Tag Archives: the classical

Teddy Roosevelt Can’t Win: A Discussion of Baseball’s Last Fixed Race (via The Classical)

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Teddy Roosevelt was a sickly rich kid who grew into a little man with a high voice, and spent the rest of his life in the relentless pursuit of bad-assery. While in public office in Washington, he decided it was time to kill some people. So he went to San Antonio—at the time, a middle-of-nowhere cowboy town—and posted up in the Menger Hotel. He recruited the toughest-looking dudes who walked through the door, then took them to Cuba to start a war. He compared firing a gun to having an orgasm in terms of pleasure and necessity. Even his signature policy accomplishment as President, the “trust-busting” of monopolies, has a tough-guy name. He would scoff at Obama for issuing a “kill order” instead of personally going to Pakistan to carry it out himself. For his sheer mythic ruggedness alone, Teddy Roosevelt is the sort of President to whom candidates in both parties routinely compare themselves. But when it comes to a simple foot race, the 26th President of the United States just can’t win. … Read More

(via The Classical)

The Beards of Summer (via The Classical)

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Chris Siriano wants to get the hell out of Michigan. Even on a gorgeous fall day in Addison (population 627), with the leaves turning and the sun bright, Siriano—middle-aged, sporting a gray goatee and ball cap—can’t stop dreaming about the beach. “I raised my daughter by myself and everybody knew that when I got the kid to college, they could reach me in the Caribbean by email,” he says. “I’m done with Michigan winters, basically.”

Two barriers stand between the Benton Harbor native and moving south. The first is not unusual: A few years ago, Siriano married the love of his life, a fellow Michigander who didn’t share his interest in fleeing south. The second is more distinct. Since the mid-1990s, Siriano has owned and curated the House of David Museum, a 4,000-square-foot archive that tells the weird, hirsute story of the most popular barnstorming team in baseball history.

To describe the House of David in such forceful terms is warranted. For two decades in the early 20th century, a band of religious eccentrics from Southwest Michigan was one of the biggest draws in sports, selling out ballparks in big cities and small towns across the country. Baseball fans adored their aggressive style of play, vaudeville flair, and flowing beards—House of David players were forbidden to shave because of an obscure rule in the strict doctrine to which they adhered. More than any franchise of its day, the House of David skillfully exploited the American love of spectacle. Siriano, who has spent much of his own energy and money preserving their largely forgotten story, is convinced the fascinating artifacts he has recovered belong in the Wolverine State. … Read More

(via The Classical)

Scrutiny of the Bounty: A prequel

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We’ve been quiet here lately, though not for a lack of notable sports events, even if they are coming in the one sport that’s currently in it’s offseason. Two big NFL stories have been developing in fits and tumbles over the past week or two: 1) Peyton Manning leaving the Indianapolis Colts, and 2) Gregg Williams and Bountygate. There isn’t much to say about the first story yet, or maybe ever. He’ll go to a team. It won’t be the Titans. And we’ll get some variety of Joe Montana in Kansas City or Brett Favre in New York. He won’t have teammates like Marvin Harrison, Jeff Saturday, and Dallas Clark who are on his level, and we’ll probably see a lot of sad Manningfaces peering out of an unfamiliarly colored helmet.

As for the second story: first, a nod to Deadspin for the title tag to this post, and very quickly second, this:

That out of the way, how much can one really say about the bounties Williams and certainly other coaches paid to players for big hits on important players, and how much does one really want to say given the at least tiresome and likely nauseating cliche-laden moral hand-wringing on the part of the sports media?

Instead, we’ll offer a short, derivative series on the bounty story through the eyes of the evolving media reaction. As usual when I start a series of posts without fully mapping it out, the first post is the best (e.g., here and here), and this is likely to be no exception.

This first item is interesting because it was a profile of the New Orleans Saints’ defense under Williams published just before the bounty story broke. Untainted by the news of the bounties, the NFL’s investigation, or the media reaction to it, The Classical’s Charles Star offers up an innocent (from the writer’s perspective) take that’s telling upon retrospective re-read:

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Instant replay, wildcard expansion, and Bud Selig’s incentives

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This month, Major League Baseball announced that it would be expanding its playoff field, starting with the upcoming season, by adding a second wild card team in each league. While Twitter-age baseball analysts roundly lamented the slow speed with which this announcement came, it looks like a lightning strike when compared to another still-waiting reform, instant replay, that has been “under advisement” for years.

