Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Game 5 of the ALCS

I found myself home early today for some bi-naz so I'm going to share some live-blogging thoughts of today's elimination game!  Yay!

-Top of the fourth inning.  Lance Berkman!  Hahahaha!  Oh man.  Running a straight line into foul territory for a pop foul, he managed to slip with BOTH feet and fall down flat on his back.  "Did he hit his head?"  "Maybe it's whiplash?" the intrepid TBS forensic doctors intoned, before a commerical-break worth of research yielded this conclusion from Craig Sager: "MY SUITS BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!"  Also, "Berkman told Joe Girardi he got the wind knocked out of him."  Awesome.

-Oh look it's Brett Fucking Gardner.  I hate Brett Gardner.  He sucks but he's white, dives into first base and runs fast, so naturally he's key to the Yankees offense, along with Derek Jeter's steely gaze and Jorge Posada's inability to catch three outs in a row without 50 trips to the mound.  Brett Gardner runs fast.  That is all.  So do some horses.  GARDNER STRIKES OUT!!!  Fuck that guy.

-After the Gardner strikeout we get a shot of Lance Berkman in the dugout.  Poor guy.  Get that man a wheelchair and some chamomile!

-5-1 after a homerun from Matt Treanor but the Yankees have two on with runners in on second and third with one out.  Ron Washington decides NOT to walk Marcus Thames, even though Lance Berkman is up next and, as John Smoltz says in the booth, is a double-play candidate.  Yes.  Yes he is.  Not because he's slow, but because he'll need to run in a straight line to get to first and that's not really his thing.

-Washington comes to his sense, walks Thames.  Berkman walks up to bat slowly, falls face first onto home plate.

-Berkman flies out, Swisher tags up and scores.  Berkman jogs back to the dugout for a high-five but trips over an extra long piece of grass.

-Inning over.  Sabathia still going strong.  In the dugout.  With his nacho platter.  He's also pitching today too; only one blemish in a day otherwise full of donuts.  Har.

-First and second for the Rangers, one out.  Francoeur singles, bases loaded!  Swisher makes a "great play" to keep the ball from going to the wall, even though it bounced right in front of him and hit him in the chest.  After going 0-2 on Matt Treanor, Sabathia throws strike three but Posada blows the frame job and Treanor's still alive. 

-3-2 pitch!

-Groundout, run scores, 6-2 game.

-How are you even a minor league catcher if you have to run out to the mount all the damn time?  Stupid Posada.

-Mitch Moreland is having a ridiculous at-bat.  He fouled off a pitch so far outside the ballboy had to lean over, then another curve right at the knees, and just hit another one that would've beaned a right-handed batter.  Sabathia eventually strikes him out and ends the inning on the same pitched that Posada blew earlier, a curve that cut across the inside corner.  Posada manages not to fuck this one up and the inning is over.  Maybe Sabathia should job to home after each pitch for meetings with Posada: "Hey Fucker, catch the ball like this.  M'kay?"

-Granderson leads off with a shallow pop up to the third baseman, except this is Yankee Stadium so it goes off the wall for a double.  There are seriously highway rest-stop parking lots bigger than this Little League Yankee Stadium.

-Runners at the corners because of Derek Jeter's amazing ability to control the motion of the earth and draw a walk.

-Kinsler makes a tough pick-up to start the inning ending double-play.  Commercial!  Buy a Blackberry because only Blackberry allows you to, um, drive a cupcake maker van?

-Reader Matt wants the hockey scores, so here's the latest: Minnesota Wild Fan: 1, Rick Rypien: at least 5.

-Kerry Wood in the game now and has run up a 2-2 count without requiring multiple season-ending surgery.

-Lead-off runner aboard as Wood jumped up and just missed a high bouncer.  Both his shoulders are separated.  Dr. James Andrews readies his credit card for another territory to his personal island.

-Kerry Wood's throw is OVER EVERYTHING!  Jeff Blauser scores!

-Readers are up in arms over the lack of tsn.ca content in the liveblog.  If only there was a site that catered exclusively to the TSN and Toronto Maple Leafs audience...

-Elvis Andrus hates his team and comebacks.  Derek Jeter with a, you guess it, "brilliant play."  He caught the ball and tagged out a runner by five feet, so brilliance is now measured by a player's ability to not turn around and throw balls into center field.  Kerry Wood's last pitch was therefore also brilliant, despite being two feet outside.

-How do you get picked off second base when Josh Hamilton's at the plate with one out?  Didn't Andrus see the big graphic about how Hamilton was tied for the most single-ALCS homeruns ever with four?  It was all over the screen!

-Hamilton out, onto the seventh.  Rodriguez picks up a one out walk but not as well as Jeter would've.

-A-Rod steals second, because he is greedy.  Jeter would've done it for the team.  Speaking of his team, Marcus Thames hit the last pitch so far you wouldn't even measure it in feet. Maybe parsecs.  It was foul though, and Rodriguez jogs back to second in the richest way possible.

-Lance Berkman returns to the game!  Moonwalking up to home plate, he is the picture of confidence, poise and dexterity.   Quickly down 0-2.  That's the number of feet touching the ground; the number of balls and strikes is uninteresting.

-Berkman strikes out, teammates run out and carry him to the dugout.  All but Mark Texeira, who sits in the dugout and shakes his head, laughing quietly at the thought of a grown man, a professional world-class athlete, unable to run in a straight line without hurting himself.

-A quick top of the eighth, ended by A-Rod's diving catch and accurate throw to get Ian Kinsler.  Yankee fans boo and hold up signs to bring back Scott Brosius.

-If the Yankees hold on, and they absolutely will with only a half inning left and the Yankees still with Rivera in the holster, their pitching is in decent shape going back to Texas.  Phillip Hughes will go Game 6 and Andy Pettite goes Game 7.  The Rangers will send out Colby Lewis in Game 6, so they have the edge there, and of course anytime you've got Andy Pettite pitching a Game 7 on normal rest you've got to like your chances.*

-Curtis Granderson continues to make weak contact with the ball.  This time he manages to feebly loop a ball into shallow right field for an easy out.  EXCEPT this is Little League Yankee Stadium, so it's a line drive homerun.  You could spit it over the fence from home plate.

-Derek Jeter continues to make incredible plays.  "That's what makes Jeter, Jeter."  Yes.  THIS is what makes Jeter, Jeter:  Making awful contact on a pitch you just plain misjudged, rolling it 40 feet into a lucky dead spot in the infield, and smiling like a motherfucker over your good luck.

*Unless the other team is starting a cyborg, built from Walter Johnson's blood mixed with a liquid metal compound, sent back through time for the sole purpose of making people believe in a future worth saving through his pitching skills alone.

-Sportsnet Update!  Rick Rypien has been suspended indefinately pending a hearing from the NHL about jumping up and grabbing a fan against the Wild last night.  Everyone knows this so this isn't really news.  But what IS news... is what Francois Beauchemin and Ron Wilson think about it!  SPOILER ALERT: Nothing interesting.

-Joe Girardi decides that this is the last game of the series and he does NOT want Joba Chamberlain fucking up a five run lead.  Mariano Rivera and his one pitch are the greatest weapon a manager can summon against a team looking for a six run inning.  Except, of course, for literally any other pitcher in the majors, and most AAA pitchers too.

-The Yankees win!  No they don't!  That pitch was a foot outside!  Just because a catcher catches a pitch without moving his glove doesn't mean it's automatically a strike.  Posada was so far outside he was drinking Gatorade from the dugout.

-Moreland singles to left, the tying run is now six batters away.  Andrus fouls out to Berkman though, who crawls his way toward the stands to make the catch.  No more of that "running" for me!

-And that'll do.  Game 6 coming up from Texas!  Go Not Yankees!  The Not Yankees have always been my favorite team, ever since their World Series victories in 2008!

Friday, September 17, 2010

Jose Bautista vs. George Bell

In terms of power, the definitive Blue Jays' season belongs to George Bell.  In 1987 he led the league in RBI's and total bases and was named the American League MVP.  What's interesting about the 1987 MVP selection is that it's become a great example of how new statistical measures have changed the way we look at player value; Bell had 332 votes compared to Alan Trammal's 311, a pretty close race.  Side by side, the MVP outcome shows pretty clearly which feats were the most important at the time.  Bell had 47 HR's, 134 RBI's, and a 54 point advantage in slugging % (.605 vs. .551) compared to Trammell's 28 HR's and 105 RBI's.  Bell also hit .302 so yeah, great year for sure (all numbers are from Baseball-Reference.com).  Except that now things have changed; we value RBI's a lot less and are concerned more with the offensive performance relative to the player's position.  RBI's, of course, have lost panache because, and this is pretty intuitive, they really have more to do with how good your teammates are at getting on base.  So while Bell had a higher slugging %, Trammell had a higher on-base percentage (.402 vs. .352), drawing him almost even for OPS (.953 vs. 957).  Trammell did this as a shortstop; that's a fantastic season for a middle infielder.  Bell had a great year but played an easier defensive position (and played it a lot worse when you compared range factor), walked a lot less (39 vs. 60), didn't steal many bases (5 vs. 28) and had less hits overall (188 vs. 205).  All this stuff is summed up nicely in a stat called W.A.R.P., or Wins Above Replacement Player.  It basically looks at how many more wins a player contributes over the course of a season above what an average or Triple A player could contribute .  It's complicated but it concludes that Trammell contributed an 8.5 WARP (anything over 8 is considered an MVP season) while Bell put up a 5.0 (an All-Star season, but nothing to raise eyebrows over).  But what's done is done.

