable to reach the 85% vaxxed mark for all personnel MLB has set to allow teams to return all their activities to pre-covid “normals.” As of the last official pronouncement, eight of the majors’ 30 teams had fallen short.

               Rizzo and Heyward are veteran players and reputed clubhouse leaders of their team. Both said they weren’t anti-vax but want to “see more data” before receiving their jabs, although neither specified what that data might be. Their choices will sit heavily on their teammates, who must continue to observe masking and social-distancing protocols in their dugouts, weight and locker rooms and medical and training facilities until the 85% cutoff is met.

               Yeah, I know, not getting vaxxed has become a “freedom” issue with some, although that particular freedom amounts to a willingness to catch and pass on a potentially fatal illness that continues to spread. And yeah, big-time jocks have the same right of expression as the rest of us, whether or not we applaud what they say. But the prominence and wealth their positions command do, or should, carry with them greater-than-usual responsibility, making them role models even if they don’t wish it. They should ask themselves how they’d like to live in a world that follows their examples.             

BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER...AND MORE FRAGILE

 

               It’s universally accepted that today’s American professional baseball players are bigger, stronger and faster than those of any previous era. Richer, too. Much richer.

               But it’s now becoming clear that another adjective should be added to those above. It’s “more fragile.” That is to say they are getting injured at a greater rate than any time in the measurable past, and the situation is getting worse.

               Due to Covid last season was a short one of 60 games, and played after an unprecedented two months’ pause, so comparisons with that season would be misleading. But in the season that began with spring training in late February, and through the first two months of the regular season, the number of injuries that resulted in Injury List stints increased to about 350, 31% over the same 2019 period.

 Pitchers accounted for most of that figure, but the sort of “soft-tissue” injuries (hamstring, groin, oblique or calf-muscle strains or tears) position players usually suffer also rose, more than doubling the 2019 level.  With the presence of names like Justin Verlander, Chris Sale, Corey Kluber, Mike Trout, George Springer and Corey Seager, you could put together a pretty fair All-Star team from the current IL. At just about every point of the season at least a half-dozen of the 30 MLB teams have had a dozen or more players in sick bay at any one time, or about one-third of their 40-man rosters.

Some in baseball attribute the rise to a bounce from the herky-jerky 2020 season, but the trend continues what’s been happening in the Major Leagues for quite a while. Definitions and reporting accuracy have changed over time, but MDEdge, a medical website, has charted a steady annual rise in baseball injuries dating back to 1974. One of its papers counted 8,357 IL designations between 1998 and 2015, or close to 500 a year.

Ironically, much of the increase stems from advances in medical treatment. Exhibit A is the so-called Tommy John surgery, in which a ligament from another bodily part (or from a cadaver) replaces a torn ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) that binds the body’s elbow bones. It’s named not for the physician who perfected it (Dr. Frank Jobe) but for an early recipient. The left-handed John got the surgery in 1974, 11 years into his career, sat out that year and the next, and returned to add 164 wins to what would be a 288-win, 26-year stand (1963-89).  His success became living testimony for the procedure.

Before the surgery came along, pitchers with severe “sore arms” were flushed from the game, never to return. Sandy Koufax (1955-66) was a prime example. Now, with the operation at about a 90% success rate, they’re back after about a season and a half. It’s estimated that about one-third off all current MLB pitchers have had it, some more than once.

UCL injuries stem partly from the greater elbow strain required to achieve today’s hyper-fast deliveries (the average fastball last year measured 94 mph against 92.7 in 2015) and from cumulative overuse. The latter phenomenon begins in childhood, where talented youngsters are identified early and encouraged by ambitious parents and coaches to concentrate on a single sport and position.

 Back in the day kids played the sport in season, utilizing (and resting) a variety of muscles. Today, between Little League, age-group , school  and “traveling” teams, baseball prospects can play as many as 70 organized games a year before turning 18, plus long and intense practice sessions. Tommy John himself (he’s 78) is a bit of a nut, having spoken out against the covid vaccine from the hospital bed from which he was recovering from the illness, but he made plenty of sense when he declared against too-early sports specialization.

