The burden of evidence

Often, the lack of definitive evidence is frustrating.  What really happened with OJ?  There is evidence, but nothing conclusive; a criminal jury found him not guilty, a civil trial convicted him.  What really happened?  We’ll probably never know.

But sometimes having definitive evidence is a problem.  Take the case of Donald Sterling.  His Neanderthal views on race relations were well known and documented at the time he bought the Clippers and in the three decades since.  If proof was needed to show these just weren't rumors, in 2003 he was sued by Los Angeles for racially discriminatory policies, in 2006 he was sued by the US Department of Justice on similar charges, and in 2009 he was sued by respected former NBA player Elgin Baylor alleging race and age discrimination.

So the bottom line is that Adam Silver should have known Donald Sterling was a racist, Doc Rivers and Chris Paul should have known he was a racist, LeBron James should have known he was a racist, and all the other owners in the NBA should have known.  Yet, no one had a problem with there being an owner in a league whose workforce is primarily African-American having such a reputation when it came to race relations.

But then there was definitive proof.  His mistress secretly taped a conversation he had with her in which Sterling blatantly expressed some of his feelings.  Suddenly, NBA Commissioner Silver had a problem with Sterling being an owner, Clipper players were threatening to boycott the playoffs, and he was summarily stripped of ownership without any due process.  Why the change?  People could actually hear Sterling’s beliefs coming out of his own mouth.

A similar situation arose more recently with Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice.  In February video surfaced of Rice dragging his unconscious fiancée out of a hotel elevator after he presumably rendered her unconscious.  NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell caused an outrage when he suspended Rice for only two games (by comparison, Ben Rothlisberger was suspended for four games when he was merely accused of abusive behavior towards women).

Why such an uproar?  Once again, the reaction is due (in part) to the presence of irrefutable evidence that shocks the consciousness.  It is one thing to hear about allegations that a professional athlete struck a female companion, but it is another to see him carry her limp body out of an elevator.  It appears Rice will not be prosecuted, and the victim subsequently married him so one assumes she forgave him.  But the general public can’t, largely because of the evidence of their eyes.

George Will once mused that the reason conservatives had a difficult time getting liberals to be shocked by rap lyrics is that the lyrics were so offensive that they couldn’t be quoted verbatim in “family” newspapers and magazines, leaving those who objected with the only recourse of using euphemisms that had no shock value.  It is one thing to defend the first amendment in the abstract, another when confronted with explicit song lyrics about what a gentleman is planning to do with his lady friend when they share some alone time.

Plaintiff’s attorneys have long known the power of emotional evidence.  Juries have awarded damages to supposed victims in mass tort liability cases when there was no scientific proof of any link between the chemical a plant released and birth defects.  Charlie Chaplin was found guilty in a paternity suit when blood testing proved he was not the father but the judge ruled the jury could look at the baby and find him guilty if they thought the baby looked like the alleged father, blood test be damned.

In some cases having direct evidence can be as confusing as having too little evidence.  All we can do is quote Bob Seger; wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.

Baseball: How to stop Tommy John surgeries and beat the shift

Whenever there is a discussion of who should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame, I always argue for Tommy John.  I mean, not only did he win 288 games and finish in the top five of Cy Young voting three times, but he applied his name to the most famous medical procedure outside of the Heimlich.  Did anyone name a surgical procedure after Frank Thomas?

The major leagues have seen a rash of Tommy John surgeries this season, with a chance that the record of 36 in 2012 might be broken.  One not-quite victim is Cy Young/Rookie of the Year candidate Masahiro Tanaka, who is resting his arm in hopes of avoiding Tommy John surgery (and apologizing profusely to Yankee fans; forgive him, he hasn't been in New York that long).  At this point a lot of major league coaches, managers and scouts would tell him to just get the surgery.  It’s almost as if every 16 year old kid who wants to be a pitcher is contemplating Tommy John surgery as a preventative measure.

Another Japanese pitcher, Yu Darvish, has a suggestion: America should adopt the Japanese practice of a six man rotation.  There is only one problem with this strategy.  Most teams don’t have three good starters, much less six.  Promoting what is now a middle-inning mop-up man to be the sixth starter is nothing but a recipe for higher batting averages and more scoring.

But if you can’t increase the time between starts, maybe you can decrease the innings pitched per start.  We already have relief “closers” who never pitch more than one inning, preferably to only three batters.  In the past when pitchers like Kerry Woods came up, the debate would rage whether he should be a starter or a closer. I thought the answer was obvious; if he’s a good pitcher, do you want him pitching six innings every five games or one inning every three or four games?  If he’s good, you want more innings.

