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Cultural Lap Speed Comparison

2012-05-28T07:02:00.001-05:00

When a driver wins the Indianapolis 500, they give him a lot of money and a bottle of milk. Refreshing after spending three hours in a 180-degree race car cockpit.

When a driver wins the World 600 NASCAR Sprint Cup race, they give a lot of money and whatever beverage is a full or part sponsors of his car.

When a driver wins the Grand Prix of Monaco, they give him a lot of money, and a fancy dinner with the Prince and whatever crowned heads of Europe made the scene that weekend.

Aspiring reckless young men and women with a fondness for speed and very good reflexes, the career choice is yours. And it seems a damn clear one to me.

Why Gary Bettman Frets at Night

2012-05-26T08:04:00.001-05:00

Maybe it's a function of my age. Maybe it's a function of having lived in the Bo-wash Corridor all of my life. Maybe it's both. Whatever the motive, I don't have good news for the NHL and NBC this beautiful May morning.

The second the Devils scored to eliminate the Rangers last night, my commitment to the Stanley Cup playoffs vanished. Not that I care for the Rangers, although there's something to be said for a fan base New York City cops dislike working with more than even wrestling fans. Their loss just set off a habit I picked up long, long ago.

As soon as all the Original Six teams and all the Canadian teams are out of the playoffs, so am I. Oh, I'll watch a game or two. Make that parts of a game or two. Stay up late for overtime? Don't be absurd. I lack the emotional commitment and intellectual interest for that. A Stanley Cup final between the Kings and Devils? How can I, an outsider, get pumped for a death match between a franchise that's a small cult in its home city and a franchise that's ranked dead last in overall public interest (Jay-Z gives the Nets some pub from Page Six) in ITS home? There are alternative rock bands in SEC college towns with bigger followings than these two fine hockey clubs.

Neutral fans, front-runners to be blunt, participate in a big game or series to the extent they can feed off the emotion brought to the event by existing fans. It's psychic physics. The greater the critical mass of emotion, the more attraction it extends to us free-floating uncharged fan particles. That principle is why I, the more-than-casual soccer fan, delights in watching a match on the order of Real Madrid-Barcelona, and can't click the remote fast enough past an MLS tilt. Not fair to MLS, perhaps, but so what? A fan from Philly is supposed to be fair?

The Devils and Kings, both of which have been around for many many years, represent the NHL's continuing failed efforts to not be the fourth of four U.S. professional sports leagues. I mean, if Wayne Gretzky couldn't make Los Angeles care about hockey, and he couldn't, a don't think one measley Stanley Cup will do the trick. The contempt two-thirds of Tri-State area has for business enterprises with Jersey in their name will never end. New Yorkers are funny that way.

The way this fan particle measures the emotional attraction of a neutral event is the loss test. How badly will fans care if and when their team loses the game/series? By that standard, last year's Bruins-Canucks Stanley Cup final was perfect. Ask any Vancouver cop. Hockey is an indigenous and important part of the culture of both Boston and Vancouver. In Newark and Los Angeles, hockey is an indigenous part of the fact that the two biggest metropolitan areas of the U.S. have a niche market for any product. That's hard to warm up to, unless you're a TV exec or in the sports marketing racket, and God forbid on both counts.

The 2011 Final had the strongest ties possible to the history and culture of its sport. The 2012 Final has next to none. It has no pull on me. Like many another Final, it will probably evoke the reaction, "it's really nice outside. Why should I look at ice?"

It's possible and perhaps even likely that the above analysis was merely the cranky rambling of a sports follower whom the 21st century is passing by faster than Danica Patrick gets passed in the Nationwide series. But I suspect I have plenty of cranky, or rather, uninterested company.

The ratings for the Bruins-Canucks series were excellent. Let's see what crowd the Kings and Devils draw.

Self-Fulfilling Second Guesses

2012-05-20T07:23:00.001-05:00

The opinion of almost all observers before the series began, myself emphatically included, was that the Celtics would defeat the 76ers and do so without undue difficulty. This prediction has taken a bit of a beating in the first four games. The series is tied, and there is as of yet no scoreboard evidence that Boston is the materially superior team, or even marginally superior.

In a dazzling display of one of sports punditry's sillier and nastier maneuvers, many of the predictors are now giving the Celtics a bit of a beating. It's their fault the prediction didn't come true. They had "no respect" for the Sixers (Charles Barkley, TNT). They were "arrogant" (Gary Washburn, Boston Globe). They "always play down to the opposition" (talk radio callers and hosts).

Here's an opinion I didn't hear or read, so remember folks, it's an exclusive. The 76ers were better than I thought. My pre-series analysis has not been supported by subsequent events, and that'll be true even if the Celts win the next two games by 20. The Sixers are low on guys who get overcovered by ESPN, but they have excellent ratings in a number of important basketball virtues -- little things like hustle and defense.

That wasn't so hard to write. Sports forecasting is a mug's game anyway. Being wrong is an inescapable part of making predictions. Write or say why you think you were wrong, and move on.

Instead, many of the folks who picked Boston in a breeze have reacted to an NBA playoff series that's been much like many past series in nature with the odd but common emotion that somehow the Celtics have their predictions down. It's the team's fault they were wrong. If it had had higher standards of professionalism, if the Celtics were better people, THEN they'd have already swept the series, and you'd see how smart the forecaster was.

You see this reaction a lot in sports punditry. For the most extreme example, check out the college football polls. It takes about three losses for a preseason top 10 team to drop out of the top 25, even though NO predictions in sports are based on less information than college football preseason guesses.

The "bad Celtics" meme is not just self-serving, it makes its adherents look like they've never seen a playoff before. It requires ignoring two known facts of NBA history.

Fact 1: It's match play, not medal. A blowout win/loss is not evidence of the superiority/inferiority of Teams A and B (Two blowouts can be). Just to cite two examples from Celtics history. In the 1984 Finals, they lost 136-104 to the Lakers in Game Three. In the 1985 Finals, they beat LA 148-114 in Game One. And of course, in each case it was the blowout loser who won the series.

Fact 2: Momentum doesn't matter from game to game, but IN the game, it matters a great deal indeed. A big early lead can be and often is a poisoned chalice, especially on the road. It is very, very difficult for a team to maintain its best level of play for 48 straight minutes, and once that level slips, it's harder still to find it again.

And there, class, you have the stories of Games Three and Four in the 2012 Celtics-76ers series. It's a series between two teams of reasonably competitive levels of ability falling into established patterns of such series. With two home games left, it's still more likely than not the Celts will win it. But not because they were prohibitive favorites and SHOULD have done it already if they weren't so stuck on themselves.

In truth, it was the forecasters who were stuck on the Celtics. They took the fact that when Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce are in top form Boston is more than a match for almost every NBA team and straight-line projected fact into fiction -- assuming that happy circumstance would be the Celtics' default mode throughout the series. Now, with the emotional balance of jilted 15-year olds, the forecasters are attacking the attitudes and character of their former love objects.

