Wattage and Brass: Drive By Truckers, live at the 40 Watt

Posted on March 3, 2014 by AD

Sadness is the defining element of Southern rock in 2014. Checking in on its leading modern purveyors in one of their main clubhouses reveals a melancholy running deeper than the double-deep cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon that liquidate the room. Theirs is a blues without the form, which sometimes seems to be all that’s left of the aging blues. This is palpable, consistent emotion driven through late rock conventions. The bluesmen say they’re glad or proud about their affliction. While the Southern rock folks don’t despair, they are resolved: this is the situation, and the stories must be told. Listen for yourself.

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That Saturday was my first visit to Athens’ famous 40 Watt Club, the third night of Drive-By Truckers’ “Homecoming” stand at the downtown venue. I saw the Truckers for the first time last summer, in Atlanta, and I was struck then by the degree to which a) they weren’t what I expected and b) their performance reoriented me to what they were doing. By the end of their short festival set I understood why people like them so much, and I jumped at the chance to hear them again last month in Athens when Magalan suggested the idea. Continue reading →

Friday Jam Approximately

Posted on February 28, 2014 by AD

February’s almost over, John Lee Hooker was almost a Chicagoan, (try Detroit) where the clip of this week’s Jam was set by someone who was not Harold Ramis (try Egon’s sometimes collaborator John Landis), who was directly involved in almost every other comedy movie of the last forty years.

If you need me tonight, I’ll be watching Stripes.

Baseball Notes: Lineup Protection

Posted on February 28, 2014 by AD

Part of the perceived strength of last year’s Detroit Tigers offense came from the arrangement of the middle of the batting order: Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder, and Victor Martinez; two huge bats following the biggest one in the game. The idea was that Fielder, batting fourth, “protected” Cabrera in the three hole because he was there to make pitchers pay if they wanted to simply intentionally walk Cabrera to mitigate his potent power, the same way pitchers treated Barry Bonds a decade a go. With Fielder there to “protect” Cabrera, the theory went, Cabrera’s offensive numbers should improve because pitchers would have to be more aggressive with him.

The lineup protection concept makes intuitive sense, but it has been a popular target for the sabermetric folks, who insist that “protected” hitters show no measurable improvement as a result of lineup protection. In light of Prince’s departure from Detroit, ESPN’s Jayson Stark, who surely knows much more about baseball than me, is the latest to take up the advanced statistical ax against the lineup protection effect:

Continue reading →

Judges Take Swings at The ‘Baseball Rule’ (via Fulton County Daily Report)

Posted on February 23, 2014 by AD

A panel of the Georgia Court of Appeals on Tuesday tested the Atlanta Braves’ argument that the team should be insulated from suits by fans hit by flying bats or balls.

The Braves’ lawyer, former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, said the appeals court should adopt the so-called “baseball rule,” which says teams are immune if they provide enough seats behind home plate shielded by a net to meet demand.

Hearing the case with two colleagues, Judge Michael Boggs wondered why the baseball industry should get its own rule. “The concern being, of course, if you carve out a rule for baseball, if we adopt the baseball rule, next week we’ll be adopting the hockey rule, and the week after that we’ll be adopting another rule,” he said.

The case was filed against the Braves by a parent of a 6-year-old girl who was hit by a foul ball while attending a game at Turner Field in 2010. A Fulton County judge has refused to dismiss the case.

Backed by the commissioner of Major League Baseball, the Braves say the baseball rule is used in the majority of states that have adopted a rule around errant balls and bats at baseball venues.

On Tuesday, Sears told the judges that the Braves need to know exactly what their duties to spectators are. “The baseball rule is a clear rule,” she said, “and, quite frankly, its clarity is its virtue.”

Arguing for the girl and her family, Atlanta lawyer E. Michael Moran of Law & Moran said it didn’t make sense to adopt a rule created for baseball in another jurisdiction about 100 years ago. “The game has changed,” he said, noting high rates of speed of balls hit by players today. … Read More

(via Fulton County Daily Report)

Out Route (via ESPN The Magazine)

Posted on February 20, 2014 by AD

He’s done. He can’t take another year. The grind of football has exhausted him, and the grind is just now starting. It’s July. He’s in the weight room of his Huntington Beach home, in a gated community only miles from the projects where he was raised. He is about to work out, because his 37-year-old body might not last 16 games otherwise, because he has played in the NFL for 16 years and knows no other way. He is a physical wonder, sculpted to the last inch, but the imperative to work out is more draining than the workout itself. His body seems to be outlasting his will, rather than the reverse.

Tony Gonzalez has convinced himself that he can find happiness without football. Of course, he’s said that before. He all but filed retirement papers the past two years only to return. He exists in a state of conflict that he hates, of not being able to live with the game or without it. Now he’s tired. The energy required to train at his future Hall of Fame level is offset only by the certitude of finality. He looks around his weight room, littered with steel plates and bars. “I can’t wait to get rid of all this next year,” he says. “Should have gotten rid of it last year.”

He pauses.

“I’ll never need this shit again.” … Read More

(via ESPN The Magazine)

The Essential Michael Sam

Posted on February 13, 2014 by AD

Following NFL draft prospect Michael Sam’s announcement about his sexual orientation (he’s gay) last weekend, many people wrote and said many stupid things. Many more, I hope and believe, wrote and said positive things. The reality, though, is that few of us knew Sam’s name a week ago, which is a little bit baffling when we found out he was the top defensive player in the top college football conference, perhaps the truest testament to the bandied axiom that this is the football age of offense. As a result, the other reality this week is that few people’s responsive comments have been insightful or of much consequence.