I have written at length elsewhere about the importance of examining incentives to understand the real rationale behind a situation with apparently conflicting internal logic. Over at The Classical, Matthew Callan suggests that such an analysis will prove illuminating in the case of MLB reforms:

Bud Selig is arguably the most transformative figure in the history of Major League Baseball. Under his watch, we’ve seen more changes to the way the game is played and consumed than at any other time in the sport’s history.
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Twenty years ago, adding a play-in game at the end of the regular season would have sent the game’s gatekeepers into fits of great weeping and gnashing of teeth. In the Bud Selig era, we hear nary a peep.
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It’s telling that whenever he discusses the matter, Selig always makes sure to note how much the teams request it. “Clubs really want it,” he said back in January. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an issue that the clubs want more than to have the extra wild card this year.”

When Selig says “clubs,” he means the owners thereof, all of whom stand to benefit from a play-in game and the additional revenue attended thereto. Selig has never shed his owner’s mentality, and every change under his watch as commissioner . . . has been allowed for the primary purpose of lining owners’ pocketbooks.
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This isn’t to fault Selig, necessarily—if he didn’t grow the game’s revenues, he’d be a bad commissioner. However, it does explain the one change he remains reluctant to make: instant replay. The new wild card will become a reality mere months after the subject was first broached; in contrast, four years after being instituted on a trial basis, instant replay remains limited exclusively to home run reviews. Which are, as any baseball fan knows, sacred unto actual magic.

That the man who has dramatically altered baseball in countless ways suddenly becomes a traditionalist whenever instant replay is mentioned is hard to explain through anything but his owner’s mentality. His other innovations have the immediate, tangible benefit of increased revenue, but instant replay has none. In fact, it would cost the league money to equip every stadium with extra cameras and review booths and training the umpires to use them.

The lesson? Don’t hold your breath if you’re waiting for instant replay review of MLB’s decision to move the Expos to Washington, D.C. instead of contracting the Milwaukee Brewers.

NBA free agency and state income tax rates

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From Dr. LIC at The Classical:

“Tax Avoidance: How Income Tax Rates Affect the Labor Migration Decisions of NBA Free Agents” (Journal of Sports Economics, 2011)

As often as we hear about NBA players and other professional athletes going bankrupt, it turns out they are not as financially unintelligent as some suspect. It turns out that surreptitiously, players take state income tax rates into account when deciding where to sign as free agents. As much as we talk about chasing rings, getting max contracts, positional fit, chemistry with coaches, big market versus small market endorsement deals, and weather, it appears there are other rational factors at play in these decisions. Economist Nolan Kopkin looked at NBA free agency from 2001 to 2008 and found that even after accounting for a host of relevant factors such as team wins, player position, or crime rate and student-teacher ratio in a particular city, increases in income tax rates during this time period equaled lower-quality free agents. This data helps explain ”The Decision.“  LeBron James’ selection of the Heat allowed him to purchase $12.34 million worth of purple gingham shirts by relocating to tax-free Miami versus the tax load that would have resulted in New York. Whether agents, players, or some other invisible hand is responsible for this remarkable effect of income tax on free agency is unknown, but perhaps we should take this information into account when formulating our opinions on next summer’s signing period.

While notable, I’m not convinced the “effect of income tax on free agency” is truly “remarkable,” although readers can decide whether I am remarking upon it or simply noting it, and whether that changes the remarkability of the effect. Maybe “unsurprising” is what I’m getting at, particularly when one considers the interests, knowledge, and skill set of agents. Or at least, the contrary result would have been surprising, noteworthy, and very possibly remarkable.

The rest of this edition of what appears to be a regular sports science feature is here.

