Fungible Convictions

From a Post article about Alex Rodriguez’s career after the divorce mess:

“Wife-beating would hurt him, underage girls would hurt him, a gay lover would hurt him, but run-of-the-mill affairs – that’s a non-issue in American life,” said branding expert Howard Bragman, head of the public-relations agency Fifteen Minutes.

RJ says:

Did you see the Tampa Bay game with all the fighting? And the “fight” that Orsillo and Remy had in the booth? Hands down my favorite moment of the season thus far.

I did, and I didn’t make it to the bathroom in time. I’m bummed that their “fight” isn’t up on Youtube yet, but in looking for it I found this gem of Remy and Orsillo being locked out of Jacobs Field—the best part is towards the end when Manny drives up, walks in, and doesn’t bother to vouch for them.

From Rob Iracane:

Folks, the day Joe Morgan apologizes is the day Joe Morgan admits he’s wrong. That would require him to actually have a brain that processes binary information and produce an reasonable opinion. Not happening. It’s just not consistent with his history of foibles.

Link: “Joe Morgan Besmirches Ernie Banks, Is Completely Wrong”

Okay, so it’s the day after Jerry Remy Day, held at Fenway yesterday to honor twenty years of the former Sox infielder’s gig as the Sox television color commentator. Despite a smattering of fans who are tired of him–especially of his side job as official shill–most people love him. How could you not after watching this:

As someone who probably watches—between local coverage and ESPN Wednesday and Sunday games—over 200 games a year, I’d put Remy up as one of the best color commentators I’ve ever heard. John Lowenstein, from my first hometown team the Orioles, was up there. (Lowenstein once yelled “Holy mud!” after a great defensive play, and I’ve been chuckling about it ever since. He’s also famous as a player for faking being paralyzed after sliding hard into second, being carried off on a stretcher, and then, just before the medics got him to the dugout, jumping up to pump his fists in the air.) But the vast majority of color guys are terrible. Joe Morgan needs to be put out of his own misery. Ron Santo of the Cubs is cringe-worthy on an every-inning basis. Former players have such a tough time making the transition into entertaining, intelligent commentators.

What really sets Remy apart, besides his good humor, is how he understands the nature of the game better than anyone else on TV. Or at least one aspect that intrigues me as much as it intrigued Billy Bean and Theo Epstein: the fact that baseball is still decades behind other sports on employing meaningful statistics to evaluate its talent.

Remy brought up something during last night’s game, though the quote escapes me, that there’s currently no way to measure how—or whether—a single batter can carry his team. This question could be phrased this way: Which batters bat better when their teammates are struggling, and how could this be measured and put to use to improve a team, to better identify underrated players?

An easy example: a player would be worth a few $100k more if it could be proved that he’s a better batter when his teammates are struggling. We already have stats for “clutch” batters: batting average with runners in scoring position; runs batted in; batting average with two outs; and the closest to what I’m talking about: batting in late-inning pressure situations. But, as Remy talked about last night, it’s assumed in traditional baseball statistics that a single batter cannot have a meaningful effect on the performance of other batters. But what if we tested that? What if it turns out a .250 batter gets an unusual number of his one-for-four hits in close games, or when his team hasn’t scored yet, or in any other situation where a runner is desperately needed? How do we track the rally-starters?

Remy got me thinking about this last night, not in any of these terms, but in something much more straightforward: he noted a couple of Red Sox batters who seemed to pick one another up. (“Picking up” in baseball usually refers to batting in a guy on second or third, but not in this case.) What he meant was that some players seem to have a knack for snapping teammates out of slumps. From a rational point of view, that would be impossible. The guy at the plate can’t do anything for the guy on deck, except maybe if he gets on base and is a threat to steal. But it’s possible that statistics might prove it to be true: we define a rally as a string of hits, but a rally starts with one hit, and it just may be that some players’ first hits are more valuable than others. That would be a key stat to identify, or for an agent to push, or for an aging pinch-hitter to bring up just before the trade deadline.

So in a sport where “Ninety percent of the game is half mental,” might it be possible to identify players whose karma is worth more than others’?

Anyway.

Happy 20th anniversary, Remy.