Worst of all is how temporary this lover's spat might be. Should the Celtics go on to eliminate the 76ers, the post-series analyses will all either implicitly or explicitly declare "I knew it all along."

Sympathy for the Slacker

2012-05-12T07:26:00.001-05:00

If honesty matters, then we must give Josh Beckett more credit than his increasing number of increasingly vociferous critics. There's something appealing in Beckett's current public posture, which boils down to a frank admission of confusion along the lines of "Hey, I've always been a self-centered cementhead. Why are people upset about it now?"

Well, it's easy to make fun of ballplayers with Beckett's worldview, as Ring Lardner proved over a century ago. But there's also a truth (well) hidden in Beckett's plaintive response to the suddenly hostile world he inhabits. He IS the same -- except for his earned run average. It's his critics whose perceptions have changed -- because of his earned run average.

Let's review Beckett's career. He's been a pitcher who's ranged from All-Star level effective to significant stretches of dismal. He gets hurt a lot, which is hardly exceptional in his line of work. He has a disturbing tendency to backload his worst pitching into the final six weeks of the season. Since he's a power pitcher and, how to put this politely, not a master student of his trade, the percentage bet is that Beckett's effective stretches will get more infrequent and his dismal ones more common as the seasons roll on.

That's not the kind of paragraph plaques in Cooperstown are made of. But neither is it why Beckett has the Sox community so upset. He's being pilloried for his attitude, which is at best inconsistent and at worst hypocrisy at its hypoest. Because when Beckett was going well, that same attitude was praised as part of the cause of his success.

Don't believe me? Here's an experiment. Every time you hear or read the word "selfish" applied to Beckett, use the word "focused" instead. It's really the same personal quality, just described with adjectives that make it sound either bad or good. How Beckett's personality is portrayed depends upon how he's seen. And that, as noted above, depends on whether or not he's getting guys out, not the morals and ethics of those who're describing him.

Beckett is an extreme proponent of the High Seriousness School of pitching. That is, pitching is a draining professional commitment akin to neurosurgery, and whatever a pitcher does to cope with the unendurable stresses and responsibilities of his life-saving art is OK. This attitude is hooey, and always has been, but it rules an increasingly pretentious sport. The most cheerful and outgoing of starters will adhere to the solemn rule of not talking to teammates, let alone the media, in the hours before a start. NASCAR drivers, in a racket where lack of focus can kill you, conduct schmoozefests with sponsors and their children three hours before the race goes green.

If Beckett was 5-1 with a 2.21 ERA this morning, you'd be told that attitude is part of the reason why. You'd be told it was a big part. Moreover, it'd be presented to you as a virtue, a valuable life skill worth copying. It'd be the same hooey, but the Iron Laws of the Frontrunners' Universe and Scoreboard Morality would say otherwise.

We've known the tragic truth about Mickey Mantle for about 30 years now, and he's STILL a hero. Willie Mays doubtless remains a misanthropic prick, which he was for his entire historic career. His 81st birthday this week was mentioned as a minor national holiday on network news. And I guarantee that if Beckett goes out and tosses a six-hit shutout in his next start, fools will rush to say his attitude has changed for the better.

As noted before, there have been ballplayers exactly Beckett since long before there was an American League. They've always been kind of a pain in the ass to have around. But not nearly as big a pain as the millions of baseball followers and commentators, who've been around for exactly the same long long time, who rush to say they're looking at a bad person when what they're watching is bad baseball.

Death of a Linebacker

2012-05-05T08:33:00.000-05:00

Junior Seau's death by his own hand at age 43 is immeasurably sad. Let's not forget that remains true whether or not football was an unindicted co-conspirator in his demise.

The evidence that football brings a high risk of brain disease or injury, a risk that gets higher the longer one plays the sport, is strong and getting stronger now that there's much more research being done on the issue. Seau played football at its highest and most violent level for 20 years. Suicide is an act of anguish and despair, and mental depression is a known result of some of the brain disorders the repetitive collisions of the head football generates. It's natural that Seau's death would immediately be linked to a moral dilemma our society doesn't want to face, but is having thrown in its face. Our most popular sport shortens the lives and ruins the health of many of those who play it.

Natural, but wrong. Millions of people whose most violent physical activity is opening cans suffer from depression, and a number of them commit suicide every year. Seau's desperate act may have stemmed from issues within himself that had nothing to do with the toll of his risky trade. Probably not, but why don't we wait and see? The pain of those he left behind is hard enough to witness.

Football's dangers would still be with us this morning if Seau was. In a sharp little irony, Seau's suicide drove the news of Roger Goodell's showboating suspensions of New Orleans Saints players for the "bounty" program right off the front of the sports pages. Goodell's Canutian decision was the NFL's way of insisting "we can make our sport safer" when medical research is suggesting "no, you can't." The research indicates that while the big hits are dangerous for players, the ongoing lesser hits that place on every play are just as if not more dangerous for the fragile packing of brain inside skull.

As of now, and likely as of some time to come, football and science have no answers for that one. Maybe there will be one. Auto racing has dropped its fatality rate astonishingly due to the creation of practical fireproofing for clothing and other improvements in fire safety technology. Boxing, on the other hand, remains about as dangerous as ever. The revenues of the two sports in 2012 demonstrate that safety is good business.

Seau's family has allowed the researchers at BU to examine his brain. If a link between brain degeneration and his awful death gives them some measure of comfort, then that's what I hope they find. But it won't change either of the two facts we're dealing with here. Junior Seau's death at 43 is an unspeakable waste. And football is bad for the human body, bad in ways we're just beginning to know.

I love football. I love watching it, loved writing about it, and most of all, I loved playing it. Being on the field offers an addictive adrenaline rush like few others I have ever felt. That's why I am grateful beyond words to the Powers That Be that I was not much good as a football player. If I had been good enough to play until I was 40, or even 20, I would have. And as much as I love the game, I'm fonder of the me that currently exists, the one football got cold-cocked only once.

It is my belief, a disquieting one, that football's dangers cannot be reduced to any significant extent, only mitigated and accounted for. That is, injuries like concussions will have to become NFL career alterers (seasons lost, careers ended) by rule, and that our richest sport will be forced to spend very large sums on the medical and psychological monitoring of its former players as part of the cost of doing business.

No game whose fans suspect has the capacity to cause its Hall of Famers to become suicides is likely to thrive. Guilt is every bit as powerful an emotion as despair.

I expect most football fans felt at least a twinge of guilt when they heard what happened to Seau. They should have, anyway. Even if football had nothing to do with his despair, we know too much about the sport he was great at to follow it with clueless delight.

Sorry, Gang, Disney Still Won't Acquire You

2012-04-29T08:00:00.001-05:00

The biggest news story of the day as measured by the Times, Globe, and God help us the BBC is this: "The Avengers" comes out on Friday.

