The default mindset when it comes to jams is the longer the better, but, today, we must mark the inevitable planetary departure of Wayne Shorter, a pillar from the most creatively dynamic period in the history of jazz. Even as I recall his headlining set at the first Duke Ellington Jazz Festival in Washington, D.C., it still seems impossible that among us might walk giants. Shorter’s catalogue and contributions are tall and wide, but, here at ALDLAND, we play the hits. You heard it as soon as you heard the news, and it’s this week’s Jam:
It’s easy to forget that athletics organizing entities, and especially in light of their popularity and rhetoric the NCAA, NFL, and MLB, do not act and regulate their respective sports with the force of actual law. (In fact, they in some sense operate outside the law thanks to formal and informal antitrust exemptions.) During baseball’s meltdown over Barry Bonds’ superhuman ascension in the early aughts, you could be forgiven if you weren’t sure whether steroids were illegal illegal or merely MLB “illegal.” The NFL also has done an effective job of coopting this officious language into its in-sport vernacular as well (e.g., “illegal touching” having quite different meanings on and off the field). All of these groups have “committees” that issue “rules” and “regulations” just like real government agencies!
In other words, try as they sometimes might to convince us otherwise, sports-organizing bodies are not the literal government.
That didn’t stop Roger Goodell from trying, though.
In the leadup to Super Bowl LVII, held this past Sunday on a public golf course in Glendale, Arizona, the City of Phoenix, probably totally of their own accord and without any outside influence, suggestion, or pressure, established a downtown “Special Promotional and Civic Event area . . . to support events and activities related to Super Bowl LVII.” Within that area of town, the City granted the NFL the real, actual legal approval authority over signage or displays that might appear on private property. Move over, Peyton Manning; Goodell’s a real sheriff now!
Or at least he was. An owner of property inside the NFL Dictatorial Enclave sued and, days before the Super Bowl, prevailed in court: Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bradley Astrowsky ruled that the establishment of the special zone was unconstitutional for multiple reasons, including because it impermissibly infringed on free-speech rights and was an improper delegation of government authority to the NFL.
Believing he was freed of his unwanted NFL overlords, that property owner, Bramley Paulin, was able to install signs on his property advertising some sort of hardware product. Success, right?
Was this a covert NFL censureship operation by extrajudicial means? Paulin filed a report with the Phoenix Police Department, but will the municipality Paulin just beat in court investigate vigorously? Was the breaching of Paulin’s fence especially bad press for the MAXguard, the fence-related hardware Paulin apparently was attempting to advertise? You have the facts, now you be the judge. Or Judge Astrowsky can be the judge. It probably makes more sense that he be the judge.
Reaching base, however a player does it, is good, and counting only some ways players reach base necessarily misses relevant data points. By including walks and hits-by-pitch (“hit-by-pitches”?), on-base percentage (“OBP”) does paint a more complete picture of a baseball player’s offensive production than does batting average (“BA”), which only counts hits. The responsive inclination to look first to OBP rather than the traditional go-to, BA, thus is understandable.
Those comfortable with taking this new step, especially the early OBP adopters, often did so zealously and callously, even as they cloaked themselves in the mantle of measured reason. And when they did so, they very often took a second step: banishment of BA. Elevation of OBP was not enough; BA, the very embodiment of the old and impure way of thinking, must be cast out.
For the SABR revolutionaries, like not a few revolutionaries before them and to mix corporeal metaphors, that second step proved to be something of an overreach. As it turns out, the ancients were in fact onto something with BA, and there was something in that something that deserved to be conserved and carried forward through the revolutionary wave. BA, Eli Ben-Porat writes, not only deserves its place in baseball’s basic offensive statistic trinity– the Triple Slash Line of BA/OBP/SLG– but is the only component that actually belongs there.
As Ben-Porat explained over the weekend: “Dismissing batting average, in this author’s view, is just plain wrong. It is statistically significant in terms of predicting team runs, and on a per point basis, the most impactful component of” the building blocks of the triple slash line. After all, BA is a big part of both OBP and slugging percentage (“SLG”). And because of the way OBP weighs walks relative to hits, it can obscure the value of the offensive production it presents; in other words, not all OBPs are created equal. To Billy Beane’s point, it is important to account for a batter’s walks, but a hit– even a single– is better than a walk. Two players thus could post identical OBPs but have gotten there in much different fashion. Dumping BA would mask the real significance of a light-hitting, ball-taking batter’s empty OBP that matched the same mark of a more balanced player who hit more than he walked. Ben-Porat shows both that BA still matters and that presenting OBP without BA really makes the former less useful.