But more innings leads to injuries and the scalpel.  But what if we chucked the whole idea of starting pitchers?  Treat you pitching staff as a collection of middle relievers.  Have a starter go no more than three innings, then someone else pitch the next two, then maybe someone pitch two more, then a set-up man in the eighth and the closer in the ninth.  Rotate slots around based on right/left match-ups, differences in pitching styles, have mediocre pitchers come in for the bottom of the line-up then a better pitcher the next inning. 

The quality start is a dying statistic.  The years of Grover Alexander throwing 16 shutouts in a season are long gone.  Managers are now under pressure to pull a pitcher throwing a no-hitter if his pitch count hits 100.  Why push it?  Don’t expect more than three innings from your starter, four tops.  Don’t expect more than two innings from any middle-reliever.  Finish off with your closer even if you’re down by two runs.

It would take some time to get the timing right, to see how many games in a row you could expect a pitcher to go three innings, or how soon after pitching two innings three days in a row could you expect a man to come back.  You would lose some flexibility; you couldn't just pull someone in the middle of a bad inning without throwing off the “rotation.”  But you would gain some flexibility too; instead of saving your closer for the ninth when the seventh, eighth and ninth hitters are up, you could use him when there was two on and one out in the seventh and the heart of the order was on deck.

It’ll never happen.  Bullpen by committee is one thing, but rotation by committee?  But with good starters being harder to find, maybe the answer is to stop looking.

On another baseball subject, we have an irresistible force approaching an immovable object.  Last week pitcher Colby Lewis complained when batter Colby Rasmus, a .223 hitter, bunted against the shift that the Rangers had deployed.  Lewis claimed that Rasmus was just trying to pad his batting average (yeah, because he’s so close to the batting title at .223).  So basically he’s saying hitters should be forced to hit into shifts.

But this week SI’s Tom Verducci suggests that maybe it is time for baseball to consider making the shift illegal.  It simply isn't fair to left handed power hitters to expect them to bunt down to third.  So basically he’s saying batters should never be forced to hit into shifts.

When ESPN ran a poll asking if people had a problem with Rasmus bunting against the shift with his team up by two runs in the 5^th inning, a whopping 97% responded “No” (the smidgen of yes votes must have come from Texas).  If only voting in political elections was this sane.  In some cases, a well-placed bunt against an extreme shift could almost be stretched into a double (assuming the batter has any speed, which is probably a bad assumption).  Ted Williams refused to hit to left field against the shift, but may I suggest that Colby Rasmus is NOT Ted Williams. 

Baseball, most sports actually, are about adjustments.  Rasmus hits a lot of singles to right field.  The other teams employ a shift and his average falls.  He starts bunting to third base, and his average goes up.  Teams stop employing a shift.  The circle of life is complete.

I am sick of hearing about baseball’s unwritten rules.  It used to be an unwritten rule that if you hung a curve ball and the batter hit a home run, you hit the next batter in the ribs with a fastball.  You screw up, you risk injuring someone else.  Baseball’s unwritten rulebook should be thrown out.

As was said in the film Bull Durham, baseball is a simple game; you throw the ball, they hit the ball, and you catch the ball.  There is no need to complicate it by creating rules for illegal defenses or unwritten requirements that players not try to exploit their opponent’s weaknesses.  Just play the game.  Please.

Emmy nominations redux

Everything I am about to say I said in a previous post, but it bears repeating, especially as the Emmy nominations are out and have confirmed my worst fears.  There is no one minding the store.

How messed up are the Emmys?  The actress from Orange is the New Black who got a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Drama is nominated for an Emmy for Best Actress in a Comedy (another actress from the show was nominated for an Image award in the Mini-series/Movie category).  Two shows, Mad Men and Downton Abbey, are nominated for Best Drama even though both produced fewer episodes than Fargo and American Horror Story: Coven which are nominated for Best Mini-Series.  A member of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players is nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award.  Actors in True Detective are nominated for Best Actor in a Drama even though the show will be completely different next season, making it a mini-series and not a series.

This is what happens when you let people choose the category the want to compete in, mainly because there are no established standards.  In response to claims of “category fraud” the Chairman of the TV Academy, Bruce Rosenblum, said that the academy “should look at” some of the rules.  Saying a committee should be formed to look into something is one of the oldest ways to avoid doing anything.