The Gawker empire’d sports blog Deadspin today announced its ESPN Accountability Record, a place to catalog all the corrections submitted by ESPN viewers and ESPN.com users. It comes as a welcome rebuke of ESPN’s own Corrections Page:

The site itself has been updated once in the last three weeks, and that’s just with one mistake, a slip that claimed Bradley University was in Peoria, Ind. rather than Peoria, Ill. And that’s it. We’re not saying ESPN is inherently prone to errors, but jeez, with all those stations, and all those Web pages, and all those radio stations … that’s the only one? Really? They do know Emmitt Smith still works there, right?

Anyway, we thought maybe we could help them out. Therefore, we heretofore introduce the ESPN Accountability Record, in which we invite all Deadspin readers to email us any error they find on any ESPN radio affiliate, network or Web page. We will run a complete list once a week and put together our own compilation.

Deadspin has done a remarkable job covering sports news since its launch in the fall of ’05. ESPN, over the same period, seems to be turning into the Howard Hughes of corporations: wildly successful and increasingly paranoid. Deadspin has shown that ESPN can’t provide straight answers to its viewers or its own employees on issues like the sexual misconduct of its broadcasting personalities or its trouble retaining minority employees. And then there’s the news that ESPN is cutting salaries and skimping on the perks that made Bristol a place young people wanted to work, and I’m left with the impression that ESPN’s only remaining bone fide—its “Worldwide Leader in Sports” status—could be whittled away too, by efforts like the Accountability Record.

I must admit, I’m in that large chunk of the American public that pays absolutely no attention to soccer but is then quadrennially transfixed by the World Cup. I’ve never heard an argument as to why Americans watch the World Cup—we do, in numbers that correlate in no way to our disinterest the forty-seven other months. But I’d like to propose one: Americans pay attention to soccer during the World Cup because it’s the only chance we have to watch the world’s best players.

First, let me dispose of the oft-proposed claim that Americans don’t watch soccer because “we didn’t invent it.” Bollocks! Americans invented only one of its major sports: basketball. Hockey was imported–primarily by Dutch, English, and French settlers as a variation of land-based games, then combined with native North American games. Baseball was imported—it’s the evolution of the British game rounders. Football was imported—it’s the direct descendent of British rugby. Three sports, all with strong British roots. And guess what: modern soccer is British too. So let’s stop repeating this “we didn’t invent it, so we don’t watch it” junk, because we Americans didn’t invent any of our sports but basketball.

Then why don’t we care much for soccer?

In the four major North American sports—baseball, football, basketball, and hockey—Americans have been able to watch, for the entirety of those sports’ professional existence, the very best players in the world. Whether they’re named Ruth, Ichiro, Elway, Singletary, Jordan, Nowitzki, Orr, or Hasek, we’ve always had sports’ best players living and playing in our cities, covered daily in our newspapers, and talked about nightly on our radios and televisions. Part of Americans’ passion for sports is knowing we’re witnessing the world’s very best. The World Series may only feature teams from one country (or, in ’91 and ’92, two), but there’s no doubt that the winning team is probably the best team in the world. The Stanley Cup—sports greatest trophy—may feature the names of superstars from dozens of countries, but those names were on the jerseys of teams in places like Toronto, Edmonton, Boston, Tampa Bay, and Detroit.

In short, Americans expect to see the best.

But what about soccer? Where are the best, most entertaining, most highly-respected, most highly-compensated players? Europe. Not America. They’re not playing for our cities or doing charity work for our hospitals; we don’t recognize their faces. Career sports writers hear “Ronaldinho,” and the name of the world’s greatest player means nothing to them.

The World Cup comes along, though, and suddenly Americans have easy, near-constant TV access to the world’s greatest playing one of the world’s most beautiful games. And we watch, at least for that month. Because despite the personalities’ not being local, despite our unfamiliarity, depsite “not inventing it here,” Americans have respect for seeing the best at their best. That’s what we expect to see in sports; that’s what we each grew up with. It’s something that makes us different than, say, an Israeli who obsesses over Arsenal or an Indian who makes a pilgrimage to see AC Milan. European (or perhaps South American) soccer is the non-North American’s only access to the best in a sport that he himself knows or plays.

But until Ronaldinho, Beckham, and Valderrama start barnstorming stadiums from New York to L.A., we Americans are not going to know to care.

There is no man in baseball more honorable than Jackie Robinson, and there’s no use of a particular player that makes me more uncomfortable. Jackie Robinson is too good for baseball.

