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Think Like a Winner (Ep. 363)

Mark Teixeira, the retired Yankee first baseman, hit 409 career home runs — No. 54 on the all-time list. The hardest thing to do in sports, he says: hitting a baseball. (Photo: Elsa/Getty)

Great athletes aren’t just great at the physical stuff. They’ve also learned how to handle pressure, overcome fear, and stay focused. Here’s the good news: you don’t have to be an athlete to use what they know. (Ep. 4 of “The Hidden Side of Sports” series.)

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

Kim NG: You cannot be afraid to fail.

Mark CUBAN: I have an 8-year-old son, there’s no way I’d let him play tackle football.

Martha NEWSON: I had never been in an environment that was so emotionally charged.

Lauren MURPHY: The fight started, and I hit her as hard as I could.

John THORN: I would say that sports was my way of becoming American.

Kerri WALSH JENNINGS: I want to leave this sport being known as a bad motherf—er.

Toby MOSKOWITZ: I would say most things that we think are true do turn out to be true. Not always for the reasons we think.

Toby Moskowitz is an economist who teaches at the Yale School of Management.

MOSKOWITZ: That’s right.

DUBNER: You have won a really prestigious academic award as one of the top finance scholars in the world. Why do you mess around with sports?

MOSKOWITZ: It’s called tenure. They can’t fire me. No, one of the things I tell my students all the time is, “Don’t go into this business unless you really love what you research.” So, sports has always intrigued me, and to be a little bit more serious — a lot of what I study is behavioral economics, and how people make decisions when faced with a lot of uncertainty. Sports is just a really rich field to look at those kinds of things.

This is a true fact. It’s why a lot of economists mess around in sports. It’s why you see a lot of sports-themed academic journals and conferences. Sports may not be nearly as important as education or healthcare or politics. But when you do research in those areas, it can be really hard to establish cause and effect; there are so many inputs of so many different types, and such hard-to-measure outputs. Furthermore, the incentives in education and healthcare and politics are often opaque — or, worse, twisted. In sports, the incentives are usually transparent, the results are clean, and if you like data — as economists do — well, sports provides boatloads of data. Most of which happens to be neatly categorized and extend back for decades.

Toby Moskowitz, along with Jon Wertheim, wrote a book taking advantage of these data. It’s called Scorecasting. In it, they challenge some of the most fundamental beliefs in sports. For instance: does defense really win championships, as N.F.L. pundits like to say, especially around this time of year? (Short answer: no.) What’s the biggest reason for home-field advantage? (Short answer: involuntary referee bias.) And what’s the real story behind one of the most compelling elements of sports: the hot streak?

MOSKOWITZ: There’s a huge academic literature on this. So, as an example, a player in the N.B.A. who’s hit a couple of shots in a row, his teammates will start feeding him the ball more. His coach will give him the ball more and he’ll start taking more shots as a result. There’s this belief that they’re hot.

Is this belief supported by the data? Is the player actually “hot?”

MOSKOWITZ: If you look at the actual evidence, you find either zero or something very close to zero in terms of predictability. It’s just a bad strategy.

Other scholars, we should note, challenge this conclusion. They argue that there is some evidence for the hot-hand theory. Where does Moskowitz land?

MOSKOWITZ: I’ll sum it up in the following way, which is our beliefs in streaks are much stronger than the data actually supports.

DUBNER: But don’t we know that confidence is a big contributor to good performance in any realm, and wouldn’t past success in sport contribute to greater confidence, which would then contribute to greater future success?

MOSKOWITZ: That’s the theory, but the evidence is that it just doesn’t show up. You could say, “Well, it’s hard to measure, right?” Because take my example of the N.B.A. shooter. “If they’re taking more shots or the defense tightens on them, it’s not the same experiment.” I agree. However, there have been experiments run where it’s a perfectly controlled experiment, and what was really interesting is that players who hit a couple of shots in a row did indeed remark that they felt more confident, that their mechanics felt good that day, they felt good. But the predictive value was absolutely zero.

J.J. REDICK: I am familiar with that study. I also did a version of this hot-hand study on my own.

That is not another economist. That’s the Philadelphia 76ers’ J.J. Redick, who’s played in the N.B.A. since 2006. Redick ranks No. 6 among active players in career three-point shooting percentage. The study he did was for a statistics class at Duke, where he played his college ball, and where Redick is still their all-time leading scorer.

REDICK: I went in the gym and I did four or five workouts where I would shoot 100 or 200 shots, and I would get to the point where I was in a rhythm. And I would note if I have a hot hand and I would record the result of the next shot. And I came to the exact same conclusion, that it is a fallacy.

Of course, measuring the hot hand idea in practice, or even an experiment, is different from what happens during a game, with people watching — millions of people if you’re an N.B.A. player.

REDICK: My mindset, and most players’ mindsets, is if you make two in a row, three in a row, your natural inclination is to get what we call a heat check in. And a heat check is — it’s not necessarily a wild shot — but it’s a shot that has a low probability of going in. So you made two threes in a row. Now the crowd is on their feet. The ball comes to you. It’s a fast break. You dribble up. Two guys are guarding you. Sometimes I shoot one-on-four. You shoot an off-balance three, and it’s one of those things in basketball culture, it’s understood, “Well he’s hot. He’s made two or three in a row, he’s allowed to sort of take a heat check.”

N.B.A. ANNOUNCER: It’s good! He’s as hot as a blowtorch! That’s a heat check, you know that was coming. It’s heat-check time.

REDICK: There’s got to be an element of true belief in yourself that every shot you take is going to go in, whether that’s rational or irrational. You just have to believe that. You cannot play a professional sport and be hesitant.

“You cannot play a professional sport and be hesitant.” “You just have to believe.” Whether it’s rational or not. Today on Freakonomics Radio: the latest installment in a series we’re calling “The Hidden Side of Sports.” In the first episode, we looked at how sports have throughout history mirrored society — which may explain why we care so much about an industry that dollar-wise, is actually quite small. In episode two, we looked at the economics of a single N.F.L. franchise, the San Francisco 49ers, who’ve been trying to recover from a debilitating losing streak. The third episode was called “Here’s Why You’re Not an Elite Athlete.” We looked at all the things that have to go right for an aspiring athlete — from talent to coaching to luck.

Today: the mental side of sports. How do athletes prepare for high-stakes situations? How do they recover when things go wrong? How do they develop a winning strategy when they know their opponent is thinking the same thing? We’ll hear from a mental-skills coach, athletes, and, of course, we’ll hear from some of our favorite economists.

* * *

It’s natural enough to see elite athletes as finely tuned machines, like a BMW or a fighter jet. For starters, they’re usually bigger, faster, and stronger than the rest of us. Some of them, like Olympic gymnasts, are competing on a global stage at an age when most people are still struggling with acne. Also, even in sports that require over-the-top physical power — think of a clean-and-jerk in weightlifting or a brutal scrum in rugby — there’s a graceful element that, to the casual observer, can look nearly effortless. All these factors conspire to persuade us that an athletic endeavor is an almost purely physical endeavor; it’s easy to neglect what may be happening in the athlete’s mind. But if you talk to enough athletes and coaches and others, you discover that’s where a massive share of their energy is going.

Bob TEWKSBURY: I think developing a mental game plan is important for consistent success or consistent performance.

That’s Bob Tewksbury.

TEWKSBURY: I am the mental-skills coach for the San Francisco Giants.

DUBNER: And just give me in a nutshell your major league career as a pitcher yourself.

TEWKSBURY: I pitched in the major leagues from 1986 to 1998 with six different teams. I won 110 major league games, lost 102, had two arm surgeries, seven demotions, made an All-Star team, and experienced just about everything.

Tewksbury recently wrote a book called Ninety Percent Mental. He did not have such a long major league career because he threw the ball so hard. His success was rooted in control, and accuracy: Tewksbury had one of the lowest ratios of walks-per-nine-innings in baseball history.

TEWKSBURY: Correct. People know the strikeout people, but they don’t know the guys that don’t walk people.

When he retired, Tewksbury got a master’s degree from Boston University in sports psychology and counseling. He got his first coaching job with the Boston Red Sox; that year, they won the World Series for the first time since 1918.

JOE BUCK: The Boston Red Sox are World Champions!

During Tewksbury’s playing career, there was no such thing as a mental-skills coach; today, the vast majority of baseball teams have them. Here’s one of Tewksbury’s foundational beliefs, which he tries to teach to every player:

TEWKSBURY: Confidence is a choice. A lot of people think it’s a feeling. But if you wait for that feeling, it may never come.

“Confidence is a choice.” That seems intuitive enough, maybe even obvious. But it’s remarkable how easily even an elite athlete can get derailed.

TEWKSBURY: I remember a day in San Francisco, where I was pitching for the Cardinals, and the hecklers — you know, I didn’t know my mother had Army boots under my bed. They would say all these things, and it really distracted me, and my first thought was, “Well, I could always go back to school and become a physical education coach.”

There’s also the voice inside your head.

Shawn JOHNSON: Yes.

Shawn Johnson is a four-time Olympic medalist in gymnastics.

JOHNSON: Gymnastics is terrifying.

Johnson is 26 now; she’s been retired for years.

JOHNSON: I am terrified of gymnastics. I would never get up on a balance beam now and try to flip. I would hurt myself. Anybody in the world can be trained physically for an Olympic event. You can train your body to do it. Now training your mind is the hardest part because learning to overcome fear, learning to push aside thoughts that are negative, and still take that risk of injury, or of failure, or of falling on your face in front of the entire world, is really difficult to do.

Kerri WALSH JENNINGS: I was so afraid of losing.

That’s Kerri Walsh Jennings, one of the best beach volleyball players in history. She has three Olympic gold medals. But it’s a bronze medal, a third-place finish, that haunts her from the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

WALSH JENNINGS: I’m really working on letting go of it. To be very honest with you, getting bronze in Rio threw me for a loop. And it’s not necessarily losing — I’ve lost plenty in my life and I’ve had bad matches plenty. But I believe in the fairytale. Even if I’m having the worst game, I know there’s going be a point where things are going to shift because I’m never going to give up and I have that mindset “It’s coming, it’s coming, I got it.” I had a terrible match in the semifinals, and I just kept talking to myself, “It’s coming, it’s coming, and it never came.”

Because it never came, and because Walsh Jennings went home with bronze instead of gold, she’s preparing for another Olympics.

WALSH JENNINGS: I’m going for my sixth Olympics, and I’m turning 40, and I’m playing against these young kids, and it’s so nutty, but I’m still going through the same process of leveling up, aspiring to go higher, looking in the mirror, “Do you got it, do you want it? Yes? Carry on.”

But since Rio, the insecurities are still there.

WALSH JENNINGS: It’s exhausting. It’s really exhausting. Ever since then, I’m letting go of living in fear of that happening again. It’s been messy and sad and nonsensical, because one match should not define anyone. One bad performance in life — if you’re a doctor, a wife, an athlete, it should not define you. But I allowed it to define me. And I’m still working my way through it. I’m almost there.

That feeling Walsh Jennings experienced in Rio — of desperately waiting for the “real you” to show up, the you who’s practiced for thousands of hours and excelled at every level — that feeling is not rare. Consider the recently retired baseball player Mark Teixeira.

DUBNER: Were you ever totally lost at the plate?

Mark TEIXEIRA: Absolutely. I had stretches, whether it was a week or even a month, where I said, “This might be my last week in baseball. I am so bad right now. There is no way I’m getting another hit in Major League Baseball. I look awful. I feel awful. I can’t get a hit.”

It’s worth mentioning that Teixeira was not a borderline Major League player. He won all sorts of offensive and defensive awards, he won a World Series with the Yankees, and he hit 409 career home runs — No. 54 on the all-time list. But the line between success and failure was always right in front of him.

TEIXEIRA: Hitting a baseball is still the hardest thing to do in sports. You have guys on the mound that are trying to get you out. And if you’re off a little bit mechanically, mentally, confidence-wise, and he’s on — you can have some bad nights.

We were surprised at how often the word “fear” came up in our interviews with athletes. It’s another dimension on which we think athletes are so different from us — that they’re somehow fearless. Plainly, they’re not. But they do try to fake it.

Doug PEDERSON: Having a fearless mentality — I coach that way. I tried to play that way. You can’t live with fear.

Doug Pederson is head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles.

PEDERSON: It just can paralyze you, and you’re not going to have success in life.

Pederson spends a lot of time helping players mute that fear — or, better, crush it.The Eagles last year made the Super Bowl, and faced the New England Patriots. The Patriots, led by coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady, had made it to eight Super Bowls since 2001 and they’d won five. So, a fairly intimidating team. But in the days leading up to the game, Pederson made sure his team did not think about that.

PEDERSON: We didn’t focus ourselves on the Patriots and worry about all the mystique because again, it’s fear. It’s going to paralyze you. If that’s what you’re worried about you’re not going to be able to play.

The Eagles, who had won zero Super Bowls, were underdogs. Just before kickoff, Pederson had a quick greeting with the opposing coach.

PEDERSON: I had just briefly met Coach Belichick in the past and that was really our first time to spend a minute together, and we basically just congratulated each other on our seasons and wished each other the best for the game.

Bill BELICHICK: Coach, congratulations. Hell of a year.

PEDERSON: But at the same time, internally, I was just thinking, he just had no idea what’s coming. Not saying they overlooked us, but that feeling can creep in. I was so confident in our guys and our coaches that I just felt that he had no idea.

PEDERSON: Alright everybody’s up, everybody up, everybody up, everybody up. Come on, 7, let’s go baby, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.

Pederson’s fearlessness was made manifest toward the end of the first half. The Eagles had a small lead and a fourth-and-goal from about one-and-a-half yards out. The safe play, probably the smart play, was to kick a field goal. Pederson decided to go for the touchdown.

Cris COLLINSWORTH: This is an unbelievable call. This could decide the game.

ANNOUNCER: People say you’ve got to be daring to beat the Patriots on this stage, and Doug Pederson certainly showing a lot of confidence in his offense.

On the sideline, quarterback Nick Foles approaches Pederson to suggest a play.

Nick FOLES: You want “Philly Philly”?

You can hear Pederson think about for a second, and then approve:

PEDERSON: Yeah, let’s do it, let’s do it.

“Philly Philly,” or what would come to be known as “Philly Special,” was a trick play, the thing you draw up in your backyard on Thanksgiving. But it turned out alright.

Al MICHAELS: Caught. Foles. Touchdown! How do you figure?!

COLLINSWORTH: Breathtaking. In a Super Bowl, that’s a breathtaking call. You don’t make that, that one’s second-guessed forever.

Doug Pederson today:

PEDERSON: It’s definitely going to go down as one of the greatest Super Bowl memories.

But now it was only halftime. Pederson had another chance to be fearless in the fourth quarter. Now the Eagles were trailing;

MICHAELS: 33-32

… they had the ball near midfield facing another fourth down.

MICHAELS: For the moment they’re going to leave the offense on the field. Do you dare?

PEDERSON: There was just six minutes or so left in the game, and if you remember the Patriots didn’t punt a single time in the football game. We were struggling to stop them and I just knew there’s no way I’m going to punt this football and give Tom Brady the ball back where he could either run the clock out and win the game or go down and score again. So I wanted our team to control our destiny. And in my gut, I said, “This is the right time to do it.” I didn’t flinch. Called the next play on fourth down and we got it by a yard.

MICHAELS: And Foles under pressure, throws, caught, just enough for the first down.

PEDERSON: And we ultimately went down and scored the game-winning touchdown.

Merrill REESE: The Philadelphia Eagles are Super Bowl Champions!

Pederson, of course, was just the coach; he didn’t actually have to run the plays. For the people that do, who have to perform difficult physical feats under massive mental pressure, how do you shed your fear, gather your confidence, and focus on the task at hand? As Bob Tewksbury told us, it generally starts here:

TEWKSBURY: Developing a mental game plan is important for consistent success.

Okay, so the mental game plan starts when?

TEWKSBURY: It starts with the preparation. What time do you get up, what time do you eat lunch, what time do you go to the ballpark? What do you do when you’re at the ballpark? And more specifically as you get closer to game time, what do you do from a mental perspective? Jon Lester uses a concentration grid.

Jon Lester, whom Tewksbury coached with the Red Sox, has been one of the better pitchers in baseball for many years.

TEWKSBURY: He’s channeling his mind to get ready to perform. In the transition away from the day to getting ready to pitch, he needs to make his world a little bit smaller. That leads into using the imagery program of seeing himself perform and doing pregame rehearsal of the lineup that he’s going to face. Imagery happens better when you are relaxed, through the breathing exercises, and then the imagery starts. When he goes out to warm up, he can recall those images of what he wants to do with the baseball.

Now it’s time for what Tewksbury says is one of the most important components of the mental game: self-talk.

