Category: Sports

Commentary and news about sports and sports teams — and media coverage of them.

Joltin’ Joe

Joe DiMaggio did not get a hit on this date in 1941. Too bad, if he had, his streak would have been 73. As it was he hit safely in 56 consecutive games up to this date — and 16 after. (44 is the best by anyone else.)

At AmericanHeritage.com, John Steele Gordon, who seems not to have heard of Eddie Gaedel, tells two good DiMaggio stories:

A few years before he died, in 1999, when baseball salaries had been going through the roof, a reporter asked DiMaggio what he thought he might be paid if he were playing baseball then. DiMaggio smiled and answered, “I’d just knock on Mr. Steinbrenner’s door and say, ‘Howdy, pardner.'”

The other story concerns his brief, disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was a film actress, used to working in front of cameras and technicians, not audiences. After their wedding, DiMaggio and Monroe went to Korea to entertain the American troops fighting there against the Chinese communists. There were perhaps 5,000 soldiers on the air-base runways waiting to greet them, and when they stepped out of the plane, the soldiers started cheering. Monroe, startled by the ovation, turned to her husband and said, “I bet you’ve never heard such cheering, Joe.” DiMaggio, who had brought a sold-out Yankee Stadium screaming to its collective feet more times than he could count, just said quietly, “Oh, yes I have.”

Then he beat her.

Top Grades and No Class Time for Auburn Players

This lengthy report in The New York Times on what may prove to be a scandal at Auburn reminds me of a story.

The coaches and athletic director were despondent. The big game was approaching and the star player was failing all his classes. If something wasn’t done, and done soon, he wouldn’t be eligible to play. They convinced the dean.

So, the dean approached each of the player’s professors and explained how contributions from alumni depended on how the team did in the big game — and how important this player was to winning. The dean convinced all of the teachers to change the player’s grade.

All but one.

“No,” this professor insisted, “he has to re-take the exam.”

“OK,” said the dean, “if he passes, can he play?”

“Yes,” said the professor.

“Can it be an oral exam?” asked the dean.

“Sure,” said the professor.

“With just one question?”

“Yes,” said the professor, feeling his arm twist.

“Can it be a spelling test?”

“Why not,” said the professor, now just trying to be a team player.

“A one word spelling test?”

“Sure.”

“And if he gets one letter right, he passes, right?”

“OK. OK.”

“And the word will be coffee?”

“Yes, yes, anything.”

They called the player in. Spell coffee they said.

“K-a-u-p-h-y.”

What Marco Materazzi said

Kottke has the scoop. [Update: Materazzi denies calling Zidane a terrorist.]

“Sledging,” as it’s called, is part of the game — verbal abuse from opponents. It happens in all sports where there are match-ups. The purpose, if there is one, is to rile your opponent sufficiently to take his or her mind off the game.

So, is Zidane the fool for letting words get to him? Or is he justified for reacting to slurs against his religion, his ethnicity and his mother?

And don’t miss Jason’s comment.

Best line of the day about a head butt, so far

Madness. Can there be any other word for both this World Cup and the way it ended? It would be like Tiger Woods, moments from donning another green jacket at the Masters, bringing his putter down on top of Vijay Singh’s skull. Or Michael Jordan stepping up to the free throw line in the final ticks of an NBA championship game and breaking Kobe Bryant’s nose with a basketball.

David Hirshey

Wrong place, right time

(By the way, I’ve been watching the World Cup for four weeks trying to decide which NBA players could have been dominant soccer players, eventually coming to three conclusions. First, Allen Iverson would have been the greatest soccer player ever — better than Pele, better than Ronaldo, better than everyone. I think this is indisputable, actually. Second, it’s a shame that someone like Chris Andersen couldn’t have been pushed toward soccer, because he would have been absolutely unstoppable soaring above the middle of the pack on corner kicks. And third, can you imagine anyone being a better goalie than Shawn Marion? It would be like having a 6-foot-9 human octopus in the net. How could anyone score on him? He’d have every inch of the goal covered. Just as a sports experiment, couldn’t we have someone teach Marion the rudimentary aspects of playing goal, then throw him in a couple of MLS games? Like you would turn the channel if this happened?)

Bill Simmons, ESPN

NewMexiKen also wonders how a few NFL running-backs or safeties might do on the pitch.

Great tournament, shame about the football

Sean Ingle, writing for Guardian Unlimited, loves the tournament but laments the lack of scoring in this year’s World Cup. He proposes some changes:

Such intervention needs to happen again. Because ever since the wondrous magic of Euro 2000, football’s delicate balance between attack and defence has spun increasingly out of kilter. Here are a few ideas:

– Stop the clock every time someone gets injured. Too often players feign distress, especially in the last 10 minutes, wasting two or three minutes of play and destroying their opponents’ momentum. They’re rarely seriously injured. Another option: if the injury is in the middle of the pitch, allow the physio on but keep playing. Either way, more playing time may lead to more goals.

– Investigate the use of sin bins. At the moment it’s rational for defenders to body-check, scythe and take out opponents in promising positions, picking up a professional yellow, because conceding a goal is far worse. The possibility of 20 minutes in the sin bin – with a yellow card chucked in – for cynical fouls might change a player’s incentives and, ergo, behaviour.

– Increase the size of the goals by a few centimetres. Yes, you hate the idea. Every football fan does, but surely it’s worth experimenting with in a semi-professional league? After all, keepers are at least a foot taller now then in the 19th century when goalpost sizes were laid down in law.

