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Lunacy of college sports

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This is completely crazy, not to mention abusive. A ninth-grader is committing to a college because of a soccer scholarship. It verges on the immorality of arranged child marriages: this kid spent almost every evening in eighth grade talking to coaches instead of doing homework (or having fun!).  The whole story is worth a read, as it shows how this madness isn’t even good for soccer itself, never mind the players.

No fourteen-year-old (putting aside prodigies who have already blown away their high school courses) can possibly know what college, or what kind of college, will be the best fit for her four-years-older and -more-experienced self.  Period. What if she decides she wants to be an engineer and CalTech starts to look attractive, or a singer and discovers Berklee, or for that matter decides rugby is more fun than soccer? She can ditch the UTA scholarship and go elsewhere, but will she even explore those things if she’s spending her whole high school career assuming her die is cast, taking her commitment seriously, and living on a playing field?  What if she gets hurt in her senior year and didn’t get the GPA that would put her on a good career track that uses the inside of her head?

This industry is deeply and pervasively sick.  The presidents — yes, and AD’s -who allow it to go on as it is are simply contemptible and cowardly. And Ms. Berg’s parents could spend some quality time thinking about their responsibilities, too.

Olympics grinch

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There’s plenty to not like about how the Olympics have evolved: nationalism, commercialization, appropriation by vile host regimes…and now we’re going to be biting our fingernails right through February waiting for a terrorist outrage, or a Russian security outrage, or both.  They have become a hot mess, but fortunately that apostle of cool, tasteful elegance in dress, Ralph Lauren, designed the US team uniforms: understated, gracious, and confident, that’s us. Continue Reading…

How low can we go?

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Let’s just check the scoreboard here:

Cal football and men’s basketball have the lowest graduation rates of any FBS school.  Not PAC12, FBS: that’s national, baby!  The football team is 1-10 and a 31-1/2 pt underdog for Saturday’s Big Game; MBB is not ranked in either poll for this year.  The campus is on the hook for a third-of-a-billion dollar loan for a coaching office palace/booster party venue/conditioning center: losing programs don’t sell tickets.  The program is supposed to break even, but loses $7 to $10m per year, year after year.  One of the football players sent a teammate to the hospital a couple of weeks ago in a locker-room fight.

You might think our Intercollegiate Athletics Program, who get to sell the Cal logo for chotchkes and sweatshirts, has some kind of pervasive management problem, but you might be surprised to learn that they seem to have an even more serious morality problem. This billboard is glowing above our local freeway only a few miles from campus.  The pic is fuzzy, taken with a cell phone; if you can’t read the text, it says “we will sell drugs to our students, and everyone else, if there’s money in it for sports.” Mark says “Alcohol is not just a drug, but the archetypal drug: the drug most widely used and the drug that causes the most addiction, disease, and violence.” We have a real student drinking problem at Cal, and it seems to be getting worse.

Cal and Coors BillboardThe Associate Vice Chancellor, to whom an inquiry from one of our profs was bucked by the Chancellor, assures us

The Intercollegiate Athletics program has a master agreement to sell advertising and promotional space using Cal assets with a number of vendors.  Part of the overarching agreement includes a contract with Coors/Miller.

I understand your concerns, and will be talking with the vice chancellor of administration to discuss the alcohol ads and to explore ways to ensure that future promotions are aligned with the core values of Berkeley and our brand.

Discuss?  Explore ways to insure?  Am I missing something here; can this discussion take more than thirty seconds?

Which cigarette brand do we think will win the bidding to put a Cal logo on their packs?

The Tragedy of Bill Buckner

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In Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, Dr. Watson warns Sherlock Holmes that a single high profile mistake will lead to the Great Detective’s “honoured career ending in irreparable failure and disgrace”. This is one of most terrible potential costs of fame: One misstep can define how you are remembered. It happened to Senator Ed Muskie, it happened to Admiral James Stockdale, and it happened to a fine baseball player 27 years ago today, when he committed the most famous error in the history of the World Series.

Even though he never played for my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates, I followed Bill Buckner’s career because of a chance encounter. My dad took a business trip to Cincinnati, and my older brother and I got to go with him. Ken and I walked down to Riverfront stadium, bought two cheap tickets and sat down to watch the hometown Reds play the visiting Chicago Cubs. The Reds, who were very good that year, pounded the Cubs into the ground right up to the moment that a torrential downpour began.

It rained very hard for a very long time, and the game seemed in the bag for the Reds, so almost all the fans left. After the deluge finally abated, my brother and I moved to the much-desired but now vacated seats directly behind the dugout. As the ground crews pulled away the sodden tarp and began to prepare the field for a resumption of play, up popped Buckner (he played for the Cubs then) to chat with the few remaining people in the stands. It was a thrill for a teenage baseball fan, as was the post-rain delay part of the game during which the Cubs pulled off an epic comeback and won after being behind 7-0.