The position-player equivalents to pitchers’ elbow ligaments are the oblique muscles, which stretch across the abdominal cavity and control trunk flexion and rotation.  Maybe it’s me but I don’t recall hearing much about them until a few years ago. Now they are a major injury category, their rise corresponding to the “swing for the fences” mentality of today’s batsmen. Oblique strains don’t match other soft-tissue injuries in frequency but they typically take longer to heal, with IL times often stretching into months. There were 22 of them in the Majors through May, up from 12 in 2019.

The most common muscle injuries in baseball are hamstring, groin and calf sprains. These have always been part of baseball, a consequence of the game’s stop-and-start nature that has players running full tilt after sometimes-long periods of idleness.   Supposedly, these are controllable through exercise, but they continue to rise despite advances in exercise technique.

Part of this problem, I think, is that smart as their trainers might be they don’t teach ballplayers to exercise properly. For instance, a player in the on-deck circle will swing a weighted bat to prepare his arms and shoulders to hit but won’t stretch his legs to prepare to run as soon as he makes contact. Similarly, infielders and outfielders play catch before the start of each inning when, really, they are most vulnerable from the waist down after bench-sitting. Players today look a lot better in their underwear than those of 20 years ago, but they’d benefit from more attention to flexibility and less to muscle.

By me, though, the major cause of the injury surge is the fact that the wealthy ballplayer of today is a jock 24/7 and 365/365, and probably is working out somewhere when he isn’t playing. There’s such a thing as being in too-good shape, especially among adherents to the “no pain, no gain” school of exercise.

Like in other highly lucrative sports, competition for positions and roster spots in baseball is extreme, and players looking to rise, or who feel others nipping at their heels, believe that one more rep at whatever they’re doing will give them an edge. It’s hard to prove, but I think that too often that's what lands them on the IL.  In brief, they need to be protected against themselves.

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

THE FIX IS OUT

 

               The National Basketball Association playoffs are under way and the New York Knicks are in them. That means rumors are aswirl that they are fixed for them to win. There always are.

What’s that you say? The Knicks didn’t make the playoffs in the previous seven seasons and haven’t won a league championship since 1973, a 48-year span that is assuming Cubsian dimensions?  Nate McMillan, coach of the Knicks’ first-round opponent Atlanta Hawks, wasn’t about to let such things get in his way when before the series began he said “there’s going to be a lot of [referees’] calls that probably won’t go our way.”

The whispers no doubt will continue despite the fact the Hawks are off to a three-games-to-one lead in the best-of-seven series.  I’m not given to making predictions but I feel safe saying the Knicks, which had the NBA’s eleventh-best won-lost record (41-31) during the regular season, won’t go all the way this year.

  Indeed, facts rarely stand in the way when the subject of “fixed” games arises in sports, as it does with the least prompting. That may be particularly true these days, when all sorts of conspiracy theories abound. New York teams usually are at the center of them because the city is the nation’s largest, with the most television sets, and it stands to reason that the success of its teams means higher TV ratings, more ad revenues for the airing networks and, ultimately, larger rights fees for the leagues involved. There’s no simpler equation.

And there’s no simpler statement of fact that when it comes to the integrity of our sports’ outcomes the major American professional leagues are second to none. We don’t know everything that’s happened behind the scenes in the many thousands of games those entities have staged, but it requires a deep study of history to find solid examples to the contrary.

 To find one in baseball you have to go back more than a century to the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox confessed to “throwing” the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Pete Rose bet on games as a player and manager but never was accused of trying to fix one. The National Football League’s skirts have been clean since a couple of New York Giants entertained bribe offers to lose to the Chicago Bears in the 1946 title game (one of them, quarterback Frank Filchock, played anyway and threw a touchdown pass in the 24-14 Bears’ win), and the National Hockey League’s slate is marred of late by only the 2006 revelation that several players and coaches (including the great Wayne Gretzky) were involved in a betting ring but one that put its money on football games, not hockey.