So George Bell's 1987 MVP may be in dispute, his team record for homeruns has not.  At least until Jose Bautista hits one more.  They're currently tied at 47 and with 16 games left in the season, Bautista has a pretty good shot to get to 50, let alone to the top of the team's homerun heap.  But, again, who's had a better season?  Comparing Bell and Bautista is actually a little easier considering they're both corner outfielders.  The games played won't quite line up, but here's the basic rundown so far:

Bautista:  145 games, 47 HRs, 134 hits, 32 2Bs, 111 RBIs, 8/10 SBs, 93 BB's, 106 K's, .262/.381/.613, .994 OPS, 165 OPS+, 313 total bases

Bell: 156 games, 47 HRs, 188 hits, 32 2Bs, 134 RBIs, 5/6 SBs, 39 BBs,  75 K's, .308/.352/.605, .957 OPS, 146 OPS+, 369 total bases.

So Bell had 54 more hits but Bautista had 54 more walks.  That doesn't quite even out obviously, since a hit can mean more than just one base, so close edge to Bell.  Way more RBI's for Bell but, again, this isn't really important unless you believe in magical powers, called "knacks," that turn themselves on in only the clutchiest, team-neediest situations.  "Knacks" for things don't exist when players have 600 plus at-bats; huge sample sizes are why baseball numbers are so statistically meaningful.  ANYWAY, Bautista does have way more strikeouts and while a popular opinion suggests strikeouts are no worse than any other type of put-out, I think that logically that's wrong.  At least if the ball is in play the possibility for a productive out exists.  Possibilities for errors, runners' advancing on a fielder's choice, that sort of thing.  Of course if the ball is in play then you can also have UN-productive outs, like double-plays.  So, I guess, um, shut up.  I don't like strikeouts.  ANYWAYS, Bautista's walks give him the advantage in on-base percentage and OPS, but Bell retains the advantage, at least at this point in the season, in total bases.  So far the best indicator is probably the difference in OPS+, which takes into account park factors and compares a player's numbers against the rest of the league's.  Bautista's had a much better year relative to his peer's than Bell, so offensively we award a split decision to Jose Bautista.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

You've got to at least ask the question...


Damien Cox, a hockey "writer," voiced his, um, not quite opinion, not quite a question, not really any kind of reporting at all, about Jose Bautista's sudden power surge this year, complete with the requisite suspicion about PED's.  This wasn't in his column but his own blog.  The issue raised here and here has been about whether or not the lack reaction against his article, compared to Jerod Morris asking the same baseless questions (albeit in a much less accusatory, faux-noble and contemptible way) about Raul Ibanez last year, is a result of a double-standard between bloggers and mainstream writers.  Morris was raked over the coals for suggesting that, given the history of baseball stars and steroids, it was reasonable to be suspicious of any player who's had a dramatic performance jump.  Why hasn't the mainstream media attacked Cox the same way for the same kind of unfounded character assassination?  Buck Martinez and Pat Tabler went after him during, if I remember, the second game of the Jays-Yankees series but didn't mention him by name and didn't really drop the hammer.  Their criticism was mostly that he isn't around the team, hadn't seen how hard he worked, intangibles, blah blah, square jaw blah.  I'm here to fill in that criticism. 

My problem with the Cox article isn't that he thinks there's something funny about Jose Bautista's numbers this year.  I think every fan who's watched a game this year wonders how a guy with 100 career homeruns managed to hit 42 of them in two-thirds of a season.  It's not even the numbers; have you watched this guy hit baseballs this year?  It's like his bat is twice the width of a normal bat and he's hitting tennis balls filled with flying faerie juice.  His groundouts are hit harder than Ichiro's homeruns.  When he connects it sounds like missiles detonating against other missiles.  He's killing so many baseballs that Greenpeace activists throw buryric acid at him like he's a Japanese whaler.  Of COURSE one has to wonder why.  

Cox fails to understand that "just asking the question" is tantamount to an accusation, especially when you consider that Major League Baseball does indeed test for steroids.  There's no proof, no corroboration, not even an unnamed source he can point to as a catalyst for his article.  There's only a jump in numbers and, remarkable as Bautista's year as been relative to other seasons, a spike in numbers isn't remarkable in itself.  In fact, considering the rollercoaster Aaron Hill and Adam Lind's numbers are riding from last year to this year, we should be asking what performance-enhancing substance they were using last year.  Or, rather,  what performance-damaging substance they're using this year, depending on which season you think is the outlier.  Statistical abnormalities happen all the time.  To properly analyze stats, the analyst has to appropriately set the parameters of a player's sample size, otherwise, the comparisons are meaningless.  Cox, bless him, is a hockey writer and only knows about Stanley Cup rings, Heart, Soul, Grit, Toughness, Character and (as a Toronto newspaper writer) that fighting is bad.  It's common sense that the way you count and compare numbers is important, right?  When you look at the Raul Ibanez example this makes much more sense. 

This is terrific article on the Ibanez-Jerod Morris hulabaloo from last year.  Briefly, the story was that Raul Ibanez got off to an incredible start last year, hitting .329/.386/.676 with 19 homers and 54 RBI's in his first 55 games (all numbers from the linked article).  That's 55 HR's and 159 RBI's over 162 games.  In other words, preposterous numbers for a 37-year-old.  After some deliberation on the situation itself, Posnanski makes the astute point that the kind of stretch Ibanez started the season on was typical of many other hot streaks he'd had in his career.  He points out a number of other stretches of games where Ibanez got hot and put up similar numbers only to cool off later and revert to form.  These stretches, like any hot stretch for any player in any sport, seemed to come at random, either mid-season, playoffs, whenever.  Has Ibanez ever hit 55 HR's and drove in 159 runs in a season before?  No, but his career numbers suggest numerous occasions where he's been as good of a hitter.  The point is that when an analyst says a player's performance is outside their normal range of production, they have to be very careful that they know exactly how that past performance has been quantified.

Obviously, in the case of Jose Baustita, there is no 130 game stretch one can point to and see a similar display, therefore this season stands totally apart from the rest of his career.  TSN looks at outlier seasons here in an attempt to explain how Bautista's amazing season compares to other players whose careers had an unexpected jump.  There's lots of examples of players coming out of nowhere, having career years before disappearing due to injury or ineffectiveness.  That contextual lens makes more sense, doesn't it?  He's a guy who got into a good situation in Toronto, was given all the playing time he wanted, stayed healthy and kept getting pitches to hit because Vernon Wells started out strongly too.  Before long Bautista will be back platooning with some other average player and we'll all talk about his one amazing year.  Right?  Not steroids, just a fluke?

Or is it a fluke?  Carlos Pena is one of the top first basemen in the American League.  He's had seasons of 46, 31 and 39 HR's and is on pace for 34 this year.  He's won a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger, played in the All-Star game in 2009 and was in the MVP discussion in 2007 and 2008.  He came out of nowhere too; his breakout year was 2007 but he was drafted way back in 1998.  He only went to the Rays because Boston let him go as a free agent, as did the Yankees the off-season before that.  There's never been a hint of discussion about Pena and steroids.  Bautista could be another Pena, a star who comes out of nowhere and excels on a young team because he was given a chance to play every day.  It's not hard to see examples of players who've had seasons well outside their career averages, nor it is impossible to find players who've come from obscurity and turned into stars.  

I'm not stupid or naive, of course I wonder about Bautista's line drives that dent the centrefield restaurant, but nor am I a well-known sportswriter whose job it is to do some research.  Pena is a great story because he's the exception to the rule, as is Bautista and any other player who's toiled in the minors, been a free agent, been a Rule 5 or a waiver pick up only to find a home and have a great year or two.  The point is that there lots of examples of this kind of thing happening where steroids weren't an issue, yet Cox doesn't even mention an alternative.  Shouldn't he?  I guess he's not just curiously "asking the question" since to do so would suggest he's willing to look at any explanation, not just the one he's decided on.  His argument seems to be that because other players did steroids and baseball's rules allowed it, every player who's numbers go up dramatically is subject to pessimism and doubt.  Well, okay, that's actually reasonable.  We're all jaded and suspicious now.  Except that Major League Baseball does in fact test for steroids.  That's important isn't it?  Shouldn't Cox address that?  Well no because again, he's not actually accusing Bautista outright, he's just complaining about baseball's steroid history and tossing Bautista's name in the mud.  Let's see how it looks if I do something similar.  Ahem...

