The Astros may have cheated, but they still won unfair and unsquare

It seems like a miracle of some sort has occurred: I turned on ESPN in mid-January, and they were talking about baseball.

ESPN’s talking-head shows generally focus on football and basketball, the two sports ESPN is most heavily invested in.  ESPN does show the occasional baseball game on Sunday nights, but it isn’t nearly as important to them as the other American sports with inflated balls.  Usually, in late July and early August when football season and basketball season are still theoretical, ESPN will devote 95% of its time to anything other than baseball, the only sport actually being played.

But baseball managed to catch the attention of ESPN in January, and not because of the Hall of fame vote.  I am referring, of course, to the scandal involving the cheating allegations against the Houston Astros.  So far three managers and a GM have lost their jobs, and the LA city council has demanded that baseball award the 2017  and 2018 championships to the Los Angeles Dodgers (not that the Los Angeles city council is biased on the subject).  By the way, that ain't going to happen.

FiveThirtyEight.com looked into the allegations when they first came out, and their conclusion wasn’t very conclusive.  Yes, the Astros showed tremendous gains in power vs. strikeout rates in 2017 over 2016, but they showed improvement both at home and on the road, which wouldn’t have been possible if the only effect was cheating using cameras at their home field.  But still, the home effect is so pronounced it does indicate some gain from sign-stealing.  Of course there wasn’t much advantage of playing at home in the 2019 World Series as the Astros lost all their home games.

There have been a lot of complaints about the culture around the Astros’ front office.  There was an ugly incident where Astros assistant GM Brandon Taubman taunted a female reporter for being critical of acquiring reliever Roberto Osuna, who had previously been suspended under the MLB domestic abuse policy, and the Astros then denied the incident occurred (Taubman was suspended for 2020 by Commissioner Rob Manfred).  There has also been speculation about the resurgence of the career of Gerrit Cole, who lead the 2019 ‘Stros to the World Series by displaying stuff he had never shown before with his other teams; many pointed out that his improvement was mostly due to improving the spin rate of his pitches, and one way to do that is doctor the ball with a sticky substance (this is now the Yankees’ problem, as Cole signed a free agent deal with them during the off-season). 

Then there is the allegation and bizarre denial of former MVP Jose Aluve over whether he was wired with an electronic buzzer to signal pitches.  ESPN repeatedly showed slow-motion footage of Altuve desperately warning his teammates not to rip off his jersey as they celebrated a game winning home run, possibly to avoid showing the offending device.  Altuve’s explanation was that he was very shy about having his body exposed, and his wife didn’t like it.  I’m not saying he’s lying, but if that is the truth, he should come up with a lie that is more believable.  There are supposedly (I haven’t looked) dozens of photos of him posted on Instagram posing shirtless, and what woman marries a professional athlete but is so against his chest being exposed that she forbids it even when his teammates want to celebrate a home run?

So, there is firsthand testimony that the Astros cheated, supported by statistical evidence.  Should more be done, other than the suspension/firing/resignation of three managers and GM Jeff Luhnow?  Should MLB acquiesce to the LA city council and name the Dodgers the champions for those two years?

First of all, I’ve never been a fan of vacating championships.  Yes, it is a punishment, but you can’t take back the joy felt by team supporters retroactively, so it is rather ephemeral.  Also, there is the problem of determining whether the team would have lost but for the cheating.  You could argue that is irrelevant, that voiding championships is the only way to discourage teams from cheating (just as denying Barry Bonds admission to the Hall of Fame is the only way to discourage super-rich, super-successful athletes from juicing), but the fact is that after years of tanking the Astros had developed an exceptional roster of talent through good drafting and wise free agent acquisitions (a famous and prescient 2014 Sports illustrated cover had the line, “The 2017 World Champion Houston Astros”).  The same goes for the 2018 Red Sox, who won 108 games under rookie manager Alex Cora and went through three exceptional teams (Yankees, Astros, and Dodgers) in the post-season like a hot knife through butter.  It wasn’t all due to cheating.

Declaring the Dodgers to be champions in 2017 and 2018 is even more problematic.  Maybe the Dodgers would have lost to the Yankees in the 2018 World Series if the Red Sox and Astros were disqualified.  Anything can happen in a short series.