Big-league athletes today are considered conspiracy-proof because they make too much money to risk their careers and freedoms to further one. Thus, it was no surprise that the splashiest U.S. sports-betting scandal of recent years concerned an NBA referee. In 2007 Tim Donaghy, a 13-year veteran in the league, was convicted of shaving points and otherwise aiding gambler-confederates during the last two seasons of his tenure. He served a 15-month prison term. A conspiracy theorist himself, Donaghy accused league officials of asking refs to steer games in certain ways, but produced no evidence to support that claim.

Horse racing is the sport most-often linked to fixes in the public mind, but most race-altering schemes involve furtive drug use rather than the jockey-conspiracies of popular imagination. Further, animals being animals, even those aren’t sure to succeed. Sam “The Genius” Lewin, the racing lifer and legendary bettor with whom I wrote a 1968 (gasp!) how-to-book, liked to tell about being a technical adviser for a racing movie in which a scripted race had to be run a half-dozen times before the right horse won.

College athletes don’t get paid by check, and then usually not much, so it should be no surprise that most American “fix” episodes concern them. The New York-based 1947-50 point-shaving scandals encompassing some 30 college-basketball players is the granddaddy of the genre, and more-recent schemes have involved basketball or football players at Northwestern U., Tulane, Boston U. and the U. of Toledo, among other schools. Northwestern footballer Dennis Lundy admitted to intentionally fumbling in a 1994 game against Iowa, and NU basketballers Kenneth Lee and Dewey Williams said they shaved points in several 1995 games. Interestingly, all three got off with one-month jail terms and probation. Other recent college-game fixers were treated similarly, indicating that the courts don’t find such behavior especially heinous.

To find evidence of multiple fixes one must look abroad to soccer and international tennis, which Betfair, the English bookmaking firm, rank with horse racing as the world’s three most-bet-upon sports. Most soccer betting schemes have involved low-level leagues, but the big boys also can play; the Italian world-power Juventus team had its 2005 and 2006 Serie A titles stripped away in a gambling scandal the involved its top management.

Tennis hardly is noticed in the U.S. outside the four “Grand Slam” tournaments, but among European and Asian plungers it’s a much-bigger deal, with minor-league tournaments galore and thousands of players scratching to earn a living. With only one player on each side of the net in singles it’s a fixer’s ideal, and on-line bets can be made on individual points, games and sets as well as matches, if you can believe it.

Tennis blogger Ben Rothenburg has written that there’s an informal pay scale for finaglers in the minor leagues, starting at $300 to $500 for service breaks, $1,000 to $2,000 for sets and $2,000 to $3,000 for matches. The International Tennis Federation, the sport’s governing body, took note of the bad press match dumping was generating by setting up a Tennis Integrity Unit to police that end of the sport. In 2019, its first full year of operation, the group cited 26 players for violations and issued lifetime bans against the Egyptian brothers Youssef and Karim Hassan.

 Moral of the story: you bet on tennis at your peril. But, then, who bets on tennis?

 

 

 

 

 

THE "GEE" LEAGUE

 

               You’ve probably never heard of Jalen Green or Emoni Bates, but chances are you will sometime soon. Green is a 6-foot-5 wing player out of Napa, California, who was ranked by some observers as the best basketball player to come out of a U.S. high school last year. Bates, from Ypsilanti, Michigan, is a 6-foot-8 forward who was similarly regarded in this year’s senior class.

               As you might expect, both young men were intensively recruited by institutions of higher learning even though neither was expected to stick around in college for more than a year as they turned 19, the current minimum age for a National Basketball Association contract. That would have placed them in the notorious “one and done” category that really is a misnomer because kids thusly dubbed almost always leave school after completing only a semester, or half-year, in academe. Green was said to be leaning toward Kentucky as his landing place, Bates had declared for Michigan State.

               But Green never graced a college classroom with his presence and neither will Bates because both signed up with the G League, the NBA’s minor-league affiliate. That means they will be paid across the table rather than under it as they make their final preparations for their game’s Bigs. They will have played more games than they would have as collegians and, mostly, against better opponents or, at least, older ones, and under NBA rules with coaches schooled in NBA tactics and techniques.

 Green averaged about 18 points a game with the G League’s Ignite team based in Walnut Creek, California, in the just-concluded season that was truncated by the pandemic. The team’s coach was Brian Shaw, the ex-head coach of the big-league Denver Nuggets. Green is a sure-fire first-round choice in the NBA’s July draft, probably a lottery pick. Bates, touted by some as a best-in-10-years prospect, is expected to follow the same path.