Don't blame me.  When it comes to Damien Cox, how is it exactly that one of his blog posts, normally ignored by everyone outside of Toronto, suddenly becomes one of most talk-about stories in Major League Baseball?  Chance?  New keyboard?  Diet (ahhh no, this is a sportswriter after all)?  New reading glasses?  Anyone familiar with the great Mitch Albom's brush with controversy should at least be willing to wonder about Cox's sudden transformation into the baseball writer king.

Shouldn't we at least be asking the question about whether or not Cox "borrowed" some ideas from someone else and "forgot" to credit them?  I mean, this recent blog post is pretty explosive, much more than his usual body of work, and plagiarism has happened before, not that Cox has ever been accused of this sort of thing but SHOULDN'T WE AT LEAST ASK??  Don't blame me, it's certainly not my fault that it's now up to Cox to defend himself against a totally baseless charge he did nothing to deserve.  I can't be held responsible for anything I write!  Why?  I'll tell you why?  BECAUSE SOME WRITERS SOMEWHERE HAVE PLAGIARIZED BEFORE!!!


Disclosure:  Cox Bloc did this same angle on Cox-as-a-plagiarizer.  I read it afterwards so I did NOT plagiarize, I'm just guilty of being less clever than I originally thought.  That was certainly bound to happen eventually though.  

Stupid Damien Cox.  Take some damn responsibility for your opinions, or do some research, or know something about steroid testing, or samples sizes, or innocent until proven guilty, or anything to do with being not just a reporter but, good God, the associate sports editor at a major newspaper. 

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

"Go Gay Go! SCORES!!!"

I was driving home from work today, as I often do, and was listening to an interesting conversation on the radio about gays in sports.  Mark Spector's recent column was the topic and Spector was on the show with TSN's Ryan Rishaug and Sportsnet's Jaime Thomas.  They were talking about how the pro sports world would react to whichever player was willing to come out and become the first openly gay active pro athlete in team sports.  There's been former athletes come out after their playing careers and several pro tennis players and golfers have come out (do your own research if you want to know who!) but so far nobody in any of the four major sports has been willing.

I say "willing" because, as was noted on the radio, the word "courage" would be somewhat disrespectful to players who aren't willing to make that public announcement.  It is their choice after all; it shouldn't come down to courage vs. cowardice dichotomy since it's hardly cowardly to want some privacy.  Yet it will be bold for someone to go public, that's a lot of attention on a personal subject and potentially a lot of backlash.  I suspect though that it won't be the kind of backlash we might think and that's what I want to eventually bring up. 

At the same time though, there's a pretty big benefit to being that first person.  Comparisons to Jackie Robinson will be made (and hopefully tempered heavily; there's sure to be some nastiness coming that player's way but it won't be as bad and there will also be a lot more support), there's TV appearances, certainly a book deal and maybe a movie.  I don't care if an athlete is gay or straight, they're all brands and you gotta cash in when you can!

There's two major challenges for an athlete in a team sport coming out.  First, obviously, is the degree to which they will be accepted by their teammates, opponents, fans and media.  I would think that teammates would be the group any athlete considering this announcement would be most concerned with.  They spend more time during the season with their teammates than with their family, after all.  It's not necessary that everyone be best friends of course, but a divided team will collapse at the first sign of hardship.  These are the truisms we've been taught by players and coaches so we'll just believe them and move on.  Imagine a team divided along lines substantially trickier than strategies and practice length and you can see how a player would hesitate at unleashing this kind of polarizing issue in their dressing room. 

That's where this debate becomes a little murkier and much more interesting.  Homosexuality in our society is a hot-button issue and gay marriage rights are the fault line of a major cultural identity crisis in the United States.  For a player contemplating this decision this kind of polarization is, seemingly, a major concern.  Is it though?  Here's a reasonable expectation for how each of the four above listed groups will react.

The media will be overwhelmingly supportive and congratulatory towards that player because, well, can you imagine what will happen if they are not?  Sure you'll get a few Rush Limbaughs who say exactly the wrong thing, there will be a few irrelevant preacher types who warn of the impending Apocalypse, but this will serve the player in the end because every else in the media will absolutely shit on their head.  Don't worry Mr. Gay Athlete, the media will be your loyal foot soldier because God help them or their editor if they are not. 

The fans will make jokes, be supportive, be spiteful, cheer loudly, boo when he (and this is a "he" we're talking about here, in no way are the same social issues present if Serena Williams says she's a lesbian) drops the ball or goes 0 for 5.  Fan will be incredibly supportive and caring, ignorant and horrible, distant and disinterested, and quickly distracted by the next game and a different channel.  The player will be pretty separated from all of that.  Players love the fans when they're cheering for them, are mildly annoyed or indifferent when they boo and are totally removed from any other opinion they might have.  Sure, that first game will garner them a pretty good cheer but after that fans will grow bored and will find something else to argue over.  It'll be a story that turns into a novelty and soon forgotten.

Opponents will be very interesting.  Which player is willing to be publicly flayed in the media and heavily fined over some comment meant only to get inside their opponent's head?  Apart from Sean Avery?  Think of the most famous attention whores in each sport.  Terrell Owens and Chad Ochocinco don't seem like they'd go that far, and besides that isn't about them so they won't care about it.  Fame sluts in the NBA only care about joining the Heat, baseball players don't often give those kinds of quotes, and even Avery or a Steve Ott might not push this one.  Hockey has its own set of accepted groups that are, apparently, considered fair game for discrimination: French Canadiens, Swedes, Russians, oh hell, all of Europe.  Homosexuality isn't the same and any trash talk in this direction would quickly go public and follow that linecrosser around for their whole career, like the Avery-Georges Laraque incident.  Leagues will come down hard on this kind of trash talking and it won't be worth it.

The most reactionary, backwards, ignorant comments, either from opponents or teammates, will come from league oddballs like... well, it's probably unfair to call players cavemen before they've done anything.  Carl Everett was a crazy, crazy man but he's retired now.  I really only wrote that sentence so I could link to those quotes.  Lots of people will agree with those comments but publicly only a minority will support anyone who comes out against homosexuals in sports and in society.  Maybe I'm being naive but I think that there's far more support for the first gay player than they think.  Those outlying voices will be written off and characterized as unfortunately relics of an era we soon hope to pass.

Here's where it's not so simple.  This player, wherever he is, will be a big, big deal when he comes out.  Interviews in every city, print and radio, for himself, his teammates, opponents, management, everyone. This will be a travelling circus long after the national interest has waned because each city will need to hear his story one more time.  Let's say then that the opposition this player faces from his own team isn't about his beliefs or his lifestyle but the distraction he'll cause for his team?  His teammates will all range in supportiveness but none will particularly enjoy the distraction after the novelty has worn off.  That's where the real centre of this debate lies to me because publicly the first gay athlete will be overwhelmingly hailed for his courage for paving the path for the future.  Again, maybe I'm naive, but I think it's a pretty clear path, media-wise, as long as the announcement isn't totally botched, like right before Game 7 or something.  It's the other public debate that will be misunderstood, miscontrued, poorly verballized and set up as a straw man:  Will it be okay to love the announcer but hate the announcement? 

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Things that Are and Are Not okay with the NHL

Things that are Okay:

-15 year, front-loaded, cap-circumventing contracts that are unlikely to be fulfilled because both the player and the team are aware that the player is a butterfly goalie with groin muscles made out of gossamer and voodoo.

-12 year, front-loaded, cap-circumventing contracts that are unlikely to be fulfilled signed mere minutes after a player has declared themselves a free agent on July 1st.  Or by a Canadian on a Canadian team.

-8 year contracts to aging defensemen that is unlikely to be fulfilled by teams whose owner were prominent in Gary Bettman's hiring and supported him through the lockout.

-12 and 11 year contracts, front-loaded, cap-circumventing, signed by Detroit.  Detroit and player contracts are like a Roy Halladay fastball that paints the outside corner:  They both know what they're doing so they always get the call.

-13 year contracts signed by the league's most popular player.  There's no out-clause where he can bolt for the KHL, right?  Okay, yeah, then it's fine.

-Headshots, hits from behind, missed high-sticking penalties.

-Concussions.

-Bankruptcies.

-Labour disputes.

-Neutral zone traps.

-Bad attendance.

-Bad U.S. television numbers, unless absolute top-flight superstars are involved.

-Potential team owners who cobble together money from the sock drawers of magicians, couch cushions of used car salesmen and the power of Gary Bettman's prayers.


Things that are Not Okay:

-17 year contracts that is unlikely to be fulfilled IF the player is Russian, not North American or the Good Kind of Eastern European.

-Potential team owners who are Canadian and RICH AS FUCK.