Under the current set-up, no broadcast series producing 22 episodes a year will ever again be nominated for Best Drama when it has to compete with cable shows producing at most 13 and perhaps no more than 6 episodes (maybe one day Sherlock will snag a nomination with three episodes).  The only answer would be a return of the Cable Ace awards, giving out one set of awards for cable shows and another for broadcast.

Defining a series as having a minimum number of episodes is easy (they won’t do it, but it would be easy).  

Differentiating comedy and drama is harder.  Northern Exposure won the Emmy for Best Drama and when picking up the award the producers admitted it was actually a comedy.  Harry Morgan opined that he felt MASH was at a disadvantage in the comedy categories because so many of its episodes were serious (given it is one of the most nominated shows ever, one could disagree).  Maybe the only solution is to leave it up to judges to decide if they thought it was comedy or drama (it would be embarrassing if a comedy received a nomination in the Drama category simply by not being funny).

I could say “There are no easy answers” but the fact is there are.  A series has a minimum of 13 episodes per season.  A mini-series cannot have the same characters and cast two seasons in a row.  Actors under contract cannot be considered “guest stars.”  Judges in the comedy category should place an emphasis on how funny the show or performance was.

Of course this won’t happen, because producers like the current format.  That’s why it evolved the way it did.  The good news is that we’re talking about television industry awards, not world peace.

Is Winning Necessary?

In the world of sporting events, the goal is almost always to win.  A tie is like kissing your sister, as the saying goes.  At the end of a season, there is one team celebrating and everyone else says, “Wait ‘til next year!”

But does that have to be the case? I ask this because of a couple of recent comments made on ESPN.  One involved the definition of “success” regarding the United States and the World Cup.  In looking to the future of US involvement, one persistent question has been how long until the United States has a credible chance of actually winning the Cup, instead of losing or tying most of our games.  Some thought we were decades away, some thought we had a shot at winning in 2018.  But one person asked whether it was necessary for the US to threaten to win in order to maintain American interest in soccer.  Would it be enough to continue to improve at “the beautiful game” while allowing European and South American countries to dominate the knockout rounds.

The second comment was one involving the Oakland Athletics, possessors of the best record in the American League.  Someone, before they traded for All-Star pitcher Jeff Samardzija, asked if this was finally going to be the year when Moneyball produced a World Series championship, or would the A’s fail again as usual.

Given that the entire point of Moneyball was that trying to buy a championship would cost you a lot of money and not guarantee success, the question is absurd.  Moneyball is a more sophisticated version of what was practiced by Minnesota Twins owner Calvin Griffith in the 1970’s, namely keeping the payroll just large enough to be credible and rely on the visiting team’s stars to draw attendance.  Only the Yankees can afford to play for a World Series title every year; if the A’s tried they’d go bankrupt quickly.  Moneyball means you marshal your resources and find efficiencies to exploit over 162 games, and then cross your fingers in the post season.

The A’s have had bad breaks in the post season, literally.  In 2001 their cleanup hitter, Jermaine Dye, broke his leg in game four of the five game playoff series with the Yankees.  The game before that Derek Jeter had thwarted Jeremy Giambi’s attempt to score on the freakiest play in the history of baseball.  The result was the Yankees came back from losing the first two games to take the series.  Other A’s playoff teams have suffered similar fates.

The architect of Moneyball, Billy Beane, has famously said, “My S#!t doesn’t work in the post-season.”

But are the A’s failures just because they have only won two consecutive division titles with the sixth lowest payroll in baseball?  It’s not like they are going to catch the record held by the Yankees for most World Series titles.  The A’s are built for the marathon regular season; expecting them to also be able to sprint to the finish line of a 100 yard dash is maybe expecting too much.

Other sports figures are haunted by not winning.  Danica Patrick has won one Indy Car race but so far has failed to win as NASCAR.  ESPN talking heads often talk about how she has to win a race, but honestly how many career NASCAR drivers have never won a race?  If you consistently finish in or near the top ten, should you quit just because you never finish first?

Another female athlete who “never won” was Anna Kournakova, although in her case this isn’t true.  Kournakova won two Grand Slam titles in doubles, two WTA Championships, and was ranked #1 in doubles in 1999.  But all anyone remembers is that she never won a singles title.  One ESPN commentator referred to her as essentially a model who pretended to play tennis.  She was ranked #8 in the world in 2000; I doubt if Giselle Bunchen picked up a tennis racket she could crack the top 80,000.