TEWKSBURY: I like to have affirmations or mantras, essentially, that players can use in performance when things start to go awry. I call them anchor statements, and those anchors would be: “See it, feel it, trust it.” “Smooth and easy.” “I got all it takes to beat the competition.” “One pitch at a time.” What you say to yourself, how that little man affects performance, how to understand it, change it, correct it, minimize it, and move forward. Without them, your performance could get swept away like a boat in the ocean.

Brandon McCARTHY: I do think there is something to that.

That’s Brandon McCarthy, who just retired after pitching in the major leagues for 13 years.

McCARTHY: Once the ball’s coming back from the catcher, you’re still doing a quick breakdown of what just happened. Then it’s slowing down my breathing, getting myself back to simply focusing on the execution and at times that’s been based on having a little mantra. “Good direction, good angle, quality pitch.” And you just say that a few times and it’s something that calms the mind and enhances some of the delivery things that I’m working on.

REDICK: The mind has incredible power.

J.J. Redick again.

REDICK: The mind is as big of a separator for professional athletes as any physical tools or physical liabilities that a player may have.

He’s been doing some form of self-talk for many, many years.

REDICK: From ages 8 to 12, it was a lot of imagination. It was a lot of playing imaginary games.

And then years later, playing for Duke, in the conference championship …

REDICK: We were down 15 points with 10 minutes to go. I blacked out and just went crazy in the last 10 minutes and had 23 points.

ANNOUNCER: Fires a three, made it! Holy cow he made another! Are you ready to change your M.V.P. vote? J J Redick, putting a show on!

REDICK: And we won the A.C.C. championship, and in the postgame press conference I said, “I’ve played that game in my backyard 100 times.”

Mental preparation and visualization are particularly important for those pressurized moments when the ball is not yet in play, and it’s your job to put it in play. Picture a tennis or volleyball player about to launch a key serve, a golfer standing over a drive on the 72nd hole of a tournament, or an N.F.L. placekicker preparing for a game-winning kick:

Robbie GOULD: When you’re young, you want to kick a bunch of footballs to figure it out.

That’s Robbie Gould of the San Francisco 49ers. He’s one of the best kickers in N.F.L. history.

DUBNER: Last year, you missed one field goal?

GOULD: I missed two.

DUBNER: Two. So 30-for-32 or something?

GOULD: 39-of-41.

DUBNER: Sorry, 39-for-41.

GOULD: Who’s counting, though?

Gould says N.F.L. kickers spend most of their time not kicking footballs.

GOULD: You can take mental reps so that way you’re not using your leg, because every kick that you take is a kick off your career. So the more that you visualize, the more that you mentally go through situations, and you talk through situations, it makes those situations easier, and you’re not wasting reps.

This preparation doesn’t just happen during the workday, but also at home.

GOULD: I’ll get home about 5:30, I’ll have dinner with my family, I’ll play with my kids, do bath time, read them a book, and then put them down. Once they go to sleep, then I’ll pull out my iPad, start watching film, going over game plans, going over what we might have to do that week, whether it’s weather, playing in a certain place with crowd noise, or something that happened in practice. You’re just always thinking of ways to make yourself better.

On some dimensions, making yourself better as an athlete has never been easier. Like the rest of the modern world, sports are undergoing a revolution in data analytics — aren’t they?

MOSKOWITZ: Look, to say that data analytics is revolutionary is a bit strong. I view it more as evolutionary.

The Yale economist Toby Moskowitz again.

MOSKOWITZ: What you’re trying to do is make a judgment. That judgment is based on intuition, it’s based on theory, as well as it’s got to be based on data. That’s what science is. Every good science is a combination of both.

So how much do the athletes partake in this data evolution?

WALSH JENNINGS: We have heat maps. There’s two applications that break down where every serve is coming from, how a hitter does when she gets served in the middle or short or wide, and we watch a ton of video. So all of that is happening.

Kerri Walsh Jennings again.

WALSH JENNINGS: I do not do well with all of that sensory input. I want to feel it, and certainly know their tendencies, but that’s where I want to finish it. I don’t need to know the rest.

REDICK: I ration data to myself. I don’t let myself read all of it.

The 76ers’ J.J. Redick again:

REDICK: If you’re obsessing about these numbers on a daily basis in the middle of the season, I’m just going to be honest, I’m a little bit of a head case. I don’t want to be in the middle of a game going to my left and saying, “Wow, this shot is 15 percentage points worse than if I was on the other side.” You just can’t do that.

Maybe it’s just too much to process when you’ve got the ball. On defense, meanwhile:

REDICK: I’ll look at all of that data for the people that I guard.

Redick recalls a defensive assignment he had a few years ago in a playoff game. The data revealed that the player he’d be guarding was a great three-point shooter, but:

REDICK: If you run him off the line and he has to take a pull-up two or a runner, a floater, 5–7 feet from the basket, this guy was shooting low 30’s.

Low 30’s meaning his make percentage. Which is pretty low for a two-point shot in the N.B.A. So whenever this guy got the ball in three-point range, Redick stayed in his face:

REDICK: For the whole series, I didn’t care if he beat me off the dribble at all. And he shot 27 percent from two for the series. So I did my job. That’s an example where you used the data available and it works.

The sport that’s seen the most use of data for the longest time is baseball. That’s partly because some of the early data nerds happened to be baseball fans. But also, the sport lends itself to analysis: every pitch, every at-bat, every ball put in play is an independent action that can be independently measured. Even though there are nine players on a team, they don’t interact with anything like the complexity of players in football or soccer or basketball or hockey.

One obvious change in baseball, facilitated by data, is how a manager will shift his defense in response to the opposing batter’s tendencies. Toward the end of his career, Mark Teixeira suffered from this change: once teams knew exactly where he was most likely to hit the ball, they would shift their defenses; what used to be a ground-ball single up the middle was now an easy out.

DUBNER: I’m curious the degree to which you think that rise in analytics and the use of the shift was a contributing factor to your decline and how much of it was just the natural cycle of an aging baseball player.

Mark TEIXEIRA: It’s probably 70/30, just the natural age. Without analytics I still would be retired. Analytics doesn’t make your wrist blow out. Analytics doesn’t make you tear up your knee. But I would say that analytics took numbers that should have been better and decreased them.

DUBNER: What are some ways that you benefited from analytics? I don’t know if you were a tape rat, if you watched a lot of tape. I’m curious whether you studied pitchers for their tendencies?

TEIXEIRA: I didn’t benefit, I think, at all. I wasn’t the guy that went up there and said, “Okay, it’s 2-1, this guy is a 73 percent chance to throw a backdoor slider.” I never did that. And there’s a whole bunch of players that still don’t look at tape.

* * *

We’ve been talking about the mental side of sports — so far, mostly from an internal perspective: using your mind to drive your body’s performance. But there’s a whole other, external perspective to consider: outhinking your opponent. And this gets us into what economists call game theory.

Steve LEVITT: Game theory is a part of economics which is actually quite different than most of the rest of economics, because most of economics focuses on either cases where there are many, many, many people interacting, and that’s what we call perfect competition, or where there’s exactly one person, like a monopolist, interacting with many people.

That’s my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt. He teaches economics at the University of Chicago.

LEVITT: But game theory is economics applied to the interactions of two or three or four or five individuals or firms or actors, and so game theory, it turns out, has very different predictions and kinds of predictions than the rest of economics.

DUBNER: Levitt, would you consider yourself a sports economist?

LEVITT: Absolutely not. I’ve written papers about sports, but I’ve only written about sports as a vehicle to understand bigger economic concepts. Sports happened to be a place where there’s often really good data and really well-defined and simple incentives in place, so that you can match data to incentives to try to answer questions that economists want to answer more generally.

Questions about cheating, for instance. In one paper, Levitt analyzed sumo-wrestling data and found what he believed was widespread match-fixing.

LEVITT: So it really looks like a quid pro quo — there’s a deal worked out where if you let me win when I really need it, the next time we meet, I’m going to throw the match and let you win.

In another paper, Levitt found evidence of racial bias in the TV game show The Weakest Link — not quite a sport, I know, but other economists later did similar research and found racial bias among N.B.A. referees and major-league umpires. Levitt has also studied the details of in-game decision-making in professional sports. In a paper he co-wrote with Ken Kovash — a one-time University of Chicago research assistant, now a Cleveland Browns executive — Levitt looked at how good N.F.L. offenses are at confusing or deceiving the defense.

LEVITT: We looked at whether teams are making the right choices between running plays and passing plays, and our conclusion is that we see that on average teams seem to make a mistake.

The mistake is, essentially, being too predictable.

LEVITT: They seem to not throw enough passes, relative to running plays. And N.F.L. teams in particular have lots of serial correlation.

“Serial correlation” meaning the previous play is too predictive of the next play. Ideally, you want the play-calling to appear nearly random, to maximize the element of surprise.

LEVITT: It turns out the play that you just ran has a very large influence on the next choice. And interestingly, and almost embarrassingly funny to an economist, is that it’s exactly when that play did badly. So if you do a running play and it didn’t do well, you are much less likely to call a running play the next time because of some belief that, “Well if it didn’t work last time, it’s not going to work this time.”

There are, of course, other factors to consider: if a run play fails, you’ve got more yardage to make up, which might argue in favor of a pass play. But in the final analysis, Levitt and Kovash found that teams were leaving points on the table.

LEVITT: We think the stakes are really high. The magnitude of the mistakes that they made were associated with scoring an extra point a game, which doesn’t sound like much, but an extra point a game would turn into about half of a win per season, and that’s worth about $5 million a year. So it looks like roughly a $5-million-a-year mistake. Currently in the N.F.L, the number of pass plays is about 58 percent. And our belief is the optimal looks much more like 70 percent. And so there really should be dramatically more passes in the N.F.L.

Levitt and Kovash also looked at a game-theory question in baseball: how well do pitchers randomize their pitches? The best way to fool a hitter is to throw a fastball when they’re expecting a curveball or a slider, or a curveball or slider when they’re expecting a fastball. Game theory in action. So, how well do major league pitchers do at defying expectations?

LEVITT: It turns out, all major league pitchers, on average, there’s an enormous overabundance of fastballs being thrown. And by that I mean when pitchers throw fastballs — controlling for the situation and controlling for everything imaginable — it turns out that on average, pitchers are doing worse when they throw fastballs than when they throw curveballs or sliders. That suggests that pitchers are not doing what game theory says, which is balancing off the three different kinds of pitches.

TEIXEIRA: I agree 100 percent.

That, again, is former baseball star Mark Teixeira. We’d asked him about Levitt’s research showing that pitchers are too reliant on fastballs. But it’s not so simple as merely randomizing, he said. Imagine you’re the pitcher, you’ve got two strikes on the batter, and maybe also a runner on third.

TEIXEIRA: The issue is you have to take the pitcher’s skill and ability to perform that skill with two strikes into account. So the pitchers that can throw curveballs and change-ups and sliders with two strikes, do it. The guys that maybe bounce that pitch or hang that pitch are going to throw fastballs. And so they’re going to get hit. So the best pitchers in baseball, they throw more sliders and curveballs and change-ups with two strikes because they can control it better.

In their study, Levitt and Kovash actually did factor in pitcher quality. But, even when controlling for pitcher quality: they found too many fastballs. That was good news for a hitter like Teixeira.

TEIXEIRA: My entire career was based on not getting me to chase the curve balls and the sliders in the dirt, and having to come with a fastball over the middle of the plate. That was the style of hitter that I was.

Knowing about this fastball surplus would be especially useful if you are, say, the general manager of a baseball team.

LEVITT: It’s funny. We did get some time with the general manager of a major league club that I will not name to protect the identity of the innocent. The executives looked at the data and said, “This is incredibly convincing and I think you’re absolutely right.” And then the general manager said, “But what am I supposed to do about it?” And I said, “Throw fewer fastballs.” And the guy said, “How in the world am I supposed to get my team to throw fewer fastballs?” And I said, “Well, you’re the general manager, why don’t you tell them to throw fewer fastballs?” He said, “I can’t do that.”

I had anticipated that, so I said, “Here’s my other suggestion. There are eight catchers available on the free-agent market, and I’ve calculated over the last three seasons what share of fastballs have been thrown when each of these eight catchers have been behind the plate. And there’s a big difference, and these two catchers have actually called games with something like 4 or 5 percent fewer fastballs per game. And my suggestion is you go pick up those catchers on the free-agent market.”

Well, they didn’t do that either. Instead, they stuck with their current catcher, who called the highest share of fastballs of any catcher in the league.

This disconnect between the data and behavior suggests a few things. The first is that decision-making in sports, while trending toward the scientific-ish, is often still not that scientific. It also suggests just how strong habit can be, and our belief in intuition. And, maybe more than anything, it suggests that in the heat of competition, the mental state of a given athlete can be fragile. Brandon McCarthy told us there were times when a particular pitch in his arsenal just became unavailable.

McCARTHY: Mentally, you just couldn’t imagine throwing that pitch where you wanted.

In McCarthy’s case, it was his fastball. The problem started when he was pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers and followed him, off and on, to the Atlanta Braves.

McCARTHY: I mean, your brain just — I couldn’t — I would lay down. You close your eyes and try to picture throwing that. It truly felt like your brain went in a Tilt-a-Wheel and you just couldn’t, you couldn’t picture it. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t imagine doing it. It just went haywire. So when it would happen in a game, you would try and throw everything else to make something work and keep going as long as you can. But you’re very aware that you’re, you’re now trying to run a race except you’ve lost one of your feet.

I was convinced early on it was a mechanical thing and it feels like it’s something physical that eventually becomes mental and then you just can’t see otherwise. So I really — I don’t know. I just know I’m fortunate that it happened late enough in my career that I could get past it, or at least work around it.

Most of the best athletes in the world are are the ones who can control something in their mind just a little bit better than everybody else can. They can be physically gifted, able to do certain things that others can’t, and that last bit is just how much better they are mentally in some capacity that we haven’t figured out.

I asked McCarthy how much of that mental advantage lies in the ability to self-diagnose in the moment.

McCARTHY: It’s a tremendously large component. Not just the ability to diagnose but the ability to fix instantly. Not just “I’m not doing this well today. This is what I have to work on before my next start.” It’s, “How do I fix this for the next pitch?” And watching Clayton Kershaw in L.A. for the last three years—

Clayton Kershaw, McCarthy’s teammate during that time, is one of the most dominant pitchers in baseball. One thing that McCarthy particularly admired about Kershaw—

McCARTHY: —is how quickly he fixes something where most everybody else spirals, and it turns into an okay outing or a poor outing, his turns into a just a less-great outing, because he fixes the little thing that’s going wrong. And then even if it’s still not great it’s much better and then by the next start he fixes it again. That’s the diagnosing and the ability to fix immediately that the brain and physical ability to do that is very rare.

DUBNER: Did you pick his brain when he was a teammate of yours?

MCCARTHY: As much as you can. But one thing I’ve noticed when you talk to players who are really, really great and they’re historically great, is a lot of them can’t explain the things that they do. That’s why a lot of them make for bad coaches. I’ve had Greg Maddux in different camps with me before and, “How do you throw your changeup?” And it’s, “I grip it like this and I throw it.” Well, thank you. That’s not — it wasn’t of any help to me. But in his mind, it makes complete sense.

Bob Tewksbury, the former pitcher and now mental-skills coach, argues that the ability to self-diagnose, and self-correct, in the moment, is among an athlete’s most important tools.

TEWKSBURY: That’s the ability to have consistent performance. And what I mean by that is, you’re not always going to go out and perform well every game. What happens to athletes is they get to that situation and then they don’t know how to manage themselves out of it. There’s a lot of great “five o’clock hitters” — guys that hit the ball very far during batting practice, but can’t hit in the game. And there’s a lot of pitchers who pitch no-hitters in the bullpen and can’t take it with them across the lines.

I asked Tewksbury to explain how a pitcher like him, in the heat of competition, could get himself back in synch if his mechanics started to go haywire.

TEWKSBURY: So, my mechanics — you step back with your left foot; you rotate your right foot adjacent to the pitching rubber; your hips turn clockwise toward third base; you lift up your left leg; as you do that, simultaneously your hands are together at about the waist, waist to the shoulder height. Then your hands: as your body starts to go forward toward the mound, your hands separate with the ball coming out of your glove. Your body continues to glide toward home plate. Your left shoulder should be in line with your target as your arm takes its arc and path and gets into a position to throw. Now your body is square to home plate, your left leg has hit the ground, your left knee is bent, and the arm continues its arc, and you throw the pitch to your intended target. So, there’s a feeling that happens with that. When that is all in synch, you know that the ball can be located at your intended spot.

And what if the ball doesn’t hit your intended spot?

TEWKSBURY: So, say I throw that pitch, and I bounce it in front of home plate. That tells me that my body was too far in front of my release point, so that the only place the ball would go would be down. Conversely, if my body was lagging, or if my arm was lagging, the ball would be high. Once you know how your body responds, you’re able to make that correction.