Whether Ben-Porat’s proposed adoption of an even more elemental triple slash line that omits the BA components of OBP and SLG and leaves the remainders (i.e., BA/BB%/ISO) catches on is another question. For now, rest with the satisfaction that you aren’t wrong to not get irritated when you see a player’s BA displayed during an upcoming MLB telecast.
Since then, things for the Commodores hardly could have gone better, at least relatively speaking. Two home conference games in magic Memorial Gym. Two wins.
To call the first a get-right game against middling Ole Miss obscures the depths from which the team necessarily climbed to claim that victory and falsely implies a level of predicate rightness that simply did not exist. Still, it’s like when you’re standing on the South Pole: any step you take in any direction is a step north.
The second was satisfying, affirming, and, for Stackhouse, likely job-saving:
It speaks for itself, as does Tennessee’s record as a top-ten ranked team in Nashville, where the Volunteers are winless in regulation.
There’s no firm basis to believe that these two wins constitute building blocks toward an imminent future of sustained success. It sure is better than losing, though.
Following the departure after the 2015-16 season of the longest-tenured coach in its program’s history, Kevin Stallings, Vanderbilt’s men’s basketball team turned for his replacement to a celebrated former player.
Following the losses in recent weeks of Christine McVie, Jeff Beck, and Robbie Knievel, yesterday announced the departure of David Crosby. The founding contributor to The Byrds; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, his own solo career, and other affiliated ensembles remained an active creator until his death at the age of eighty-one.
I read a quote in this morning’s paper attributed to composer Gustav Mahler that stopped me for a moment: “Death has, on placid cat’s paws, entered the room.” I shoulda known something was up. David and I butted heads a lot over time, but they were mostly glancing blows, yet still left us numb skulls. I was happy to be at peace with him. He was without question a giant of a musician, and his harmonic sensibilities were nothing short of genius. The glue that held us together as our vocals soared, like Icarus, towards the sun. I am deeply saddened at his passing and shall miss him beyond measure.
Crosby’s “juvenile” anthem, undertaken quite maturely in 1974 by CSNY is this week’s Jam:
Although it at times seems as though this site has become something of a necrology, these are significant passings that merit note.
The 2022 Detroit Lions came pretty close to securing the team’s first playoff berth in six years and, had they made it in, seemed as primed as ever to claim a playoff win for the first time in over thirty years. In coming up short of those benchmarks, they nevertheless delivered the most exciting Lions season in quite some time.
The Lions played eight of the fourteen playoff teams during the regular season, including two games against the Minnesota Vikings. Detroit lost more of those games than they won, but, in the aggregate, they outscored those teams:
What seems to be the actual good news this week is that the team avoided what could have been a Kyle Shanahan-Atlanta Falcons scenario by ponying up to keep offensive coordinator Ben Johnson in that position rather than lose him to a head-coaching opportunity elsewhere. I was critical of Johnson when the Lions surrendered what should have been a Thanksgiving-Day win against the Buffalo Bills, but Detroit’s overall high offensive production and 8-2 record to finish the season counsel maintaining the status quo in that regard.
And speaking of meaty bodies, eleven years ago today, we brought you the stories of Steve Spurrier, then coaching at South Carolina, who volunteered that he did not want to hire “fat, sloppy guys” as assistant coaches, among other preferences, and Todd Haley, who believed the Kansas City Chiefs still were tapping his cell phone a month after he’d been fired from the head coaching job there. Read more in The sports profession: Where not everybody’s working for the weekend.
Spurrier spent four more seasons in Columbia before resigning in the middle of the 2015 season. His next head-coaching job came in 2019 with the Alliance of American Football’s Orlando Apollos.
Haley next worked as an offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Cleveland Browns, and Riverview (Sarasota) High School before returning as a head coach for the USFL’s Tampa Bay Bandits and Memphis Showboats.
