Somehow I missed this outrageous smear (probably because I was still icing my sprained ankle when it went up):
On Saturday, TNR beat a combined Atlantic Monthly/National Journal squad in softball 10-9 in a 10-inning thriller. The highlight of the game was Ross Douthat injuring himself while--this is true--attempting to wave home a runner while coaching third base. (Those worried about the future of theoconservatism and right-of-center populist reform will be happy to learn that Douthat limped off the field but later returned.)
Attempting to wave home a runner? Let's just be clear about this: I twisted my angle while leaping up and down to celebrate having successfully waved a runner - the tying runner, I might add, with two outs in the bottom of the last inning - home all the way from first (a gutsy call, in other words, worthy of the greatest third base coaches of all time) on an error by TNR's third baseman. I trust Frank Foer has already ordered an internal investigation at his publication to determine how this outrageous slander slipped by the fact-checkers.
Nearly a third of the way through the season, the best record in baseball belongs to ... the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. But the AP couldn't resist taking a dig at Rays fans yesterday:
While Tampa Bay is 11 games over .500 for the first time, the Rays drew an announced crowd of just 12,174 for the holiday game.
Baseball fandom depends on two things: The experience of the current season, and the memory of seasons past. The Rays finally have a current season worth getting excited about (at least so far), but they've been playing for a decade without producing a single non-embarrassing memorable moment - and they play in a city where half the population are transplanted Yankees, Mets and Red Sox fans, all of whose teams have been consistently interestingly for the past ten years. Speaking as a transplanted Sox fan myself, it would take more than two good months of baseball to make me start caring deeply about the fate of the Washington Nationals, and if the Nats subject us to another seven years of Rays-style baseball and then turn in two good months of play in the spring of 2015, I'll be even less likely to leap headlong on to the bandwagon. This isn't a brief for fair-weather fandom: I stuck with the Red Sox and Patriots through the mid-'90s lean years, and I'll happily stick with them long after the current run of championship play has come to an end. But there's a difference between sticking with your favorite team through thick and thin and signing up to root for a lousy team that's never had any thick at all. I have nothing but respect for those Tampans who do root for the Rays as passionately as any fan of a more distinguished franchise - their reward will be great in baseball heaven - and I'm pulling for their team to have a great year, for the same reason that I was pulling for the Rockies last season: I want to see a long-dreadful franchise make the Leap, I want to see Tampa fall in love with Scott Kazmir and James Shields and Evan (not Eva) Longoria, I want the '08 Rays to give future generations of Floridians a reason to identify with their hometown team. But I don't blame the people of Tampa for not showing up in droves just yet.
Over on the Current, I use this rain-soaked Opening Day as an occasion to contemplate why the steroid scandal hasn't prompted large-scale disillusionment among baseball fans.
Being a typically provincial American, I lack the breadth of experience to adequately address Alex Massie's claim that the glories of baseball are eclipsed by the perfection that is cricket. In defense of my limited horizons, I would only say that Americans’ provincial attitude toward sports has less to do with our philistinism than with our glut of home-grown, big-time sports. The United States has not one but three national games, two of them wildly popular in their collegiate as well as professional varieties, plus a kitchen sink’s worth of popular alternatives to the football-baseball-basketball trifecta, from hockey and horse racing to boxing and tennis; meanwhile, we’re constantly being hectored by internationalist goo-goo types to support our local soccer league as well. And then of course there are the Olympics, when we’re supposed to feign interest in a slew of contests that nobody find remotely interesting if their nation’s honor weren’t at stake.
All of which is to say that while I’d love to immerse myself in cricket – if nothing else, it would enable me to appreciate the greatest sports book ever written – as it stands I can barely keep up with the sports that I followed obsessively as a kid. In high school, I was fanatical about college basketball, baseball, and football; in college, the first of these dropped off my radar screen somewhat (too many teams, not enough time); and now that I’m a half-decade deep in adulthood my football IQ has dropped to a point where I had to turn down a chance to write a piece about about the Patriots this winter – something I would have killed to do years back – because I simply wasn’t following their season closely enough. Maybe once I’m retired I’ll finally have time to learn enough about bowlers and wickets to judge whether Massie’s making sense or full of it, but until then I have to plead ignorance and duck the argument.
Photo by Flickr user Pandiyan used under a Creative Commons license.
