Category: Sports

Picking a New President

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

It’s not the main one, though, just the comically costumed mascots who run around Nats Park once per game.  The nightly race among Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt is getting a fifth contestant, to be announced tomorrow.

Any addition has to be the perfect President.

Naturally, DC-centric media outlets have been running polls since the hint was dropped last fall.  So who do you pick to join the Rushmores?  George, Abe, Tom, and Teddy represent historically significant figures who are also outside of mainstream controversy, so you have to balance fame and significance.

We can eliminate most Presidents for being too boring.  Sure, people like Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley had the same office as Washington and Linclon – just like Bubba Crosby had the same job as Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio.  (Martin Van Buren goes in this group, too – even if it means a harsh visit from the Van Buren Boys.)  James Madison, James Monroe, Ulysses Grant, and Harry Truman were more significant historically, but in a history class kind of way.  They’re on the Dwight Evans/Dale Murphy level of Presidents – if you watched them play they were pretty good, but today’s ten-year-old baseball fans probably don’t know them yet.  There are the incompetent one-termers, like Carter and Hoover, and corrupt cesspool dwellers like Nixon and Harding (who suffers from guilt by association here).

For historically significant, household-name Presidents, there’s Reagan, JFK, FDR, and Jackson.  Given the pro-government-expansion zeitgeist of modern Washington, Reagan would be an out-of-place choice; in a few years when Republicans control everything that may resonate more.  FDR’s confinement to a wheelchair would make for an interesting cameo but probably disqualify him long-term.

JFK has made a previous appearance, so he is probably the favorite.  It’s a good pick: there are elements of the JFK presidency that appeal to both conservatives and liberals, and he was a larger-than-life celebrity President.  The main strike against him is that a giant, foam rubber caricature might diminish the grimness of his Presidency’s end, but it hasn’t seemed to be the case for Lincoln.

Now that we’ve selected the next President to join the race, here’s an even better idea: How about a rotating “Guest President”?  FDR could win a race in his wheelchair one night against the Phillies; the next night the Diamondbacks might see a rotund Taft bouncing past the finish line ahead of Teddy.  Nixon could unfurl the “finish line” from a reel off an old-style tape recorder.  Ford could fall down.  Grant could fall down drunk.  James Buchanan could hit on a guy in the front row.  These jokes practically write themselves.

On the other hand, since the Nats are actually good now, maybe all this is an exercise in overthink – after all, in Milwaukee, they just have sausages.

What does Manti Te’o owe you?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

NBC News has “9 baffling questions about the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax.”  They forgot #10: Why so serious?

ESPN Radio’s Mike Greenberg has been incredulous that Notre Dame is standing behind its star.  Sports Illustrated’s front page this morning dissects Te’o’s interviews about his now-fake girlfriend.

Morning drive time radio shows joking about it?  That makes sense.  Ditto for the Te’oing internet meme.  It’s a bizarre story, and the jokes practically write themselves, and it’s funny to talk about.  It’s also interesting to follow, as each revelation makes the story that much weirder.  But getting to the bottom of what Te’o knew and when shouldn’t win anyone a Pulitzer; it’s definitely not worth a crusade.

It doesn’t matter whether he knew or not.  It doesn’t matter when he knew.  If Notre Dame has some egg on their face for supporting their player, it will not lead to a lack of enrollment.  (It may drive away recruits who fear that, even playing for a national college football powerhouse, they can’t do better than an imaginary girlfriend – but that’s another story.)

Te’o owes no one an explanation, other than the NFL teams which are his prospective future employers assuming he enters the draft as planned.  They will be reasonably and rightfully curious about his integrity and mental state.  That’s part of the usual pre-draft evaluation, though NFL draft history tells us that the bars for both qualities are not always very high.

On the other hand, a sports reporter who had written some glowing human interest puff piece on the tragedies in Te’o’s life might feel duped when it turned out to be a fake.  It made for great copy at the time – surely, ESPN and others enjoyed the ratings/pageviews bump for tugging at the viewers’ heartstrings.  If your job was to research, write, and present true stories, wouldn’t you bristle when it was revealed that you didn’t check the facts and you didn’t question conventional wisdom when it sounded a little too perfect?

Despite all the “unanswered questions,” at least we know where the sanctimony comes from.