No story in the Sunday Globe got more space, as it was the sum of their inexplicable Movies section. Cast member Samuel L. Jackson was the cover story of the Sunday Times magazine. BBC World broadcast a long feature on the flick I caught when I turned it on to get soccer scores.

I'm gonna see the picture. I've been reading Marvel comics since childhood. I'm a big Joss Whedon fan, and after all, he's a Wesleyan grad, too. But the first of the big summer tentpole movies is not news. It is a predictable harbinger of the change of seasons. People like seeing the first daffodils, too, but no paper devotes a special section to them. The only time a tentpole is news is when they die sudden awful deaths at the box office. Then, Variety gets a big story when some studio executives get fired, as happened with "John Carter."

So what's with the free publicity? It's not as if "The Avengers" doesn't have plenty of the paid variety. Stan Lee, founder of Marvel, is one of the greatest promoters in American history. Walt Disney Co., which bought Marvel Entertainment some years back, might be THE greatest. In smallish towns of Provence in France two weeks ago, I saw "Avengers" related merchandise. Why did editors of two of our country's prestigious dailies choose to highlight something everybody already knew about?

It's not for money. The stories will not alter in the slightest the large (but not large enough) ads motion picture theater chains will place in each newspaper's Friday May 4 editions and for some days after that. Movie marketing budgets are planned out to the nickel before a director gets hired.

Alas, I think wistful envy is the cause. As the sickly poor uncle of the mass media, newspapers have a subconscious desire to experience, if only vicariously, what it's like to be part of the mass media industry that MAKES money, the big money they used to have as monopoly outlets for certain forms of advertising. The grosses of "The Avengers" will be financial porn for a revenue-starved business.

Then again, the Globe's front page lead news story had the headline "Shale Gas Boom Has Benefits and Risks." Stop the presses!!! Get me rewrite!!!! Suck my thumb!!!!!

Maybe "The Avengers" was news today because most everything else wasn't.

Lack of Method Actor

2012-04-28T07:49:00.002-05:00

People just don't get Bill Belichick and never will. Lucky him.

Since this lack of comprehension offers the Pats' mastermind a considerable competitive advantage, I'll bet he had less than no trouble coming to terms with it. At the very least, it must be fun to live in a reality where he's constantly surprising folks -- especially since they shouldn't be surprised at all.

The Patriots' 2012 draft is being treated as a big surprise by many people who ought to know better. Belichick traded modestly up from first round choices 27 and 31 to picks 21 and 25 to snag defensive end Chandler Jones and linebacker Dont'a Hightower. This moderately aggressive maneuver evoked shock within the commentariat. It was, so we are told, a complete reversal of Belichick's draft "philosophy." (I admit prolonged exposure to the Chris Berman-Jon Gruden-Mel Kiper triad makes a strong case for Stoicism).

That is to say, in 2012, Belichick traded up to draft players, while in drafts in 2009, 10 and 11 he'd traded down to get more picks in lower rounds. Obviously, the coach was repudiating a failed strategy that has kept New England's winning percentage at a woefully inadequate .770.

This is nonstuff and nonsense. It is further evidence that the world will never grasp the ultimate truth about Belichick's football "philosophy" -- he ain't got one. Each decision he makes is based on the facts of the individual case before him. If that involves intellectual inconsistency, so what?

One of the most basic truths of the NFL draft gets ignored every spring. The draftees change every year. The pile of talent from which 32 teams select varies wildly in its overall talent level, talent level by position, etc. You can't have a rigid draft "philosophy" or you'll wind up picking square pegs for your round holes every year. Ask the Oakland Raiders.

It's all beyond obvious. In previous New England drafts, Belichick was less enamored of the players rated oh, 15-35 in the total talent pool, so he traded down. In 2012, that pool contained two guys he really liked, so he traded up. Next year he could trade down again, or stand pat. It depends, two words that guide most of human existence but almost never appear in sports commentary.

Come to think of it, Belichick does too have a philosophy. It's called Pragmatism.

Euphemism: One Industry Where America Will Always Lead the World

2012-04-26T15:34:00.001-05:00

Drive-time radio and radio advertising have expanded this commuter's sum of knowledge. Thanks to Steve Wynn and various shoddily written news stories, I know now that in Massachusetts casinos are no longer casinos.

They are "destination resorts."

That's because, whenever some American's rich uncle dies, or they win Powerball, their dream vacation dreams always are of Foxboro. Unless they're dreaming big.

Of Taunton.

Jeu de Chemin

2012-04-22T08:24:00.001-05:00

Two hours before game time, one is accompanied on the very short walk between the subway station and Stade de Gerland in Lyon, France by men in windbreakers in their 20s and 30s familiar to anyone who has ever attended any sports event in any big city in the world. These worthies are how I learned the French for "who's selling tickets?" and "Who needs tickets?"

They were also a preview of things to come. For this American fan and former sports journalist, the most striking thing about attending the Olympique Lyonnais-Auxerre Ligue 1 soccer match, my very first big league European soccer match, was how similar the entire experience was to attending a ball game in Boston or Philadelphia, and I suppose like attending one in Bogota or Phnom Penh. A ball game is a ball game is a ball game wherever you go. It's the universal Brotherhood of Man Wearing Face Paint After Six Beers.

Except for speaking a different language, the other 31,488 fans who showed up that cool April evening could've been heading for any U.S. ballpark or stadium. They were mostly guys, mostly younger guys, but there was also a significant percentage of dads with sons and a smaller but still significant percentage of younger women in groups. The latter two demographics were the ones I was looking for. They are the universal sign that fistfights, let alone riots, are not gonna happen at this game. Soccer hooliganism is a dying thing in Europe, for the very same reason hooliganism died out at Foxboro -- a combination of much higher prices and vigorous security. The cop/security staff to spectator ratio inside and outside the stadium was about 1 to 6.3.

Not that there weren't several things that reminded one you were in France and not on Causeway Street. Take the pregame meal. There were sausage vendors, but there were also kebab vendors, an option we don't have and ought to. On the advice of an expatriate U.S. resident who is also my daughter, we chose to dine at Nimsaki, a restaurant across the street from the stadium. In one sense, Nimsaki was Boston Beer Works. It served burgers, fries, big salads and a plethora of draft beers. But this was France. Nimsaki was also about 1 billion times better than Boston Beer Works. You could get a burger with foie gras, for instance. Most especially, the beer was better. Lyon was a big brewery town several centuries before the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded, and they really have the hang of it by now.

But in a land where eating and drinking are the real national sports, there's no tailgating. And once inside the Stade, a functional but elderly stadium that is due to be replaced when the new stadium funding controversy is resolved (I told you it was just like the States), there are no food concessions, only a tiny souvenir stand.

Maybe that's due to the nature of soccer. Attending a game in person made it clear why many U.S. sports fans can't relate to the game. The rhythm of watching it is too different and too difficult. In this game, as in all soccer games, there were long stretches where nothing happened. But you can't take your eyes off the non-action, because you'll miss the four or five remarkable moments that DO happen, and they're all only moments long. The combination of concentration and ennui is very draining.