 The emergence of the G League has been basketball’s most significant development of the current century, albeit one that’s largely gone unnoticed. In its evolved form it offers to make honest men of kids whose aims in life have little to do with formal education and who take up college space that might otherwise be filled by actual students.

 The G-League option won’t stop the ones-and-dones even after the NBA returns its entry age to 18, as it’s expected to do; that path still will be available to players not willing to try their luck in the pros at such a tender age.  But, importantly, it will smooth the path to college for athletes who, wisely, can look past their noses and see their skills as a passport to the education that will lead to a more fulfilling and prosperous life. Further, having more players willing to stick around for the full four years would be a boon to the college game.

The league was started by the NBA in 2001, mostly as a place to park superfluous players who might someday be worth a call-up. It was called the National Basketball Developmental League then, and had eight teams. In 2005 it shortened the name to the NBA Developmental League and officially added the nickname “D League.”  Reasoning again that shorter is better, in 2017 it renamed it the NBA G League, the “G” standing for the sports drink Gatorade, which had stepped in as a sponsor.

In 2019 it had 29 twelve-man teams playing a 50-game, November-through-March schedule in places like Canton, Ohio, White Plains, New York, and Birmingham, Alabama. Each NBA team save two now has a G League affiliate, the exceptions being the Phoenix Suns and Portland Trailblazers, which can stash some of their fringe players with other clubs. The 2020-21 season was reduced to 18 teams and 15 games by the pandemic and played under the same sort of “bubble” conditions the big teams used.  A 50-game card and full team participation is expected to be resumed next season.  TV coverage will come via the ESPN and NBA channels, either streamed or on cable.

Players fit into a number of categories besides teenaged whizzes. These include ones who were drafted but not signed to big-league contracts, ones recently waived by NBA teams but seeking a way back, foreign prospects, tryout-camp winners and older Americans returning to the U.S. after playing in foreign pro leagues. A few are so-called “two-way” players under contract to both leagues who can be called up or back without a limit on times.

Players sign contracts with the league instead of with individual teams. The base annual salary is $35,000 plus housing, insurance coverage and $100 a month in Lyft tickets. The top salary, which Jalen Green reportedly earned and Emoni Bates reportedly will, has climbed to $125,000, and players are free to corral whatever outside income they can. Players also have free access to on-line college courses at Arizona State University, which they can take during or between seasons. In all, it’s not bad recompense for semi-skilled labor.

The roster of players who have made the NBA after stints in the G League or its predecessors is long. It includes Khris Middleton of the Milwaukee Bucks, Pascal Siakam of the Toronto Raptors and Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz, all of whom have earned NBA All-Star Game selection and the monster salaries that go with such honors. Middleton’s contract this season reportedly is worth $33 million, Siakam’s $29 million and Gobert’s $26.5 million.  There’s nothing minor league about those figures.

 

  

 

 

THE SLUMP BUG

 

               When the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series, ending a 108-year drought, I and, I’m sure, many other fans of the team swore to never again bemoan the unfairness of the baseball gods. We’d got what we’d prayed for and were content to move on after a seventh-game WS win that left us breathless. Besides, our bellyaching had long since turned off any of our friends who didn’t share our allegiance and there was no sense returning there.

               But such pledges come with a statute of limitations of undefined length, and for me it lasted five years. When the 2021 team opened its season with a collective .166 batting average over its first 13 games my eyes crossed, my mouth gaped and I uttered a scream of disbelief. How could a lineup that included the core of the ’16 champs be so ineffective for so long, I wondered.  Could their locker room be invaded by a slump bug more potent than covid 19?

               Being a curious sort I set out to investigate that possibility, and discovered research that indicated that, yes, hitting and, therefore, not hitting both can be contagious. There are, it seems, bodies in our brains called “mirror neurons” that cause us to perform actions related to things we have recently witnessed, for good or ill.  Witness a base hit and you’re more likely to get one yourself, studies show. Ditto for the opposite.