Via Crooked Timber, I see that John Rawls got at least one thing right. Here he is channeling the legal scholar Harry Kalven on the perfections on baseball:
… the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.
… the game uses all parts of the body: the arms to throw, the legs to run, and to swing the bat, etc.; per contra soccer where you can’t touch the ball. It calls upon speed, accuracy of throw, gifts of sight for batting, shrewdness for pitchers and catchers, etc.
… all plays of the game are open to view: the spectators and the players can see what is going on. Per contra football where it is hard to know what is happening in the battlefront along the line. Even the umpires can’t see it all, so there is lots of cheating etc. And in basketball, it is hard to know when to call a foul. There are close calls in baseball too, but the umps do very well on the whole, and these close calls arise from the marvelous timing built into the game and not from trying to police cheaters etc.
… baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball, and this has the remarkable effect of concentrating the excitement of plays at different points of the field at the same time. Will the runner cross the plate before the fielder gets to the ball and throws it to home plate, and so on.
Finally, there is the factor of time, the use of which is a central part of any game. Baseball shares with tennis the idea that time never runs out, as it does in basketball and football and soccer. This means that there is always time for the losing side to make a comeback …
One could go on to note the perfect balance that baseball strikes between team effort and individual performance, a balance at once deeply Christian and deeply small-d democratic. Or its paradoxical nature, which inspires quantification and romanticization in equal measure, and offers food for statheads as well as novelists, conservatives as well as liberals, historians as well as business writers. Or …
No, enough. No argument, however self-evidently powerful, will persuade those deluded souls – and they do exist! – who would argue that the qualities that Rawls and Kalven considered strengths are actually weaknesses. Those who would claim that baseball’s physical ecumenism – the sport’s ability to find a place for Chone Figgins as well as Vladimir Guerrero, for John Kruk as well as Bo Jackson - makes it ultimately inferior to basketball or football or soccer as a test of athletic ability. Those who would assert that the skills that baseball requires are too idiosyncratic to be interesting – that whereas everyone can appreciate the physical strength required to be an offensive lineman, or the speed and agility required of a small forward, only a crank or an obsessive can get worked up about how well a paunchy middle-aged man flicks a curve or spins a knuckleball. Those who would aver that baseball’s clocklessness, its out-of-time quality and its inclination toward eternity, just means that the games take too damn long.
Such people are beyond the reach of reason. Also, they’re communists.
This is the seventh series this postseason and it likely will be the fifth to end in a sweep (of the 22 previous teams to take a 3-0 World Series lead, 19 swept it). Of the other two series, one ended in four games. Even the one series that went the limit scarcely had a good game -- the average margin of victory in the American League Championship Series was five runs, with Boston outscoring Cleveland 30-5 the final three games. And let's not get into all the days off without any game at all.
You know a postseason is bad when the most interesting moment is an invasion of insects.
Obviously, I'm not complaining about the outcome, but Caple's right. Buster Olney has similar thoughts, behind the ESPN firewall, and he makes the larger point that really, there hasn't been a good World Series since the Tribe-Marlins tilt of 1997.* (And that one involved the Marlins depriving the Indians of a championship, so I've basically stricken it from my memory.) I would add that the postseason as a whole hasn't produced any really memorable series in the three years since the Yanks-Red Sox war in '04 (and the neglected, but likewise excellent, Cards-Astros battle the same year). Yes, the Sox-Indians went seven games this year, as did the Mets-Cards semi-final in '06, but I wouldn't call either one a series for the ages, and beyond that it's been a sweep here, and a sweep there, with precious few of the extra-inning marathons and shocking turnarounds that you look for in postseason baseball.
The Red Sox were only seven games better than the Rockies over the course of the regular season, a nearly-meaningless edge when you're talking about a seven-game playoff series. In the second half of the season, they were considerably worse. In the postseason, they've gone 7-3; the Rockies have gone 7-0. Admittedly, the National League offers markedly inferior competition, and I do think the Red Sox are a better team than the Colorado. But 2-1 favorites? Not hardly.
(All betting lines provided for informational purposes only.)
Via JVL, your (semi-accurate, alas) guide to being an insufferable New England sports fan. (I get the feeling the author doesn't much care for Bill Simmons ...) Meanwhile, Ben McGrath profiles Scott Boras.