Concentration was rewarded in my case. For one thing, our seats were in the very first row. At ground level, the level at which I watched many a Lexington youth soccer game in the 1990s, one could see both the incredible athletic ability of the players and the incredibly dirty nature of their play. Tugging, jostling, elbowing, etc. takes place at all times between all players at an NHL playoff game pace. If European soccer players are always bitching to the refs, and boy are they, they have cause, or would if they weren't fouling all the time, too.

Olympique Lyonnais (OL to the tabloids) is one of the big-market powers of French soccer, a franchise which expects to finish in or near the top of Ligue One and to compete in the Champions League on an annual basis. Auxurre was the cellar-dweller of the Ligue, headed for relegation to the minors. (I'll bet soccer team owner John Henry is happy U.S. sports don't have that particular rule). As can happen in all sports, the basement denizen succeeded in dragging the power down to its own level of play. OL ground its way to a less than artistically satisfying 2-1 win, and got booed off the pitch at halftime when it was 1-1. Since I had no skin in the game whatsoever, it was all enjoyable sports anthropology to me, particularly when Lyon got the winning goal on a penalty kick, and Auxerre was consistently screwed by the laughably incompetent or perhaps just bored referee in the final minutes of yet another loss. That's something I've been watching at ballgames since attending old Eastern League basketball games as a child.

The trip back to the hotel, which I will note the Lyon Metro does a much quicker and less uncomfortable post-game job of than does the MBTA gave me one final insight into how sports brings human beings together. Two of the straphangers in our car were middle-aged guys who'd clearly been OL fans for most if not all their lives. They were engaged in the inevitable post-game analysis. I understand written French OK, and spoken French rather less well. But I speak fluent sports. From the few words I did pick up, from body language and from a tone I've heard outside a hundred ballparks, I'm willing to bet cash money my translation of the topic of their conversation was accurate.

They were discussing if the OL coach/manager needed to be fired.

Another New York Sweep

2012-04-21T06:08:00.000-05:00

The 100th anniversary celebration for Fenway Park, which wasn't nearly as hokey as I thought it might be, received something beyond saturation coverage in Boston media. That was to be expected, right down to the TV stations hawking those commemorative caps with no identifying marks on the outside -- one of most puzzling merchandising moves I have ever seen.

What I didn't expect was the coverage of the event in today's New York Times. Every one of its stories on the event except for a buried game story was a horrible triumph of the baseball as mystic spiritual heart of America and baseball writing as poesy school. One was by some Sox fan named David Margolick, who's probably some Pulitzer winner for covering nuclear physics or the European Central Bank, and he was every pretentious Sox bigdome fan real Sox fans have made fun of for decades. Reading it was like listening to Doris Kearns Goodwin on her eighth glass of chardonnay. And it was in notable contrast to the Times' much less sentimental coverage of the final days of the old Yankee Stadium and opening of the new one.

The Globe, by contrast, was reasonably straightforward, almost covering the ceremony as a news event. It was all backwards. It made me wonder if the Times was getting even with the residents of the city that cost the Times corporation about $800 million bucks on its ill-advised purchase of the Globe.
Was the thought process something like this?

"We can't make money off those people, so at least let's show the rest of the world what twits they can be."

Schedule Note, Also Proof I'm a Sick Fan Note

2012-04-04T19:48:00.002-05:00

This will be will be my last post until at least April 16th, as I and the rest of my family leave tomorrow night for Lyon, France, where my daughter teaches English to little kids.

Her European grad student roommates are having a toga party Friday night. On the one hand, people that age don't ever want to meet people my age in social situations. On the other hand, the honor of my generation and the Red, White and Blue is an issue here.

The next night, we're going to see Olympique Lyonnais play Auxurre in France's Ligue 1 soccer league. I've been given to understand it's a very critical game. But I can't say how amazing it is to look forward to an entirely new sports experience at my age and background.

Full report to follow. Well, maybe not entirely full.

If You Can't Feel Good on Opening Day, You'll Be One Miserable SOB by the All-Star Break

2012-04-04T18:05:00.002-05:00

The entrail-readers have peered into Florida and spoken. Boy, have they spoken. The signs for the Red Sox look very bad.

Which is of course very good, probably the best news from spring training there could be.

This is my 39th baseball season as a Boston area-resident. Before that I was in college elsewhere in New England. And ever since the Impossible Dream, there's been an almost immutable law I've used to predict how the Sox will fare each season.

The Sox have and I expect will almost always perform in an almost exactly inverse proportion to the general expectations of how they will. When natural normal optimism is replaced with giddy arrogance, the Sox are headed for failure. When all seems lost, take that bus to Vegas and bet the rent money on 'em.

Want evidence? Try the 2011 Red Sox for an example of how failure followeth pride down Yawkey. It isn't hard to remember a recent example of the ratio working in reverse, either. Do any Sox fan readers remember how they felt about the team after Game Three of the 2004 American League Championship Series?

And so on back through time, from the '86 ALCS and World Series, to the almost wholly unpredicted pennant of 1975 and the subsequent can't-miss '76 bunch that went out and lost 10 straight games in May. The only exception to the rule I can remember is the 2007 team. People thought they'd be really good and they really were.

So Sox followers should be happy to note that optimism among their peers and especially within the media is muted to where it can only be heard with electronic equipment. Pick a program on the Sports Hub, any program, and it sounds as if some trick of the airwaves has picked up Pittsburgh or Houston talk radio assessing their local nines. One of the clerks at my local packy, a good and ordinarily rational Boston sports fan was expressing dire anxieties about the team on St. Patrick's Day.

The official seal of preseason pessimism was set by the Globe's Kim Jong-Il, excuse me, I meant Bobby Valentine Personality Cult baseball preview special section last week. Another one of baseball's inverse ratios is that the amount of attention the media devote to a manager customarily reflects just how little they think of said manager's team. To go into a season regarding the skipper as the sole topic capable of holding the readers' attention is hand-wringing of truly heroic (or should it be cowardly?) dimensions.

Boring reality indicates the Sox have issues. A team worried about its bullpen is a team worried for a very sound cause. Then again, the Sox did lead the majors in runs scored last year, despite having the worst start and worst finish to a season in franchise history, and all of the hitters responsible have returned. That suggests Boston is at least halfway to being a consistent winner.

But you can get baseball analysis anywhere. In fact, there's no place you can get away from it. I'll stick with my ratio, thank you.

I'll be surprised if the Sox aren't right up near or on the top of the AL East this season. That's because of all the people I know who will be surprised when they are.

Brevity Is the Soul of Competition or Should Be

2012-04-01T07:50:00.002-05:00

Naivete is not a very attractive personality trait at my age, so let's admit up front that the main reason the NCAA Basketball Tournament is a popular sports event is how uniquely suited it is for low-investment but possibly high reward gambling competitions. It's as if the Sunday Times crossword offered cash prizes for winners.