               Details later, but first let me assure you that I wasn’t being alarmist in my concern over the Cubs’ early ineffectualness. People who monitor such things report that their batting average through game 13 was the second worst ever, topped (bottomed?) only by the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who began their season 1-12 in the won-lost column (miraculously, the Cubs went 5-8 during their skein).

 Further, the ’03 Tigers were a rag-tag lot that would go on to post 119 losses (to 43 wins) for the season, tying the 1962 New York Mets for the most in MLB history, while the current Cubs are star-studded with a four-man core of Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez and Willson Contreras that can boast 10 All-Star Game appearances among them.  All four of those worthies are in their athletic primes, aged 28 through 31 years, and three of them (all but Contreras) are in their final seasons before being eligible for free-agency, usually a potent motivator. On April 17, though, only Contreras was within 50 points of his career batting average.

Worse was a recent team history in which group slumps were a feature, ending promising pennant runs. The 2018 team went into the playoffs off a 95-win regular season only to fall to the Milwaukee Brewers by a 3-1 score in a divisional tie-breaker and then lose to the Colorado Rockies, 2-1 in 13 innings, in a play-in round game. The team’s two-game totals were two runs and nine hits in 22 innings. Both contests, by the way, were played in home Wrigley Field.

Pretty much the same thing happened last season after the division-winning Cubs fell to the Miami Marlins by scores of 5-1 and 2-0 in the first playoff round, also at Wrigley. In their last four post-season games the Cubs have totaled only three runs and 18 hits, a slump by any definition.

Streaks are part of all sports, all the time, of course. Certain baseball batters have the reputation for being “streaky,” but, in fact, they all are, with good and bad games sprinkled unevenly through their seasons. Relatedly, any gambler can tell you he does not win or lose on an even basis but has “up” days in which wins seem to come by accident and others in which they do not come at all. At bat or betting window psychology certainly plays a part in this; winning breeds a positive, self-confident mindset while losing causes one to doubt one’s abilities and sabotages the most-sound plans.

A key physical element in learning any sport is “muscle memory,” the groove formed by repetitively performing a motion, such as a golf or tennis swing. That jibes with something called “action induction,” the tendency to imitate an action that has just been observed. A well-known example is seeing someone yawn and then yawning yourself. A good warm up for a golf or tennis game is to spend a few minutes watching a good player hit balls properly. A history of swinging poorly or watching faulty swings can have an opposite effect, and the more ingrained a bad habit becomes the harder it is to change. That’s why it’s best to get a kid some lessons before he or she takes up a sport.

               A web search turned up on several pages the unattributed info that a baseball hitter is more than 50% more likely to get a hit right after he’s just seen two teammates hit safely than after watching the two make outs. In one oft-noted university study a group of college-age baseball players, 12 varsity players and 12 recreational ones, were shown examples of batters getting and not getting hits, and then fed pitching machine deliveries to swing at. Both groups had better success after watching the positive examples than after the negative ones.

The question of whether seasoned players are affected by such things was answered in the affirmative; the varsity group followed the positive examples better than the less-experience one. For both groups, the effects of the filmed examples waned with time, with the more-immediate ones the most potent.

The contagion theory was affirmed by the Cubs after their dismal first-13; in their next six games they scored 13 or more runs three times, raising their team batting average. It’s still poor, though, .213 on Friday. After an off-season in which they just about white-flagged it by trading away their best pitcher, Yu Darvish, for a passel of pallid prospects, they’re bumping around under .500 with no swift turnaround in sight.

 As noted, Bryant, Rizzo and Baez all will be free to move come 2022 and the team can’t/won’t pay them all, so decisions loom. Maybe a thoroughgoing roster change might bring in a less-suggestible crew.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              

JUST WIN, BABY

 

               The NCAA Final Four weekend is about kids playing basketball, of course, but it also serves another function. It’s an annual, though informal, coaches’ convention, where college hoops mentors from around the country gather to network and gossip, the latter talk centering on what might be available where in the game’s always-lively job market.  A colleague once remarked to me that every sportswriter in America was on the lookout for a better job. The same is true of coaches, and then some.