Simple, right? And remember, you’re not just throwing the ball into space; you’re throwing to a supremely tuned and muscled opponent gripping a long piece of hardwood, preparing to hit the ball as hard as he can right back in your direction, from just 60 feet, 6 inches away. So what do you do, in that moment, if your mechanics are off; if your confidence abandons you; if the only thought in your mind is that your next pitch is about to be crushed?

TEWKSBURY: What you do is you delete the thought. I’m going to just change the channel. It’s as if I’m watching this bad channel, I’m going to change it to ESPN. Delete the thought, take a breath, and then reframe that thought or use an anchor statement.

Some of Tewksbury’s anchor statements, as you’ll recall:

TEWKSBURY: “See it, feel it, trust it.” “Smooth and easy.” “One pitch at a time.”

And if that doesn’t work, here’s what Tewksbury suggests:

TEWKSBURY: Taking a tongue depressor time out. I tell pitchers to tape two tongue depressors together, put it in your back pocket, and when things get tough on the mound, call a timeout, go back behind the mound, clean your spikes, or make pretend you clean your spikes, and that allows you more time to take your breath to refocus. That’s a lot better than going around the mound, walking around the mound, rubbing up the baseball, because your behavior is really adding to your frustration. You’re not doing anything to slow down.

And slowing down your mind is almost always a good thing. When he coaches athletes, Tewksbury uses a simple, four-step mantra to get their mind right. Step one: slow down. Step two: breathe. Seriously — under pressure, it’s easy to forget to breathe. Breathing is important, and it helps you slow down. Step three: engage in some positive self-talk: “I got this.” Step four: focus on the task at hand. There, now you’ve got it: Bob Tewksbury’s recipe for success in athletic competition under pressure.

There’s just one problem. For every athlete trying to harness their own mental fortitude, there’s an opponent trying to mess with them. Trying to invade their mental space; trying to plant a seed of doubt, or confusion, or fear. That is the premise behind one of the most entertaining mental battles in sport, a practice in American football known as “icing the kicker.”

There’s just a few seconds left on the clock. One team trails by a single point, and they’re lining up for a game-winning field goal. The kicker goes through his mental preparation: he breathes; maybe he invokes a mantra; he focuses on the task at hand. And then just as the ball is snapped, the other team has called a time out. This is how you ice the kicker. The opposing coach wants to freeze the kicker out of his routine; he wants to make him think a bit more about the enormity of the circumstance.

Icing the kicker has become a standard move in these situations and occasionally it yields results: in the Eagles-Bears playoff game a couple weeks ago, the Bears’ kicker was iced and he missed the kick. But overall, statistically, is icing the kicker effective?

MOSKOWITZ: It’s certainly the conventional wisdom.

That, again, is the sports-loving Yale economist Toby Moskowitz, who covered this phenomenon in his book Scorecasting.

MOSKOWITZ: It’s something every fan believes and, in fact, every fan expects a coach to do. But it turns out there is no effect from this. And if you think about it logically, it makes sense. These are kickers — if you make it to this level in the professional football league, they’ve kicked the ball thousands upon thousands of times in many pressure situations. They are selected on that dimension — as one professional kicker said to us when we were writing the book, “If something like that bothers you, you probably shouldn’t be kicking in this league.”

That professional kicker, it turns out, was none other than Robbie Gould, whom we heard from earlier.

GOULD: You’re just always thinking of ways to make yourself better.

Gould prides himself on mental toughness and mental preparation. This includes practicing, alone and with his team, for any game-time possibility — including being the kicker who is getting iced.

GOULD: We’ll actually line up the field goal, snap, hold, but won’t kick it. So, you go through your entire routine, whether it’s the head coach calling a timeout to ice you, whether it’s a bad snap. These are all situations that come up that you have to be aware of.

Part of that awareness is the particularly intense pressure of the position Gould plays. Let’s say you kick the game-winning field goal — you’re the hero. And if you miss it?

GOULD: I don’t get another chance to get that play back. I have to wait for the next week. Some players, like wide receivers, defensive backs, they have 70 plays a game, so if they screw up they can go right back to it. Well, as a kicker, you have to make them count, because the point totals in the National Football League are staggering to the point of how many close games there are.

Gould just finished his 14th N.F.L. season, and his second with the 49ers.

GOULD: Yeah, I played 11 with the Chicago Bears. I played one with the Giants.

The Bears, remember, were eliminated from the playoffs this year when their kicker was iced, and missed the game-winning field goal. Gould, meanwhile, had another excellent season this year for the 49ers: he made 33 field goals and missed just one, though he did miss two extra-point attempts. His team, meanwhile? It was a mostly-dreadful season, marked by injuries and losses. So what happens to Gould next year?

GOULD: You never know. You can be here one day and gone the next. I got cut in Chicago on Labor Day weekend after making the team. It’s just how it is.

DUBNER: Had you missed a couple in the game?

GOULD: I missed a couple in preseason, but it was just a lot of different things. Salary-cap issues. I had a big cap number that year.

DUBNER: What’s the most you’ve ever earned in a year?

GOULD: $4 million. This is a business. This is not a college football scholarship. It just isn’t. It doesn’t matter what round you’re picked in, it doesn’t matter how much you’re making, how old you are in the league, how experienced you are. Every day you have to earn your keep.

Of all the mind games a professional athlete must master, this is perhaps the most difficult: how to sustain your career once you’ve reached the elite level. Once you’ve realized that, as good as you may be, there are 100 people nearly as good — maybe even better — who can’t wait to take your place. The life of a professional athlete is relatively short; if you’re lucky enough to be paid well, you have a relatively small window of time to take advantage. And the people who pay your salary — well, they’d be very happy to pay someone else less.

So, coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, we get into perhaps the toughest competition in all of sports. We’ll start with the management side. We’ll hear from team owners and league officials from the big team sports, like Major League Baseball, as well as newcomers, like the U.F.C. We’ll hear their dreams of expansion, their excitement over legalized gambling, what they hate about their own sports, what they think is the sport of the future, and where the money goes.

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Alvin Melathe, Anders Kelto, and Derek John, with help from Matt Stroup, and Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Robbie Gould, professional kicker for the San Francisco 49ers.

Kerri Walsh Jennings, three-time Olympic gold medalist in beach volleyball.

Shawn Johnson, four-time Olympic medalist in gymnastics.

Steve Levitt, professor of economics at the University of Chicago; Freakonomics co-author.

Brandon McCarthy, former professional pitcher and current front office executive for the Texas Rangers.

Toby Moskowitz, professor of economics of Yale School of Management.

Doug Pederson, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles.

J.J. Redick, professional basketball player for the Philadelphia 76ers.

Mark Teixeira, former professional baseball first baseman.

Bob Tewksbury, mental skills coach for the San Francisco Giants; former professional pitcher.

RESOURCES

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won by Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim (Three Rivers Press 2012).

Ninety Percent Mental: An All-Star Player Turned Mental Skills Coach Reveals the Hidden Game of Baseball by Bob Tewksbury and Scott Miller (Da Capo Press 2018).

“Winning Isn’t Everything: Corruption in Sumo Wrestling,” Mark Duggan and Steven D. Levitt, The American Economic Review (2002).

“Testing Theories of Discrimination: Evidence From the Weakest Link,” Steven D. Levitt, The Journal of Law and Economics (2004).

“Racial Discrimination Among NBA Referees,” Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers, The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2010).

“Professionals Do Not Play Minimax: Evidence from Major League Baseball and the National Football League,” Kenneth Kovash and Steven D. Levitt (2009).

“The Hot Hand: A New Approach to an Old ‘Fallacy’,” Andrew Bocskocsky, John Ezekowitz, and Carolyn Stein, MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (2004).

“Surprised by the Gambler’s and Hot Hand Fallacies? A Truth in the Law of Small Numbers,” Joshua B. Miller and Adam Sanjurjo (2015).

EXTRA

“How Sports Became Us (Ep. 349),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“How to Stop Being a Loser (Ep. 350),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Here’s Why You’re Not an Elite Athlete (Ep. 351),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

The post Think Like a Winner (Ep. 363) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/think-like-a-winner/

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rickhorrow · 6 years

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10 to watch 102218

The Boston Red Sox have met the Dodgers in the World Series once before. The year was 1916. One hundred and two years ago, the then Brooklyn Dodgers faced the Sox and their best pitcher, a 21 year-old gent named Babe Ruth. Boston’s Fenway Park had opened four years earlier – and today is the oldest active ballpark in Major League Baseball. In 1916, the Red Sox beat the Dodgers, ruining their first World Series appearance. And since then, of course, Babe Ruth left the Red Sox and the Dodgers departed Brooklyn. The 2018 World Series pits the Los Angeles Dodgers, at $3 billion the second most valuable team in MLB according to Forbes’ annual valuation against the $2.8 billion Red Sox, number five on Forbes’ list. Fenway Park holds only 37,731 fans – Dodgers Stadium packs in 56,000, MLB’s biggest. And all of this history and data adds up to one thing – what is perhaps the most storied, eagerly-anticipated World Series in the modern era.

As the NFL settles in to London for its ever-growing annual International Series, different timing news has come from across London Town. Starting on Monday, the NFL Network will film its "Good Morning Football" studio show in London for six days straight, leading up to Eagles-Jaguars at Wembley Stadium next Sunday. Last Friday, the All England Tennis Lawn Club and Wimbledon organizers announced that the tournament would "adopt final-set tiebreakers for all matches" in 2019 if the score is tied at 12-12, joining the U.S. Open as the only events of tennis’ four Slams to implement any sort of tiebreaker in the final set. As the New York Times noted, the French Open and Australian Open "still do not have a tiebreaker in the final set.” Tradition "dies hard at Wimbledon," so this change was "notable and somewhat surprising.” And Sports Illustrated concludes this is the “latest in a long string of welcomed innovations by Wimbledon, which has done a masterful job in reshaping and modernizing its image.” Now, if the NFL would only attempt to show the same respect for athletes and fans by better attempting to limit football’s constant interruptions for penalties and commercial breaks, all but rendering the sport unwatchable in real time for today’s time-shift savvy consumers.

Despite conflicting reports, “Crown Jewel” remains on WWE’s calendar of events, indicating the November 2 show in Riyadh will happen as planned. Political and diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi have driven several high-profile companies to cut business ties with the Kingdom and have brought on demands for WWE to cancel the high-profile show. Sports Illustrated reported that several of the company’s stars are uncomfortable with the idea of performing in Saudi Arabia, citing the country’s “poor record with human rights” as the reason for their apprehension; WWE female stars are still banned from performing in the Kingdom. "Crown Jewel” is worth $450 million in PPV signups, and the decision to cancel the event could torpedo the lucrative long term deal. Should the WWE end their relationship with the Saudis, they’ll join Endeavor and Virgin as companies that ended profitable deals in the name of human rights. According to JohnWallStreet, Endeavor is reportedly terminating a $400 million investment agreement that would have given the Saudi’s a 5-10% stake in the company. A formal announcement will likely come this week, amidst continuing political and diplomatic fallout.

Hosting a mega international sporting event like the Olympics or World Cup often takes a heavy financial toll on a host nation without much return, but the 2018 World Cup provided Russia with a $14.5 billion economic boost. According to SportsBusiness Journal and a report from the organizing committee, from 2013-2018, a total of 952 billion rubles, equivalent to $14.5 billion, was added to the Russian economy. That number is equivalent to 1.1% of the country’s GDP. This figure comes as good news for Russia, which spent an estimated $10.5 billion preparing for and hosting the World Cup this past summer. In all, the tournament created over 300,000 per year in the build-up to the event, adding $7 billion to the population’s income. Going forward, the positive economic impact from hosting the World Cup is expected to continue for Russia, with an additional $2.3-3.2 billion per year being contributed over the next five years from areas such as tourism.

The Los Angeles Chargers have struggled to fill the seats at the tiny StubHub Center but remain optimistic that they will pack their new stadium in Inglewood once it opens in 2020. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Chargers believe that their pricing model for season tickets will bring more fans to their new stadium than what they are currently seeing. Tickets at the Inglewood facility, which will be shared with the Los Angeles Rams, will start at $50 per game for the least-expensive general seating option; that will also require a “one-time personal seat license fee of $100.” News of this pricing comes just a month after the Rams announced their ticketing options. For that franchise, season tickets start at $60 per game and require a much more expensive PSL, beginning at $1,000. For Chargers games, more than 26,000 seats will be made available at prices between $50-90 per seat at the new Inglewood stadium, as the low prices will hopefully bring in more fans. However, the new pricing scheme will drop the Chargers’ revenue goals for the initial Inglewood season from $400 million to about $150 billion – a reality that is reportedly concerning to NFL owners.

UConn and IMG have agreed to extend their partnership through 2033 as part of a 15-year deal worth at least $93 million. According to the Hartford Courant, the deal will “allow IMG to continue holding the sole rights to UConn multimedia, as well as remaining the licensing agent of UConn athletics.” UConn athletics are buoyed by the women’s basketball program, the most successful women’s basketball program in the nation with 11 National Championships. The university’s previous deal with IMG was signed back in 2008 and worth $80 million, including "incentives for UConn, which could have raised the yearly threshold.” Under terms for the new contract, IMG will pay $6 million in the first year, with that number increasing by $10,000 in subsequent years. However, “the deal is a revenue-sharing agreement” in which UConn receives 100% of revenue in the first three years, 95% in years three and four, 90% in the two following years, 85% in the next three years and 80% for the remainder of the contract. Will the new deal ultimately be better for IMG or for UConn? Time, and athletic teams’ win-loss records, will tell.

Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham FC Owner Shahid Khan has withdrawn his bid to purchase Wembley Stadium. According to the Financial Times, Khan’s $787 million offer was met with a great deal of controversy in England, creating a divide within the FA. The thought of selling Wembley Stadium, known as “England’s home of football,” to an American did not sit well with much of soccer’s establishment overseas. “I cannot rule out revising the opportunity at another time when perhaps the Football Association family is unified in its view on the opportunity,” said Khan. “I recognize the passion many people have for Wembley and what it means to English football, and will be willing to reengage with the FA on this matter under proper circumstances.” Talks between Khan and the FA first began in April and escalated last month when the two sides agreed to draft sales terms. Both sides continue to deny that the collapse of Khan’s bid has any bearing on the future of a permanent NFL franchise in London, but without a guaranteed, controlled home it’s not likely that the Jaguars or any NFL franchise will call the moving vans any time soon.

Canelo Alvarez is moving to DAZN as part of a record-shattering 11-year, $365 million deal. According to ESPN.com, the boxer will now move away from HBO PPV in favor of the upstart OTT platform that launched in the U.S. just last month. The deal is set to commence on December 15 when Alvarez fights Rocky Fielding at Madison Square Garden. On HBO PPV, Alvarez’s fights cost $80 apiece for viewers, while “his two fights per year on the all-sports streaming service” cost $9.99 per month. When Alvarez was fighting on PPV, he would “earn money for every buy above a set threshold beyond his guaranteed purse.” But even though DAZN “doesn't offer” PPV, Alvarez can “still earn even more money beyond his guarantee based on specific subscription benchmarks that DAZN can reach during the course of the deal.” DAZN has been making serious moves in the professional boxing space — this deal comes after a $1 billion deal with Matchroom Boxing USA was struck to stream 32 fight cards per year.

Rest in peace Paul Allen. Allen, owner of both the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers, passed away on October 15 at the age of 65 from complications of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. According to the Seattle Times, with no spouse or children to take control of the two franchises, questions are beginning to emerge regarding the future of the two Pacific Northwest clubs. While many speculate that Allen’s sister, First & Goal Vice Chair Jody Allen, could take charge of the teams, it remains unclear whether or not she has an interest in running the daily operations for the Seahawks and/or Trail Blazers. Trail Blazers Vice Chair Bert Kolde would "likely have interest in ownership" of the NBA team however. Trail Blazers President and CEO Chris McGowan, who serves as the team's alternate governor, will “continue to represent the Blazers at all ownership meetings” following Allen’s death. Considered a progressive sports franchise owner, Allen brought a Super Bowl championship to Seattle back in 2014 and got the Blazers to the NBA finals twice during his tenure.

This Tuesday brings the latest book release continuing the dialogue around CTE: Brainwashed, by former NFL running back Merril Hoge. When post-concussion syndrome forced Hoge into early retirement in 1994, research on football-related head injuries wasn’t a priority. At the time, football was heavily influenced by a tough guy culture, and little was known about concussions and their potentially dangerous effects. Then the tragic death of Hoge’s ex-teammate Mike Webster in 2002 launched a wave of fear after an autopsy determined he suffered from an obscure brain disease—chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Concern over player safety soon became a discussion about football at every level, with one scientist even declaring youth football “child abuse.” In Brainwashed, Hoge and board-certified forensic neuropathologist Dr. Peter Cummings address some of the common perceptions surrounding the disease, examining significant flaws in the often-cited studies and exposing some of the sensationalistic reporting that colors today’s CTE dialogue. Brainwashed attempts to provide a balanced dialogue around the disease that’s creating serious questions about America’s favorite sport, and adds valuable perspective to the “Is football too dangerous?” conversation.