However, for me, the singular appeal of the tournament is not a pool or pools. No, what makes me able to grit my teeth and endure Jim Nantz and Clark Kellogg is the happy knowledge it's just a date, not a relationship. The key word in the phrase March Madness is the first one. Of all the annual big U.S. events, the tournament requires the least amount of time and emotional commitment. In our era of sports overload, that's of inestimable value to any fan.

From Selection Sunday to One Shining Moment is 22 days. Throw in conference championship week, and we should, that's 29 days. That's an entire season of high-stakes thrills conducted in far less time than it takes baseball to have spring freakin' training, its mystical ritual of nothingness.

And unless one has some emotional identification with one of the six or seven schools where basketball is a socio-religious imperative (two of 'em will play for the title tomorrow), there's no pain involved, only entertainment. I was highly entertained when Lehigh beat Duke, but there was no corresponding sorrow when Xavier thumped Lehigh. What's Lehigh basketball to me, or for that matter, to Lehigh? For the players and coaches, March is life and death. For fans, except maybe for immediate families of players and coaches, it's just fun. This is how sports is supposed to work and would be how sports worked if the human race enjoyed better emotional health.

Basketball is a wondrous game, beautiful to look at, full of operatic passion. To delve deep into the skills, dreams, joys and anguish of thousands of its participants is an abiding pleasure. So is the knowledge that you're coming right back up to the surface and getting out of the pool to move on with life. The tournament arrives and then, poof! it's gone, with only one of those fraud Sports Illustrated commemorative issues to mark its passing.

Come May, when the baseball season and the NBA and NHL playoffs already seem longer than the Thirty Year's War, the transitory nature of March Madness comes off as sports' Brigadoon.

That's Why He's Called Mr. Baseball

2012-03-30T15:58:00.002-05:00

I really need to learn to change the radio channel in my car in the mornings. That way, this afternoon I would have avoided the mellow baritone of former colleague Tony Massarotti staking a claim to win the Dopiest Thing Said by the Media in the 2012 Baseball Award wire-to-wire.

The topic, as it often is when baseball is the subject on Felger & Mazz, was the many shortcomings of Josh Beckett.

"You what else is wrong for a guy with Beckett's stuff?," Tony asked with extreme rhetoricality, "He needs to hit more guys."

Hey, sure. A few more beanballs last September and the Sox would be hoisting up another World Series banner at Fenway this April. I can envision Bobby Valentine's heart-to-heart pep talk with Beckett down in Fort Myers right now.

"Josh, what we really want you to do this season is put more men on base and expose our lineup to a greater risk of injury. It's a tough assignment, I know, but we're counting on you, big fella."

Tony, I say this as someone who worked with you and liked you. It's for your own good, honest. Nobody on this planet makes a less convincing tough guy than you do. Angelina Jolie has a bunch of movies where she was a better tough guy than you are. Drop the act. All it does is make you seem stupid, which you're not, or least didn't used to be.

There's something in those studio headphones that drains the IQ right out.

Kickoff Pigskin Prognostication of 2012 Season

2012-03-26T16:34:00.001-05:00

At some point this fall, Tim Tebow will win a game for the New York Jets they otherwise would have lost.

Immediately after this event, Mark Sanchez will go out and lose at least two games for the Jets they otherwise would have won.

Contrarianism Is as Stupid as All The Other Words Ending in "Ism"

2012-03-25T08:19:00.002-05:00

As Tebow is my witness, I heard a radio talk show host issue the following rhetorical question yesterday afternoon. Try to imagine the smarmiest, most querulous tone of voice you can.

"Yeah," said the antihero of this post, "but how much better does Peyton Manning make the Broncos, really?"

Some People Can Just Bring the Sunshine

2012-03-21T18:13:00.002-05:00

Today was more proof that whenever life gets me down, and human existence seems a grim, gray slog to the grave, the New York Jets will come to my rescue, and paint rainbows of slapstick to brighten my soul.

Really, the Jets aren't an NFL franchise. They're the Make-a-Wish Foundation for bored sports fans and commentators.

Thanks for all you, gang.

And the Fifteenth Shall Be First

2012-03-17T09:13:00.004-05:00

Norfolk State University's basketball team made me look very foolish yesterday. Of course I loved it.

The first two rounds of the NCAA tournament are the only reason anyone who doesn't have the misfortune of being a fan of some school like Kentucky finds the event enjoyable. It gives dedicated, talented, utterly anonymous college kids the chance to be heroes for a day. That's more of a shot at that status than 99.999 percent of humanity ever gets, and "hero" is second only to "champion" in the sports chain of being.

The Norfolk State and Lehigh players are heroes today. Odds are prohibitive that come Sunday evening, they'll be dead, well, eliminated heroes. Who cares and so what. Whatever the price of glory is, they paid in full, and got what they paid for. All of sport's joys are fleeting. In compensation, they're awesomely joyous, and human beings have memories so that they can be recalled at will.

OK, philosophy over. Let's focus on the second of the two adjectives I used to describe the Norfolk State and Lehigh teams. Talented. They won their upsets not through malfeasance on the part of the beaten favorites, but through their own merits. Most of all, in a sport which always has and always will be dominated by the star system, they had the stars.

Kyle O'Quinn of Norfolk State and C.J. McCollum of Lehigh were the best players on the count in their games by huge margins. Now either the souls of Karl Malone and Chris Paul took over their bodies for a day, or they were always good players who happened to do their best facing their maximum challenge/opportunity, which is fancy of saying "star."

I hadn't heard of either guy until yesterday. There's entirely too much sports in the world for yours truly to follow Patriot League and MEAC basketball, and I daresay I've got company there. Yet these obscure seniors were able to kick the asses of their foes around the block for 40 minutes. Foes who were exclusively composed of the highly recruited products of the high school/AAU flesh market ESPN thinks is worthy of its own branch of programming.

This strongly suggests that a) human beings change a great deal between the ages of 18-22, and you'd think college basketball coaches would realize that, and b and more important), the world is not running a shortage of basketball talent. There are more than enough 18-year olds of ability and/or serious growth potential to go around for college basketball. Some teams are always going to run massive talent surpluses, the Kentuckys, North Carolinas, and Kansases of the world.

But Duke is one of the surplus-runners, too, and a fat lot of good that did them yesterday. Maybe the teams in the bottom halves of power conferences should spend more time looking at the high school players nobody else seems to want. That's what Al Skinner did quite well at BC for many years, and it sure worked better than whatever it is they're doing now.

The powers-that-be are always going to run that surplus. Like all other humans, high school kids are frontrunners. But the powers that aren't have one thing going for them. It may take a bunch of stars to win a championship. But it only takes one star to win one game against a team with a bunch.