Think American TV likes that idea about time outs (known here as commercial time outs)?

Pointer via The Sports Economist.

Leroy Robert Paige

Stachel PaigeBaseball Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige was born 100 years ago today. A huge star in the Negro Leagues, Paige began pitching in 1926 and was the oldest major league rookie ever when he joined the Cleveland Indians at age 42. Paige pitched in his last major league game in 1965 (at age 59).

In the barnstorming days, he pitched perhaps 2,500 games, completed 55 no-hitters and performed before crowds estimated at 10 million persons in the United States, the Caribbean and Central America. He once started 29 games in one month in Bismarck, N.D., and he said later that he won 104 of the 105 games he pitched in 1934.

By the time Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 as the first black player in the majors, Mr. Paige was past 40. But Bill Veeck, the impresario of the Cleveland club, signed him to a contract the following summer, and he promptly drew crowds of 72,000 in his first game and 78,000 in his third game. (The New York Times)

Paige first published his Rules for Staying Young in 1953. This version is from his autobiography published in 1962, Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever.

  1. Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.
  2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
  3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
  4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society — the social ramble ain’t restful.
  5. Avoid running at all times.
  6. And don’t look back — something might be gaining on you.

Gotta be a better way

So, Germany and Argentina and it comes down to penalty kicks.

Maybe baseball should just play three extra innings and if the game remains tied go to a homerun derby.

(Even so, soccer’s tie-breaker is better than the NFL tie-breaker.)

The Sins of American Sportscasting

American TV sportscasting is full of factoids, full of graphics, full of breakaways from the midst of play for prerecorded human-interest backgrounders, full of color analysts overexplaining what happened a couple of minutes ago even as new, more urgent things are happening in front of our eyes, full of overpacked broadcast booths with three-man teams, sideline reporters, spotters, graphics people and telestrators, all breathlessly jostling for air time. Goals are scored in hockey games, and instead of showing the players celebrating, hyperactive producers cut away to show coaches, random crowd shots, the empty net, the goalie whose expression is hidden behind his mask. A single football play cannot pass without two instant replays; lineups cannot be given without film clips of the players saying their own names. At any given moment in a baseball game, what you’ll hear is the studied casualness of the down-home, nothing-really-exciting-going-on-here play-calling tradition that O’Brien personifies.

All these strands together add up to the crisis in American sportscasting that is made evident at every World Cup, when English-speaking fans flee in enormous numbers to listen to commentary in a language they don’t even understand. It’s not just soccer, of course — for many U.S. sports fans, it has long been impossible to listen to the type of football telecasts epitomized by Al Michaels, John Madden and the overproduced Monday Night Football franchise. John Davidson’s interruptions wherever there is an American hockey telecast has driven those few fans who care about them to the Internet for local radio connections. And so on down the line. The common denominator in the way American TV covers any sport is the absence of the simple, urgent description of what is happening on the field, the court or the ice — the single most visceral thing for any fan watching any sport he or she cares about.

That is the very experience the Spanish-language World Cup telecasts give English-language viewers: the sense of urgency, of excitement, of drama. There are no departures to explain what the rules are, no fancy graphics to present statistical factoids, no interruptions to show personal profiles. In Spanish, the narrative is the thing, and even though anglophones may not be able to follow that narrative perfectly, its primacy is so compelling as to be prefereable to the ESPN/ABC model.

Jeff Z. Klein World Cup ’06, from a longer commentary on World Cup coverage

Amen! Given the choice, NewMexiKen would choose to watch most sports on TV with just the players, crowd and public address sound.

The line

NewMexiKen believes there is a fine line in professional sports between athletic competition and unabashed show business — pro wrestling is the best example of the wrong side of the line.

The fights in the NHL pushed that league over the line, but it has mostly pulled itself back. The NBA dances with the line but usually stays on the athletic side. Honoring the line is why the NFL discourages celebration and taunting. (My advice: When you get to the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.)

It seems to NewMexiKen that the melodrama over fouls in professional soccer, especially in international competition, with the moaning and groaning, and the silly mandatory stretcher, push the sport — at times — precariously close to the line.

Best line of the day, so far

“I’m covering my seventh World Cup, and love the event, but I can understand if Americans who catch a glimpse of soccer are turned off by the weasel code in which players fake grievous, perhaps even mortal, injury.”

George Vescey, The New York Times, who adds:

I’m not a big fan of American football — I get bored between downs — but I admit that the American game does not reward a player for rolling on the turf like a man possessed by evil spirits in a science-fiction flick. That’s downright unmanly, by our standards. Jim Brown used to lope stoically back to the huddle after every play because he never wanted to show pain. “You can’t hurt me,” was his attitude.

The YouTube Hall of Fame

After a decade of watching the Internet change everyone’s lives (including mine), it never ceases to amaze me. The Internet gave me a job and a career. I pay my bills online, follow stocks, buy DVDs and books, argue about the Celtics with complete strangers on a message board, send streaming video of my kid back home to my parents, get almost all my sports information, keep in touch with dozens and dozens of family members, friends, acquaintances and co-workers every week. There’s always some new way to kill time. But YouTube ranks among the greatest Internet developments ever, right up there with iTunes, Napster, free porn and e-mails with “Vegas?” in the subject heading.

With that as part of the introduction, Bill Simmons describes and links to dozens of his favorite videos on YouTube.

Go waste enjoy a couple of hours.