#10 #10towatch

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hsews · 6 years

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While you’ve been admiring ESPN’s MLB home page this season, you’ve probably noticed the Ohtani Tracker. We even gave it its own place on the menu bar, right between “MLBRank Top 100” and “More.” It’s an auspicious presentation.

The Ohtani Tracker has been a little quiet lately, given that Sho-Babe Ruth-tani hasn’t hit since June 4 or pitched since June 6. Worse, as of this writing, we don’t know if he’s going to do either, both or neither again during the 2018 season. It’s a limbo likely to dangle over us for the next few weeks.

The story of Shohei Ohtani has been unbelievably compelling. Here is a 23-year-old bidding not just to work regularly as both a starting pitcher and a designated hitter, but to do both at an elite level. This isn’t a Brooks Kieschnick situation, where a fringe player is leveraging his unusual versatility to shore up two end-of-the-roster spots for a team, thus creating an opening for someone else. The hope for Ohtani was to be the offensive complement to Mike Trout the Angels sorely needed, while heading up a rotation that lacked an ace.

For two months, it went better than anyone could have expected. At the plate, Ohtani had a .907 OPS and six homers while displaying top-shelf power on contact and an advanced approach. According to Bill James Online, only three Angels have posted more offensive win shares than Ohtani, even though nine of them have had more plate appearances. Meanwhile, he has posted a 3.10 ERA on the mound with 61 strikeouts over 49 1/3 innings. Only Tyler Skaggs has more pitching win shares on Los Angeles’ staff.

Keep track of the Japanese phenom’s bid for greatness on both sides of the ball. Story »

Alas, Ohtani’s unquestioned early success only whetted our appetites. We want more. We want it now. Can he win 10 games and hit 10 homers in the same season? Only Babe Ruth did that, and he only did it once. Now, though, Ohtani is injured and may be looking at surgery. His season might be done, leaving us with only a glimpse of what he might’ve otherwise accomplished in an unforgettable rookie campaign.

If Ohtani is done, the season is ruined. Except: It’s not.

For years, as the popularity of baseball and its place in contemporary culture have been discussed, there has been a persistent line of thinking that MLB, like its NBA brethren, needs to do a better job of promoting its stars. Make the sport more personality-driven. We look at rankings of the most popular athletes and see how a retired player like Derek Jeter remains the most recognizable baseball player, and something seems askew.

There is something to that thinking. It would clearly be good for the game if its stars were a little more embedded in the collective cultural consciousness. However, it’s a challenge because of the nature of the sport.

For one thing, there is only so much any player, even Trout, can do on a nightly basis. In the NBA, if LeBron James is playing, you know you’re likely going to get 27 points, 9 rebounds and 9 assists. That’s an average, but it’s one that adheres closely to nightly reality. Maybe he goes off for a special night, maybe he has an off-night. Either way, as long as James is playing, you know he’s going to be a fulcrum on which the game teeters.

That is not really true in baseball, especially when it comes to position players. Trout might have a big night. He’s more likely to have one than anybody else. But he might also go 2-for-4 with a walk, all coming with the bases empty and all resulting in a left on base. It’s a good night, but it might not have impacted the game that much, because the impact is so dependent upon what the rest of the team does. And Trout may well have an 0-fer — he has had 25 hitless games already this season. And Trout is the best player in the world, having what could end up as the best season anyone has ever had. It’s the nature of baseball.

After losing their way for a few years, the Braves went back to the formula that launched a dynasty — and it’s paying off in a big way.

Who leads the way for MVP and Cy Young? Which rookie has the brightest future? Our experts reevaluate their award picks at the almost-halfway point.

Philly’s ace lost his cool about defensive shifts, but was his point accurate? Plus, a new way to track bullpen usage and remembering a Redbirds icon.

2 Related

In basketball, if you buy a ticket to a game because James is in town and you want your kids to see him play, but arrive at the arena only to find out he’s being rested, you feel hoodwinked. In baseball, star players are rested sometimes and star pitchers only go once every five days. People show up at the park for the atmosphere and the team. Obviously they want to see Trout or Ohtani or Aaron Judge or Mookie Betts or Sean Doolittle (hey, we all have our reasons), but the experience of attending the game is not all that dependent on who is playing in it. Bad teams are harder to watch than good ones, but that has to do more with the stakes of the game, not so much who is or isn’t in the lineup on a given day.

In other words, relax, because whatever happens with Ohtani, the 2018 season will be fine. It will be incredible. The postseason will be one we’ll never forget. There will be pennant races and great individual achievements and heartbreaking injuries.

Just off the top of my head:

• Races! The Yankees and Red Sox are poised to give us a real pennant race for the first time since, well, that’s hard to say. It’s all but impossible for two teams to win 100 games and one of them miss the playoffs. Before the second wild card, teams could win 100 games and not win the division but still make the playoffs. Now, though, winning a wild card puts you in that coin-flip game. You’d rather be in that game than miss the playoffs, but if you’re going to the postseason, you want to skip the win-or-go-home game if you can. It might not be the Dodgers-Giants in 1951 or the Twins-White Sox-Tigers-Red Sox in 1967 or the Braves-Giants in 1993, but we could have a 100-win team playing the coin-flip game, and two 100-win teams trying like hell to avoid it. That should lead to some tense Yankees-Red Sox action down the stretch.

• Trout! Did I mention Trout might be on his way to the best season anyone has ever had? We’ve been discussing this for a month now, and his pace only hastens. Right now, Trout is on pace for 13.4 WAR, 54 homers, 106 RBIs, 131 runs and 31 steals. And if you think the RBI pace is low, consider that Trout has a 1.184 OPS with runners in scoring position but has been walked nearly a third of the time in those spots. Can you blame the pitchers?

• Scherzer! Putting pitcher WAR in historical context is tough because of the evolution of workloads, but Max Scherzer is second to Trout, with a pace of 11.0. His other per-162 paces: 25-5, 2.00 ERA and 354 strikeouts. We are watching a Hall of Fame career coming into full bloom.

• Trades! Manny Machado will most likely be playing for a non-Baltimore team two months from now, and the team he joins will tack a few points on to their probability of winning this year’s World Series. Josh Donaldson could be on the move. So, too, might Jacob deGrom, or at least that’s been bandied about lately in the whisper mill. DeGrom, about the only good thing going for the Mets, just reached the ace tier in my starting pitcher ratings, giving us a magnificent seven in that group.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, we want Ohtani back, but if we don’t get him, we will be just fine. Because we still will have baseball, and with that comes the magic of limitless possibility.

What the numbers say

Is Atlanta’s Freddie Freeman “criminally underrated”? Depends on who you ask. Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports

Overrated … and underrated stars

The other day, I wrote a story about the Atlanta Braves. It was a pretty long story, and even though I’m the one who wrote it, there were a couple of words that stuck in my craw — “criminally underrated.”

Those words were in reference to the Braves’ Freddie Freeman, who has continued to climb the WAR leaderboard with another hot streak. He’s currently second to Scherzer in the National League, putting him in contention for a serious run at the MVP trophy. Freeman also is the runaway leader in the early NL All-Star balloting, not just at first base but among all players. That would indicate Freeman isn’t underrated at all, much less criminally so, but nevertheless, that’s been Freeman’s calling card for a number of years. Underrated.

The “overrated” and “underrated” labels are an easy device for a sportswriter because they are inherently subjective. But can they be quantified? Can we know if a player crosses over from one to the other?

Part of it depends on who is doing the rating. If it’s a bunch of Atlanta baseball fans, chances are Freeman has not been underrated at all. If it’s the American baseball fan writ large, then we might be able to use All-Star voting to determine whether a player is appropriately recognized, though there are plenty of nonperformance factors at play. Alas, I can’t really test this idea because, best I can tell, there isn’t a good database for historical All-Star voting.

That leaves us with the other group that does plenty of rating: media hacks like me. While we do plenty of rating in the various forms of media, we also do some ratings that have real-world consequences: awards voting. And, thanks to the sublime Lahman database, I was able to grab historical awards voting.

After pulling up the voting data, I adjusted each season’s MVP votes to put it on the same scale of the current era, where we have two voters in every city and a first-place vote is worth 14 points, giving us a 420-point maximum for any player. I decided to focus strictly on the integration era, or since 1947.

Using Fangraphs.com, I created a database of WAR numbers for every player since 1947. This step won’t thrill everyone, but that’s what I did. However, it’s important to acknowledge that this method does not imply WAR is a perfect metric for determining a league’s most valuable player. It’s a tool, a good one, but should be looked at in conjunction with other factors.

For each season and for each league, I ranked the players by WAR and assigned them the number of MVP points they “should” have had by using the 14-9-8 system, modified so the top 40 players in a league have at least one “should” point. From there, it was just a matter of looking at the differences. If a player had more actual MVP points than he “should,” then he has been overrated and vice versa. Now, for the results, or at least the highlights.

• On both a per-season and cumulative basis, the most underrated player since 1947 has been Willie Mays. Over his career, Mays should have had 5,198 MVP points. He actually had 2,550, a shortcoming of 120 points per season. Mays won the MVP award in both 1954 and 1965, but he led the National League in WAR nine times. In 1956, Mays ranked second in WAR but finished just 17th in the balloting. Yes, I realize WAR did not exist in 1956, but there were other subtle indications of Mays’ excellence that season, like 36 homers, 40 steals, a .557 slugging percentage and more walks than strikeouts.

• The most overrated player on a per-season basis is active: Colorado’s Nolan Arenado. Do I agree with that? Not really, but this result did make me look at Arenado’s Coors Field-inflated numbers with some fresh eyes. I’d still like to have him on my team, especially doing his Brooks Robinson routine at third base.

• The most overrated player on a cumulative basis has been Juan Gonzalez, likely because WAR is not swayed by flashy RBI totals. I have no problem with this result.

• Among active players, the most underrated has been … no, it’s not Freddie Freeman, the reason for all this trouble in the first place. In fact, this method suggests Freeman has been treated just about right by MVP voters over the years (207 expected points; 285 actual). No, on a per-season basis, it’s Clayton Kershaw. If you don’t like a pitcher getting this nod, then it’s Chase Utley. Kershaw and Utley are also the answers for being underrated on a cumulative basis. Now, armed with that knowledge, Utley and Kershaw can sit together in their Dodger Stadium clubhouse and grumble.

Since you asked

First-year Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos joined a team embroiled in scandal, but brimming with young talent. AP Photo/David Goldman, File

A Brave new world

Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos took the Atlanta job last fall either in the best of, or the worst of, circumstances. His predecessor, John Coppolella, along with a couple of his assistants, were banned from baseball for misdeeds in the international player market. And the Braves subsequently had to relinquish their rights to 13 prospects. Still, he joined an organization brimming with talent. We’ve seen some of that talent hit the ground running this season, as the Baby Braves remain in the thick of the playoff race into the middle of June.

Anthopoulos is a Montreal native who got his start with the Expos, before going on to become the 2015 American League Executive of the Year with the Blue Jays. After that, he became part of the braintrust in Los Angeles under Dodgers vice president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. Now, Anthopoulos is tasked with returning the talented Braves to the glories of their 1990s and early 2000s predecessors. I had a chance to chat with him during my recent trip to Atlanta, a period in which he was hard at work with his staff in preparation for last week’s draft.

When it comes to the draft, I’m interested in how things evolve when it comes to someone who’s been in your position for a while now. I assume that you develop certain traits that you identify in a younger talent that you are attracted to, but does it become easier or harder to filter through guys? Do you have to guard against becoming too set in the criteria that you use?

Alex Anthopoulos: In theory, the longer you do it, you should be better, just from experience. You’ve made more mistakes, so there is more to learn from. The only caveat to that is there is so much more information right now that can really paralyze your thought process. We can overcomplicate things. There have always been psychological tests and so forth, but now we just have more. On the one hand, it should only help you inform your decision. You’re trying to separate guys, and having all of this data is great. But knowing how to weight it, that’s really challenging. But it would be an interesting study: Are we [as an industry] better in the draft than we were 20 years ago or 10 years ago? Do we have a higher rate of return with the higher picks?

When you took over in Atlanta and had a chance to do an evaluation of the talent on hand, how did that inform the way you approached the offseason in terms of immediate objectives?

When I got the GM job in Toronto, I had been in the organization a long time. I was an assistant GM, I was in scouting, so I knew the organization up and down. I knew the players, I knew the staff. Even though, on one hand, I came into this job with experience, I had never experienced coming into a brand new organization with no ties, no relationships. The role of general manager and the responsibilities that come with it, I was familiar with that. I knew what to expect. But the new organization, I wasn’t. So I actually reached out to a few GMs who had gone through the same thing, who had come to brand-new organizations, and asked if there was anything they would change, anything they would do differently in hindsight. I think I spoke to three of them. And all three of them told me, “You know what, I just wish I had moved a little slower.” They all said they moved on a player more quickly than they should have because they didn’t know the player as well as they could have.

“Look, young players — some perform, some get hurt, some regress. All of a sudden, we might have a lot more holes at the end of 2018 than we thought we did.”

Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos

You’re always anxious. You want to make the team better. All I knew from the outside was that there was a lot of young talent here. All the previous regimes and scouting departments had done a fantastic job collecting and accumulating a lot of talent, even though the team wasn’t winning at the big-league level. It was just a matter of, let’s make sure we are not too quick to dismiss … someone. Let’s give the young guys as much opportunity as we can.

When I look at rosters, I always look at breakout and collapse potential, and even tried to incorporate that into my simulation model. How important is the variability that comes with young teams when you are talking about “surprise” teams in one form or another?

When I talked to everyone in the organization, going through reports and on the phone, there wasn’t really a consensus on every player. I could talk to 10 people, and five would say this player is going to be a star, and another five would say, “We’re not sure, the jury is still out.” There was never really a consensus. So even though I didn’t know the evaluators, wasn’t necessarily familiar with the information that we had internally, there was still [much] undecided internally. So that was a big part of it, looking around and giving guys opportunity and saying, “We’re going to find out who is part of this core and who isn’t.” At least we would have a much better indication. We were going to want as much payroll flexibility as possible going forward because, look, young players — some perform, some get hurt, some regress. All of a sudden, we might have a lot more holes at the end of 2018 than we thought we did. We may have fewer. The hope is, and we’re still not there yet, is that we fill as many positions on this team as possible internally. That will just free up dollars for us to do other things, whether it’s in the free-agent market or the trade market.

Conversely, what if our young players don’t take a step? What if they regress, or there are injury concerns? We’ve got an elite-level player like Freddie Freeman, a stud defender like Ender Inciarte — we have players that we still want to capitalize on. How can we continue on to take a step in 2019? That’s where the payroll flexibility is going to come in. Right now, two months in, [Ozzie] Albies looks outstanding. Dansby Swanson has been very good. Johan Camargo has been coming on. [Austin] Riley is in Triple-A, so we feel good about that spot. … I can go through the whole team, but it could have gone the other way. We just didn’t know, but 2018 was a critical year for us to find out what we had.

Coming right up

Isn’t Mike Trout grand? EPA/PAUL BUCK

Here’s to the next 1,000 …

The Angels have six games scheduled between now and next Friday’s column. If Mike Trout plays in them all, then when the Angels take on Toronto at home next Thursday, Trout will be making his 1,000th appearance in a big-league uniform. Suffice to say, it’s been a grand grand for Trout.

Including the 40 games Trout played when he broke into the majors in 2011, he has played fewer than seven full seasons and he missed 48 games last season because of an injured hand. (Please don’t let your stars dive into a base.) Officially, though, he’s in his eighth season. According to baseball-reference.com, only Ted Williams, Albert Pujols and Mickey Mantle had more WAR than Trout over the first eight seasons of a career. If Trout maintains his 2018 pace, he’ll easily pass Pujols and Mantle.

Williams (72.6 WAR) is safe, but because of the time he missed flying fighter planes in World War II, he was 30 by the time he finished his eighth season. Pujols was 28. Meanwhile, Mantle, like Trout, was just 26. What a player. Can’t wait to see what happens over the next 1,000.

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Patriots Stun Steelers; The NFL is King

By Michael Vallee

Sometimes the star of a game is an individual player. Someone that steals the show with a singular effort. Think Michael Jordan, sick with the flu, dropping 38 on the Utah Jazz in the NBA Finals. Sometimes the star of a game is an entire team, one that collectively takes over with a transcendent performance. The New England Patriots trailing 28-3 and winning the Super Bowl certainly qualifies. And sometimes the star of a game is simply one play or one moment. Ask Seattle Seahawks fans about this one, I have a feeling they might be able to come up with an example.

But in certain instances, the star of the game is the game itself or, more specifically, the league in which it resides. In Sunday’s 27-24 Patriots victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers there were many standout performances and moments but the real star of the game was the National Football League and its total domination of our sports universe.