I can’t find the quote, but I seem to recall a female tennis player who retired young (Kimiko Date?) because, as she put it, she was tired of being a “career quarterfinalist.”  But if you are a top twenty tennis player, traveling around, making a living playing a sport, shouldn’t making it to the second week of most majors be enough?

I don’t have an answer to this question.  I think the answer for the US Men’s Soccer team is borne of necessity; you aren't going to contend anytime soon, so doing your best will have to be enough.  Clearly the A’s, with their trade for an all-star starting pitcher, are all in for the short run.  But maybe they’d be better off being a small market team who bowed out in the first round of the playoffs.

World Cup News: America loses (in other news, Scarlett Johansson is attractive)

News flash from Brazil: the United States was eliminated from the World Cup, raising the number of World Cup lost by the US to, well, all of them.  At least our streak is intact.

Of course since we are the United States of Egotism, many have interpreted this loss as a win. This is understandable.  We lost to Germany, but since we made it to the next round we considered it a win.  We tied Portugal, but since they scored at the last minute we considered that a win.  At this point we sound like Jerry Jones calling losses “moral victories” and imaging the Cowboys in the Moral Victory Super Bowl.

How good was the US Men’s soccer team?  We played four matches and won once.  What other team had the same ratio of wins to games?  The 1962 Mets, the worst baseball team of all time.  If you want to toss out the tie (because in the most important sporting event in the world they can’t be bothered to always have winners and losers) then we won one game and lost two, which is such a low winning percentage you wouldn't have even reached the NBA Playoffs from the Eastern Conference last season (wait a minute, I’d better double check that; okay, that’s right).  In no other sport is winning 1/3 of your games considered to be a sign of competence.

The problem is that nearly every soccer match ends with a score of 1-0. Or maybe 2-1.  So when we beat Ghana by a single goal, and we say we crushed them; when Germany beats us by a single goal (possibly because they didn't need to beat us by more), then we just barely got nosed out.  When we tie with Portugal, it’s actually a win because we had the lead for most of the match.  It’s as if soccer is scored like Olympic diving or gymnastics; it’s all a subjective view of who played better, not an objective score like baseball or football.

What’s pathetic about soccer is that it has been threatening to become a “major” sport in America since Pele joined the New York Cosmos in 1975, and after forty years soccer is barely starting to threaten hockey for 4^th place in the American pantheon of sports.  Waiting for soccer to catch baseball in popularity is like waiting for Godot.

There’s been a lot of speculation about why American Men’s soccer can’t compete on the international stage. One factor is fairly obvious; good athletes follow the money.  The median pro soccer player in America makes $90,000 a year; the median pro baseball player makes over $90,000 a MONTH.  Star soccer players are paid like excellent accountants, while average baseball players are paid like rock stars.  Maybe young soccer players in America could make more overseas, but they don’t grow up hearing on ESPN how much a star in the Premiere League can earn.  They do hear about light hitting shortstops signing contracts for millions of dollars per year.  The same goes for mediocre football players and basketball players.

This also helps explain why the US Women’s team has had international success.  Female athletes are encouraged by Title IX, but when it comes to pro opportunities there is soccer, basketball and maybe tennis.  The WNBA pays less than men’s pro soccer, with Britney Griner earning less than $50,000, so choosing soccer makes sense.

In the next forty years, the median salary for pro soccer players in the US will not come close to the median in the other major sports.  Attendance at MLS soccer games will not threaten attendance at baseball games.  The United States will not serious challenge for a World Cup.  Soccer fans, accept it.

I am in total agreement with the character of Dan Rydel on Sports Night, modeled on ESPN personality Keith Olbermann.  Dan Rydel once said, “I'll tell you what else. I'm starting to get a little cheesed at people telling me the reason I don't like soccer is that I don't understand it. I think I do understand it. I think I understand it just fine. I just happen to think it's a mind-numbing bore, and that any reasonable person would rather be playing it than watching it.”

So all you soccer fans out there, enjoy yourselves.  Plan on having World Cup parties in 2018 when the games are in Russia and airing at 2 AM.  Talk about how soon soccer will render Major League Baseball irrelevant.  Dream of your children signing contracts with the MLS that would make A-Rod blush.  Go on.

I’ll be sitting here smug in the knowledge that soccer will be the most popular sport in America when everyone is wearing jet packs.