The Astros scandal is probably the most egregious team-focused scandal in baseball since the 1919 Black Sox.  Steroids were a bigger scandal, but that was about players inflating their own achievements, not changing the outcome of games.  Collusion is the early days of free agency was possibly the biggest sports scandal ever, but that was about teams trying NOT to win.  There is the allegation of the Giants cheating in 1951 by having a guy with a telescope steal signs, but that is so quaint compared to the incident of the Red Sox using Apple Watches to telegraph pitches that it pales in comparison.

There have not been any additional show drops since Carlos Beltran resigned a manager of the Mets, so maybe this scandal is over.  Or, it is at least until Spring Training when players on other teams invoke baseball’s “unwritten rules” and seek to extract a little justice with some high and tight fastballs.

Wither the Rooney Rule

https://minervasconsort.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-rooney-rule.html

Whither the Rooney Rule?

I've written before about the Rooney Rule, the innovative method the NFL adopted to try and encourage NFL teams to hire more people of color as coaches and general managers.  The Rule, to put it succinctly, requires teams to at least interview one minority candidate for any opening in the organization at the management level.  It did not mandate that minority candidates be hired, only that they be given an interview.

The Rule was surprisingly (to some) effective when it was adopted, and the number of minority hires increased.  The reason for this was that the pool of head coach talent was exceedingly shallow and requiring teams to interview minority candidates deepened to pool by adding qualified minorities who would otherwise be overlooked.  It was a brilliant example of how to encourage minority employment without adopting hiring quotas or mandates.

However, the coaching carousel has spun around in 2020 and the Rooney Rule no longer seems effective.  Except for the hiring of Hispanic coach “Riverboat” Ron Rivera by the Washington [insert racist team name here], all of the coaching hires have been Caucasian men.  Has the Rooney Rule become obsolete?

I believe the problem is not some rise in the number of racist owners in the NFL, or an overt desire to thwart the goals of the Rooney Rule.  I believe the process by which teams evaluate head coaching candidates has significantly changed since the Rule was implemented.

As I said, the purpose of the Rule was to deepen the pool of candidates that teams might evaluate by added minority candidates.  But the process was hierarchical; ex-players became assistants, then specialist coaches like offensive line coach, then more important position coaches like quarterback coach, then ultimately an offensive or defensive coordinator.  Next stop, head coach.  The roster of NFL OCs and DCs is littered with those who had a shot at head coach, failed, and then went back to managing one side of the ball.

The process is less hierarchical now.  One of the recent hires was the New York Giants hiring Joe Judge, who previously had been wide receiver and special team coach with the Patriots.  First of all, it may be news that the Patriots even HAD a receivers coach, given how poor their passing attack was by the end of the season.  Secondly, how can a lowly specialty coach leapfrog all the way up to head coach with being an OC or at least a QB coach first?

The answer is that it is all about coaching trees now.  Judge had spent eight years working under Bill Bellichick, arguably the greatest NFL coach of all time (someone once referred to Ricky Henderson as arguably the greatest leadoff hitter of all time and Bill James replied, “What do you mean “arguably”?).  He had previously worked at Alabama under Nick Saban, one of the greatest college coaches of all time.  Just being in the vicinity of these two great coaches given him the pedigree to become a head coach in the NFL.

GMs now look for coaches who rubbed shoulders with other successful coaches, and after the LA Rams’ success hiring 30-year-old Sean McVay (who had worked under both Jon and Jay Gruden, as well as Mike Shanahan) GMs want coaches who are young.  This means ones that haven’t worked their way up the coaching hierarchy but are working as specialist coaches instead of OCs or DCs.

The problem is that since most successful coaches are white, most of their protégés tend to be white.  I’m not saying their racist; it’s just that people, all people, are generally more comfortable around people who are like themselves.  So African American coaches who have worked their way up under less prestigious coaches are now being bypassed by younger white coaches who lucked into a job with a more prominent coach.