               The celebrities of the conclave are the coaches whose teams are boogying in the “big dance,” or who have otherwise distinguished themselves. Coaches are among the most suggestible of people, always eager to put to use anything that might add a W” or other filip to their resumes. The saw “nothing succeeds like success” is nowhere more applicable than in their profession.

               The lessons of what counts or doesn’t in the scramble up the greasy pole were rarely more evident than at the just-ended get together in Indianapolis. Exhibit A was Kelvin Sampson, whose University of Houston Cougars were a Final Four contestant. If you follow the sport loosely you might have been surprised to learn that Sampson still worked at the collegiate level. He’s a heckuva coach, with a long record of winning seasons, but also left a trail of slime as a result of NCAA rules violations at Oklahoma and Indiana, his previous collegiate employers. He put both those schools on probation before moving on.

               NCAA members don’t trust one another so the organization has a fat rulebook, full of petty crimes. Thus, it’s easy to dismiss some violations as nitpicking. Not so in Sampson’s case. At Oklahoma he was found to have made, um, numerous improper recruiting phone calls over a several-year period ending in 2005, 550 to be exact. That figure impressed the most jaded and earned the school a three-year spanking, which included recruiting restrictions.

               Sampson wanted no part of that so by the next year he’d fled into the waiting arms of Indiana U., a promotion by most standards. In short order there he not only repeated his depredations but also lied about them to university and NCAA investigators. In 2008 Indiana got a three-year rap and Sampson personally was tagged with a rare order that effectively barred any NCAA school from hiring him for a five-year period.  

               That made him unemployable collegiately but he landed on his feet with a number of NBA teams, whose coaches employed him as an assistant. The fraternity takes care of its own that way. His penance completed, he’s thrived at Houston, pulling down a reported $3 m yearly to guide young men there, a shining example of rehabilitation.

               That, maybe, is what the good fathers at Iona College, a Catholic institution in New Rochelle, New York, had in mind went they hired another FF-weekend celeb, Rick Pitino, as their basketball coach last year, and watched him lead the Gaels to this year’s tourney.  A peripatetic type who’s bounced between the pros and the colleges, he got in trouble at his last employer, the University of Louisville, when it was discovered that his team hired stripper/prostitutes to entertain recruits in parties at school dorms.

 A hapless assistant coach took the rap for that one but none was available when Pitino’s name came up in the “pay for play” scandal of 2018 that had the shoe company Adidas funneling money to recruits to play at schools that used their products, so out he went. In between, he’d bravely fought off a shakedown attempt from the wife of an assistant with whom he’d had an adulterous relationship.  His reported Iona salary of $1 million a year is a small fraction of what he’d made at L’ville, but it’s probably enough to get by on.

Also taking bows at the tourney was another “Adidas school” principal, Bill Self, the head basketball coach at the U. of Kansas. His latest distinction was for landing a five-year rollover contract that amounted to a lifetime pact at the school at a $7 million-plus annual salary, something about which his contemporaries can only dream. Self was taped by the FBI yakking with an Adidas functionary about payoffs to one recruit, and about the guy’s continuing help in keeping KU supplied with future NBA lottery picks. Nonetheless, he denies all.

 Sean Miller, the coach at the U. of Arizona and another figure in the long-moldering scandal, just lost his job, but unlike Self’s teams Miller’s didn’t continue to win big in the three years since the thing broke. The point has been taken, I’m sure.

Another figure of veneration for the educators was Roy Williams, who retired after 18 years as head coach at the U. of North Carolina. Williams’ tenure at Chapel Hill included eight years (2003-2011) during which the school maintained an academic shell department, called African and African-American Studies, whose main function over an 18-year period (1993-2011) was to keep UNC athletes eligible by handing out no-work credits and grades. The Drake Group, a faculty-based college-sports watchdog, called it “the mother of academic fraud violations.”

Butch Davis, UNC’s football head coach at the time, was fired when the story surfaced. Not Williams, whose teams were busily winning ACC championships and contending for national honors. He claimed total ignorance of the fraud, and over the years questions about it faded. The New York Times devoted two full columns of its national-edition sports pages to Williams’s career when he called it quits, and only one paragraph mentioned the episode.

 How does that line go: “The evil men do lives after them”?

 Well, sometimes.