-"Sloppy seconds."

-ESPN

-The 2007 Preakness Stakes.


So yeah, the Kovalchuk contract is a hilariously bad contract.  Here's the breakdown, courtesy of NJ.com:

2010-11: $6 million
2011-12: $6 million
2012-13: $11.5 million
2013-14: $11.5 million
2014-15: $11.5 million
2015-16: $11.5 million
2016-17: $11.5 million
2017-18: $10.5 million
2018-19: $8.5 million
2019-20: $6.5 million
2020-21: $3.5 Million
2021-22: $750,000
2022-23: $550,000
2023-24: $550,000
2024-25: $550,000
2025-26: $550,000
2026-27: $550,000

The total cap hit is $6 million.  Or "was."  It's ridiculous, right?  Look at the last 6 years!  It takes our beloved CBA that we lost a year of hockey for, chews it for a while, spits some of it out, stores the rest in its lip for years until it develops a Lou Brown voice:




 


THEN sprays it all over the front page of every hockey publication in North America!  A tragemedy!  Except that it's totally legal, totally compliant with the CBA and would probably win an appeal, even though the Devils have said that they won't appeal the ruling.  This is so stupid.  WHY DOES THE NHL DO THIS?!?!  I'M SO MAD I oh fuck it it's 30 degrees outside, who cares.  Enjoy your summer!

Monday, July 12, 2010

The Team That Everyone Hated


*I'm sorry if you read this after I published it but before I edited it.  That's the wrong order to do things in.  The amount of typos and spelling mistakes... just, sorry.

See those guys?  A busy week for the three worst people in the world.  They ruined the competitive playing field in the NBA, engaged in blatant collusion against the poor helpless owners, shamelessly flaunted the loyalties of their former and current cities, wreaked further havoc on the already-shaky sporting confidence of one of the world's great cities (over a sport they don't even like), grabbed the poor ugly kid/city who never gets the girl who tries oh so hard and punched it in the face on national TV, possibly ended the life of the NBA in one city but that doesn't matter because they set in motion a series of events that ENDS WITH CLEVELAND BURIED AND FORGOTTEN.

Oh it was quite a week.  If you can find any sports news website columnist, blogger, radio personality or Guy You Met Once At A Party who thinks that Lebron's bizarre ESPN primetime Hey, Go Fuck Yourself Cleveland! was in poor taste, congratulations, you've passed into a parallel universe!  Neato!  Bring me back some of the Oreos with the cookie part in the middle and a shopping cart with three wonky wheels!  Nobody likes itAnywhere!

But how could you not???  We were witness to something pretty special:  the culmination of all the world's sporting egos combining together to form Egonotron, the Most Powerful Ego, whose powers include 1) thinking it's okay to humiliate one of the saddest, most unlucky loser cities in North America, 2) hold a ONE HOUR ESPN SPECIAL to simply say "Next year I basket my ball in *blank*," and 3) not telling anyone in Cleveland (remember Cleveland?  That city near Akron where you're from?), either the fans or the team that hired, fired and signed whoever James wanted, what he was doing and made them find out on TV SEVEN DAYS after free agency started.  That sucks because there are, you know, other players out there that Cleveland might've wanted to sign if you didn't want to play there.  All of this, all this self-created hype and exposure, all this attention and the weird WWE-style intro:



All this so that the Greatest Basketball Player on Earth (except for all those guys with NBA Championships like Kobe, Tim Duncan, Dwayne Wade, Shaquille O'Neal) could live with this philosophy (from Joe Posnanski's always brilliant blog.  Why aren't you reading him right now?):

“We don’t have to have the pressure of going out, scoring 30 every night, or shooting a high percentage or logging long minutes and worrying about our team suffering because of that at times.”

In other words, ALL THIS NONSENSE was so that Lebron can do LESS on the court that he was before and accomplish MORE because basketball will be EASY NOW and make this whole ordeal easier without all that silly team-building.  No more 30 point games!  Won't it be better for the team now that I, Lebron James, one of the two best players in the game, am playing LESS?  Why aren't other athletes like Gretzky, Jordan or someone else with a championship, as giving as I?  Now, with Bosh and Wade and some part-time cap-friendly illegal Cubans in the lineup, James can simply stroll into his pre-ordained vestige as Basketball Demigod.  Won't it be so much easier now without all that work???  We might never see anything this ballsy again.  Haha!  Of course we will.  After all, Kevin Durant is due for free agency... wait!  What's this?  The youngest player to even win an NBA scoring title just re-signed in his own bland and unremarkable city?  Without ESPN there to lick his balls for a full hour?  Pussy. 

Public opinion seems split on whether or not it was okay for Lebron to leave Cleveland at all.  Public opinion, in this case, is being gauged by the two hours of sports radio I listened to on a road trip before I lost signal, or my brain shut off from lack of activity, whichever.  Some callers, and one host, thought he'd blown his chance at greatness not so much by leaving his hometown team that drafted him, no, that only cost him immortality, but by going to a team with another superstar and another very good star.  By giving his reason for leaving as needing to play with better players, he was basically admitting that he needed help, couldn't do it alone, and wasn't willing to stay and build a team around him like Jordan or Bryant.  I counter that with "So he treated a team sport like a team sport?  He didn't destroy and alienate everyone around him by insisting on doing things his way, maybe having some players traded because they were as good as him?  He's going to sacrifice some vague notion of personal glory in order to win championships?  What an ASS!!!!

Other callers, and the other host, seemed to think that it's fine for him to leave, Clevelanders are embarrassing themselves by showing how angry, sad and hurt they are and after all James did spent seven years there, re-signing once and giving the team every chance to build a championship around him.  He left because management couldn't find any complimentary talents to play with him, so he took charge of his own life and career and made the best move for himself and his family.  I'll counter that with BUT HE WON 60 GAMES TWICE!  If the Lakers or Heat had back to back 60 win season and didn't even make the finals, Kobe and Wade would be labelled chokers!  Why is it different with Lebron???

The lesson, of course, is that nobody's right about anything and everyone's an idiot.  Well, except for everyone who says the one hour on ESPN was stupid.  When they announced The Decision would air on ESPN, it was like when the Oilers traded away the 17th overall pick in the 2003 draft to New Jersey and the Devils took Zack Parise.  I was watching and knew it was stupid right away and it would only prove itself a stupider and stupider move the more time went by.  Same thing with The Decision, everyone knew it was preposterously arrogant, self-important, journalistic unethical and embarrassing the minute it was announced.  It got so much worse when it included, as a bonus, the crushed soul of an entire city which simply accelerated the rate at which this ridiculous experience has sickened our taste for the famous and powerful in sports.  Only when they actually act rich and powerful though; we're fine with with them when they act like cole miners, pulling out teeth and getting stitched up in hallways.  Athletes:  They're Not Really Like Us At All!

Perhaps the only thing more universally agreed-upon than the denouncing of ESPN's Big Stupid Mess, at least among fans, is how much everyone wants to see this team get its ass kicked.  Every caller I listened to giving their "opinion" on whether it was okay for Lebron to leave Cleveland either loudly cheered for or quietly conceded that they hoped the Heat lose out at some point this year, either suffering the embarrassment of not making the playoffs at all or the heartbreak of an overtime playoff loss.  I'm hoping for a Final where Kobe hits an impossible three-pointer to give the Lakers the lead with seconds left and for Lebron to miss the buzzer-beater while Wade and Bosh wave their arms and scream "I'M OPEN!!!"

Friday, June 25, 2010

Taylor Hall

It's finally done.  Since, what, January this has been going on?  It's a case of the Oilers taking the safe pick because you can't ever be second-guessed when you take a two-time defending Memorial Cup champion and two-time tournament MVP.  It's also the risky pick because of the recklessness and higher injury factor.  If you're flipping coins and everyone says don't worry, both heads or tails wins then, well, shouldn't you be happy?

I went to the Oiler draft party and it was great, mostly because I won a Hall number 10 jersey.  I'll get to spend my remaining years explaining to strangers that yes, I know Hall isn't number 10 and yes, I realize that Shawn Horcoff will always be number 10 after turning his career around, signing another long-term deal, captaining the team to many Stanley Cups and having his number retired, and having a taller, stronger statue built, out of pure gold, right in front of Gretzky's.  I'll call it commemorative, and whenever I cross ways with one of the other 99 Edmontonians who won a Hall 10 jersey tonight we'll shake hands in a way you CANNOT BELIEVE.

Now, if only we can make some trades.

"No spot on this team is safe, I don't care if your name is Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle or... Smithers, what's one of the bad players' names?"

"Robert Nilsson, Patrick O'Sullivan, JF Jacques, Ethan Moreau, Marc Pouliot, Liam Reddox?"

"Or... all those players!" 