Buckner had a hit that game, one of over 2700 he would garner in his career. Hitting a baseball thrown by a major league pitcher is one of the hardest things to do in professional sports, so much so that a player who can do it 3 times out of 10 is a star. Buckner hit over .300 in seven seasons and had a .289 batting average over his 22 years in the majors. Early in his career, before ankle injuries slowed him down, he was also an accomplished base stealer. He was not quite a Hall of Fame-level player but he was certainly among the best batsmen of the 1970s and ought to be remembered as such.

But of course Buckner isn’t remembered as such, because he booted a critical ball hit in the World Series when he was playing first base for the Red Sox. That manager John McNamara should probably have made a defensive substitution for Buckner at that point in the game didn’t matter to angry Boston fans. That other Boston players made critical mistakes in the same game and in the ensuing Game 7 didn’t seem to matter either. That Buckner had helped Boston win many games that season which got them into the playoffs in the first place was also viewed as irrelevant. Many Red Sox aficionados pinned the blame for the painful World Series loss uniquely on him.

He and his family were mistreated by much of the press and the public. Cruel jokes abounded (“Did you hear that Buckner tried to kill himself by jumping in front of a bus? It went between his legs.”). He was traded away by Boston’s management after the season ended. When he was traded back to Boston later, he was booed when he walked onto the Fenway Park field.

This ESPN story about Buckner and his family describes what they went through after the 1986 World Series. It clearly took a long time, but it’s good to see that Buckner was eventually able to come to peace with everything, indeed even to find humor in it. That may be as much a credit to him as are his many fine years as a top baseball player.

Stewardship

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Really smart students are sort of a dime a dozen at my school; students who can finish in three years and get into graduate school, not so many.  This guy obviously has some real chops; too bad for me he was in such a hurry and didn’t have time to take any of my courses!  He has a really promising career in front of him; if it unfolds as it appears it will, it will be good for my health and yours down the line.

Unclear if that career will be as long as we might hope, though; the incredibly cool software he will code  after he’s, say, 40 may be left for someone else to do, or not done at all. See, to the best of my knowledge, our smart students do their thinking and like that with their physical brains, Brazinski too.  For some reason, Cal’s idea of how to take care of that particular device is to send it to collide with really big guys, again and again, to entertain the rest of us and pay for our fancy new stadium and coaching office palace.

Maybe that’s efficient use of a class-A brain; Mark weighs 305 lbs and will surely give us some Really Great Hits this season - the kind you can hear over the crowd and the announcers on TV - to go with all the one’s he’s taking and dishing up in practice. In the seven minutes of play he will probably get (that’s the average playing time of a member of our football squad), should be at least two or three of those!  As between doing some wonky computer stuff for a few decades, and steering an offensive lineman into collisions for a couple of years, don’t the fundamental values of a university clearly favor the latter way to use up a good brain?

The Leaking America’s Cup

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Hey, the famous America’s Cup Yacht Races are happening right now in San Francisco Bay!  Hey, really, is that exciting or what; you can watch this immortal series, cheer for your favorite boats, see thrilling…are you listening to me?  Is anyone watching?

What a bust.  The Chronicle loyally slips an annoying page-and-a-half sheet about it over the front page every day, that I have to peel off and discard.  I have not heard a word of conversation about it anywhere and I don’t know anyone who has a clue who’s winning.  Or knows who’s even racing except Larry Ellison, whose brainchild this stinker was and who is spending $80m to put two of the boats in the water.  Fifteen teams have shrunk to four, and the hopes of the city making money have evaporated.

What happened here is that Ellison (and the whole arrangement, including the design of the boats that would compete, is his call) completely misunderstood what’s important about the sport, and what’s not.  What he thought was important, and would gin up public engagement with the sport, was going fast, so the boats, if you can call them that, are enormously expensive catamarans with rigid airfoil sails and hydrofoils that can lift the hulls out of the water.  Wow, they really go fast! But they don’t have any of the tradition of real sailing; no spinnakers or even Genoa jibs (at least not in any pictures I’ve seen yet) to balloon out on downwind legs and change at the turn, practically no rigging, no worrying about luffing. Most important, they have nothing to do with what constitutes sailing for people who sail, whether dinghies or ocean racers.  They are capable of nothing except course racing: they have no cabins, you can’t sail them to anywhere or take your friends out for a weekend trip, and  they are extremely dangerous in unprotected waters (trimarans and catamarans have, last time I talked to a sailor, a very bad record of leaving port and not coming home).  One of these even killed someone right on the bay earlier this summer.