No other league can touch the anticipation factor of the NFL. The Patriots vs. Steelers has been circled on the NFL calendar for weeks. Everybody from Patriots and Steelers fans to network executives and beat writers were eagerly awaiting Sunday’s game which featured a stable of superstars and two future Hall Of Fame quarterbacks. In a cluttered sports landscape it felt like the only game that really mattered. What is the equivalent in other sports leagues? Quick, what day do the Houston Rockets play the Golden State Warriors? OK, how about what month? Do you have any idea? Me neither.

I guess the baseball equivalent would be Red Sox/Yankees but does the baseball world outside of Boston and New York really care about that series? They might watch parts of a game or two but does it really matter to out-of-market fans? And how do even Sox and Yankees fans get geeked up for a series that will be played six times in a season and have little functional impact in a 162-game schedule? Pittsburgh vs. New England had urgency and desperation, the result of clear and tangible consequences for both teams regarding home-field advantage and first round byes. Fans from coast-to-coast knew the stakes and, more so than any other sport, cared about the outcome.

A marquee matchup like Patriots/Steelers stirs interest across the entire football world. When you are dealing with teams that have won as often as Pittsburgh and New England, odds are, you are either a fan of one of those two teams or absolutely despise everything about one or both of those teams but, either way, you are going to be watching. Additionally, you might not love or hate either team but know your team has to deal with one or both of them if they want to win in January. Or maybe you have no dog in the hunt but just love football and there is no way you’re missing a chance to watch arguably the two best teams in the NFL, two teams with a long history of mutual animosity, knock the hell out of each other for 60 minutes. A hockey diehard could easily miss a Tampa Bay Lightning/L.A. Kings game and not think twice. There is nobody that calls themselves a football fan that was missing Sunday’s game.

It’s appointment television. It’s what people revolve their social calendars around. It affects not only your schedule but the schedule of your family. I am sure a lot of Christmas shopping was done on Saturday knowing that being in a mall at 4:25 Sunday was not an option. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NFL’s cultural dominance even affected some drinking schedules. How many guys do you think didn’t go out Saturday night, or went out and drank less, because they wanted to be at “full strength” for the big game on Sunday? That might seem like a stretch, or even a little insane, but I bet that number is bigger than you think. That is the reality of America’s obsession with football. It’s like nothing else in sports.

And the ratings for this one more than backed that up.

The Patriots/Steelers did a 17 rating, making it the highest rated NFL game this year. The game also did a 32 share which means one out of every three televisions that was turned on in America was watching this game, an unheard of number in the age of multiple choices and splintered audiences. The game peaked in the final half hour with a 20.5 rating and 36 share. There has been a lot of yapping this year about the NFL’s declining ratings and dubious future but you didn’t hear any of it on Sunday.

The NFL is also the only sport that consistently delivers in the regular season. How often do we hear people say about hockey or basketball, “I’m just waiting for the playoffs”? Which is understandable considering that the intensity level for the winter sports increases exponentially in the playoffs. But anybody that watched the Steelers and Bengals two weeks ago beat the hell out of each other for four quarters knows that simply isn’t true about football. The regular season can be every bit as intense and brutal as the postseason.

And this was abundantly true on Sunday.

The only thing better for the NFL’s dominance than a nationally hyped game is a nationally hyped game that delivers - and Sunday’s Patriots game delivered in a big way. Patriots/Steelers was a three hour football explosion of big plays, big moments and big performances. It had drama and suspense - heroes and goats - controversial calls and controversial decisions. There were last second comebacks and botched final drives. The outcome was always in doubt. Literally every second mattered. It was one of those games that reminds us why we watch sports.

Imagine switching over in the middle of that game to a baseball game. It would be like going from the roller coaster to the merry-go-round.

All of this says nothing of the ancillary activities that are also crucial to the NFL’s dominance. Throw out, for a minute, all the loyalties, passion and hatred that drives sports fans and just think of what Sunday’s game was like for the millions that bet on it. Patriots -2.5, trailing by five, driving for the “winning” touchdown. A crucial two-point conversion looming if they score. Massive financial swings riding on every play. Pittsburgh responding with a huge play and apparent game-winning touchdown. The play reversed…...the clock running…….both the point spread and under/over (52.5) are in play…….a gut-wrenching interception that simultaneously realized and dashed the hopes and dreams of gamblers everywhere from Pasadena to Peoria. It was gambling tension at its finest.

Then there’s the office pools, football cards, pick four pools, pick five pools, underdog pools, big money winner-take-all suicide pools, futures bets (Patriots over/under wins was 12.5), any and all of it just adds layers to the cultural sports monopoly of the NFL.

And then there’s fantasy football. We don’t do much fantasy talk on this blog as I don’t generally like to mix real football with pretend football but it’s impossible to ignore or deny the role of fantasy football in all of this. Week 15, for most fantasy leagues, is the playoffs and Sunday’s games offered a bevy of highly productive offensive stars that can make or break a fantasy team. While most probably tuned in for the football, don’t kid yourself, there were a lot of eyeballs on that game sweating out the production of the Bells, Bradys, Browns and Gronks.

Purists hate it, your girlfriend doesn’t understand it and those that don’t participate most likely find the whole thing absurd but there is no denying its impact. Fantasy sports has grown from an obscure hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry, and the pseudo-monopoly held by the NFL is yet another linchpin of its dominance.

All that was before the emergence of daily fantasy sports, the high stakes game-changer that just recently exploded onto the sports world, and is, of course, dominated by the NFL. This new phenomenon, which reduces players to mere numbers on a screen and can turn nobodys into millionaires, has allowed the NFL to capture a certain fringe geek element that might have otherwise been occupied with something else. They might not love football but they are now engaged because they have found a way to link it to their computers and smartphones. Yet another financial notch in the NFL’s belt.

It can still be argued that the NFL’s future is far from secure. Audiences continue to fracture, youth football participation is down and the effects of CTE loom like a dark cloud on the horizon. And the current product is not perfect. The games are increasingly micro-managed and slowed down by confusing rules and an archaic replay system; and NFL leadership, from Jerry Jones to Roger Goodell, is often an embarrassment.

But on a day like last Sunday that all just seems like a bunch of white noise for talk show hosts and sports columnists to pontificate about. It might not be perfect but there is no denying that the NFL is a cultural tour-de-force that is extensively ingrained throughout American society. All ages and both sexes watch it, the president tweets about it, networks live and die by it, advertisers flock to it and the sports media can’t get enough of it. In our sports solar system, the NFL is the sun and everything else is just rotating around it. Mark Cuban once said about the NFL, “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy.” Maybe, but if all the sports leagues are competing, that hog is miles ahead and the gap ain’t closing anytime soon.

Game Notes

-Amateur Hour: Another Patriots’ opponent, another late-game meltdown. It’s hard not to sound like a homer when you cite all the times New England’s opponents have puddled in the final minutes of a big game and you conclude that the Patriots are simply smarter and more composed than their counterparts. But how often does something have to happen before opinion becomes fact. Atlanta in the Super Bowl, Seattle in the Super Bowl, Baltimore in the AFC Championship, Pittsburgh on Sunday, and on and on it goes. Someday we might look back on this historic run and conclude that the Patriots’ ability to handle situational football, and perhaps as important, their opponents complete and total lack of ability to handle situational football was the most crucial component to their success.

-Rah, rah, sis boom bah: The more you watch him the more Tomlin looks less like a head coach and more like a glorified male cheerleader. His handling of the final moments of Sunday’s loss and subsequent comments are doing little to dispel that notion. For starters, the offensive “brain trust” of Tomlin, Roethlisberger and OC Todd Haley had three minutes and 20 seconds to formulate a plan of attack while the refs reviewed the Jesse James touchdown yet reportedly the Steelers spent the entire time playing grabass and assuming they had already won the game. That’s more time than you get for an actual timeout yet they seemed wildly unprepared after the touchdown was overturned.

And this only gets worse.

According to Tomlin the reason they had no timeouts was because referee Tony Corrente mistakenly awarded them a timeout. His reasoning is so dumb I can’t possibly do it justice so I’ll just let him do it, “I was looking at Ben. Ben was signaling timeout, but he wasn’t signaling at you (Corrente), he was signaling timeout at me, trying to get confirmation of what we wanted to do.” So let me get this straight, following a 69-yard gain, which is a moment when most teams would call a timeout, your quarterback, who is on the field of play, signaled for a timeout but wasn’t actually signaling the refs that he wanted a timeout but was asking his coaches if they wanted a timeout and it’s all Corrente’s fault that he didn’t accurately read Roethlisberger’s mind to decipher his true intentions. I think we’re starting to get a window into why Tomlin never learns from his mistakes - apparently he doesn’t think he makes any.

Oh, and we’re not done.

Tomlin, displaying a mindblowing level of ignorance, also asked Corrente this Mensa-level question, “Why did you award that timeout, the timeouts are supposed to come from the bench?” What? WHAT?!? Timeouts only come from the bench? Alright, Tomlin’s gotta just be fucking with us at this point. How can that question come out of an NFL head coach’s mouth? Are we actually supposed to believe that in his 16+ year NFL coaching career he has never seen a quarterback call a timeout? That is so ridiculous on so many different levels when I first read it my brain had trouble processing it. It feels like a quote from The Onion.

-Jedi Master: Imagine Belichick giving that answer as to why his team didn’t have anymore timeouts. Or try to picture Belichick, Brady and McDaniels standing around for over three-minutes at then end of a crucial game and doing absolutely nothing. Belichick is the anti-Tomlin: No intense dramatic scowls, no excessive enthusiastic hand-clapping, no meandering aimlessly on the sideline; Belichick learns from his mistakes and has an actual working knowledge of the NFL rule book. He knows rules that the refs don’t even know yet, Tomlin, who is on the NFL Competition Committee, doesn’t even know that quarterbacks, in the course of an NFL game, sometimes call timeouts. When the Patriots face the Steelers, for Belichick, it must feel like he is playing chess against his grandson.

-What down is it again?: Don’t think for a minute Roethlisberger is off the hook for that late-game debacle. There is no excuse for a future Hall Of Fame quarterback to ever throw that pass. None. That is the type of pass you throw on 4th down or if your team is trailing by 4+ points. On third down, with your team down by three, that ball has to go out of the back of the end zone. Throw it away, kick the field goal and take your chances at home in overtime. There are high school quarterbacks that understand that. And Big Ben’s entire approach to the play was a hot mess. If you’re not going to clock the ball, why not just take a deep breath, call out a play at the line-of-scrimmage and take a legit shot at the end one? Instead Roethlisberger looked panicked, rushed to the line despite plenty of time, attempted some half-ass fake spike then threw the ball into triple-coverage. Baffling.

-Revenge is a dish best served unhinged: If you want to have a laugh, peruse Twitter and Youtube for reactions to the end of the Patriots game on Sunday. Too many examples to cite them all here but think Seattle fans circa 2014 with the added twist of a controversial call. In short, Steelers fans lost their f’n minds. It’s hard enough losing to the same coach and quarterback for 15 years straight but to lose at home, blow a late lead and have it all come to fruition because of an annoying NFL rule is enough to send any sports fan reeling. The saddest part of their reactions was the repeated and desperate cries of “cheaters”. It’s perfectly understandable to not like the NFL’s “survive the ground” rule regarding what is and isn’t a catch, but somebody needs to inform Steelers fans (and Raiders fans for that matter) that NFL officials enforcing a rule already on the books is not actually cheating nor is it the NFL rigging the outcome for New England.

-OK, maybe we’ll cite one example because this is really damn funny: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc1McOfjcSD/

-Words to live by: There are two concrete truths in life: never get involved in a land war in Asia and never throw a slant on the goal line against the Patriots in a big game.

-Taking the chalk: The Patriots victory over the Steelers meant that every NFL favorite, based on the point spread, won week 15 - only the third time since the 1970 merger that has happened.

-“Never stop fighting till the fight is done”: One of the sneaky underrated plays from the game was the Patriots defense keeping Steelers receiver Juju Shuster out of the end zone on his 69-yard catch and run in the final minute. When the speedy Shuster cut back to the middle of the field in Patriots territory it looked like he was a sure bet to score. But the Patriots secondary never gave up on the play, eventually pinning him down and gang tackling him on the 10-yard line.

-Why was Trey Flowers covering (or trying to anyway) Le’Veon Bell on some key pass plays? That was a very Tomlinian move by Belichick.

-Gronk smash Pittsburgh: It is widely accepted that Gronkowski is not only the best tight end in the NFL but is on a trajectory to be the best tight end of all-time, but a week ago if someone asked you what the signature game of his career was you might have struggled to come up with an answer. I think it’s safe to say that is no longer the case after what Gronk did to the Steelers. Despite a slow start, Gronkowski finished the game with 9 catches for a career-high 168 yards (10 catches if you include the two-point conversion). Nowhere was Gronk’s dominance more on display than on the game-winning drive, when he completely took the game over with five plays:

Play one: Brady to Gronk deep down the middle for 26 yards

Play two: Carbon copy of play one, another 26 yards

Play three: Gronk reaches down and snatches the ball just before it hits the ground for another 17 yards

Play four: Gronk seals off a defender with a key block on Dion Lewis’ 9-yard game-winning touchdown

Play five: Gronk fakes an inside release, jukes the defensive back out of his jock, catches a wide-open two-point and celebrates like a deranged mad man

It was Gronk at his unstoppable best. Someday a guy will have to go in that room at the Pro Football Hall Of Fame and make the case for Gronkowski’s induction and after Sunday that guy’s job just got a whole lot easier. Now all he has to do is walk in, pop in the Pittsburgh tape, kick back, and watch the HOF votes tumble in.

-Tomlin not double-teaming Gronkowski at any point on that final drive is a fireable offense.

-Shhhhhhhh: Tony Romo remains razor sharp with the Xs and Os stuff but desperately needs to learn the art of how to shut the hell up.

-Make space on the mantel: Brady all but wrapped up the MVP on Sunday. Not only did Brady lead the Patriots to a key road win but his MVP competition was decimated. A week after Carson Wentz tore his ACL, dark-horse candidate Antonio Brown hurt his calf and Russell Wilson and the Seahawks imploded against the Rams.

-No easy task: If Brown is healthy come January and the Steelers get past the Jaguars don’t count me as one of the people that thinks this rematch will be an easy win for the Patriots if the game is played in Foxboro. Pittsburgh represents all kinds of matchup problems for the Patriots defense and, despite the Steelers dubious history against Belichick and Brady, Pittsburgh could easily win next month in New England.

-Belichick is not pliable: Interesting story in the Boston Globe by professional shit-stirrer Bob Hohler, who details how Brady whisperer Alex Guerrero has had his his team privileges revoked, banning him from team flights and from the sideline during games. It’s hard to know just how big a riff this represents between Brady and Belichick, if any, because none of the principals are talking but it is definitely a situation worth monitoring. The importance of this story would multiply tenfold if Jimmy Garoppolo was still a Patriot.

-Stars and stripes: A Great story emerged last week about Tom Brady and his commitment to supporting the troops. According to Pittsburgh Steelers left tackle, war hero and unabashed supporter of the National Anthem, Alejandro Villanueva, Brady routinely Skypes with soldiers stationed overseas on the front lines. Brady has said nothing about this and has sought no publicity for his actions. Go ahead Steelers fans tell me again how much you hate Tom Brady.

#tom brady #bill belichick #nfl #tv ratings #patriots #steelers #tony romo #alejandro villanueva #military #alex guerrero #mvp #mike tomlin #gronk #russell wilson #antonio brown #leveon bell #ben roethlisberger

0 notes

flauntpage · 7 years

Text

Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB's First Knee

On Saturday, the ACLU tweeted a quote from Jackie Robinson's 1972 memoir, I Never Had It Made:

"I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world."

On Saturday, Oakland Athletics rookie catcher Bruce Maxwell, a black man, became the first MLB player to kneel during the national anthem. In a moment that faintly echoed Robinson and white teammate Pee Wee Reese's iconic embrace seven decades ago, Mark Canha placed his left hand on Maxwell's shoulder. The game went on. Oakland beat Texas 1-0.

Maxwell spoke eloquently about his reasons for taking a knee. Following his tweets from the weekend, you can see that Donald Trump's fixation on Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry rather than national issues like the destruction of Puerto Rico struck a chord with him.

Why did it take so long?

The conservatism that has always held baseball hostage is a short, serviceable answer. It's nothing new. Back when Muhammad Ali was embracing the Nation of Islam, and Tommie Smith and John Carlos were raising their fists in black solidarity at the Olympics, the most meaningful activism among baseball players was economic—the fight to unionize and to earn free agency. Even the leaders of those movements faced backlash from their fellow players, not to mention owners, the media, and the public at large.