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Phutebhawl


I like soccer.  It's a great sport, it's outdoors and anyone, regardless of age or physical prowess, can pick up and play it right away even if their last period of outdoor exercise occurred during the Nixon-Kennedy debate, resulting in friendly black-and-white lecture and a severe beating.  Chances are, in a group of six or more friends or family, someone has a ball and someone else lives near a park so there's always a fall-back activity if, you know, that friend who doesn't drink is hanging around.

The World Cup is different.  When you're neutral to a professional sport you'll always take the opposite of whatever opinion you're facing at the moment.  Not with much conviction, but if someone hates soccer you'll find yourself defending it and if they love it you'll complain.  That's probably a good way to determine if you're actually neutral.  I am neutral but given the way closet soccer fans are coming out of the woodworks during this and every World Cup, I'm spending a lot more time bitching about the whole production than enjoying it.  And with good reason; here's all my Reasons Why The World Cup Sucks:

-The Diving - No sense waiting with this one.  After two months of Stanley Cup playoffs where players block shots with everybody part you can nightmare about, nothing makes me want to learn how to shoot guns than watching soccer players writhing around on the ground, in tears, covering their faces and being helped off the field by three players to sell a kick to the shins.  This is almost a silly thing to complain about because nobody's going to argue against this, but that's why it's a problem.  It's so accepted in the sport, but for the occasional governing body complaint, that it becomes part of the sport's identity.  It's Okay To Dive Because You Won't Score Otherwise.  Yeah?  Fuck you soccer.

-Soccer fans - I cheer for England, I guess, or Scotland, or Ireland.  But not really, because I'm not English, Scottish, or Irish.  Know what, fair-weather soccer fans?  If you life in Canada, chances are that you aren't actually Spanish, Greek, German, Italian, or whatever.  I know, you'd cheer for Canada if they were in it and you're just supporting your heritage, but why?  Ever seen any of those countries play?  Think those players care that some people in Canada support them?  If the Oilers don't make the playoffs, I don't just pick my next favorite team because their next on the list.  I kind of hoped Chicago would win the Cup, or that the Tampa Bay Rays win the American League East and that Roy Halladay and his Phillies win the World Series.  But these teams aren't my teams and I don't pretend they are, unlike every half-assed some-time soccer fan.  It's worse when you're faking whole COUNTRY allegiances.  It's treason.  You all suck for committing treason.

-It's Boring - Baseball, at times, under very unfortunate but rare circumstances, on the wrong day, with the wrong weather, without any beer, can be a little, just a smidge now, boring.  I can see that.  It's still wrong but, like a fat woman wearing 3/4 length pants and a sweater, I can at least see it, unspeakable as it may be.  What separates baseball from soccer though is that something could happen literally anytime.  Each pitch is a homerun, great catch, double-play or hilarious error in waiting.  Soccer is a bunch of puttering around at midfield with the occasional shot that misses high and wide by 50 feet.  Sometimes, after an effective dive that punctures a lung (cured only with a split second on the bench and presumably some oranges), a goal is scored.  This is exciting but you already knew it was coming because...

-Why Are The Nets So Big And There's No Scoring - I guess the title covers this.  Keep the big net but cut the number of players and field size in half.  Also, swords.

-This:


These are not athletes.  These are cartoons from the gayest Saturday morning cartoons you've ever seen.  Athletes have scars, bruises and body hair for God's sakes. 

-The vuvuzela.  It's an instrument that makes a culturally unique sound: whenever the instrument is played by a large number of people anyone listening will say, and ONLY say, "Man.  That sounds like a shitload of bees."  Every time.  Like they're the first person to notice this.  In other words, it's an instrument with perfect pitch.

-Ties.  Or, in soccer parlance, "0-0 For the Bad Team."  I know, lots of sports have ties in their preliminary rounds.  They're wrong too.  Overtime and shootouts!  Then only overtime in elimination rounds!  Give us Winners and Losers!  Number will tell us who is brilliant and noble and weak and cowardly!

- France.  France sucks.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Armando Galarraga and the Mostly Perfect Game

Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game last night, the third perfect game this season.  It was a close game, some great defense by the Tigers to keep the night alive, highlighted by Austin Jackson's brilliant running catch in the ninth and a difficult 3-1 put-out at first to end the game.  Except, of course, that isn't what happened.  First base umpire Jim Joyce (man, we're really getting good at knowing the names of umpires and referees aren't we?) looked to move into a punch-out motion before changing his mind and calling the runner safe.  Replays clearly showed the runner was out and after the game, which ended after one more batter, Joyce would say that he was wrong and felt terrible for taking away Galarraga's career highlight.

First, obviously, a moment for Jim Joyce for man-ing up and admitting his mistake, not in a press release, not hiding behind Major League Baseball's official statements, not making excuses like it was a close play, coulda gone either way, I stand by my call, etc.  Nope.  He apologized, healed the situation, and certainly eased the increasingly volatile relationship that seems to have developed between managers/players and umpires.  This last week had Joe Maddon and Kevin Gregg ejected in the same Jays-Rays game two nights ago, Joe West (and his publicist) continuing to make an ass of himself, Ozzie Guillen flaming West after a game, and that other really heated argument from a few nights ago.  So it's been a tough go for the umpires lately, much of it their own doing, and it was nice to see what would've been the uber-climax of recent umpire-embattlement handled with some humility and class.

This is baseball though, and so any type of umpire mistakes become fodder for those who want to see increasing use of instant replay.  A few years ago, umpires forgot what a homerun looked like and MLB had to institute an instant replay to determine if a potential homerun was foul, off the wall, or legitimate.  Of course after last night, there's a new call for instant replay use on the bases to avoid this kind of situation.  The traditionalists, who are comprised of Old Columnists, Old Former Players Who Are Now Announcers, Anybody Directly Employed By MLB and People On TV.  That's almost everyone, isn't it?  Oh, except for fans.  The argument against more instant replay use is that it'll make the game longer than it already is.  That's valid.  You can counter that by saying that ANY FAN IN THE GODDAMN WORLD will wait an extra few minutes in a three-hour game to get the call RIGHT.  And that's the problem here, there's too much emphasis on the broad and vague idea of "maintaining tradition" and not enough on "getting the fucking call right."

I hate listening to this debate in baseball, especially when an incident like this raises the intensity and importance of the debate.  I tip my hand I suppose with my own leanings on the matter, but maybe unfairly.  I'm not sure how exactly instant replay will be used, if I want more instant replay, if I want the game to take even longer, if it should be a coach's challenge, which plays should be reviewable.  What I know for sure is that the traditionalists' argument is infuriatingly stupid.  "The games will take too long?"  Bullshit.  This sport has done NOTHING to speed itself up, priding itself on allowing players to call time between pitches, endless catcher visits to the mound, batters stepping out of the box and performing a full-body epileptic fit on their batting gloves, and on and on.  Joe West was right on this one, even if he should keep his mouth shut.  Time has never been a priority for baseball, so why pretend to make it one when changes are being proposed to get more calls right?  The other main argument is that it's important to keep something called the "human element" in the game.  Why?  Because fans like the memory of Doug Eddings and AJ Pierzynski, Don Denkinger at first base, or Phil Cuzzi missing a Joe Mauer double by five feet (from probably 20 feet away, what a shithead)?  These aren't quaint parts of a grand sport's legacy.  These are embarrassing mistakes that the system was not yet advanced enough to avoid.  MLB has the means to advance the game and will eventually implement them; every other sport has a replay and/or challenge system, it's inevitable baseball will too. 

What would be great is if baseball was willing to retroactively change the ruling on the field from last night's game.  Does it create a dangerous precedent?  Maybe, though in this case I think everyone involved can agree that the player and the team getting credit for the perfect game is the most important thing.  Would other teams attempt to have calls that went against them reversed?  Absolutely!  Every chance they got!  But couldn't baseball simply make the ruling, then say that because of the extreme and rare circumstances (it would've been the last out!) this event will not be considered precedent for future retroactive corrections.  The league will announce that it will take another look at instant replay feasibility in light of recent events, and the game would evolve without any suffering.  I'm not a lawyer, this might not be a perfect strategy and there may be issues in the future, but how could they be worse than last night?


Update: *SIGH*

Thursday, May 27, 2010

How Are The Blue Jays Any Good?

Well they were for a while, but after last night's near-comeback against the Angels they sit today at 27-22, fourth in the American League East.  That's a tough spot to be in with a record that good.  Any arguments that suggest playing in the AL East absolutely sucks need only gander at some of the numbers below:

-The Blue Jays have 27 wins.  That's tied for third most in the American League and tied for FOURTH IN THE MAJORS.

-The Major League home run leader is Jose Bautista with 15.  He's tied for fourth in RBI's, putting him on pace for a 49 HR, 128 RBI year.  No big deal.

-They have three players (Bautista, Vernon Wells, Alex Gonzales) on pace for a 30 HR, 100 RBI season.  John Buck is on pace for 30 HR, 99 RBI's.