Today, April 15, marks the fifty-ninth anniversary of Robinson’s breaking baseball’s color barrier. With an on-field aggression overshadowed only by his remarkable forebearance, Robinson could have been said to be a martyr—if he had played a day and gone away. But he played well. He joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 in his prime, at age 28, and earned Rookie of the Year. He was MVP and batting champion in 1949. He led the Dodgers to six pennants. He batted .311 for his career. And, for good measure, he stole home 19 times, a mark since unsurpassed.

But for one confrontation with a bigotted umpire, Jackie Robinson resisted racism with necessary poise. During World War II, he fought in a segregated battalion. He was denied entry at first to officers training but persevered and gained admittance. A decade before Rosa Parks’ resistance, Robinson refused to sit at the back of a Texas bus and was nearly discharged from the Army for insubordination. He took the kind of abuse that Americans pretended was buried at Antietam and Gettysburg, and he took it with grace. He is exactly the kind of man Major League Baseball should hold up, should shine full light upon so that generations of young Americans can see that character triumphs over prejudice.

But the size of Jackie Robinson’s character is such that baseball can, and does, hide behind it. It wasn’t some abstract national weakness that kept blacks out of baseball for fifty seven years. It was an agreement of team owners, who, fearful of the advantage any one team would have by hiring black talent, plotted against, and repeatedly thwarted, the entrance of any Negro Leaguer. Bold but self-interested owner Branch Rickey had to lie to his own scouts working the Negro League teams, had to tell the scouts that he was forming his own blacks-only league, just to get a look at Robinson without arousing supsicion.

Baseball forgets this.

In the pre-game canned-elegy today at Fenway Park, Robinson was remembered as someone who struck down racism, all racism, just by stepping on the field. “He opened doors for countless players after him” was a repeated line. True enough. Hall of Famers like Roy Campenella soon joined the Majors and thrived.

But many other doors remained closed. It would be twenty-seven years before baseball hired its first black manager; ironically, Jackie Robinson, who died before Frank Robinson was hired to manage the Cleveland Indians in 1974, desperately wanted to manage but was denied the opportunity. The Cincinatti Reds—baseball’s oldest team—waited until opening day 1954 to field its first black players, Chuck Harmon and Nino Escalera. And this year, in a league of thirty teams, there is only one black general manager, Ken Williams of the defending champion Chicago White Sox.

Major League Baseball prides itself on its appeal across cultures, and the recent MLB-sponsored World Baseball Classic bears this out. But baseball returns to its fight against white/black racism and returns to Jackie Robinson in 1947 and fetes the victories—all while diverting attention from contemporary failures of equal stature.

Americans sports in general have a terrible record when it comes to acknowledging the existence of homosexuality, for example. Only two baseball players—Billy Bean and Glenn Burke, who died of AIDS in 1995—have ever gone public with their homosexuality. I should say, I don’t feel publicly-fought social battles over sex and sexuality have a place in sports. But for baseball to hold itself up as the stage upon which social advancements play out—it’s nothing if not disingenuous.

And there is the issue of the day: steroids. The owners knew. The managers knew. The players knew. While Jackie Robinson played in an unadulterated era, one in which the only available chemicals were the kind that gave you hangovers, for the last ten years, as fans celebrated the retirement of Robinson’s number 42, players were lying to fans, lying to their employers (who knew anyway, and then lied to the fans with their silence), and encouraging each other to cheat as well.

Baseball didn’t have clear rules against steroids. It had no testing policy, in fact, until the BALCO story broke. So player and fan reactions are necessarily complicated: we as fans paid to see home runs, the thought goes, and the players delivered, using means that weren’t proscribed.

But the steroids issue is why Robinson’s memory is so dangerous.

If baseball held up as its idols only players like Ruth and Mantle—let alone talented thugs like Cobb and Rose—then what would steroids matter? It would be another chip in the bargain. We pay; they entertain. But Robinson is so flawless, so admirable, and so exalted by the game that the game obliges itself to be exalted too. To be above pettiness. To be above greed. To act with honor, as Robinson did.

To love what Jackie Robinson did is to believe in a game that does represent our national character. As such, owners and players are our trustees. A game marred by those trustees in persistent racism, intolerance, and, now through steroids, dishonesty—this is an afront to the memory we honor this day.

April 15, 2006, was the first Jackie Robinson Day, and it was marked at all fifteen stadiums with an idealized picture of baseball and its role in America. Every April 15, then, baseball should do the same, but not with a picture—with a mirror.