Of course, one reason for all the current openings is that these coaches, sometimes referred to “quarterback whisperers,” aren’t having the immediate success Sean McVay had in LA.  Actually, McVay isn’t having the success he had last year, but that’s another story.  But because what is seen as “head coach qualifications” is more mercurial and less hierarchical, an approach to increasing minority representation that tries to improve “the pipeline” will have less of an impact.

The fact that there are only four minority coaches in the NFL is pathetic.  Even worse is the fact that there have only been 19 African American coaches ever in Division I college football, where African American coaches would be valuable role models for hundreds of young men.  While the Rooney Rule shouldn’t be abandoned, the time has come to try and develop new strategies for addressing the lack of African Americans at the highest levels of football coaching.

Carson Wentz and Tua Tagovailoa are not delicate snowflakes

There is a show that I DVR and watch every day, a talking head show on ESPN called Around the Horn.  It is either the greatest show ever created, or the worst, and I swear on some days I just can’t tell.  But I have watched it for around 15 years so it must be doing something right.  On the show the host, Tony Realli, poses questions to four sportswriters and then gives them points based on the erudition of their answers.  He also deducts points if they say something egregious, or if they utter a banned word, a word so trite and cliché that no one speaking intelligently should stoop to using it.  One of the banned words is “narrative.”

There is a narrative that is routinely used when discussing two particular football players, one in the NFL and one in college.  Whenever someone discusses Carson Wentz of the Philadelphia Eagles or Tua Tagovailoa formerly of the University of Alabama, the speaker will at some point get around to expressing the narrative that the person they are discussing is “fragile” or “injury-prone.”

It is perfectly true that because of injuries Carson Wentz has not played in a full quarter of any of the Eagles’ postseason games since he’s been their starting quarterback.  He finally started a game this season, but left the game in the first quarter after a hit from Jadeveon Clowney gave him a concussion.  And Tua, who just decided to pass on another year at ‘Bama and enter the NFL draft, has had surgery on both of his ankles and is currently recovering from hip surgery.  Given these repeated absences from the playing field, what other narrative is there but “injury-prone”?

This narrative overlooks one small detail; both men make a living (well, Tua will once he is in the NFL) playing a game where very large, muscular men jump on them and drive them into the ground.  I haven’t conducted a lot of research on the subject, but I do not think that I am going too far out on a limb to suspect that this just might account for their propensity to need medical assistance, not some internal flaw in their genetic code.

It is a source of concern if an athlete either: suffers a recurring injury, such as a torn or sprained ACL that indicates that part of his body is not as strong as it should be or contains a congenital defect; or suffers a variety of injuries indicating a systemic flaw in his physiognomy, such as rheumatism.  The injuries suffered by Wentz and Tua have been just dis-similar enough to make me believe neither is “injury-prone.”

Wentz had an injury free college career, then suffered his first significant injury in a 2016 pre-season game when he injured his rib.  He recovered to become the Eagles’ starter for most of the season.  In 2017 Wentz, on the way to what appeared to be a possible MVP season, suffered an ACL injury and missed the last part of the season including the Eagles’ run to winning the Super Bowl.  In 2018 he suffered a back injury, and again back-up Nick Foles took the Eagles into the playoffs. 

And now in the first playoff game in the 2019-20 season, Wentz was tackled by Seahawk Jadeveon Clowney and had his head driven into the turf.  He entered the concussion protocol and did not return to the game.

So, there was a rib injury, a knee, a back, and a concussion.  None directly connected, all explained by being jumped on b y a large man.

Tua’s injury history can be summed up briefly: in 2018 he suffered a sprained ankle that required surgery, then in 2019 he sprained the other ankle (again requiring surgery), and after recovering played in a later game where he dislocated his hip.  Maybe the two ankle sprains are cause for concern as indicating weak ankles, but the hip injury is clearly a fluke incident.  Whether it caused any permanent damage is something that teams will have to decide on draft day.

Football is a violent game and violent things happen to players.  The rules currently offer more protection to quarterbacks, but hits are inevitable and sometimes those hits are going to make body parts move in ways they were not intended to move.  So please stop referring to players suffering more than one injury as “injury-prone.” 

Until they switch to flag football, every player in the NFL is injury-prone.  An athlete than can be described as injury-prone is Zion Williamson, but that’s another story.