-The team leads the Majors in doubles, HR (by 14 over Boston), RBI's, Runs Scored, SLG %, Total Bases and, obviously, Extra Base Hits.  That's the MAJOR LEAGUES.

-They've done all this with the following stellar performances: Aaron Hill (.154/.268/.324), Lyle Overbay (.200/.281/.337) and Adam Lind(.228/.293/.391).  Hill is coming off a hamstring injury but nothing is stopping Overbay and Lind from hitting like Major Leaguers any time now.  Hill and Lind were the team's second and third best players last year so they have a longer leash, but Overbay is a free agent and a prime asset for a rebuilding team to move for, well, anything.  Right now he has no value and that's disappointing.  They'd surely love to move him and give Brett Wallace some at-bats.  Anyway, the point is that for how good they've been offensively, they could be better.  That's unlikely of course, Hill and Lind will probably heat up as Bautista and Gonzales cool off, but it goes to show how over their heads they've been to this point.

-Some good signs from the pitching staff.  They've given up the second fewest HR's in the American League, fourth fewest earned runs, lead the AL in strikeouts, second in strikeouts/flyouts ratio (always a good sign), third in slugging % against, and have caught the second most runners attempting to steal (a shared pitcher/catcher stat).

-The defense has also been good, they have the third best fielding percentage in the AL, fourth in double-plays turned, third fewest errors (they have 25, behind the Yankees with 20 and the Twins with, holy crap!  9!), second in assists credited and first in put-outs (any caught ball, tagged out, or thrown-out.  No strikeouts, basically). 
So that's the good, and lots of it as you can see.  There's some bad though...

-The batting averages are terrible.  Nobody is over .300 (Wells is .299), six regulars (played over 30 games) are below .260.  That would fine, except for...

-The on-base percentages are awful too.  For perspective, a good-to-great hitter will have three slash line number (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) of .300/.400/.500.  Bautista leads the team with a .361 OBP and four are under .300 (important guys too, Gonzales, Lind, Hill, Overbay).  The indicators are bad for guys like Gonzales, who's hitting .263 but has an OBP of .296, Wells, who's hitting .299 but has an OBP of .355, and recent pick-up Fred Lewis, who's hitting .283 but has an OBP of .316.  To me a good sigh is a hitter with an OBP of about 70 to 100 points higher than his batting average.  That's arbitrary of course, but that indicates a player who will still get on base if his hitting slumps or he runs into bad contact luck.  These three aren't walking enough and when the hitting drops off the team will suffer.

-Overall, the team is 22nd in the majors in walks, 10th in the AL.

-They strikeout A LOT.  Second most in the majors.

-Their OPS (On-base % plus slugging %) is fourth in the AL.  That's pretty good, except when you consider how many other categories they lead the league in.  Specifically, the fact that they lead the entire MLB in slugging % but are fourth in their own league in OPS (8th overall) speaks to how disproportionate their offense is.  In other words, they're hitting a LOT of homeruns proportional to their walks, singles, etc.  That's good though, right?  Kind of like a skinny girl with big boobs?  "In proportion" isn't always best!  Well yeah, except that when you aren't walking enough to keep up with your homeruns and doubles, you're prone to offensive slumps when the ball isn't dropping between fielders or landing in their gloves at the warning track. Or you lose even when you hit six homeruns in one game.

-There's some poor pitching indicators too, mostly in the bullpen.  Overall, the pitching staff is 8th in American league ERA and only have one complete game (tied for second last).  That's starting to tax the relief corps who've finished 48 of 49 games, have needed to record to fourth most average outs per game, have thrown the fourth most average pitches per game (all AL stats) and have already blown 6 saves.  The bullpens' ERA is a little higher than the team's, 4.49 vs. 4.36, but that's only 0.02 points higher than the league average.  They've done a good job of overworking individual relief pitchers; they're below league average in back-to-back relief appearances as well as relievers pitching over one inning.  So Cito's managing his bullpen well enough but the starters have to start pitching deeper or the bullpen ERA will creep higher and higher every month.  And there's no Stephen Strasburg to pick first overall.
 
Basically, you've got a team that kills baseballs when it makes contact, misses a lot, has a lot of players putting up hilariously unexpected offensive numbers, fields pretty well, and pitches okay but is overworking its relief pitching.  The fact that they don't walk enough and are using the bullpen so much indicates that they won't maintain their success level, especially with 12 straight games against divisional opponents, six of which are against Tampa Bay who have the game's best record.  We know this already though, don't we?  This team was supposed to finish last or lower, right?  Probably, but when you look at where they'd be in other divisions, whether in the AL or NL, it's frustrating because it's the same story every year.  
When you talk about re-alignment, it very much depends on the salary structure of the sport.  In the NHL, re-aligning the divisions because one is weaker than the rest is pretty silly; a hard salary cap ensures some degree of balance and fairness so that if you aren't winning, well, too bad because everyone's rules are the same.  Major League Baseball, with it's capless spending, regional TV channels and flimsy luxury tax, should have to deal with the periodic re-alignment question because teams are playing by such dramatically different rules.  You can point to low-revenue success teams like Tampa Bay or the occasional Florida Marlins run, but those both flukes and exceptions to the rule.  Florida had much bigger payrolls in their World Series wins before stripping them down to nothing and Tampa had years of not just high draft picks, but high draft picks that worked out.  They're the Pittsburgh Penguins of MLB, but with no protective salary structure to keep the Yankees from signing away Carl Crawford next year, and whomever they want after that.  It's a well-stated argument that the MLB salary structure is unfair, I'm not going to get into it again, but it spills into the re-alignment debate.  If you won't institute some player salary restrictions, can't you at least let the Yankees and Red Sox beat up someone else for a while?  You got to toss the mid and low-revenue market teams a bone, don't you? Hello?

Friday, May 21, 2010

"No, I think we should stay!" "Why?" "Because I'm in the dumpster already!"

3D TV is the focal point of consumer electronics this year.  My experience in the industry suggests that most customers, as is the case with any new technology, are taking the wait-and-see approach.  In fact, most people roll their eyes and shake their proverbial fists at how the world is changing so fast, there's always something new, Things in My Day were just fine thank you very much, how do I know when to double-click, and Get Off My Lawn!!!

Anyways, what's telling about the reactionary nature of most people is, at least when it comes to technology, there's an admittance of their own culpability for not seeing how new products, ideas and paradigms will fit into their lives.  People generally don't like change unless it's an improvement over something they already know they don't like; if they don't know they don't like it, they won't like the thing they'll eventually like that's better than what they don't like but think they do.  Totally.


This is not true in professional sports, where some fans and the majority of media take conservatism to a level where, if you translated it into the real world, would be like watching a mob storming Apple and protesting the cost of the new iPhone because they've been writing letters with parchment and quill for three hundred years and that's GOOD ENOUGH.  The Stanley Cup playoffs, apart from almost everyday in Major League Baseball, is probably the worst cesspool of the kind of reactionary, Thug Life, xenophobic mindset that you hear shrilling from the mouths and pens of the hockey media. 


 This shouldn't be new to anyone, is it?  How long have we had to listen to CBC's choice of buffoons in the booth or in the intermission shows, from the lovable and silly (Don Cherry, yes you love him even if he is crazy) to the horrible and unfortunately (Mike Milbury) to the better but only by comparison (Glen Healy) to the inexplicable (PJ Stock).  It's not that I dislike their commentating, I'm slowly getting over the shock of seeing a mediocre third line agitator taking air time away from Ron MacLean, it's just that they all thump the same old-school mindset in lockstep with each other.  The old-school hockey dogma, always around but LOUDER during the playoffs, encompasses the following ideas bellowed out as Facts: The superiority of Canadian role players to European skilled players, the importance of Grit, setting the Tone For The Next Game (because NHL players are terrified by facewashing and are not able to emotionally recover), the importance of intangibles (which, by definition, is something that cannot be demonstrably proven to be beneficial), the often overrated Underrated Player (if Maxime Lapierre is the key to your team...) which is often paired with the Well-Known Player who "surprises" in the playoffs, except that everyone knows who they are (look, Joe Pavelski was an Olympian, stop discrediting him as a nobody because YOU'VE never heard of him and don't understand that he's facing weaker defensemen than Thornton-Marleau-Heatley), the importance of Toughness, silly sayings like "It's not a series until the home team loses" (by that logic, Montreal, down 2-0 going back home after being outscored 9-0, had NOTHING to worry about), the importance of both Heart AND Soul, how it's a great story when a bad player scores a bad goal off a bad line change on a bad deflection in overtime and, of course, character.  It's exhaustingly repetitive.  At least when Don Cherry's talking about covering the point men and screening the goalie he shows some actual video evidence.  Imagine that.