The door is open for the Red Sox, with a rich baseball tradition and a high payroll, to replace the Yankees as the team the nation loves to hate ... The possibility is there for the spending: no more just missing the brass ring, but rather grabbing that ring season after season. But does Red Sox Nation really want to do this?
Vince Lombardi’s exhortation that winning is the only thing, in retrospect, has caused unimaginable heartache and blues. It sounds good but is probably antithetical to inner peace.
Look around. The pursuit of winning has tempted some of us to break rules, tear moral fiber, take performance-enhancing drugs and jettison a manager who failed to lead his team past the first playoff round for three consecutive years.
I would ask Boston fans whether they really want to see their team do this. Do they want a franchise whose ethos is that winning titles is the only thing?
Here's the problem: I understand where Rhoden's coming from, and there's no question that I look at the Yankees and their fans and feel more than a little pity for them, trapped as they are in a cycle where the ordinary joys of having a winning baseball team are overshadowed by a grim win-at-all-costs mentality. But I'm not sure what the Red Sox organization is supposed to do to avoid this fate: Yes, they should avoid signing unlikeable mercenaries who can't perform in the clutch (ahem, Kevin Brown), but overall I think they have an obligation, having grown financially fat off the dollars generated by a passionate fan base, to plow that money back into the team on the field. (This was always something you had to respect about Steinbrenner: He was crazy and horrible and tyrannical and all the rest, but you always knew that he was in it to win baseball games, not to get rich.) And if you do plow the money from a passionate fan base back into the team, and do so intelligently, you're going to have the chance to grab the brass ring season after season - which in turn creates the sort of unreasonable expectations that the Yankees currently labor under.
Rhoden raises the spectre of the Sox signing Alex Rodriguez this winter as an example of what turning into the Yankees might mean, and I take his point - but look, if the Red Sox ownership has the chance to sign Rodriguez for an amount that makes sense given the team's resources, what should they do? Not sign him, out of some sense that it's bad form to want to win as much as the Steinbrenners of the world? Surely not. Yes, they should consider the character of the team as well as its rotisserie value; yes, they should spend more money on the farm system than on free agents (more Pedroias, please, and fewer Julio Lugos); yes, they shouldn't adopt Steinbrenner's star-chasing obsessions when the stars in question are passing their primes. But if you're the custodian of a franchise like the Red Sox, the trap of high expectations is one that you have to be willing to step into, even knowing what it's made of baseball in the Bronx.
I worry that my earlier reference to the flukishness of the Rockies' current run suggests a general lack of respect for that team and its accomplishments. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I've been following the Rockies on-and-off all season, usually via this guy's blog; along with the Brewers, Royals, and Pirates - and until last year, the Tigers - they're one of the down-and-out franchises I pull for every season (except when they play the Red Sox, of course). I won't say I saw this run coming, but at the very least I could talk intelligently about Troy Tulowitzki, Manny Corpas and Ubaldo Jimenez back in August.
The crucial question, of course, is whether a team that's less than fifteen years old deserves the same kind of goodwill that older teams - and long-suffering fan bases - like Detroit and Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Kansas City merit from out-of-town baseball fans like myself. The other day, Bill Simmons wrote of the NLCS:
No matter how much you love baseball, it's nearly impossible to care about the Colorado-Arizona series. You might watch it, you might enjoy it, you might even gamble on it ... but unless you're an absolute baseball nut or a Rockies/D-backs fan, how could you honestly care who wins when neither franchise is older than Jamie-Lynn Spears? It's like going to a wedding in which you don't know anything about the bride or the groom ...
Anyway, a friend of mine who works in the sports world got me thinking about this on Monday when he e-mailed just to say, "Colorado versus Arizona might be the least watched LCS in baseball history. Who the hell cares about either team? I'm convinced that sports is all about history. If there's history, it's interesting. If not, who cares? People need the emotional attachment that comes from a lifetime of cheering for the same team -- and especially when their parents rooted for the same franchise."
He's since backtracked a bit, but it's a reasonable point: Aren't the Rockies too new, too un-historied, their fans too unacquainted with suffering, to deserve our love?