Mark-it Monday

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Last weekend featured championship games in all of the major college football conferences. Clemson rolled hard over Virginia Tech, Boise State smoked New Mexico, Southern Mississippi upset Houston, and Baylor doubled up Texas. Georgia played a decent first half against LSU but never made it out of the locker room for the second half, and in the late game, the inaugural Big Ten championship game, Michigan State totally blew it in their rematch with Wisconsin. After officials reversed a play ruled a catch on the field (the ultimate decision being the incorrect one in the eyes of the television announcers and Spartan fans at the bar where I was watching), MSU got a second chance to win the game, only to negate a punt return for a near touchdown on a melodramatic roughing the punter penalty.

If you’re wondering what would happen if two teams that lost championship games on the strength of serious second-half miscues faced off in a bowl game, wonder no more: Georgia will meet Michigan State in the Outback Bowl this year. In other bowl news, the BCS national championship game will be a rematch of the de facto national championship between LSU and Alabama, despite protests from Oklahoma State, which dismantled Oklahoma this weekend. Vanderbilt, as reported last month, will play in the Liberty Bowl, where they will meet the Cincinnati Bearcats. As for all of the rest of the bowl pairings, the big surprise seems to be Virginia Tech making it to the Sugar Bowl on a very weak record. They’ll face Michigan in New Orleans on January 3. And in case you were worried, Ohio University and Utah State will meet in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl on December 17. It’s FAMOUS!

The injury-riddled NFL limps toward its own playoffs as well. The Packers survived the New York Giants to stay undefeated, and the Lions died a death of 1,000 self-inflicted cuts in the Sunday night game in New Orleans. Rather than wait until the end of the season to admit that my nuanced, second-level prediction back in August about the Philadelphia Eagles— basically, that if they were to dream team their way to a Super Bowl win, it would be under the direction of Vince Young and not Michael Vick– has been proven wrong through rigorous testing under the conditions of actual reality. Whoops.

In baseball news, Pedro Martinez wants everybody to know he’s going to retire sometime soon, in case you’d forgotten he never actually did that. Our bdoyk reacted here last night.

Finally, in sports writing news, The Classical launched somewhat inauspiciously on Friday evening amidst technical difficulties. More on that site down the road.

11|11|11: A three-for-one holiday

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Rare is the day that is three holidays in one. Thinking about it for zero seconds, I can’t think of another day like this one.

First up is Veterans’ Day. It’s tough if not impossible to say something that seems really genuine on the internet, much less in a blurb on a silly site like this, but here we are, so I’ll say a thank you to my friends, family members, and the multitude of strangers who have served or currently are serving this country in the armed forces and whose service makes it possible for, among many other infinitely more important things, me to comfortably spend some of my spare time typing off-hand thoughts on here. More importantly, thanks to those of you who read about, and even donated to the documentary To Them That’s Gone. It’s about running, and running is a sport, so it’s cool. For today in particular, read Matt Ufford’s piece for The Classical preview, entitled “38 seconds.” It might literally be the least you could do.

Second, today is Corduroy Appreciation Day, and indeed it is the most important of such days in most of our lifetimes. A dear friend brought this to my attention, and he had a brief cameo in CBS’ report on last year’s day. Hail the wale!

Third, today is Nigel Tufnel Day, and like this instance of Corduroy Appreciation Day, today’s Nigel Tufnel Day is the most important of our lifetimes, as no day will go to eleven to the extent today does. Yahoo!’s Movie Talk has the background for the uninitiated, but this clip should show you all you need to know:

(HT: @cpramsdell)

What to do on this unprecedentedally celebratory day of days? My best advice is to rock it on your Les Paul in some red, white, and blue corduroy duds.

The Classical preview and Bill “Spaceman” Lee

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I’ve previously mentioned The Classical, the forthcoming sports writing blog currently in preview mode. Their plan is to get up and running in a month or so, and I hope to offer my thoughts on the new site shortly thereafter.

In the meantime, they’ve been posting a few articles and other bits to give readers a sense of what’s to come. Here’s Paul Flannery on Bill Lee:

Keep reading…

Text messaging competitions: Non-sports vs. no sports

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August is known as a slow sports month, which means it probably isn’t the best time to start a new sports website, but here we are. An NFL labor dispute provided a compressed preseason that offered some contrast to that part of the baseball season right before most people wake up and start watching again (which means it’s exactly when the Tigers will go on a tear (and as soon as I write that, for them to blow it in the 10th against the D-Rays)) and that part of the NASCAR season where drivers are still screwing around, oblivious to the fact that the lack of urgency probably will cost them a spot in the playoffs.