All these so-called "old-school" ideas are frustrating because they're repeated ad nauseum and because they're examples of the kind of lazy journalism you see all the time.  We've been hearing about how having role players, hot goalies, Good Ol' Canadian boys and experience gained from prior losses are keys to playoff glory.  The causal links between these "truisms" and actual successes are questionable.  If a team full of role-players wins, it's because of effort but if they lose it's because they just lacked the talent.  Hot goalies are great, they really are, but even this year Jaroslav Halak, who certainly has been utterly brilliant, and his team would've been eliminated if Bruce Boudreau could get his Vince Carters to drive the damn puck to the net instead of firing wrist-shots from the blue line.  Not to mention how soft many of the goals against the Capitals were.  Michael Leighton, after two straight shutouts, is the current Hot Goalie even though he has Chris Pronger playing against the top TWO lines, not to mention 6"5' Braydon Coburn, Matt Carle and Kimmo Timmonen playing against everyone else.  Pretty sure lots of goalies could put up a few shutouts with that defense.  The point is that there's plenty of teams that win Stanley Cups in spite of their goaltending (Chris Osgood never had to be any more than Chris Osgoodenough), and plenty of hot goalies whose teams are gone after one or two glorious rounds.  Lastly, I think we can finally put the myth of the Great Canadian playoff stars to bed; Malkin and Zetterberg have won the last two Conn Smythe trophies, Nicklas Lindstrom won it in 2002.  


I'm not taking the argument that good goaltending, role players and grit and intensity aren't important components of a Stanley Cup run.  My problem is that we hear about this stuff all the time and the media uses these phrases to paint a broad stroke and avoid digging any deeper.  Identifying Grit and Intensity and Will To Win is like walking outside like you do everyday and being shocked when you see the sky.  Everybody is working their ass off in the playoffs, there aren't any bad teams with lazy players left and when there is, like whenever Alex Kovalev's team is in the playoffs, they're the exception to the and stand out.  The increase in effort, speed and intensity from regular season to playoffs is astonishing and it's important to notice it and celebrate it, but don't "prove" this to us using examples of shot-blocking and beating out icing calls.  We see that in the pre-season.  Narrow the focus a bit, highlight the guy who returns after having all his teeth knocked out, the player with the bad knee, the stitches on the bench.  Putting all the examples of toughness and grit together cheapens the impressive ones and makes them seem ordinary.  They're all tough, incredibly resilient and every night they risk permanent injury.  We know this and that's why we love hockey, we don't need to hear it ALL the TIME.  You're CBC/TSN/Sportsnet, your audience knows why it's watching.  Teach us something we haven't heard about yet. 


Corsi numbers were discussed a little while ago on Coach's Corner (I think, Cherry "mentioned" them) and were, of course, dismissed as bad new-age hoodoo.  Corsi numbers count the number of shots for and against that a player was on the ice for; a shot for is a plus one, a shot against is a minus one.  It's like plus/minus but with shots, not goals.  There's a host of new stats out there (QualComp, Team Regression, David Staples' Error Stat) that bloggers and hockey writers are playing around with, suggesting that we might be at a dawn of a new statistical age similar to the Bill James baseball statistical revolution that had its roots in the 1970's.  I kind of doubt it, hockey's a tougher sport to measure because it doesn't stop and start in the same quantifiable way, but the effort and research being done is outstanding.  These are hockey fans who are dedicating their free time to digging deeper into the sport to try to understand what exactly is going on out there, how are some teams winning consistently more often than others even with a salary cap, how can you evaluate two players with similar basic stats, which position is the most important, and so on forever.  


This isn't the place for an insufferable argument about blogs vs. mainstream journalism, that's been done to death.  Instead, I'm simply asking why CBC, TSN and Sportsnet continue to feed us cliches about momentum and effort while fans in their own time are testing their statistical hypothesis and risking their new ideas in the flamewars of the Internet to see what works.  There's problems with any stat in the hands of an idiot, particularly in hockey where the very collection design can be called into question (you can image how easy it is to poke holes in the Quality of Competition Faced measurement), but bless those souls who use their great minds and limitless patience on trying to figure out which millionaire should be signed by which team's billionaire owner instead of curing cancer or writing books explaining the stock market.  Without them, we'd be reduced to Doug MacLean's assurance that Montreal has All The Momentum Now because of tonight's big win.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Stupid Telus Puppy!


So I only got halfway into my grand experiment of picking playoff series results based on one game, only to have "someone" kick out one of those tubes that keeps our internet motor running.  More to come...

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Round 2.1

Pittsburgh vs. Montreal

Boy, do a lot of people ever know everything about hockey eh?  You'd think Montreal was the first seed and Washington scraped into the playoffs!  Who were we to think that the highest scoring team in the league, with the most points, with the highest goal differential and the best powerplay would beat a team with a forward corps full of Oompa Loompas, a defense as mobile as a Hal Gill on skates (wait...), and a goaltending situation perhaps best described as having all the unity and cohesion as that guy from Identity.  None of you called it!  Stop pretending!!!  Anyway, Pittsburgh looked really good in the first game, the powerplay had four goals and Halak was chased after five goals on 20 shots.  In keeping with the integrity of this experiment you'd have to take Pittsburgh by quite a bit, especially with Montreal losing Markov for probably the series.  The Pens, against this opponent anyway, have more than enough to compensate for the loss of Jordan Staal, who is currently listed as out indefinately.  Pens in 5.

Friday, April 30, 2010

Round 2: DING!!!!

I love the playoffs!  God I love them!  More than sunshine and Hawkins cheezies!  I love them so damn much I couldn't be bothered finding out when the second round started!  Yep, that's true love and not that stuff they talk about in Nicolas Sparks novels, but only because hockey doesn't have cancer.

All is not lost though!  Wait, were you thinking all was lost or something?  Jeez.  It's spring.  Relax okay?  Okay?  Okay.  Instead, we're going to try something different.  I'm going to make all my predictions for the second round based entirely on the first games.  I guess it's not that different, since they do that after every game anyways on TSN and Sportsnet, but it'll be different here because we're going to attempt to see, with a short sample size of course, exactly how indicative one game is of the rest of the series.  I'm less interested in my own predicting ability, since obviously it should be much better than the first round (and if it's not I can simply blame the team that choked away a 1-0 series lead!), and more interested in how much we can predict based on one game.

Detroit vs. San Jose.

I didn't watch this game at all until the last three minutes so we're not off to a good start.  I was at work and even Bell TV didn't think the game was on, it thought I was watching Sportscentre.  San Jose wins 4-3 but led 3-0 at one point, so we can easily conclude that Thornton played soft, Nabakov probably only faced five shots and Joe Pavelski incredibly managed to put up four goals and four assists.  A cursory glance at the boxscore shows that some of these things are not true and Thornton in fact put up a +36DD Softness Quotient which is, of course, league average.  If you were to pick this series on mental toughness you'd take Detroit in three, but given that the Sharks overcame the Dan Boyle goal against Colorado (and really, the series wasn't that close afterwards), maybe San Jose is pulling it together.  Even though they almost choked away last night's game, maybe it's a sigh of San Jose's new found ability to handle adversity instead of shrink away from it.  Of course, Detroit handled way more adversity this year than San Jose, and have players who always show up in the playoffs, as evidenced last night, so this is a tricky one.  Detroit in 7, goaltending issues on both sides cancel themselves out and Detroit's superior net-crashers are the difference.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Round 1 Recap

Western Conference:

San Jose vs. Colorado - Whew.  That was close eh?  Then, suddenly, it wasn't at all as San Jose outscored Colorado 10-2 in the last two games.  So I was off by one game in my prediction, thanks to stupid Dan Boyle, but otherwise not a bad prediction.  Sharks-Wings should be just awesome, if San Jose can keep their heads out of their asses long enough.

Chicago vs. Nashville - NOT OVER SOON ENOUGH.  Didn't these games, whether the games were in Chicago or Nashville, just look terrible on TV?  Too dark or something, like there was nobody else there.  Gross.  Yuck.  Play a real hockey teams now plz.

Vancouver vs. Los Angeles - This was my big swing and miss, though if the Kings had held those third period leads I'd be dead on.  This was the series I watched the most and yeah, Drew Doughty is pretty good eh?  Great to actually get some prolonged exposure, it's pretty tiresome to see how people just jump on the "he's the next Bobby Orr" because that's what they've read online or heard on TSN.  It was the worst around the Olympics, all the self-styled pundits who'll assure you of the future greatness of a player that, come on, there's no WAY you've actually seen him play.  I'm thinking here of people I work with.  But yeah, great puckhandler, great passer, creates space so well on the powerplay or when trapped in his own zone, and physical too.  Not enough though.  Stupid not-good-enough-conspiracy.  Let's see the NHL really flex their muscles when Vancouver plays Chicago, a team Bettman surely has marked for the finals.