Bracket Creep, Part Last

2012-03-12T15:34:00.002-05:00

At this time in 2011, only a few players' moms had picked UConn to meet Butler in the NCAA championship game and for Virginia Commonwealth to make the Final Four. And the other moms laughed at them for their demented optimism.

The unfortunate nature of unexpected events, especially enjoyable ones, is that they almost never repeat themselves. The most judicious course of action as far as handicapping the 2012 tournament seems to be to predict a reversion to the mean.

What is the mean? It is somewhere between two and three of the number one seeds making the Final Four, and no team lower than a third seed doing so. Dull as it may be, I foresee a tournament where the craven chalk player who's President of the U.S. sees his bracket last past the opening weekend's action.

Specifics follow, but it saddens me to report that by the time I finished looking at the field of 68, I was pretty much a cowardly chalk player myself.

South Regional: Kentucky is like every other John Calipari Kentucky team. If you're starting an NBA expansion franchise, they're by far the best team in the country. They're the best team in the country by just about every other metric, too. And as we saw last Sunday, at some point in single-elimination tournaments, Kentucky will forget how to shoot from outside, shoot free throws, or both.

The kindhearted selection committee has done its best to insure that doesn't happen until the Final Four. There's nobody else in this region I can see upsetting them (Indiana already did it once, that's way over quota). For those of you mistakenly convinced early round picks are the keys to bracket success, UNLV can upset a few apple carts before meeting its doom. If you MUST play a longshot, try New Mexico State.

West Regional: To Missouri or not to Missouri. That's my question. Whether
'tis nobler to pick a team that plays an entertaining game or weasel out with Michigan State because of their tournament track record?

Oh, it's only money and what little reputation I have left. Actually, there are several little stink bombs on Michigan State's path to the Elite Eight. Memphis and Louisville are getting surprisingly little love among the cognoscenti considering their records.

I will be interested to see how Murray State fares. Otherwise, I'll pick Missouri and forget this region.

East Regional: Syracuse has already used up about four seasons worth of close wins and comebacks during the regular season. That's no way for a champion to live. One of the other top three seeds, Ohio State, Florida State or Wisconsin, will beat them. Wait, what, I'm supposed to say which one?

Here's a prediction I will make. Florida State will blow up more brackets, one way or the other, than any other team in the field. They could be champions. They beat both Duke and North Carolina twice. They could lost their first game (they lost to BC!). I choose not to touch them with a barge pole.

Ohio State is your basic boring Big Ten power. It's amazing how often boring play and NCAA tournament success go hand in hand.

Midwest Regional: Call this the region of Teams That Play After Mike's Bedtime. I'd to opine on St. Mary's or Creighton, but I never saw 'em. I saw enough of Michigan and Georgetown to say, no way. I think Kansas is getting underrated by the masses, and if you're in a pool, that's an important consideration, but here's where cowardly chalk really takes over. North Carolina is the second-best NBA expansion franchise in the tournament, and it's problem, an occasional disastrous lack of focus, tends to be cured by the emotional maelstrom of the tournament itself.

Once a man shows the handicapping white feather, he might as well totally abase himself. Shooting the ball is a pretty important skill, and in the championship game, I see North Carolina remembering it and Kentucky not so quite so well.

Picking North Carolina as champs. God, I feel so soiled.

Bracket Creep, Part 1

2012-03-12T14:53:00.002-05:00

Yours truly may not get to his own misbegotten selections until later, so here's a friendly suggestion to those of you handicapping the NCAA tournament for fun and (especially) money.

You've probably noticed, or at least I hope you have, that three of the four number one seeds in the tournament are coming off losses in their conference tournaments, and the fourth flirted with that possibility for 40 minutes. Those number one seeds indicate just what the tournament selection committee thinks of conference tourneys as a means of evaluating basketball teams -- namely nothing.

The committee, like all human institutions, is fallible. But it is unanimously composed of individuals whose college basketball knowledge surpasses yours by a margin about the same length as the distance between your home and the next galaxy.

If I were you, I'd take their handiwork as a hint.

Hitting on 18 Is Seldom Sound Strategy

2012-03-10T09:20:00.002-05:00

Peyton Manning was in Denver yesterday. He's supposed to be in Phoenix today. Then, well, who knows? Miami? Seattle? Cleveland? No, not Cleveland. But wherever an NFL franchise lacks a quarterback and good sense, and it's amazing how often those two needs go together, Manning will be a welcome visitor, especially by local TV news directors.

Nothing wrong with houseguests. It's the franchise that pays rent to Manning for the use of its spare bedroom that's in trouble.

Nobody wants to see the career of one of the NFL's greatest players ever end in sad confusion such as that awful press conference in Indianapolis last week. But rooting for a happier ending is not the same thing as paying big money and turning your football team upside down in the hope of creating one. Sentimentality is nice. Sentimental decision making is delusional.

Forget football metrics. Occam's Razor is the only analytical tool we need to assess Manning's playing status as of this morning, to wit, as of this morning, he's still not physically capable of being an NFL quarterbacks.

Hypothesis 1: People in sports are not skilled professional actors, least of all Jim Irsay. Irsay's tongue-tied anguish at releasing Manning was genuine. He hated the decision thrust upon him. Ergo, it WAS thrust upon him. Irsay saw no alternative to releasing Manning. Irsay has a number of twit-like qualities, but he is the one person outside Manning himself with the most information on the hero's medical condition. And he did not believe Manning can play ball in 2012.

Hypothesis 2: It being very much in Manning's interest for others to believe he can play football, he ought to say he can. Such a statement did not come forth at Manning's Indianapolis farewell. "Wanting to" and "very close" are not the same as "round up a few wide receivers and I'll go out in the parking lot and throw for you."

Sentimental as I am, that's still the evidence I need to even consider the possibility Manning will play again. Close-up, own eyes viewing of practices or miles of video tape of Manning scrutinized by the most skeptical assistant coaches in Christendom. Put it this way. If Bill Belichick told me Manning could play, I'd believe it. Jon Gruden, I wouldn't. Some Zapruder film of a fuzzy high school football field drill session doesn't cut it at all.

As far as I can tell, any team which signs Manning will pay for the privilege of allowing the immortal to continue his rehab on their dime (make that many dollars) in the HOPE said rehab concludes successfully and Manning will be able at some point in 2012 to begin real practices and enter real games and the even fonder hope he'll resemble the Manning of the 2000s when he does. That's not strategy. That's a lottery ticket bet. No, it's worse. It's buying a lottery ticket, then buying a cabin cruiser before the drawing is held.

It's a cinch bet that some team will make the 1000-1 bet on Manning. Teams without quarterbacks look at the odds much differently than outsiders. Check the Redskins, who cheerfully surrendered their 2013 and 2014 first round picks to move up a mere four spots in the 2012 draft to get their mitts on Robert Griffin III. Griffin had better turn out to be about as Manning was for Washington not to have swindled itself.