In the decades since, we have witnessed the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the imposition of internet filter bubbles, the optimization of soft news—of which sports is a crown jewel—and the deterioration of the American education system. Today, the average citizen cannot readily discern fact from fiction. They revert back to their trusted information troughs that validate their biases and make them feel better, smarter. Baseball players are like extreme versions of this, only with more confidence.

In the company of a few players last year, for example, I mentioned the (once again relevant) Paid Patriotism in Sports investigation led by Republican Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain from Arizona, which revealed that the Department of Defense paid MLB and other major sports leagues millions of dollars to stage many of the boutique military exercises we as players had all become so accustomed to being accessories to, standing at attention with our hands over our hearts along the foul line. One player told me that this was "liberal fake news," and that "John McCain would never do no kinda shit like that."

Baseball may value shut-up-and-play guys more than any other sport. The patron saint of that archetype is Derek Jeter, the most beloved baseball player since Babe Ruth, whose farewell tour was seen by many as excessive. What had he done but win championships? But to celebrate Jeter was to celebrate kicking ass and taking names, the Crash Davis school of never saying the wrong thing (not to be confused with saying the right thing) and only making waves off the field in heterosexual sex scandals that ultimately add girth to the legacy.

Orioles veteran centerfielder Adam Jones is one of the few players to consistently speak out about issues of race, from talking about Freddie Gray's death in 2015 to calling out fans who shouted the N-word at him in Fenway Park last season. A year ago, Jones said that Kaepernick–style protests hadn't made their way to MLB because "baseball is a white man's sport."

Jones was one of just 58 black, African American, or African Canadian players on active rosters for Opening Day this season, according to the 2017 Major League Baseball Racial and Gender Report Card. That number doesn't include Maxwell, who was called up from Triple-A later in April, nor several players who were on the DL, but the report still calls attention to "the relatively small and declining percentage of African-American players" in baseball.

It should be noted that Afro-Caribbean players born in the U.S. are not always counted in that group. I am both African and American—my parents' native Cuba was only a few stops on the Atlantic slave trade away from the Alabama of Maxwell's youth—but on the only Jackie Robinson Day in which I was in the Major Leagues (2009), I was not tabbed for that photo opportunity.

The same 2017 report card notes that there are more players of color in the league now than ever before. And the growing Latino presence in MLB creates more racial complexity that is especially hard to follow for people who don't see race and want all this race stuff to go back into the shadows. Many Latino people are racist. Many Latino people deny their own blackness. For every white-passing Latino with less than a quarter of African blood in them who speaks with an alarming NPM (niggas per minute) in public spaces, there is an undeniably African Latino who doesn't believe they're black. The individual desires of people of color to defer participation in "race" chips at the solidarity of the black community as efficiently as racism itself does. This is hard for anthropologists to follow, much less ballplayers.

Black solidarity is difficult to negotiate with a language barrier, and one should understand what might dissuade, for instance, a Venezuelan Afro-Latino from criticizing any aspect of American culture when matters are worse in every sense, including race issues, in their own country. Black people who are well traveled, especially Afro-Latinos who've traveled to many Spanish-speaking countries, eventually come to the glib conclusion quicker than anyone else, that despite our longtime and recently stoked problems here in America, there is perhaps no better place in the world to be black.

Kaepernick's protest spread slowly but surely across the NFL, where African-Americans made up 69.7 percent of players last year. Athletes in the NBA and the WNBA—two more leagues with majority black rosters—have also become fluent in peaceful protest in the last few years. Demographics may have kept the Kaepernick movement from catching on in baseball, but it's important to note that baseball conservatism has many layers.

In baseball, conformism is subconsciously enforced by the martial law of the purpose pitch, and by the ingrained biases of the people in power who make personnel decisions and drive its culture. When you wear your hat a certain way, a coach may say, "Why do you have to be different?" Your hair may irk him, and when you miss the cutoff man, it may be more irksome to him than when the guy who looks more like his son does it. There's the crappy .220 hitter and there's the scrappy .220 hitter, and the formula for who goes to AAA and who stays on as the good clubhouse guy is subjective at best.

It takes a special person to stand up, or kneel down, when you consider the full weight of the baseball institution.

Why was it Bruce Maxwell?

Three weeks into the NFL season, Colin Kaepernick is still unemployed. NFL insiders have been more reticent to say he's being blackballed than non-insiders like activist Shaun King. While Kaepernick is probably as capable as most starting NFL quarterbacks, he is not in the elite, irreplaceable strata of athletes. This gives the owners who don't sign him (i.e., all the owners) plausible deniability. It complicates the issue of Kaepernick's unemployment.

John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports

As a player, Bruce Maxwell is even more replaceable than Kaepernick. Though the Oakland A's were swift to defend Maxwell after he kneeled on Saturday, it is important to note that if he were to be blackballed, it would be virtually impossible to prove. To date, Maxwell has proven he is a light-hitting catcher worth about half a win above replacement over the course of a season. Though many ballplayers are late bloomers, Maxwell's 300 at-bats represent a sufficiently large enough sample size for him to slowly fade into journeyman status without a second thought.

But whether he noticed or not, Maxwell's path was eased by other circumstances. The Oakland A's were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs on September 22, though they were never in the race at all, and even sold off their best pitcher at the trade deadline. The length of MLB's season holds that half its teams engage in dozens of meaningless games, such as Saturday's historic, meaningless contest between the Rangers and the Athletics. Maxwell has enjoyed the luxury of relatively low stakes—in baseball terms.

Along those lines, a story:

The morning after my club, the Tampa Bay Rays, beat the Red Sox in the 2008 ALCS, a handful of teammates and I supported then Senator Barack Obama at a rally in Florida. As a rookie, I was "hazed" by being volunteered to introduce the most famous political figure of our generation with a short speech before a capacity crowd at Legends Field. We were criticized for associating the team with a political party, but it was manageable—World Series stakes or not, Tampa is a tiny sports market. At the same time, had there not been several senior teammates with me, I might not have gone to the Obama rally. I might have caved under the pressure of fitting in that Maxwell overcame. And despite a military veteran father of my own, had all of what's happening now been happening in the middle of a playoff race I was in as a rookie, especially in a major market, I would probably not have taken a knee—by myself no less—during the national anthem, either. You don't want to be labeled a "distraction" by the media, and then become one in a superstitious, cliquey clubhouse as a rookie who is a new actor in a championship run that is years in the making. We have yet to see a major baseball star in a major market make a major political engagement. We have yet to see a Kaepernick–grade athlete use the platform of a championship run, with its larger audience. The "distraction" is perhaps entirely superstition, which especially pervades sports, but its effect is real.

My money would have been on Jones to be the first player to take a knee, despite his comments. My number two choice would have been Rays pitcher Chris Archer. But Maxwell was the right guy at the right time. He was born on a military base in Germany. His father is a veteran. For a certain kind of person watching these protests—which many critics have mischaracterized as being about "the flag" or "the troops," instead of racial inequality and police violence—he had the credibility, along with the courage, to do something.

This is what Archer told the press on Sunday after Maxwell took a knee:

"It did take a while in baseball, I think mainly because the other sports that do that are predominantly black," says Archer. "Our sport isn't, so I think the criticism might be a little more harsh. It took somebody really special that had a unique background to take that leap.

"The way he went about it was totally, I think, as respectful as possible, just letting everybody know that this doesn't have anything to do with the military, first and foremost, noting that he has family members that are in the military. It's a little bit tougher for baseball players to make that leap, but I think he was the right person to do it."

What Happens Now

Maxwell was cheered by the home Oakland crowd in his first at-bat since kneeling, a line-out to left field. In Mariners veteran Felix Hernandez, he was not forced to face the kind of (white, surly) pitcher one might expect to throw at a guy to send a political message, though it's not at all implausible a pitcher of Felix Hernandez's background could have thrown that purpose pitch "for America" after reading a tea party blog during pregame.

In the last week of the season, more teams will be eliminated (including the Rays), and their players will officially have no distraction superstition as a deterrent. For these players, there will be fewer games after which to face reporters. Here is what Archer told me in a text message: "What [Maxwell] did was tasteful & respectful to all parties. I wouldn't be surprised if more guys start to follow suit."

Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB's First Knee published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

0 notes

amtushinfosolutionspage · 7 years

Text

Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB’s First Knee

On Saturday, the ACLU tweeted a quote from Jackie Robinson’s 1972 memoir, I Never Had It Made:

“I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.”

On Saturday, Oakland Athletics rookie catcher Bruce Maxwell, a black man, became the first MLB player to kneel during the national anthem. In a moment that faintly echoed Robinson and white teammate Pee Wee Reese’s iconic embrace seven decades ago, Mark Canha placed his left hand on Maxwell’s shoulder. The game went on. Oakland beat Texas 1-0.

Maxwell spoke eloquently about his reasons for taking a knee. Following his tweets from the weekend, you can see that Donald Trump’s fixation on Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry rather than national issues like the destruction of Puerto Rico struck a chord with him.

Why did it take so long?

The conservatism that has always held baseball hostage is a short, serviceable answer. It’s nothing new. Back when Muhammad Ali was embracing the Nation of Islam, and Tommie Smith and John Carlos were raising their fists in black solidarity at the Olympics, the most meaningful activism among baseball players was economic—the fight to unionize and to earn free agency. Even the leaders of those movements faced backlash from their fellow players, not to mention owners, the media, and the public at large.

In the company of a few players last year, for example, I mentioned the (once again relevant) Paid Patriotism in Sports investigation led by Republican Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain from Arizona, which revealed that the Department of Defense paid MLB and other major sports leagues millions of dollars to stage many of the boutique military exercises we as players had all become so accustomed to being accessories to, standing at attention with our hands over our hearts along the foul line. One player told me that this was “liberal fake news,” and that “John McCain would never do no kinda shit like that.”

Orioles veteran centerfielder Adam Jones is one of the few players to consistently speak out about issues of race, from talking about Freddie Gray’s death in 2015 to calling out fans who shouted the N-word at him in Fenway Park last season. A year ago, Jones said that Kaepernick–style protests hadn’t made their way to MLB because “baseball is a white man’s sport.”

Jones was one of just 58 black, African American, or African Canadian players on active rosters for Opening Day this season, according to the 2017 Major League Baseball Racial and Gender Report Card. That number doesn’t include Maxwell, who was called up from Triple-A later in April, nor several players who were on the DL, but the report still calls attention to “the relatively small and declining percentage of African-American players” in baseball.

It should be noted that Afro-Caribbean players born in the U.S. are not always counted in that group. I am both African and American—my parents’ native Cuba was only a few stops on the Atlantic slave trade away from the Alabama of Maxwell’s youth—but on the only Jackie Robinson Day in which I was in the Major Leagues (2009), I was not tabbed for that photo opportunity.

The same 2017 report card notes that there are more players of color in the league now than ever before. And the growing Latino presence in MLB creates more racial complexity that is especially hard to follow for people who don’t see race and want all this race stuff to go back into the shadows. Many Latino people are racist. Many Latino people deny their own blackness. For every white-passing Latino with less than a quarter of African blood in them who speaks with an alarming NPM (niggas per minute) in public spaces, there is an undeniably African Latino who doesn’t believe they’re black. The individual desires of people of color to defer participation in “race” chips at the solidarity of the black community as efficiently as racism itself does. This is hard for anthropologists to follow, much less ballplayers.

Black solidarity is difficult to negotiate with a language barrier, and one should understand what might dissuade, for instance, a Venezuelan Afro-Latino from criticizing any aspect of American culture when matters are worse in every sense, including race issues, in their own country. Black people who are well traveled, especially Afro-Latinos who’ve traveled to many Spanish-speaking countries, eventually come to the glib conclusion quicker than anyone else, that despite our longtime and recently stoked problems here in America, there is perhaps no better place in the world to be black.

Kaepernick’s protest spread slowly but surely across the NFL, where African-Americans made up 69.7 percent of players last year. Athletes in the NBA and the WNBA—two more leagues with majority black rosters—have also become fluent in peaceful protest in the last few years. Demographics may have kept the Kaepernick movement from catching on in baseball, but it’s important to note that baseball conservatism has many layers.

In baseball, conformism is subconsciously enforced by the martial law of the purpose pitch, and by the ingrained biases of the people in power who make personnel decisions and drive its culture. When you wear your hat a certain way, a coach may say, “Why do you have to be different?” Your hair may irk him, and when you miss the cutoff man, it may be more irksome to him than when the guy who looks more like his son does it. There’s the crappy .220 hitter and there’s the scrappy .220 hitter, and the formula for who goes to AAA and who stays on as the good clubhouse guy is subjective at best.

It takes a special person to stand up, or kneel down, when you consider the full weight of the baseball institution.

Why was it Bruce Maxwell?

Three weeks into the NFL season, Colin Kaepernick is still unemployed. NFL insiders have been more reticent to say he’s being blackballed than non-insiders like activist Shaun King. While Kaepernick is probably as capable as most starting NFL quarterbacks, he is not in the elite, irreplaceable strata of athletes. This gives the owners who don’t sign him (i.e., all the owners) plausible deniability. It complicates the issue of Kaepernick’s unemployment.

John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports

As a player, Bruce Maxwell is even more replaceable than Kaepernick. Though the Oakland A’s were swift to defend Maxwell after he kneeled on Saturday, it is important to note that if he were to be blackballed, it would be virtually impossible to prove. To date, Maxwell has proven he is a light-hitting catcher worth about half a win above replacement over the course of a season. Though many ballplayers are late bloomers, Maxwell’s 300 at-bats represent a sufficiently large enough sample size for him to slowly fade into journeyman status without a second thought.

But whether he noticed or not, Maxwell’s path was eased by other circumstances. The Oakland A’s were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs on September 22, though they were never in the race at all, and even sold off their best pitcher at the trade deadline. The length of MLB’s season holds that half its teams engage in dozens of meaningless games, such as Saturday’s historic, meaningless contest between the Rangers and the Athletics. Maxwell has enjoyed the luxury of relatively low stakes—in baseball terms.

Along those lines, a story:

The morning after my club, the Tampa Bay Rays, beat the Red Sox in the 2008 ALCS, a handful of teammates and I supported then Senator Barack Obama at a rally in Florida. As a rookie, I was “hazed” by being volunteered to introduce the most famous political figure of our generation with a short speech before a capacity crowd at Legends Field. We were criticized for associating the team with a political party, but it was manageable—World Series stakes or not, Tampa is a tiny sports market. At the same time, had there not been several senior teammates with me, I might not have gone to the Obama rally. I might have caved under the pressure of fitting in that Maxwell overcame. And despite a military veteran father of my own, had all of what’s happening now been happening in the middle of a playoff race I was in as a rookie, especially in a major market, I would probably not have taken a knee—by myself no less—during the national anthem, either. You don’t want to be labeled a “distraction” by the media, and then become one in a superstitious, cliquey clubhouse as a rookie who is a new actor in a championship run that is years in the making. We have yet to see a major baseball star in a major market make a major political engagement. We have yet to see a Kaepernick–grade athlete use the platform of a championship run, with its larger audience. The “distraction” is perhaps entirely superstition, which especially pervades sports, but its effect is real.

My money would have been on Jones to be the first player to take a knee, despite his comments. My number two choice would have been Rays pitcher Chris Archer. But Maxwell was the right guy at the right time. He was born on a military base in Germany. His father is a veteran. For a certain kind of person watching these protests—which many critics have mischaracterized as being about “the flag” or “the troops,” instead of racial inequality and police violence—he had the credibility, along with the courage, to do something.

This is what Archer told the press on Sunday after Maxwell took a knee:

“It did take a while in baseball, I think mainly because the other sports that do that are predominantly black,” says Archer. “Our sport isn’t, so I think the criticism might be a little more harsh. It took somebody really special that had a unique background to take that leap.

“The way he went about it was totally, I think, as respectful as possible, just letting everybody know that this doesn’t have anything to do with the military, first and foremost, noting that he has family members that are in the military. It’s a little bit tougher for baseball players to make that leap, but I think he was the right person to do it.”

What Happens Now

Maxwell was cheered by the home Oakland crowd in his first at-bat since kneeling, a line-out to left field. In Mariners veteran Felix Hernandez, he was not forced to face the kind of (white, surly) pitcher one might expect to throw at a guy to send a political message, though it’s not at all implausible a pitcher of Felix Hernandez’s background could have thrown that purpose pitch “for America” after reading a tea party blog during pregame.

In the last week of the season, more teams will be eliminated (including the Rays), and their players will officially have no distraction superstition as a deterrent. For these players, there will be fewer games after which to face reporters. Here is what Archer told me in a text message: “What [Maxwell] did was tasteful & respectful to all parties. I wouldn’t be surprised if more guys start to follow suit.”

Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB’s First Knee syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

0 notes

athleticspr · 7 years

Photo

In all seriousness though, who is the Face of Baseball?