Cats is the new Xanadu, or maybe Glitter

There are a lot of bad films made in Hollywood; some boring, some mis-cast, some with insipid scripts.  Every once in a blue moon (okay, more often than that) a film comes along that manages to screw up absolutely everything, despite being under the control of supposedly competent artists.  When this happens, the critics pull out their knives and strip the offending movies down to its bones, and then they eat the bones.

Such a film is Cats.

Most of the complaints have been about the special effects, which were rushed despite being innovative, and resulted in the studio actually releasing a new version of the movie a week after its opening with “improved” visual effects.  The technical problems began early in the production process, but the film was not pulling a 32 rating at Metacritic and a 17% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes because Dame Judi Dench’s hand was visible in one scene.

The problem with adapting the hit stage musical Cats into a successful film starts with one fundamental truth about the play, which was succinctly summed up by a theater-savvy friend of mine who said, “Worst.  Musical.  Ever.”  The show has no plot.  It has no interesting characters.  And the two-plus hour production features exactly one memorable song, the eleven o’clock number Memory.  Other than that, it’s just a bunch of cats in a junkyard.

It’s not like this was a secret.  The series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show steeped in Broadway musical tradition, regularly made asides about how bad the musical was (“I would never do Cats.  It has no plot.”).  Then the show did an entire episode that was a parody of Cats but was also about the main character’s yeast infection, leading to a singing number by a character identified as “Itchy Cat.”  The main character eventually says, "This sucks more than the song about what makes a Jellicle cat, and then it just goes on to describe literally any cat."  The parody is only slightly sillier than the actual musical Cats.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt also took a shot at the musical Cats.  In the show, wannabe Broadway actor Titus chaperones a group of kids to see the musical, then has an idea; he dons a self-made costume at intermission and gets up on stage in Act Two and improvises inane lyrics.  He discovers that he is now part of the cast, and that the show was never “written” by anyone and all the songs are made up by people who came out of the audience and just started singing on stage.

So, the material has been mocked for a long time, which makes the decision to mount an earnest adaptation a peculiar choice.  But it could still be adapted into a film version that would be adored by all the people who loved Cats on stage, right?  It did run for 16 years on Broadway, so it can’t be THAT bad.

Unfortunately, everything that led to Cats’ record-breaking run on Broadway has to do with the staginess of the production.  There is no plot, it has virtually no book, actors are buried under cat fur, but the stage version does have a fantastic set and kid-friendly cat costumes and make-up.  The set, consisting of oversized items in a junkyard, appeals to smaller human beings (kids), and the face paint of whiskers is something every child can seek to adopt.  But these aspects of the play can’t be replicated on film where digital effect replace the oversized sets and cat fur.

I tend to agree that having seen the play will not make you want to see the film version.  Kids will not find the literal cat look as appealing as make-up wearing stage cats, and again there is no plot and the songs all suck except for one.   So who ever thought this was a good idea in the first place should be questioned.

The studio is insisting that Cats will find an audience, but that is hard to believe as the TRAILER for the movie was derided when it was released.  AV Club named the Cats trailer the 10th worst thing on the internet in 2019.  I understand that by the time the trailer comes out your sunk costs mandate releasing the film no matter what, but if you can’t produce a trailer that shows the movie in a good light maybe you should immediately start looking for ways to cut your losses.

I am feeling some schadenfreude as the director, Tom Hooper (who had previously primarily worked in television), beat out auteur David Fincher for a Best Director Oscar in 2011, winning for the mediocre The King’s Speech over Fincher’s brilliant visualization of Aaron Sorkin’s astonishing script for The Social Network.  He had additional success with his next film, the Oscar winning adaptation of the stage musical Les Miserables.  But, to mix a metaphor, Cats may be his Waterloo.

With a budget of $100 million and nearly as much spent on advertising, Cats’ failure at the box office will have a major impact on the studio's bottom line..  As for Tom Hooper’s future as a director, the question is will people blame the film’s failure on his vision, or the technical problems.  Maybe another studio will trust him with a big budget film again; maybe he’ll find himself back working on television.