Thankfully, there have been exceptions. The first was the video SB Nation/KSK’s Matt Ufford made the day after Sam’s announcement:

https://twitter.com/ALDLANDia/status/433045693540728833

The second was Jeb Lund’s intelligently written article for Sports on Earth, posted later that same day, which took aim at Sam’s critics with precision.

The other two items are the dispassionate scouting reports of SoE’s Russ Lande and MMQB’s Greg Bedard. Lande holds some optimism for Sam’s draft position, while Bedard is more cynical, even going so far as to write that Sam may not be drafted at all.

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One has to think that Sam has a better chance of playing in the NFL– whether a team takes him in the draft or offers him a chance as an undrafted free agent– than Jason Collins had of extending his NBA career following his own sexual orientation announcement. As those scouting reports imply, though, it likely will be impossible to know whether or how Sam’s announcement affects his draft outcome this May.

Baseball Notes: The Crux of the Statistical Biscuit

Posted on February 13, 2014 by AD

The purpose of the interrupted Baseball Notes series is to highlight just-below-the-surface baseball topics for the purpose of deepening the enjoyment of the game for casual fans like you and me.

In the interest of achieving that casual purpose, this series generally will avoid advanced statistical concepts. One need not grasp the depths of wRC+ or xFIP to enjoy baseball, of course, or even to think about the give-and-take between baseball traditionalists, who eschew advanced statistics, and the sabermetricians, who live by them.

Moneyball famously highlighted this debate, such as it is, and it arose in the 2012 season around the American League MVP race between Miguel Cabrera (the eventual winner, and the traditional favorite) and Mike Trout, and again last season in the context of commentator Brian Kenny’s “Kill the Win” campaign against ascribing significant meaning to pitchers’ win-loss records.

The reason this “debate”– the “eye test,” wins, and batting average versus WAR et al.– isn’t really a debate is because the two sides have different descriptive goals. In short, the traditional group is concerned with what has happened, while the sabermetric group is concerned with what will happen. The former statically tallies the game’s basic value points, while the latter is out to better understand the past in order to predict the future. The basic stats on the back of a player’s baseball card aim to tell you what he did in prior seasons; the advanced statistics on Fangraphs, Baseball-Reference, or in Baseball Prospectus aim to tell you something about what he’ll do next year based on a deeper understanding of what he did in prior seasons.

The previous paragraph represents an oversimplification, and probably a gross one, but I think it accurately highlights the basic, if slight, misalignment of initial points of view from the two main groups of people talking about how we talk about baseball today.

DataBall (via Grantland)

Posted on February 10, 2014 by AD

Early in the spring semester of 2013, Cervone and D’Amour proposed a new project to measure performance value in the NBA. The nature of their idea was relatively simple, but the computation required to pull it off was not. Their core premise was this:

Every “state” of a basketball possession has a value. This value is based on the probability of a made basket occurring, and is equal to the total number of expected points that will result from that possession. While the average NBA possession is worth close to one point, that exact value of expected points fluctuates moment to moment, and these fluctuations depend on what’s happening on the floor.

Furthermore, it was their belief that, using the troves of SportVU data, we could — for the first time — estimate these values for every split second of an entire NBA season. They proposed that if we could build a model that accounts for a few key factors — like the locations of the players, their individual scoring abilities, who possesses the ball, his on-ball tendencies, and his position on the court — we could start to quantify performance value in the NBA in a new way.

In other words, imagine if you paused any NBA game at any random moment. Cervone and D’Amour’s central thesis is that no matter where you pause the game, that you could scientifically estimate the “expected possession value,” or EPV, of that possession at that time.

If we can estimate the EPV of any moment of any given game, we can start to quantify performance in a more sophisticated way. We can derive the “value” of things like entry passes, dribble drives, and double-teams. We can more accurately quantify which pick-and-roll defenses work best against certain teams and players. By extracting and analyzing the game’s elementary acts, we can isolate which little pieces of basketball strategy are more or less effective, and which players are best at executing them.

But the clearest application of EPV is quantifying a player’s overall offensive value, taking into account every single action he has performed with the ball over the course of a game, a road trip, or even a season. We can use EPV to collapse thousands of actions into a single value and estimate a player’s true value by asking how many points he adds compared with a hypothetical replacement player, artificially inserted into the exact same basketball situations. This value might be called “EPV-added” or “points added.” … Read More

(via Grantland)

The OKTC-Fox Sports merger is complete

Posted on February 7, 2014 by AD

I’ve been keeping an eye on Clay Travis’ SEC-football-oriented site, Outkick the Coverage, since its inception, more recently tracking changes associated with the site’s acquisition by Fox Sports. As detailed in the comments here, certain small changes indicating the Fox connection had been appearing on OKTC as early as last July, and today, that transformation appears to be complete, as evidenced by the site’s facade redesign.

Even the base URL and browser tab icon have become those of FoxSports.com:

Perhaps most importantly, OKTC now has a permanent link on FoxSports.com’s college football portal page, favorably situated right under the College Football header.

This can only portent well for Travis, who has continued to expand his television role with Fox Sports 1, even parlaying that into a Super Bowl assignment. Travis has been public about his expiring contract with what has been his main employer, WGFX, 104.5 FM in Nashville. While Clay seems unlikely to leave Music City and the SEC football beat entirely, he definitely is expanding his reach and the scope of his coverage. The only thing that seems unlikely for Travis in the near future, given his deepening ties with Fox and a possibly distant relationship with Paul Finebaum (or at least Finebaum’s callers), is a move to ESPN’s SEC Network, which launches this August. Fox undoubtedly recognizes the value of the SEC and the Southeast. How heavily they’ll rely on Travis to bring that audience to Fox remains to be seen, but they certainly aren’t running away from him.

Take the H Train Jam