I say no, and here's why. Unlike other recent expansion teams - the Marlins, the Diamondbacks - who have tasted way more success than their fan bases deserve at this stage in their history, the Rockies have entered baseball the old-fashioned expansion-team way: With a decade or so of relative futility. Sure, they had some decent teams in the mid-'90s, and snuck into a Wild Card berth once, but basically they've been terrible, with six straight losing seasons to their name before this year. Which is how it's supposed to be for expansion teams: You break in your fan base with consistent mediocrity punctuated by outright awfulness, whittle your attendance down from the sellouts of the opening season or two, and then, once you've acquainted the good people of your city with years of losing baseball, you make the Leap. This Rockies' team is thus the equivalent of the '69 Miracle Mets, or the '95 "Refuse to Lose" Mariners: It's a squad that fans will remember for years and decades as the team that put baseball on the map in Denver with an absolutely incredible, improbable, only-in-baseball late-season run. And like those teams, it deserves the affection of baseball fans everywhere. The kind of history that Simmons and his friend are talking about has to start somewhere; for the Rockies, it starts here.
Let's start back in with baseball, since it's where I'm having the easiest time catching up. Here's Joe Sheehan, explaining why Yankee fans shouldn't be disheartened to see their team turning into this decade's answer to the late-'90s Atlanta Braves, a good team bounced again and again in the first round of the playoffs:
A more concrete problem is that postseason series, best-of-five or best-of-seven sprints, are poor tools for separating the evenly matched teams that play them. The gaps between even the best and the worst playoff teams are small when reduced to a week’s worth of games.
Last year, the Mets (97-65) met the Cardinals (83-78) in the National League Championship Series. That 14-victory gap made it seem as if the Mets should be a big favorite. In fact, that difference amounted to one victory every two weeks or so during the season. That is inconsequential over the course of a postseason series. The Cardinals went on to win the pennant and the World Series.
If a 14-victory advantage can be negated in a playoff series, how does one make meaningful distinctions when four contenders finish with 94 to 96 victories, as in the American League this year?
This is a crucial question for the Yankees. They were 12-1 in postseason series from 1996 to 2000 on their way to four World Series championships; they have since gone 5-7, with two World Series appearances and no titles. The Yankees have been eliminated in the first round the last three seasons.
When looking at the big picture, though, the Yankees’ recent futility does not stand out. What is notable and unusual is their four championships in five years. The correlation between regular-season quality and postseason success is weak, and the Yankees’ achievements from 1996 to 2000 are a statistical anomaly.
Like most wonky baseball fans of my generation, I'm much more likely to call some highly unlikely development - like, for instance, the play of the Colorado Rockies over the last four weeks - a statistical anomaly and leave it at that than to wax eloquent about how the anomalous team or player has more "heart," or somehow just "knows how to win." In the case of those all-conquering late-'90s Yankees teams, though, I turn into a grizzled old scout, shaking my head and muttering about intangibles. With the exception of the 114-win '98 team, none of those Yankee squads were obviously head and shoulders above the competition as far as regular-season stats were concerned; Sheehan notes that they "featured power pitching, good defense and a great closer," all of which "correlate well with postseason success," but you could say the same of other ninety-win teams, in that era and others, that didn't come close to pulling off what the Yankees pulled off. Which would ordinarily lead me to call their run a fluke - except that I was there, I saw them play, and against all my pro-stathead instincts, I'd bet a not-insubstantial sum of money that if you replayed the postseasons of 1998, 1999 and 2000 a hundred or a thousand times over, those Yankee teams would win through many more times than the statistics suggest they would. It makes me cringe to say it, but I really do think that particular combination of players just, well, knew how to win, like no team I've seen before or since.
And God, I hated them for it.
Photo by Flickr user Dennis used under a Creative Commons license.
There are an awful lot of bad sportswriters out there (hello, Murray Chass), but there are even more dumb fans. And when a smart reporter goes up against a busload of outrageously dumb questioners in an online forum - well, that's what I call entertainment.
So I'm watching a Red Sox-Yankees game this weekend, and midway through the telecast what looked like some frat-boy doofus decked out in Sox gear showed up in the Fox broadcast booth. It wasn't Ben Affleck, the most likely candidate, and since I had the sound off it took a good five minutes to realize that it was none other than Dane Cook, the lamest comedian in America - and (naturally) the new face of post-season baseball.