Revelations about the Longhorn Network grew into the second annual Texas A&M-SEC flirtation that again has fizzled, and the news of brazen NCAA violations at UMiami are simultaneously so flagrant and unsurprising that there’s not much to add to Charles Robinson’s initial report. And so we cover year-old mascot news.

On the sports blogging front, famous ex-benchwarmer and blogger of the people Mark Titus of Club Trillion apparently now is writing for Grantland, to no tidings whatsoever. I can’t decide what to think about this. Everywhere but on this site, Grantland has been taking it on the chin pretty badly, and even I’m beginning to find The Triangle’s daily sports update by Shane Ryan unreadable. Titus has been the anti-establishment candidate for as long as he’s been a public figure, and probably longer, so it’s tough to see him alongside the purported literary elite that populate Grantland, even if that site’s natural audience surely must be welcoming his voice.

While that relationship, to the extent it is one, remains in its embryonic stages, a new site lurks on the horizon. The Classical, a conceptual rival to (at least the idea of) Grantland, is slated to get rolling possibly by the end of this year.

Sports bloggers probably fall into two camps: the big time, corporate types viewed as influential but out of touch, and the small time, snarky, critical types viewed as operating on the rumor level as much as the cutting edge. Whether internet sports writers are generally clueless reactionaries or hypercritical gossipmongers, they managed to pull it together for uniformly positive and heartfelt responses to the news that Lady Vols’ basketball coach Pat Summitt was diagnosed with early onset dementia. (See here, here, and here, among many other examples.)

All this to say that, today, I traded the slow sports news for the non sports news when I saw a commercial during the TV dead zone that is 6:30-7:30 pm Eastern for a text messaging contest on Wednesday night. I haven’t been able to locate the details on this particular contest online, but apparently these things happen from time to time.

Texting is not a sport, and neither is gambling, but for someone who likes writing about sports (and, really, writing about writing about sports), gambling on sports has a certain, vague attraction, even if I don’t gamble myself, and so I took in Bill Barnwell’s second dispatch from Vegas for Grantland. Of course, I’d trust Barnwell’s betting advice as much as I’d trust that of former vice presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root or Danny Sheridan. Barnwell does provide some background information on gambling terminology and strategy, though, and that’s nice even if it isn’t always accurate. What I do enjoy from him are the parts of his submissions that talk about the history of Las Vegas, and about trying to find a way to live there and maintain sanity and financial solvency. Having spent just twenty-six (consecutive) hours in Vegas, I have just enough personal experience to enjoy following Barnwell on his desert adventure. We’ll see how long my jealousy lasts.

Finally, Wednesday saw the fruits of a story I’ve been trying to cultivate since the early days of The Triangle and Google+, which is to say, July. It was then that the unappreciated legacy of Kerry Collins, associated more with memories of problems with alcohol and, per the New York Times’ “Black People” section, misplaced racial epithets, than gridiron greatness, came to my attention:

Collins retired this week, which, considering that I happened to graduate from the same college at around the same time, and considering that he once (rightfully) mocked me in a pizza parlor after I got wildly intoxicated on sambuca, seals both of our journeys from misbegotten youth into adulthood. And while we’re here, I would like to note that Collins has more passing yards than Jim Kelly, Donovan McNabb, Phil Simms, Steve Young, Y.A. Tittle, Johnny Unitas, and Troy Aikman. If he had won the 2000 Super Bowl with the Giants, and then made the Super Bowl with the 2008 Titans, he would be a borderline Hall of Famer. As it is, he has to be considered as the most underrated decent-to-very-good quarterback of the past 15 years.

The author makes a fairly remarkable point here, even excusing his sambuca-driven intoxication, and it’s one that Chris Johnson, Collins’ former teammate in Tennessee, mentioned in my fake interview with him the other weekend. Bill Polian, president of the Indianapolis Colts apparently got the memo too, because he pulled Collins out of retirement as insurance for an ailing Peyton Manning. And there’s the ALDLAND news/non-news cycle. Good keeping up, all.