Once that happens, this football fan will pull with all his heart for Manning to come through and get out on the field again. He's an admirable athlete whose performances bring me pleasure. He deserves a happy ending, or at least the right to end his career on the field rather than some doctor's office.

The sportswriter part of my soul will hold its tongue. If there's one thing that's changed in my outlook on games since leaving the little world of sports, it's that I'm less interested in failure and losing than I used to be. They're inevitable. Contrary to conventional sports journalism wisdom, winners, being much rarer than losers, I find to be more interesting stories.

But rooting is free. Running an NFL franchise most emphatically is not. Betting on dreams is a most expensive way to do business.

Wanted: Torn ACL or Alive

2012-03-04T08:39:00.002-05:00

The New Orleans Saints will be punished severely by the NFL for having run a bonus system in which payers were paid bounties for collisions which injured opposing players That's as it should be. It's a dangerous practice in an already dangerous sport.

It's also bad for business. By and large, football fans would prefer not to confront the sport's ultimate truth -- that it's based on hurting people. The Saints are guilty of rubbing America's nose in the truth. Can't have that.

But there's also an inherent logical contradiction in the league's praiseworthy attempts to control the violence it generates. The sanctions to be levied on the Saints seem eerily similar to the sanctions NASCAR levied on driver Jimmie Johnson and pit chief Chad Knaus for the serious crime of altering their stock car to make it go faster. Isn't that the basic point of automobile racing in the first place?

The contradiction at the root of football's attitude towards itself was best expressed back in the 1980s by Hall of Fame Seahawks wide receiver Steve Largent. An opposing defense back had injured Largent with an illegal hit that wasn't flagged. After returning to action, in the first game Largent played against that opponent, he leveled the offender with a perfectly legal crackback block that knocked the other guy out of the contest.

Largent, a devout Christian, said afterwards "I wasn't trying to hurt him, just to hit him as hard as I could."

How are those two concepts different? I didn't know then and 25 years later I still don't. Neither does the NFL. Neither does any philosopher who ever lived.

Try as it might, and it's trying harder than ever before, the league is not going to eliminate the nasty fact that players who are good at hurting people tend to become successful and wealthy out of it. Look at Ndamukong Suh. He's the best-known defensive lineman in the league. Why? Oh, I don't know. Does it have something to do with his stepping on an opponent's head?

Imagine if you will some new defensive terror in the NFL, a Super Deacon Jones or Lawrence Taylor, who knocked a quarterback out of a game once a month with perfectly legal hits and caused one running back limpoff a game. The NFL would react in two ways. The league office would change the rules to make the legal hits on quarterbacks illegal. But it'd be too late, as the violent player would already have become as famous and on his way to being as rich as Tom Brady.

That's why bounty systems should be sanctioned. They're carrying very nasty coals to Newcastle. Nobody had to pay Rodney Harrison a bounty to hit people. The defenders who're best at violence don't need chump change reward systems to encourage them. It comes naturally. It's significant that the defenses of Greg Williams, the coach at the heart of the bounty scandal, have always been mediocre at best. Those that can't teach, bribe, I guess.

And of course, there are so many ways around the NFL rules outlawing the bounty system, the Saints should be punished for being stupid enough to run theirs, too. Discreet minor contract extensions for defensive players who hurt opponents given out after a season would do it. Who's to prove that's why they were rewarded?

The NFL's position on bounties that "it's rough enough out there without this shit" is wholly justified. Futile, but justified. Outlawing the bounty system is much like a guy ordering three pieces of chocolate cream pie in a diner, then putting Sweet 'n Low in his coffee. Rules can't alter the reality that there must be rewards for violence in a violent sport men play for money.

There's not a franchise out there that wouldn't load up semis full of $100 bills to send to the house of the next Deacon Jones or Lawrence Taylor. Or even the next Ndamukong Suh.

Playoffs? Playoffs? Sure, Why Not?

2012-03-03T09:08:00.002-05:00

By common consent among the seamerati, the final day of the 2011 baseball regular season was one of the most thrilling events in the sport's history. Four teams competing for two playoff spots were in four different games with their fates on the line, and three of games went to extra innings. The last hour or so of the season became instant lore.

Baseball's immediate reaction was to make sure nothing like that happens again. Teams suffered heartbreaking losses and missed the playoffs? Why, we'll make the playoffs bigger. We're selling happiness here.

So in 2012, instead of eight teams making the playoffs, there will be 10. Each league will have two wild card teams, who will play a one-game playoff to advance to the divisional series round. Opinion within baseball is all for it. Opinion among mere fans ranges the gamut from apathy to more apathy. Television ratings indicate fans do a great job ignoring the divisional series. I'm sure they'll do even better avoiding the one-game duel to the death that baseball should but won't call the Runner-Up Bowl.

The theory that's presented as this idea's cover story is that it will generate more regular season pennant races (obsolete term, I know, but nobody's come up with a better one yet). Instead of four teams fighting for two spots, there could be six fighting for four. Nothing is more common than an unprecedented event such as the 2011 season happening over and over again.

The problem with the cover story is obvious if one extends its logic. If 10 teams in the playoffs makes for more regular season excitement than eight, than obviously 12 create more September thrills than 10, and so on. This is why sports fans are never more emotionally involved than when following the last month of the NBA and NHL regular seasons.

Even baseball is better at marketing than to create products for which there is no demand and expect it to work. Like our nation's campaign finance laws, the extra wild-card team is an internal matter. The fans/voters have nothing to do with it. The feathering of incumbent nests is the driving force.

As a rule, I avoid conspiracy theories when it comes to baseball. It's kind of like applying conspiracy theories to the Three Stooges. Incompetence is always the best explanation of why things happen in a sport whose executive talent believes Machiavelli played third base for the 1943 St. Louis Browns.

But television IS a business where conspiracy theories are appropriate, indeed, mandatory. And the baseball playoffs are a television show, the only reason the sport has national TV contracts in the first place (although playoff ratings perennially disappoint, and regular season ratings continue to grow).

To be blunt, does anyone really believe that if the Red Sox hadn't missed the playoffs last year, there'd be an extra wild-card team today? Either the Sox or Yankees have failed to make the playoffs for the past three seasons. That's intolerable for broadcasting executives, who know the iron law of ratings is that people like to see what they've always seen on TV. Originality equals a sad career transition to independent production.

It'd be just a bit too raw for MLB to create what its TV partners really want -- a playoff system where the Yankees and Red Sox play a best-of-nine series to advance to the World Series against the winner of all the other playoff series. But if neither the Sox nor Yanks make it to the postseason this year (could happen, New York's an old, old team, and those tend to fall apart quite suddenly. The Sox aren't exactly a sure thing, not after last September), look for a 12 team playoff in 2013.

It's the Only Sport With a Statistic Called "Errors"

2012-02-25T09:28:00.002-05:00

This must be a sign of advancing age, but somehow I find the entire Ryan Braun fiasco reassuring. As sports continues its seamless integration into the global corporate state monolith, it's nice to see that baseball retains its lovable and comical institutional ineptitude.