Football passed baseball as America's real national pastime sometime in the late '60s or early '70s, and for a while MLB arguably slipped to third in the pecking order, behind the NBA and with hockey nipping at its heels. Since a certain early-90s low point, baseball has arguably clawed its way back to number two, but as long as the NFL's in business it's always going to be a distant number two. Still, do they need to make it quite so obvious? Compare this:
To this:
Now, which sport do you want to be a fan of?
Or as Cliff Corcoran put it, watching the same travesty: "Dane Cook and MLB on FOX were made for each other, both are loud and completely unqualified to do what they're doing."
I was talking to some guys in Seattle at my book signing last week and I said, 'You know, Patriots-Colts is a lot like Yankees-Red Sox.' For a while, the Red Sox were everyone's favorite and people wanted them to beat the Yankees, but after a while, people were so sick of the whole thing that anyone who isn't a Red Sox or Yankees fan despises both the Red Sox and Yankees. I think we're about four months and five billion Peyton Manning ads away from hitting that same point with the Colts and Pats. Right now, everyone is out to get the Pats, but in a few months, they'll hate the Colts just as much and be desperate for someone like San Diego or Pittsburgh to win something.'
This seems exactly right. It's clear, I think, that dynasties are good for the health of sports overall. Yes, parity is important, but so is familiarity and the joy of having someone to root against come playoff season. Thus baseball in the late '70s, with the Big Red Machine giving way to the dysfunctional Yankee dynasty, and a bunch of consistently good teams (Phils, Royals, Red Sox, etc.) nipping at their heels, was better than baseball in the '80s, when the only thing you knew going into spring training was that last year's division winners wouldn't be repeating.
But two-team rivalries, on the other hand, tend to only be interesting to the fans of the two teams involved, particularly once the weaker half of the rivalry finally pushes itself over the top. The Yanks-Dodgers combat of the '40s and '50s stopped being interesting to anyone who wasn't personally invested in the two teams the moment Sandy Amoros ran down Yogi Berra's liner in '55; for anyone outside the northeast corridor, the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry died in October 2004; and the same will go for Pats-Colts from now on, I'm sure.
This means that having either the Red Sox or the Yankees in the playoffs is good for baseball: They're the big kids on the block, and someone for the rest of baseball to measure themselves against. But having both of them - not so much. So last year, as painful as it was to watch, was good for the health of the sport. And now, of course, it's the Yankees turn to take an October off - except that being the Yankees, they don't seem to have realized it yet.
Photo by Flickr user Brent Danley used under a Creative Commons license.
A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the notion of demanding greater expertise from reporters - even if it would mean putting the folks at Get Religion out of work - but alas, applying the baseball test might not carry us quite so far as one might think. The sports blogosphere may be slightly ahead of the political blogosphere in providing alternatives to lousy, lazy MSM reporting and commentary, but overall the pattern in both realms is similar - scads of bad professional journalists, and hordes of bloggers who love to ask, DeLong-style, "why oh why can't we have better baseball writers?"
George Steinbrenner, on his way out. I've spent twenty years hating the guy, but (naturally) I feel like there's a void in my life now that he's no longer attacking players, firing managers, and lobbing potshots at Boston fans. And I'm sure that if I owned the Red Sox, I'd probably be just as over-involved and over-the-top as Steinbrenner has always been with the Yankees. (Well, okay, hopefully not this over-the-top.) He's sabotaged as many dynasties as he's built, but unlike manyowners you never doubted that he wanted to build them. In the end, there are worse qualities in an owner than being too big a fan of one's own team.
I've been meaning to work in some baseball blogging here and there on this site, in imitation of Matt's basketblogging, and a slow Friday seems like as good a time as any to link to this site, which isn't always executed quite as well as I'd like - though the Dewey entry hit me right in the "deep well of male emotion" spot - but which has the potential to become the online version of one of the great baseball books of all time.
If, like me, you can't make the Kentucky Derby this weekend, the next best thing is following along with my colleague Tim Lavin as he bets, drinks bourbon and blogs, hopefully in that order, from Churchill Downs.
Rick Perlstein's Nixonland weaves social, political, and cultural history into a seamless narrative, linking backroom politics to protests over sex education to the premiere of Bonnie and Clyde.
The right hoped 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and ’50s; the left feared that it would restore the worst of the same era. But in Hollywood, another decade has slouched round: the paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.
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Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class