Continuing the football time traveling,ten years ago today, we already knew the matchups for the NFL playoff conference championships, and the coverage of the NFC’s pairing of Atlanta and San Francisco was anything but imaginative. Read more in Stereotyping the NFC Championship Game.
The Falcons would fall to the 49ers, helping set up the Harbowl.
From postseason to offseason, eight years ago today we brought you the breaking story of Max Scherzer’s departure from the Detroit Tigers and signing with the Washington Nationals for $210 million over seven years. Read more in Mr. Scherzer goes to Washington.
During those seven seasons in Washington, Scherzer was a six-time All-Star, a two-time Cy-Young winner, and a World-Series champion. I, on the other hand, did not win any awards during those seven years for my conclusion at the time of Scherzer’s Nationals deal that “it wouldn’t be prudent to commit the amount of money he’s due to another long-term contract for another player on the old side of thirty.”
Well, it is finally official: The 2022 Monday Night Football season was the worst season of Monday Night Football in the recorded history of Monday Night Football. We here at ALDLAND were on this early, and, in a report published on December 6, 2022, disclosed the preliminary and then-conclusive findings derived from our proprietary MNF Index: “This has been the worst slate of Monday-night games in NFL history….Monday Night Football never has been less worthy of its billing than in 2022.” Today, ALDLAND updates and confirms that conclusive conclusion conclusively for the now-completed 2022 NFL season.
As a reminder:
Unlike Monday Night Football’s ascendant sibling, Sunday Night Football, or its soon-to-be-terminated cousin, SEC on CBS, all MNF matchups must be chosen well before the season starts. This means that the NFL and its media partners have to make significant, long-range predictions based on minimal data when they are setting all of the pairings for their premier weekly showcase. How well do they do this?
To answer this question, the MNF Index evaluates the quality of Monday Night Football games immediately prior to kickoff to present a quality score illustrating the schedule-makers’ degree of success at presenting enticing games likely to live up to the expectations of a nationally televised, Monday-night event. The MNF Index therefore does not consider any in-game performance data.
Looking ahead from that early December vantage point, we wondered whether the three remaining Monday-night games– Rams at Packers, Chargers at Colts, and Bills at Bengals– might offer a meaningful chance at redemption. They did not. Indeed, Rams-Packers (Week 15) was, according to the ALDLAND MNF Index, the worst MNF game of the season. And although the no-doubt quality matchup between the Bills and Bengals (Week 17) would have been the best MNF game ever, the game (a) correctly was canceled due to Damar Hamlin’s frightening, serious injury and (b) would not remotely have altered the ultimate conclusion that there has been no worse season of Monday Night Football than the just-completed 2022 season of Monday Night Football had it been played.
Some good news: Not only does ALDLAND’s MNF Index generate results, but it also gets results. Beginning in the 2023 NFL season, Monday Night Football will be subject to flex scheduling. This option should allow ESPN to buoy the quality of its flagging showcase and, if executed effectively on an ongoing basis, could cement the 2022 MNF season as the worst-ever MNF season ever.
Even though Roger Goodell has insisted on watering down the league’s overall product, Monday Night Football still carries a special cachet. It’s been a rough run for MNF this year, though, with some real stinkers for what’s supposed to be the NFL’s special weekly feature. In fact, according to ALDLAND’s proprietary MNF Index, this has been the worst slate of Monday-night games in NFL history.
Unlike Monday Night Football’s ascendant sibling, Sunday Night Football, or its soon-to-be-terminated cousin, SEC on CBS, all MNF matchups must be chosen well before the season starts. This means that the NFL and its media partners have to make significant, long-range predictions based on minimal data when they are setting all of the pairings for their premier weekly showcase. How well do they do this?
To answer this question, the MNF Index evaluates the quality of Monday Night Football games immediately prior to kickoff to present a quality score illustrating the schedule-makers’ degree of success at presenting enticing games likely to live up to the expectations of a nationally televised, Monday-night event. The MNF Index therefore does not consider any in-game performance data.
The results, shown below through the current week, unambiguously support a clear conclusion: Monday Night Football never has been less worthy of its billing than in 2022. While a look into the deep numbers also reveals that the decline began in 2021, MNF’s quality has fallen off a cliff this season.
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ALDLAND 