(Photo from SportingNews.com)

By Tim Quitadamo

Who is the face of baseball in 2017? If you watched any MLB related sports show during the days after the All-Star Game, you heard this debate. Is it Yankee’s rookie slugger Aaron Judge? Is it the 26 year-old two-time MVP Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim? What if it’s a lights out pitcher like the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw? As silly as it sounds, the face of baseball debate is an actual marketing problem for Major League Baseball. However, this branding issue might prove to be beneficial for baseball.

Gone are the days of Derek Jeter and David Ortiz, who both played effectively into their age 40 seasons. It’s a young man’s game. Superstars like Trout, Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Nolan Arenado, Bryce Harper, Kershaw and Chris Sale are all under 30 years old. So instead of trying to market one guy as the face of baseball, why not market all of them?

The MLB is always focused on trying to get America’s youth interested in the game. Baseball is not a sport made for television, and technology in 2017 has shortened the attention span of everyone, so you can’t expect children to watch 4 hours of baseball 162 days a year. You also can’t expect children to be able to relate to the elder-statesmen of the game. While kids all over the country saw Jeter and Ortiz as superheroes in their own right, their dreams of becoming those future Hall of Famers seem like an extrapolation. However, the game’s young studs could be a bit more relatable.

If you look at the league’s promotional commercials, you’ll see a lot of the names I mentioned above. Their names are out there, but I don’t think they’re talents are showcased often enough. I think the real marketing issue is the selection of prime-time games. It’s great to see the Red Sox and Yankees or Cubs and Cardinals play on Sunday nights, but not every Sunday night.

This problem stems from a natural east coast bias in the sports world. Some of the greatest players to ever step on a diamond are falling by the wayside because they play on the West Coast, or for teams with little to no playoff hope. So if I’m commissioner Rob Manfred, I’m pushing networks to pump out prime-time games that showcase a wider variety of elite talent instead of a game that might have higher stakes, at least until guys like Arenado, Trout and the like are showcased more often in prime-time.

0 notes

chapulana · 7 years

Text

What if Postseason Winners Got to Draft Postseason Losers?

The MLB playoffs had not changed its format for the past 13 years. This season, however, we will see a “minor” change taking place during the World Series. The home field advantage will belong to the team with the best regular season record, thus ending the already established tradition of it pertaining to the conference that won the All-Star game in July. As this is not a mind-blowing change, I’m here to propose something much more interesting that will probably never happen, but still.

What if after each round of the postseason, from the wildcard games to the conference championships, the players of each losing team entered a pool from which the winning teams could draft some of them for the next round of the playoffs?

First of all, we must recognize that we hate when a player gets injured and misses playing time. Was it in our hands, we’ll put our favorite players on the field for the 162 games, make them bat first, get as much plate appearances as possible and see their numbers grow during the summer and into the autumn with pleasure. Even more, how frustrating is when one of our favorite players or just one of the best players of the game (hello, Mike Trout!) is stuck in a franchise that never ever makes it to the postseason or that every time it does seems to not being able to advance past the first round?

On top of this, there is the seeding and the way we watch underdogs trying to beat the odds and outplay the best teams of the regular season on a yearly basis, which in all honesty is nothing crazy given how much of a lottery the game becomes once we reach October. Wouldn’t it be great to do something to even the field a little and make the “bad” teams get –more– on pair with the “good” teams during the playoffs?

Enter the Losers-Turned-Into-Winners Draft! Let’s explain the basics and then run some historical simulations based on them.

The idea behind this system is pretty simple. As things are nowadays, the best team from each division of the American and National Leagues automatically makes the playoffs, followed by two wildcard teams that can come from any of the divisions and are determined by their record during the regular season. We can, therefore, assume that the two wildcard teams from each league, which have a round of the postseason exclusively dedicated to them, are the two worst teams from each side of the bracket. Once a winner is named, that team advances to the Divisional Series and faces the best-seeded divisional champion. Seeds number two and three also go against each other, and after that, the Championship Series of each league comes to fruition to determine who will face who in the World Series. What I propose is to take advantage of the seeds assigned to each team at the start of the postseason, and play a two-round draft after each round of the playoffs is finalized, with the pecking order going from worst-to-best remaining seeds. Each team would be able to pick two players, no restrictions applied to their position (so they can pick two batters, two pitchers, or a combination of both), and players from all losing teams would be available at the draft for any team, no matter the League they play for. Once a draft is completed, the players left unselected are removed from the pool, so players not selected during the draft held after the Wild Card round are no longer available for the draft held after the Divisional Series, and so on.

This system will solve some of the problems fans need to deal with during each season and most of all will make playoffs as exciting and competitive as they get. Every star player will get far more chances to win the World Series (who is going to pass on Kershaw if the Dodgers fall at any point?) during his career, players wouldn’t mind re-signing long-term deals with the franchises they’ve always played for as they would “only” need to reach the postseason in order to have a shot at the title from multiple angles and not only depending on the success of their team, low seeded teams (supposedly worst than the rest of the field) would have influxes of talent as long as they progress as they would pick first on those drafts, and fans will have even more events to get excited about during an already exciting time as the postseason is. Don’t fool yourself, this is a win-win masterplan!

Let’s take a look at how the 2016 MLB Postseason could have changed had this draft-system being in place. To not make this too confusing, we will leave the results of each round as they were without taking into account the players taking by each team after each round’s draft. We would comment on how those picks could have affected the outcome of the playoffs, though.

The Wild Card round made Toronto face Baltimore for a place in the AL Divisional Series against Texas. In the National League, San Francisco had to play against New York to keep alive. After those two games were played, the Blue Jays and the Giants made it to the second round. What would have this meant in our loser-draft system? Given the regular season results, San Francisco (.537 W-L%) would have picked first and Toronto (.549 W-L%) second in a draft with a pool made out of the rosters of both the Mets and Orioles. Without much thinking applied to player valuations, these would have been the best-WAR players available per Baseball-Reference.com:

Manny Machado, 3B (BAL): 6.7 WAR

Noah Syndergaard, P (NYM): 5.3 WAR

Zach Britton, P (BAL): 4.3 WAR

Kevin Gausman, P (BAL): 4.2 WAR

Chris Tillman, P (BAL): 4.1 WAR

Jacob deGrom, P (NYM): 3.8 WAR

Bartolo Colon, P (NYM): 3.4 WAR

Chris Davis, 1B (BAL): 3.0 WAR

Yoenis Céspedes, LF (NYM): 2.9 WAR

Asdrúbal Cabrera, SS (NYM): 2.7 WAR

With a rotation already featuring Cueto, Bumgarner, and Samardzija among others, San Francisco could have added Manny Machado to replace Conor Gillespie (1.1 WAR). Toronto may have followed that selection with that of Syndergaard (back up north!) in order to improve their rotation for the Divisional Series and the last two picks could have gone either way with top-notch players on the board (San Francisco could have gone Yoenis’ way to move from Angel Pagan and Toronto with Chris Davis to replace Justin Smoak at first). If that is not an improvement you tell me what is it.

Moving onto the Divisional Round, the Dodgers, Cubs, Indians and Blue Jays defeated the Nationals, Giants, Red Sox and Rangers respectively. In this case, both Machado and Céspedes would become available again and enter the draft pool for the remaining four teams. This again goes in favor of star players, as they would keep moving onto later rounds if they’re still good enough as to keep being selected round after round, and we all want to watch the best players competing at the highest stakes. These are the second round best available players, again per Baseball-Reference.com WAR (keep in mind all players from New York and Baltimore, barring those selected by San Francisco –now eliminated from contention– are no longer available):

Mookie Betts, RF (BOS): 9.5 WAR

Manny Machado, 3B (BAL/SFG): 6.7 WAR

Adrian Beltre, 3B (TEX): 6.5 WAR

Max Scherzer, P (WSN): 6.2 WAR

Dustin Pedroia, 2B (BOS): 5.7 WAR

Johnny Cueto, P (SFG): 5.6 WAR

Tanner Roark, P (WSN): 5.5 WAR

Jackie Bradley, CF (BOS): 5.3 WAR

Rick Porcello, P (BOS): 5.1 WAR

David Ortiz, 1B/DH (BOS): 5.1 WAR

Madison Bumgarner, P (SFG): 5 WAR

Cole Hamels, P (TEX): 5 WAR

Buster Posey, C (SFG): 4.6 WAR

Daniel Murphy, 2B (WSN): 4.6 WAR

Brandon Crawford, SS (SFG): 4.5 WAR

By this point, and looking at the regular season results, the seeding for the draft would make teams pick in the following order: Toronto (.549 W-L%), Los Angeles (.562), Cleveland (.584) and Chicago (.640). Judging by the wild card draft picks already made by the Blue Jays and the rest of their roster, we may infer their first pick would be Mookie Betts to replace Michael Saunders at left field. Los Angeles would probably look to improve their offense with their first pick, which could have been Dustin Pedroia in order to remove Utley from the lineup. Cleveland, given their not-so-great pitching staff, would have selected Scherzer in a hurry and Chicago may have closed the first round of selections with that of Buster Posey to get aging David Ross off behind the plate.

With pretty much every roster spot already stacked for every team, the second round would become some sort of a best-available-pick affair. I’m betting on Toronto getting Manny Machado and finding a spot for him taking advantage of the designated hitter slot in the lineup. The Dodgers could improve their pitching rotation with the addition of Johnny Cueto. Cleveland’s outfield would welcome the addition of Jackie Bradley more than anything. And finally, the Cubs would close this round by going the pitching route and picking Madison Bumgarner.

Without taking those additions into account and respecting what happened in real-world MLB, after the Divisional Round finished the two teams making the World Series for the 2016 season were the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians, which means every player from Toronto’s and Los Angeles’ rosters (including those being picked in the first two drafts) become available in the final postseason draft event. Let’s take a look at the best players on the board by their regular season WAR:

Mookie Betts, RF (BOS/TOR): 9.5 WAR

Josh Donaldson, 3B (TOR): 7.5 WAR

Manny Machado, 3B (BAL/SFG/TOR): 6.7 WAR

Corey Seager, 3B (LAD): 6.1 WAR

Dustin Pedroia, 2B (BOS/LAD): 5.7 WAR

Johnny Cueto, P (SFG/LAD): 5.6 WAR

Clayton Kershaw, P (LAD): 5.6 WAR

Noah Syndergaard, P (NYM/TOR): 5.3 WAR

Justin Turner, 3B (LAD): 5.1 WAR

Aaron Sanchez, P (TOR): 4.9 WAR

J.A. Happ, P (TOR): 4.5 WAR

Edwin Encarnación, 1B/DH (TOR): 3.7 WAR

Marco Estrada, P (TOR): 3.5 WAR

Joc Pederson, CF (LAD): 3.4 WAR

Kevin Pillar, CF (TOR): 3.4 WAR

As can be seen, five of the best fifteen players available come from teams already out of contention, with Manny Machado being the only one having made it through the first two postseason drafts by going from Baltimore to San Francisco to Toronto, which proves his value among his peers. The Blue Jays, both from their original roster and their picks, provide nine of the fifteen players while the Dodgers only add four original men and two acquired through the draft.

In terms of what Chicago and Cleveland could do in order to create the best possible roster with the World Series in mind, multiple approaches could be taken by them. Both teams made the finals without playing in the World Series so they only have two draftees each between their players –not that they need much more–. As Cleveland finished the season with the worst record, the Indians would pick first and they’d probably take Clayton Kershaw because you just simply don’t pass on the best pitcher of his era. Chicago’s pitching is already stacked so they would probably look at the outfield and bring Mookie Betts in. Jose Ramirez had a great season for Cleveland in 2016, and it would be hard for the Indians to leave Donaldson on the board although they may look at the outfield options and pick someone like Pillar or Pederson to get Lonnie Chisenhall out of the lineup. Let’s go Joc Pederson here. Finally, Chicago would close the draft by taking Johnny Cueto as they don’t even have holes to fill in their offense at this point.

And with this third and final couple of draft rounds the postseason would end in a World Series win for the Cubs over the Indians in a series that would feature two incredibly great teams that through the course of the playoffs would have added the names of Betts, Scherzer, Cueto, Kershaw, Bradley, Bumgarner, Posey and Pederson to their rosters. Are you telling me those eight players wouldn’t make the final meetings of the season much more exciting that they could ever be? While I haven’t applied much thought to each selection and I’ve based them mostly on each player’s WAR or flagrant team needs, the process could turn into a really tough war between teams at the time of picking players not only for their benefit but also to block other franchises from taking them and improving spots where they may lack a player of certain quality, be it in their hitting lineup or in their pitching rotation.

This winners-draft-losers type of draft will probably (definitely) never happen. There would be much trouble implementing it and a lot of collateral implications that make it impossible to be a real thing. But hey, at least we can dream of a parallel world where Mike Trout could reach the World Series each and every seas– oh, yes, I forgot he plays for the Angels…

#Writing #Baseball #MLB #Holyfield

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epitomy-of-venegance-blog · 7 years

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Best Tv Shows All Time

'The Daily Show' 1996-Present

The fa-Ke information display that became mo-Re credible as opposed to news that is real. Comedy Central started The Everyday Show in 1996, but it hit its stride when Jon Stewart took over in 1999. The Everyday Present got more politically abrasive as the the headlines got worse. Stewart had the rage of a man who'd signed on in the conclusion of the Bill Clinton years, only to finish up with an America much more scary and more ugly for, as well as the anger showed. "It's a comic box lined with unhappiness," he informed Rolling Stone in 2006. While the franchise struggles on without him, Samantha Bee and Daily alumni John Oliver keep that hard-hitting spirit alive on their shows.

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'The Office (U.K.)' 2001 03

Ricky Gervais created one of TV's most agonizing comic tyrants in David Brent – a bitter, awkward, pompous ball of vanities terrorizing his workers at a London paper company. He fidgets, fondles his tie, cracks awful jokes, plays guitar ("Free Love Freeway"!), invisible to anyone except the longsuffering office drones who need to put up with him. This mockumentary raised the cringe level of sitcoms everywhere, spawning the surprisingly fantastic U.S. version (also on this checklist) while paving the way for the glories of Parks & Re-Creation and Peepshow.

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'Sesame Street' 1969-Present

No kiddie present has ever been as fiercely beloved as this urban utopian fantasy, emerge a brownstone neighborhood populated by a multi racial cast of smiling adults, a gigantic yellow chicken, a grouch in a garbage can, and z/n-loving vampires, plus many talking letters and figures. It's great songs, but most important, Sesame h-AS soul, which can be why the air h-AS stayed sweet for 40 years – or as the Count would say, 4-5! 46! 47 years!

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'The Sopranos' 1999 2007

The crime saga that slice the the history of TV kicking off a golden age when abruptly something seemed possible. With all The Sopranos, David Chase smashed all the rules about just how much you could get away with on the little screen. And he created an immortal American antihero in James Gandolfini's Nj Mob boss, Tony Soprano over a crew of gangsters who double as damaged husbands and dads, men seeking to live using their murderous secrets and dark memories. As the late, great Gandolfini told Rolling Stone in 2001, "I noticed David Chase say one time that it is about people who lie to themselves, as we all do. Lying to ourselves on a daily basis as well as the mess it creates." What an inspiring mess it is. This particular poll was run away with by the Sopranos as the planet was altered by it. Chase showed how much story telling ambition tv could be brought to by you, and it didn't take long for everybody else to to go up to his problem. The breakthroughs of the next few years – The Wire, Mad Guys, Breaking Bad – could not have happened without The Sopranos kicking the door down. But Chase had a tough time convincing any community to take on a story of a guilt- while his mom plots to destroy him, gangster who goes to therapy. "We'd no idea this show would appeal to folks," he told Rolling Stone. "The show really unexpectedly made this type of splash that it screwed all of US up." The Sopranos stored heading having a wild mix of humor and blood shed for the long bomb over six masterful seasons on HBO. When FBI agents tell Uncle Junior which mobsters they want him to finger, he says using a shrug, "I want to fuck Angie Dickinson – let us see who gets lucky first." The Sopranos is full of damaged characters who linger on in the long term parking of our national imagination – Edie Falco's Carmela, Dominic Chianese's Junior, Michael Imperioli's Christopher, Tony Sirico's Paulie Walnuts. E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt became Tony's lieutenant Silvio – Chase spotted him on early Bruce Springsteen album addresses. (As Chase told Rolling Stone, "There was something about the E Street Band that looked the same as a crew.") It might not have been possible without Gandolfini's slow-burning intensity – he was the only actor who could deliver Tony's angst to life. But the writing, directing and acting went locations Television had never attained before. The Sopranos arguably hit its imaginative peak with all the well-known Pine Barrens episode, where Christopher and Paulie Walnuts wander away in the woods, realizing the gangster they tried to whack is still out there-in the darkness. They shiver in the cold. ("It is the the fuckin' Yukon out there!") They wait. And worry. The Sopranos never solved this mystery – for all we know, the Russian is nonetheless atlarge, however another key these guys can't shake off. In the streets, family loyalties flip, both on The Sopranos and a-T home. Beloved characters can get whacked at any given moment. It stored that perception of risk alive proper up to the ultimate seconds. And not quite a decade after it faded to black in a Jersey diner together with the juke-box playing "Do Not Cease Believin'," The Sopranos stays the standard all ambitious TV aspires to meet.