Let's keep the National League MVP's urine sample in some clown's basement for the weekend!! That's almost as laugh-provoking as an All-Star game ending in a tie. Now that he's on a roll, we can confidently expect Bud Selig to roll out yet another of playoffs, or maybe a Cosmic Series between the World Series winner and the winner of the World Baseball Classic.

Hard as it is to believe, both Major League Baseball and the MLB Players' Association are chock-full of extremely smart lawyers. In unison, they devised a drug-testing policy which did indeed contain protections for the reputations and rights of the players being tested. Then everyone involved shook hands and forgot the whole thing, especially the part about making sure the process was carried out.

This worked fine until they got to Braun, a guy who failed a test who was and is sure he never took performance-enhancing drugs. Braun fought back under the process, which resulted in two near-fatal blows to baseball's drug policy. 1. Some malicious and very foolish jackass, who odds are is an employee of baseball, leaked the Braun story to ESPN, immediately destroying any trust or goodwill players might have for the program. 2. The arbitrator ruled in Braun's favor, meaning the embarrassing details of how the process didn't work is now public knowledge.

Braun and MLB are considering real-world legal action. That will and should soon pass. The discovery process could be most unkind to both parties. The Glorious Guardians of the Purity of Sports, such as the New York Times sports section and the dimmer members of the U.S. Congress, will cluck disapprovingly for some time. A study committee will be appointed to recommend improvements in baseball drug testing, and its report will come out around next year's Super Bowl. By the time the Red Sox play BC down in Fort Myers, the Braun case will be news as old and forgotten as the Lindbergh kidnapping case.

That's what makes baseball unique as a business enterprise. Humiliating failures of management and horrible misjudgments (let's put franchises in Florida) have little to no impact on its bottom line. The money keeps rolling in, and if the TV dough can't compare with the NFL's, there are compensations -- like maybe owning your own network, or full parking lots 80 times a year instead of 10.

The romantic seamheads taking in the sun and watching grown men play catch in Florida and Arizona will tell you that's because baseball's timeless appeal can survive any mistreatment. They're partially right. In fact, they don't go far enough. It's my belief that its mismanagement and buffoonery are an integral, no, vital part of said timeless appeal.

It's almost a century later, and the 1919 Black Sox remain a subject of endless fascination for baseball fans. The immediate aftermath of that scandal was a quantum leap in the game's attendance and financial standing. Horrible, horrible episodes of marketing gone wrong, such as the Disco Demolition Night and Dime Beer Nights riots of the 1970s, are cherished parts of baseball lore today. Come to think of it, despite some institutional tut-tutting, most fans laughed about 'em when they happened.

Look at Bud Selig for that matter. There's a case to be made, and a strong one, that Selig has been the most successful head of the four major pro sports in the 21st century. Baseball takes hit after hit on Selig's watch, and yet its profits have moved on a nicely rising line that Apple Inc. wouldn't sneeze at. Yet Selig retains and I think carefully manages a public image as a pleasant bungler. I think Bud is well aware that a certain amount of inefficiency is essential to baseball's prosperity.

You want an image of corporate efficiency? Watch the NFL. Many people do, of course, and the image is in large part a fraud, since football is chaos. You want to have fun on a warm summer night, or on a cold night in February imagining there will be warm summer nights? Watch baseball. Many of those same football fans do that, too. Baseball is spectacular counterprogramming.

Every time baseball screws up, its followers are reassured that it's not going to change. Baseball fans like that. Hell, they're still arguing about the DH, now 40 years old. A certain amount of change is necessary for a good life. So's a certain amount of stability.

The national institution the National Pastime most closely resembles is Congress. Everybody hates and laughs at Congress. Its approval rating is about 10 percent. And this November, at least seven out of eight incumbent U.S. legislators will be re-elected, just as in every election.

Deep down, Americans of all political beliefs don't particularly want an efficient government. So they create a Congress to insure they don't get one. Deep down, Americans don't particularly want sports to be efficient, either.

Baseball caters to their desire, and does well from it.

IDMJ

2012-02-18T10:22:00.002-05:00

The title of this post was an acronym created by Boston sportswriters, I forget which one originated it, to describe pitching performances by Tim Wakefield. It stands for "I did my job," a phrase of which Wakefield was inordinately fond when he described his performances.

Wakefield did himself no favors with those words. After, say, a 6 inning, 7 hit, 3 run starting line in a 5-3 loss, it sounded and was self-centered. In those circumstances, baseball etiquette calls for a more team-oriented evaluation, something along the lines of "I could have done better and then maybe we could've won tonight.

But Wakefield was, let's say, inner-directed for much of his lengthy, honorable and very odd Red Sox tenure. He was alienated labor, a guy who felt with some justification that he was jerked around by his managers from role to role -- a utility pitcher rather than just the respected member of the rotation Wakefield thought he ought to be.

It's easy to see why Wakefield felt that way. He actually did at one point or another fill every assignment there was on the Red Sox staff, from ace starter to closer to mop-up man. This of course was due to the pitch that made Wakefield a major leaguer in the first place, the knuckleball. Knuckleball pitchers are not regular pitchers, and therefore don't get treated like regular pitchers. I'm sure that's grating on knuckleballers. On the other hand, not too many regular pitchers are out there twirling at age 44, as Wake was in 2011.

So Wakefield's reaction to his situation was to assume a limited professional code of ethics. What's the assignment? If I fulfill its requirements, I see my participation in this game as a success. Don't let that scoreboard fool you. It's significant to me that the one time Wakefield actively pursued heroic fame, his quest for his 200th win last year, was a disaster for all concerned, especially him.

If this sounds like criticism, keep reading, because the flip side of Wakefield's code was the interesting part. It was revealed in the midst of team catastrophe, about 10 minutes after the end of Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series.

Wakefield had given up the game-ending homer to Aaron Boone. Nobody then, and nobody now thought or thinks that he was in any way to blame for the agonizing defeat. Knuckleballs occasionally don't knuckle, and batters hit them very far. A homer off a knuckler is not a failure, it's a phenomenon of nature, like rainouts.

It was my assignment for the Herald to write about Wakefield. As hordes of reporters waited to bay Grady Little up a tree, Wake was the first Sox to enter the locker room. He stood and took complete responsibility for the loss. He had given up the Boone homer. It was his fault. He HADN'T done his job.

I seldom if ever liked an athlete better than I liked Wakefield that late, late night. His self-evaluations weren't just selfish defense mechanisms. They were a professional code of ethics, the code of the honest mercenary. If that code let him off the hook for past failures, he was letting it impale him horribly for this one.

That code deserves more credit than it gets in sports. I mean, does anyone think lighting technicians blame themselves when the Broadway musical that hired them folds after four show? Why should jocks feel differently?

Do your job. Isn't there some football coach who says that a lot?