(Sidebar: For competitive purposes, the NCAA may want to think about the way it crowns its champion.  In the week and a half since the nominal championship game, there’s been more talk about the players’ girlfriends than the actual blowout.  Good thing there’s a playoff system on the horizon.)

 

Matt Bryant’s second chance

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

With a sports media that just loves story lines, the redemption story in Atlanta tops the list from the past weekend.  Matt Schaub and Mike Smith finally won a playoff game, and it was the best playoff game of the weekend.  Overlooked, for now, is the second chance their kicker got.

Giants fans remember Matt Bryant.

Big Blue signed Bryant from a life of pawn shops and personal training back in 2002, in a year when the special teams unit was a decided weak link of the team.  In a playoff game against San Francisco, the Giants held a big lead late in the second half before the 49ers came storming back to take the lead.  A furious rally brought the Giants within range for a game winning field goal.

You could have forgiven Bryant yesterday if he felt like he was watching a NFL Network replay.

In 2002, Bryant never got to show that he could make the 40 yard field goal that would have  sent the Giants onward in the playoffs.

In what was a running theme that year, the snap for the field goal attempt was off.  Long snapper Trey Junkin, aside from having the coolest name in football at the time, had been signed off the street that week due to injury – and was playing in what would be the last game of a long NFL career.  An officiating error prevented Bryant from a second chance at playing the hero.

A decade later, Bryant is an established NFL kicker (or at least as established as a kicker can be) and has kicked a 62-yard field goal (a yard shy of the record).  His bad luck in San Fran didn’t send him back to the pawnshop.

Yesterday, after Seattle tried to ice him, Bryant finally got a clean snap and a shot at the ball with everything on the line.  Atlanta plays next week – thanks to Bryant’s decade-overdue kick.

A rare good PR move for ARod

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Joel Sherman of the New York Post (America’s Newspaper of Record) published an exclusive (and extensive) interview with Alex Rodriguez’s doctors yesterday.  On a day where an empty Hall of Fame induction press conference underscored the sport’s reliance on media perceptions, Sherman’s article is a great PR move from a player that could use it.  If you can spell ESPN, you know that Rodriguez was MIA in the playoffs coming off two injury-riddled seasons, and what effect that had on his relationship with the forgiving and always-adoring New York sports fans.

This Sherman exclusive – which shares intricate details of the nature of his current injury – is a great public relations move.  If you were using baseball metaphors, you’d call it a solid 2-run double.

Given the level of detail the medical staff shares about the status, it’s clear that Rodriguez had to give his blessing for the revelations, and that was smart.  Without a single clichéd, Bull Durham-esque quote from the third baseman on being “more disappointed than anyone” or “not getting it done” during his horrendous postseason, two doctors went back and forth practically amazed that he could even walk during September and October.  They also debunk the whispers that past steroid use caused Rodriguez’s injury.  Best of all, Rodriguez and the Yankees stay out of the story.  The medical information alone speaks for itself and doesn’t need framing.  Heck, it makes you wonder if Rodriguez will play another game again at all.

And there’s why this is a great story.  Demanding fans and the 24-hour sports news machine feed each other, and the meal is often re-digested.  In this case, we all know the story: ARod, the richest player in baseball history, doesn’t live up to expectations and the fans hate him for it.   More coverage begets more boos raining down from the upper deck, and boos in turn beget more negative coverage.  Sherman’s story probably won’t stop that, but it does frame the last three years of Rodriguez’s career in a badly needed new – and much more flattering – light.

Clown Questions and the Post-Media Era

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

It’s 1951.  Underneath the stands at Old Yankee Stadium, Joe DiMaggio dresses after a game, a gaggle of sportswriters crowding around his locker eager for a nugget of wisdom from Joltin’ Joe.  A cub reporter from the 78 daily newspapers New York City had at the time elbows his way through and asks if he plans will celebrate tonight’s win with a late night rendezvous with Marilyn Monroe.

Joe’s eyebrows raise in a mixture of mockery and disbelief.  “I’m not going to answer that,” he chuckles.  “That’s a clown question, bro.”

As the entire world knows now, that quote didn’t come from the Yankee Clipper but the National Treasure, Bryce Harper.  There were t-shirts for sale by the next morning, there are video mash up jokes, and, of course, tweets-a-plenty.