Detroit vs. Phoenix -Pretty close here too, great showing for Phoenix and you know they probably win if Shane Doan doesn't get hurt.  Going by what I heard on the radio, the Coyote/Jets franchise has never won a game 7.  James Duthie had a great line about how since Detroit had a bad record in day games, like 2-8 or something, that the NHL should change game 7 to an afternoon like game 6 was.  That the league could own a team the entire season, and into the playoffs where said league can influence the schedule, is pretty bush.  Not bush like being allowed to own two CFL teams or anything, but pretty close.  Now with the two who-cares teams out in the first round (Nashville and Phoenix) we can start some real hockey.

Eastern Conference:

Washington vs. Montreal - Just.  Wow.  I wanted to see an Ovechkin-Pronger matchup in the second round, then of course the epic Washington-Pittsburgh Eastern final, but Halak... oh man.  Washington became a pretty hard team to cheer for in game 7 too; how many times did Ovechkin take the puck from his own zone or blue line, skate up the wing, and take a wrist shot with the defender as a screen.  EVERY time.  Drive the net for God's sakes!  Draw a penalty!  Take a hit!  It's hard to accuse Ovechkin of a lack of effort, but when you watch last night's game you can easily accuse him of lacking creativity and being way too stubborn.  Did you see the fans leaving when Montreal went up two goals with five minutes left?  Inexcusable.  A bad hockey city that merely masqueraded as a good one for the last year or so.  Can't hope for you to win when you're team fires Jason Blake-wrist shots all game and your fans bail.

New Jersey vs. Philadelphia - Well I bombed this one.  Not sure what else to say.  All that stuff that made Philly look good on paper in the off-season, and bad during the regular season, sure looked REALLY good against the Devils.  Without Gagne and Carter for at least a few weeks (and Carter done for the playoffs I think I heard) who knows how much further they can go.

Buffalo vs. Boston - Like Philly-Jersey, the Play Your Big Defenseman All The Damn Time Stratagem was a good one.  For a team that didn't blow a third period lead all season (!!!!), Buffalo sure looked soft in those two third period Bruin comebacks.  Tuukka Rask also takes out the Olympic Hero (who, um, lost by the way), showing that the playoffs are where trends go to die (blown leads, teams who can't score suddenly flipping a switch).  I really didn't mind getting this one wrong, it'll be nice to see Marc Savard able to play in the playoffs since he's apparently been cleared. 

Pittsburgh vs. Ottawa - I did pick them in six but this and Vancouver-LA might've been the most exciting first-round series.  A great show by Ottawa, they played as well as they possibly could.  Reminded me of the old Edmonton-Dallas series where the Oilers would try hard, hit like crazy, hit a few posts, then make one mistake and the game would be over.  Does Ottawa trade a goalie in the off-season now?  Perhaps in exchange for a veteran one with an exaggerated back problem, super-short term salary and mild propensity to be "festive" before driving during his injury rehab?


I finished the first round with a paltry 4-4 record, but when there's three upsets in the East I can't imagine that many people did much better.  I should have been 5-3 but I had to take that gamble on Los Angeles, after all, how easy is it to feel contempt for a city that declares a special day after winning a first-round series?

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Comments Part II

Product testing has been completed. 

Comments

I didn't realize this, but apparently to add comments you have to input a whole bunch of stuff like email address and another email address. I'll try to find the setting to change that, even I wouldn't comment here if I had to do all that stuff.

What's a "map?" Oh, you mean one of those things a person can be "all over?"

Handy infomercial tip. Get a PalmWallet! It'll hold EVERYTHING in one tiny space in your pocket! Like, everything that you used to need two full suitcases for will now fit comfortably in the back of those Dockers! Pretty sweet, eh? Yep, it sure is one all-in-one solution! Oh, and if you buy now, you get a second one FREE!

First off, I neglected to mention New Jersey's big trade acquisition Ilya Kovalchuk in my playoff predictions. That was dumb, obviously, but I'm not sure how much of a difference he'll make in that defense-first system. If Jersey wins it'll be because of Brodeur and their defense holding up and not so much because of guys like Parise or Kovalchuk. But I still should've brought him up, he did have 27 points in 27 games since the trade. I am, as always, an idiot.

The big news last night, of course, was the NHL Draft Lottery. The draft is clearly the Super Bowl of the NHL season, both in importance and in hype, especially when you consider the parallels between how both leagues figure out the teams then wait, like, forever before getting to the big day. It's just too bad we have to wait through all that meaningless spring hockey before we get there. Hockey in JUNE?!? Lordly-loo that makes my pacemaker smart. These kids today. Cold weather. Uphill both ways. Etc.

With the Oilers drafting first overall, like I wrote before, I think they either take Hall or trade down to take Seguin. I don't think they take Seguin first overall because there's more demand for Hall later, and they'd be smart to exploit their leverage. Boston also has some cap space, depending on how they re-sign Wheeler, Boychuck, etc. The dream for Edmonton would be to get both; they've got lots of wingers coming up in the system so one of Hemsky or Penner could be available (I might prefer Hemsky, Edmonton needs one big player) and one of their smaller prospects, some draft picks, whatever. It would take a huge offer to get that pick out of Boston of course, I'm not suggesting Hemsky and Cogliano gets that deal done, but you'd have to think the price would be a little lower trading that pick to Edmonton rather than to a division or conference rival. I just hope that if the pick is Seguin, and I've been seduced into thinking it should be because of his position, he doesn't bust. If he's only a good NHL player, that's fine. Hall looks sure-fire, it would kill this city if Edmonton passed on the better player and took the other sure-fire only to have it jam.

It reminds me of Moneyball, whichever chapter where Michael Lewis talks about Oakland's mandate of only drafting college players. In some case in the draft, you'd run into a case where the college player is good but a high-schooler might be GREAT. The A's, being the cash-strapped ugly step-child of MLB (one of many!), couldn't afford to take risks on pipe dreams and fairy dust and would therefore draft the college player because they'd played longer and there was a greater statistical sample size. Play it safe, don't waste picks going for the homerun. Now Hall and Seguin are pretty close, but are the Oilers interested in playing Moneyball? Hall's resume is pretty decorated and has played an extra season, whereas Seguin's is just starting. There's more evidence of Hall's future stardom, so by definition Seguin is the greater risk because he's the greater unknown. Plus, if Edmonton can't clear out some of their roster redundancies they might put Seguin back in junior, let him dominate another year, play in the World Juniors, and not waste a year of entry level contract. That's fine, the Oilers don't need either prospect to be any good next year, but if Seguin can't crack the roster and Hall scores 30 goals it puts a lot more pressure on Seguin the following year. Also, in spite of everyone in Edmonton saying they're willing to rebuild properly and be patient, the opposite is true. We want the 1980's to start NEXT YEAR DAMMIT, and God help Lowe and Tambellini if it doesn't. This is driving me crazy.

Sheldon Souray wants to be traded
? Really? Huh, nobody knew that. Wow. Makes my pacemaker smart, getting shocks like that. I really think the only person who didn't know Sheldon Souray wants to be traded was Sheldon Souray. He proved that by getting into a stupid fight with Iginla right and getting hurt before the deadline when there were apparently teams willing to trade for him. There's two issues, totally separate, going on with his comments to Mark Spector: Should he have said anything and Was he right. The first one's easy. No, you should not make trade demands public and no you should not trash the organization before leaving it (for the second time). The timing was brutal too, right before the big draft announcment, totally coloring what should have been a happy, positive press conference. Was he right though? Dude, who knows. He was pretty specific in his criticisms though, and Tambellini's typically tepid, lukewarm, (Who's that sad dog? With the rain cloud or whatever? He's blue? If only there was some sort of Internet search thingy, with which one could use engines to find things about stuff) response didn't help the perception that Oiler management is aloof and displays the emotional range of cold to frigid. These are the kinds of things that make fans flip out. It's one thing to suck on the ice, you can turn that around. It's another thing to be a northern city that's cold and windy without much to do, you can't help that. You can sure as hell can help how you treat players though; no matter how much money they make they should be allowed to repair a surgically repaired shoulder without being harangued into playing. If that part was true, and if it's part of an ongoing behavioral pattern in Oiler management, then screw those guys and clean house. I'm the guy who wants the team to get better WITH Lowe and see his legacy in Edmonton recover, but if this is a sound description of the atmosphere surrounding the players (and, by extension, the real reason why free agents allegedly won't come to Edmonton), well screw that. If a change in management means an immediate improvement in the free agent quality we can attract then sorry guys, team first. I'm indifferent to Tambellini's legacy, if you were wondering why I left him out.

One last thought on the Draft Lottery coverage. Peter Chiarelli has to change his look. Just sayin...























Right? Okay, now compare him to that guy from Sex and the City whose name I certainly do not know:































And finally to Tyler Stewart of the Barenaked Ladies:































See? Even Gary Bettman can't tell the difference! "Hey you! Hey, in the eyes when you talk to me! Little lower... Okay! This guy? Let him in, he can eat whatever he wants on me! Why? TWO first round picks! Yeah, BOTH years!"