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'Friday Night Lights' 200611

"Obvious eyes, total hearts, cannot drop" is the golden-rule in a dusty Texas town where everybody else lives and dies for the large college football team. But Friday Night Lights isn't truly about football s O much as family, perform, class, the bitter flavor of dashed goals, with Kyle Chandler as Coach Taylor, Connie Britton as wife Tami and Taylor Kitsch as Tim Riggins – the most most notable of the many vulnerable kids who go through the Panthers' locker room. Riggins' tale becomes particularly moving after his grid iron glory fades and genuine existence beats him down.

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'Star Trek' 196669

The Starship Business took off using a five-year mission: "To explore unusual new worlds, to to locate new life and new civilizations," and it succeeded in making the most beloved of sci fi franchises, maybe not just inspiring numerous spin-offs but also codifying fan fiction as a creative art form. Gene Roddenberry's original sequence stays the the inspiration, with William Shatner's awesomely pulpy Capt. Kirk, Leonard Nimoy's logical Mr. Spock, Bones, Sulu, Uhura and Scotty. They make contact with strange and inexplicable lifeforms – Romulans, Gorns, Joan Collins. During its three years, Star Trek suffered from low ratings till NBC pulled the plug, but thanks to the most doggedly faithful of Television cults (re-member when "Trekkie" was an insult?), Roddenberry's vision lives long and prospers to this day.

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'Mad Men' 200715

The American desire and how exactly to sell it – aside from Don Draper as well as the hustlers of Sterling Cooper, selling is the American dream. Mad Men became a sensation as soon as it appeared, partly due to the glam surface – a New York advert agency in the JFK period, all sex and money and liquor and cigarettes – but mostly as it was an audaciously adult drama which wasn't about cops or robbers (or medical practioners or lawyers), staking out new story-telling territory. Jon Hamm's womanizing ad man, Don, is a genius a-T shaping other people's goals and fantasies, but he can not e-Scape his own loneliness – he's a con-man who stole the identification of a lifeless Korean War officer and constructed a new life out of lies. "A good marketing individual is like an artist, channeling the lifestyle," creator Matthew Weiner told Rolling Stone. "They're supporting a mirror saying, 'This is the way you desire you were. That is the thing you're scared of.'" A room can be reduced by Don to tears although the content family memories he is attempting to sell are a fraud. There was nothing on TV as seductive as Mad Men before – and years later, there still isn't.

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'Deadwood' 200406

Al Swearengen's moral philosophy: "you-can't cut the throat of every cock-sucker whose character it would improve." Spoken just like a Founding Father that is true. He is the villain of David Milch's epic Western set in the mud and slime of an 1870s South Dakota gold-mining c AMP. In the middle of it all (i.e., the saloon), Ian McShane's Al glowers, pours drinks, counts money and slices jugulars, in a frontier hell-hole total of prospectors, whores, drunks and dropped freaks looking for one last fatal battle to get in to (and often discovering it a T Al's place). It was like McCabe & Mrs. Miller with mo Re depressing sex scenes. The first two seasons are solid gold, the third, flimsier, but Deadwood is about how communities get built – and every one of the dirty work that requires.

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Third Watch TV Show

'Cheers' 1982 93

You require a spot where everyone knows your title – even if it's just a dive bar in Boston full of regulars with no place else to go. Cheers started with a focus on the mismatched romantic banter between Ted Danson's washedup Red-Sox pitcher Sam and Shelley Long's up-tight book-worm Diane. ("Over my dead body!" "Hey, don't b-ring last evening in to this.") By attracting new blood like Kelsey Grammar, Kirstie Alley and Woody Harrelson, but it regularly renewed it self. Cheers was to the purpose where you could tune in to see which regulars would hang tonight.

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rickhorrow · 6 years

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15 to watch 102218

The Columbus Crew might have been saved, but Austin’s MLS bid still remains alive and well. According to the Austin American-Statesman, one source close to the action cited that the Texas capital will land an expansion team, it’s just a matter of when that will happen. “The only thing (being discussed) is what's the optimum time to launch the club in Austin,” the source noted. “I don't think it impacts what's been agreed to in Austin or the league's excitement or enthusiasm, or the stadium, or anything like that.” This past August, the Austin city council approved a deal to construct a 20,000-seat, $200 million, privately funded, soccer-specific stadium in the city, clearing a major hurdle that has prevented numerous other MLS-hopeful cities from landing a team. Current Columbus Crew operator Precourt Sports Ventures has been behind the Austin push; Austin FC should is expected to start play no later than 2021. I just spent a weekend in Austin observing Formula One action at the Circuit of the Americas raceway, and can testify to the city’s sports diversity and capability to house a successful MLS franchise.

The Chicago Bulls have become the 26th NBA franchise to sign a jersey patch sponsor, inking a deal with online eyewear company Zenni Optical. According to SportsBusiness Journal, the Bulls will sport Zenni’s logo on their left breast this season. Financial details regarding the five-year deal were not disclosed upon its announcement, though Zenni will become the official eyewear partner of the franchise as part of the agreement. This marks Zenni’s first venture into the world of sports sponsorships; the company is now expected to sign a few Bulls players to endorsement deals. “The deal also includes digital assets, in-arena signage and activations, branding on media interview backdrops and community initiatives.” Now that the Bulls have a jersey patch sponsor, only four NBA teams lack one: the Indiana Pacers, Houston Rockets, Oklahoma City Thunder, and Washington Wizards.

Advertising spending numbers for the NFL’s opening weekend were recently released and the news is all good for the league. According to SportsPro Media and MediaRadar, Week 1 generated more than $280 million worth of advertising spend for the NFL, with Toyota, General Motors, and Verizon as the biggest spenders. The $280 million number comes as a 22% rise from 2017’s marker. The league also recently revealed that, as of Week 4, “the consumption of games on digital platforms has jumped 65 per cent from 2017, with an average minute audience of 326,000 viewers per game window across different platforms.” The league remains a cash cow from a media and advertising perspective, but political controversy and player safety issues have caused a lot of drama off the field in recent years, leading to a decline in television ratings. Despite that, the NFL has to be happy with these growth numbers and the emerging storylines from the 2018 season thus far.

New Jersey’s sports betting continues to grow after a “stunning” September. According to JohnWallStreet, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement reported that the eight licensed sportsbooks took $183.9 million in bets last month, up 92% from the amount wagered the previous month. The new NFL season drove a lot of this growth, as $90 million was wagered on NFL games alone. The launch of several new mobile sportsbooks helped fuel this boom as well. In terms of online betting, such activity “has already surpassed the state’s retail business, as 56.5% ($104 million) of all sports bets placed were made through those channels.” FanDuel and DraftKings dominate the New Jersey sports betting landscape, taking in approximately 2/3 of all related revenue in the state. In the end, the state of New Jersey was allowed to keep $2.6 million in tax revenue from sports betting operations, showing how lucrative this business could be for states around the country. The next legal hurdle for sports books? Being able to take online wagers from out-of-state bettors. A decision on this multi billion dollar question is forthcoming.

The future of the Los Angeles Angels remains up in the air after the club opted out of its lease at Angel Stadium with the city of Anaheim. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Angels would have been forced to wait until 2028 to opt out of their lease had they not done so last week. In exercising this opt-out clause, the team has the option to leave Angel Stadium following the 2019 season, though the club currently has no other stadium option. The Angels’ contract with Major League Baseball “gives them the rights to play in Orange, L.A. and Ventura counties, though they cannot move out of state.” Since Owner Arte Moreno bought the team back in 2003, the team has spent more than $50 million on renovations to Angel Stadium, “but the venue is expected to need more than $150 million in improvements over the next 20 years” to keep it up-to-date with other stadiums around the league. This is a long term decision for the franchise and Moreno, and with no other viable options now in hand, look for the Angels to continue to swing bats in Anaheim in 2020 and beyond.

Tech Top Five

According to SportTechie, the Patriots are the first team to venture into the world’s largest market and will launch two new television shows about the team. Foxborough TV is a show designed to engage existing Patriots and NFL fans in China and starred Brady in its first of eight episodes. Foxborough TV’s first episode was broadcast exclusively on the team’s Chinese social channels, Weibo, WeChat, and the Tencent Sports website. The other program is a monthly video series solely about the quarterback and is aptly called the Tom Brady China Show. In the series, the three-time MVP will film a 15 minute video exclusively for the Chinese audience of himself interviewing teammates, demonstrating training methods, and answering questions from fans in China. As we have seen the NBA expand into the world’s largest market, it is only natural that the NFL’s most famed team is also seeking new horizons in media overseas.

A Chicago Bulls fan-lead TV show is airing on NBC Sports Chicago. According to Broadcasting & Cable, the program called Bulls Outsiders is an interactive show created by Bulls fans for Bulls fans and will appear after the post-game show following all 82 regular season games of Chicago’s basketball team. The new platform airs on NBC Sports Chicago’s linear cable channel, streams on its app for subscribers, and is available on Facebook Live. The three hosts are all Chicagoans in their 30s who were chosen from dozens of candidates based upon one-minute video auditions shot on their cell phones. The lucky winners– Matt Peck, David Watson, and John Sabine – are die-hard Bulls enthusiasts poised to offer analysis and commentary from the fan's perspective in addition to providing interactive content on Facebook and Twitter. With Sportsnet's recent embrace of social media centric content for the NHL in the form of #IceSurfing, the NBA’s Bulls are also finding new platforms to help fans further connect.

Nike’s Jordan brand has a Facebook Messenger AI bot delivering content. Artificial intelligence platform Snaps teamed up with Nike back in February during the NBA All-Star Weekend and found in a trial that the Messenger bot was generating open rates of 87%, passing the typical 15% – 20% Jordan receives from its emails. According to Digital Agency Network, the bot has now been delivering content from the Air Jordan blog, Jordan.com, and Jordan News on a weekly basis to a larger audience and has found similar engagement numbers across its three categories: shop, Air Jordan, and watch. Users can customize the weeks, days, and time that they will get notified while the bot also delivers unique responses to specific phrases. Also, the artificially intelligent bot delivers daily workouts via push notifications and provides content in GIFs or videos for the workouts’ methods. The next move for Nike will be adding more customer-service functions to deliver a human component for our rapidly digitalized world.

MLB expands its partnership with Google during the playoffs through the tech company's Assistant. According to SportsPro, the deal saw that Google Assistant became the sponsor of MLB’s American and National League Championship Series. After inking a partnership with Google’s Youtube TV service, the league has further built on its previous relationship with the media giant. As part of the new deal, branding for the AI-led platform will be integrated into MLB TV broadcasts of the Championship Series with the product’s AI capabilities displayed during games. Commentators such as Joe Buck ask Google Assistant questions live on-air, with the Assistant then using its high-speed AI processing to respond correctly. The Google Assistant also has formed part of MLB’s original content, which will be featured on a range of the league’s online platforms. According to comScore data, voice-based search questions are predicted to account for 50% of all searches by 2020 and Google is putting itself in the spotlight to be the voice-based AI that is most heard.

The Rockets build their Chinese esports presence through Bilibili. For the last few years, the Houston Rockets and Shanghai Sharks of the China Basketball Association have played one another in an exhibition game. According to SportTechie, that on court relationship has taken to the screen as the Rockets partnered up with the video sharing company of the Sharks, Bilibili Gaming, for an esports collaboration. As part of the launch, the Rockets’ esports team, Clutch Gaming, took on the Bilibili Gaming outfit in a friendly match on October 9 that drew in 900,000 viewers worldwide. The partnership between the Rockets and Bilibili makes sense for an expanding franchise as Bilibili is one of two companies – alongside Tencent – that is active in gaming, live broadcasts, esports, and basketball in China. Although the Rockets lack a team in the NBA 2K league, this agreement is yet another innovative deal to be signed by Houston’s NBA affiliate after having partnered with China-based Bitcoin mining firm AntPool at the end of September.

Power of Sports Five

The NBA and WNBA join forces to launch Her Time To Play. According to The Undefeated, the initiative tackles the issue of high dropout rates in athletics for girls in adolescence and will inspire young women aged 7-14 to learn and play basketball. The program provides hundreds of youth organizations with life skills lessons and a free basketball curriculum developed specifically for young women while also training and licensing 500 new female coaches and mentors. Her Time To Play is a collaborative effort between the WNBA, USA Basketball, YMCA of the USA, the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and the Women’s Sports Foundation and will educate on healthy eating and nutrition, mental wellness, body image, and bullying. Each chapter of the organization features a WNBA team that will highlight personal stories shared by professional female basketball stars. Her Time to Play will drive more female interest in basketball and opens up avenues for more women to play or have a voice in the sport.

Capitol Hill Congressional baseball finds ways to give back after last year’s shooting. After a gunman opened fire on a Republican team practice in June 2017, a record number of fans attended the next two Capitol Hill baseball games. According to Roll Call, more than 17,000 tickets were then sold this year. In fact, the Congressional Baseball Game has become so popular that the league had to find new avenues to donate the incoming money. With its media attention, the Congressional Sports for Charity had a banner year and raised $700,000. The three historical beneficiaries of the game – The Girls Club of Greater Washington, the Washington Literacy Center, and the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy – will still receive grants. In addition, there will be a series of gifts for programs encouraging youth development through sports, local D.C. charities fighting hunger and homelessness, and the United States Capitol Police Memorial Fund to honor the officers injured in the shooting. In the aftermath of tragedy, sport, politics, and philanthropy have come together to create change in different sectors of the nation’s capital.

New York Jets’ Kelvin Beachum advocates for STEM while also fighting hunger. According to WiscNews, the New York Jets’ left tackle donated $5,000 to the Food Bank for New York City and challenged New Yorkers to follow suit, pledging to double his contribution if they match his support. Growing up, Beachum and his family relied on food stamps while his blind mechanic grandfather – who still works at 91 years old – defines the type of hard work the Jets offensive lineman embraces. Using his childhood as inspiration, Beachum has given back to fill bellies in cities including his hometown of Mexia, Texas as well as Dallas, Jacksonville, and Pittsburgh. The total contributions could reach $75,000 and provide 375,000 meals. The business investor and tech geek’s other charity is advocating STEM teaching in curriculum across the country. He partnered with the UT Tyler Ingenuity Center to launch his first annual STEM initiative in Mexia back in 2016. Beachum typifies a NFL player who inspires other athletes to use their platform to give back.

Canadian Olympic hopefuls receive a large donation from the Asper family. The David and Ruth Asper family donated $2.5 million to the 5to8 campaign, representing 10 times more than the previous largest donation to Olympic sport in Canadian history. According to CBC, the 5to8 campaign touts its title to help the generations of Canadian athletes who are believed to be five to eight years from the podium. Canadian decathlete Pierce LePage knows how much a program such as the Canadian Olympic Foundation's 5to8 can provide. He has lived through the athlete “in-between stage” where the medal podium is so close but the financial support to get there is little. LePage’s big break came when he won silver at the Commonwealth Games last spring, but he's seen numerous athletes who weren't so lucky. The Aspers' massive contribution inspired a fund-matching program by the Canadian federal government on a dollar-for-dollar basis. This game changing gift for Canadian Olympic hopefuls will put pressure on other sports philanthropists and governments to contribute toward their own Olympic dreamers.

ESPN launches female-focused espnW brand in Mexico. EspnW exists as a focal point for ESPN’s female-centric content and includes coverage of women’s sports across linear, digital, and social platforms. According to SportsPro, the Mexican launch of EspnW will include an increase in the number of female voices on-air, feature a range of female athletes, and provide inspirational stories relating to women in sport. ESPN claims that 23% of their audience is female and that women who consume the company's content average 100 minutes every day on an ESPN platform. EspnW’s arrival in Mexico will take place throughout the week of October 14 – 19 and be powered by “Semana de la Mujer” with highlights such as the Central American and Caribbean Games, Barranquilla 2018, #EntreNosotras, weekly EspnW-branded podcasts, and more. After having released this model in the United States eight years ago, the decision to better target female markets in Mexico will provide the sports giant a much-needed edge in the quest for audiences’ eyeballs as other sports streaming platforms continue to grow.

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flauntpage · 7 years

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Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB's First Knee

On Saturday, the ACLU tweeted a quote from Jackie Robinson's 1972 memoir, I Never Had It Made:

"I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world."

Why did it take so long?

It takes a special person to stand up, or kneel down, when you consider the full weight of the baseball institution.

Why was it Bruce Maxwell?

John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports

Along those lines, a story:

This is what Archer told the press on Sunday after Maxwell took a knee:

What Happens Now

Bruce Maxwell Had the Courage, and Credibility, to Take MLB's First Knee published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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