But they go really fast.  Here is where Ellison got it wrong, because extremely fast is what power hydroplanes do even better, and make more noise doing it - got a lot of friends who follow that sport?  Losing the culture, aesthetics, and spirit of yachting to just go fast is sort of like trying to make music better by playing it louder with a bigger amp, or “improving marksmanship” by putting lots of processing power into the rifle. Ellison browbeat and bullied everyone into playing a game by rules amusing to him, and in the end almost nobody came, nobody is watching, and nobody cares.

 

Class acts all around

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Mariano Rivera, the long-time lights-out Yankee closer is retiring this year.   The sport agreed to retire Jackie Robinson’s number 42 from all teams, and Rivera is appropriately the last player to have it.  I’m properly skeptical of sports journalism regarding the personalities of players, having read Ring Lardner’s Champion in youth (for example) but as far as I can tell what you hear about Rivera is what you get, a real gentleman on and off the field, awesomely good at what he does, confident in his skills and not a tidge arrogant or jerky. Class act all the way.

Probably no recent ballplayer has administered more heartbreak and frustration to the Red Sox (maybe Dennis Eckersley). Before tonight’s game, the last between the rivals for the season, the Sox put on a ‘time’ for Rivera with gifts, speeches, and applause.  Another class act, what sports is supposed to be about but too often lacks.  Thanks, Mo, for the great ball, and thanks, Sox, for saying goodbye so graciously.

 

One of Richard Nixon’s Many Faults

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Megan McArdle related a funny Richard Nixon story last week, concerning his creation of a White House Palace Guard. The palace guard episode is silly at any level and also reveals something of Nixon’s character. Let me start off your August weekend with a similar anecdote.

BowlingIf you tunnel deep down under The West Wing, you will find a maze of poorly lit, unpainted hallways with exposed pipes and wires (no OSHA rules apply underneath The White House, apparently). If you stumble about the labyrinth for awhile you will come to a nondescript door that, quite surprisingly, opens onto a two-lane bowling alley which was built for President Truman.

Here I am showing fantastic form therein. I bowled 300. It took me about 50 frames, but I did it. I can’t bowl at all really. But I am very good at looking like I know what I am doing when in fact I don’t — an essential Washington D.C. survival skill.

Anyhoo, almost every President since Truman has gone down at least once to the White House bowling alley and posed for a photo, bowling ball in hand. Most never return. But Richard Nixon actually liked to bowl and did so frequently. Study his left foot in the photo below and ask yourself: “Was there anything at which this guy wouldn’t cheat?”

Baseball Trivia Quiz

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While cleaning out the garage, I found some Major League Baseball trivia books from which I adapt the following quiz. Google not and see how many of these you can get right:

1. No player has hit .400 since major league baseball extended the length of the season from 154 to 162 games. Who was the last player to hit .400 over 154 games?

2. On the final day of the 1910 season, Cleveland’s Nap Lajoie was in second place in the American League batting race. The St. Louis Browns gave him some help by placing their fielders in the wrong positions and “losing fly balls in the sun”. LaJoie benefited with 8 “hits” in the doubleheader. The Browns assisted Lajoie because everybody hated the guy who was leading the batting race. Who was he?

3. Lajoie had the highest batting average in the league that year, but did not win the batting title. Why not?

4. The legendary Bob Feller pitched his first no hitter in 1940. What was his ERA at the end of the game?

5. Hitting for the cycle is an extremely rare feat and only one player in history accomplished it three times across two leagues. Who was he? Hint: Think of a word people might use for an infant, and, the father of the Munster family.

6. In 1973, Yankee Ron Blomberg drew a bases-loaded walk off of Luis Tiant and thereby made baseball history. How?

7. In 1979, Atlanta Braves pitcher Phil Niekro led the league in wins with 21. Who led the league in losses?

8. Los Angeles was a hitter’s nightmare in the early 1960s. Don Drysdale won the Cy Young Award in 1962 and his teammate Sandy Koufax won in 1963 and again in 1965 and 1966. What L.A. pitcher won in 1964?

9. Bob Gibson had perhaps the most dominant performance by a pitcher in world series history in 1967, when he pitched three complete game victories, giving up only 3 runs in total and netting 26 strikeouts. Yet he only won 13 games during the 1967 season. Why?

10. Knuckleballer Ed Rommel once gave up 29 hits in a game but won anyway, but if he is remembered at all it is because of something he introduced to baseball after his playing days ended. What was it?

Answers after the jump Continue Reading…