Mark it down: this is when Washington DC officially accepted baseball.  For all Ryan Zimmerman’s heroics as the franchise’s first home-grown star since the relocation from Montreal and Stephen Strasburg’s at-times otherworldly pitching and always otherworldly hype, nothing feeds this particular home town crowd like a witty retort to the press.  Inside the Beltway Bubble, pundits pondered over whether the quote might find it’s way to the podium at the White House briefing room.

Jokes aside, it’s a valid point.  And one the other Mormon looking to stick around DC might think about. Harper’s disdain for the reporter (if not his word choice) might work for politicians.  Remember the infamous 2008 interview where Katie Couric asked inane inquiries about Sarah Palin’s news consumption habits?  Palin did herself no favors trying to answer what were pretty dumb questions.

When done right, a snarky, off-the-cuff comeback is more powerful than answering a question “the right way.”  That reporter who wanted to know if Harper was going to crack open a cold one might have been put off by Harper’s flippant response, but it didn’t matter.  The rest of the world saw it, and liked it, and unless that reporter is friends with Cole Hamels there isn’t much he can do.  Harper’s message is out.

It’s doubtful that the communications firms in town are prepping an office for Communications Strategist Bryce Harper after his playing days are over – he may be a whale of a ballplayer, but his wisecrack was just a wisecrack.  Maybe there’s a second lesson there though: that if you have to overthink your response to a question, your answer will suffer.

Or as Yogi Berra put it, you can’t think and hit at the same time.

Our Violent National Anthem

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

No one who has spent much time reading about America’s college campuses (campi?) will be surprised to learn that an institution has banned the singing or playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” before sporting contests.

Who was behind it? The anti-American crowd?  The Marxists?   The hippies?  The greens?  Cornel West?

Try the Mennonites:  Goshen College in Indiana, the school which banned the tune, is a Mennonite school with the motto “Healing the World, Peace by Peace.”  The rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air are too violent.

The anthem is being replaced at Goshen sporting events by “America the Beautiful,” so we can assume this isn’t really a commentary on the nation we all call home being a haven for imperialist capitalist pigs.  Part of what makes America beautiful is that each person has the right to express their patriotism as they see fit.  If the students and administrators at Goshen don’t want to play the national anthem before their Division 8 field hockey games, that’s fine.  Those of us who have never donated to or attended Goshen have no right to tell them otherwise.

On the other hand, as an educational institution, so one would hope Goshen’s choice is educated.  And the idea that the anthem is a violent song is a bit misguided.

Of course, the “Star-Spangled Banner” does use military imagery, because it was famously written during the War of 1812 as a poem by Francis Scott Key – specifically, during the bombardment of Baltimore.  That was a fight that was brought to American shores by then-mortal foe England; we were on defense for that one.

Though set during a battle scene, the theme of the poem – especially the part used for the national anthem – is perseverance through difficulty.  Turbulence and war may come, Key writes (much more eloquently), but American ideals of freedom and peace endure.

Delve a little further into the story behind the poem, and it becomes even more apparent that it is hardly a call to arms.  Remember that Key saw the flag over Fort McHenry from a British ship; he was aboard on a peaceful mission to argue for the release of a popular Maryland doctor.  To make his case, Key presented letters from British soldiers lauding the care they received from American doctors (and this was before the current mess that passes for a British health care system).  The British acquiesced, but held Key and the doctor on the prison ship because the bombing of Baltimore was about to begin; they didn’t want to release a prisoner only to blow them up minutes later.  In the midst of war, both Key and the British officers demonstrated some level of civility and mutual respect.

The fact most worth noting is that the folks America was fighting in the background of Key’s poem, the British, are our closest allies today.  Despite fighting two wars within  30 years, Americans and Britons are fast friends.  (Heck, we can’t even launch a television show without swiping the concept from them, and they have, what, four channels?)

So in an educated historical context, the “Star Spangled Banner” is a song about perseverance through adversity and, after your business on the battlefield is over, making peace with your enemies.

Hey, that sounds like a pretty good song to play before an amateur sporting contest.

Cross-posted at PunditLeague.us.

Too Much Madness?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The NCAA tournament is America’s favorite championship because, more than any other sports league, NCAA Division I basketball lets armchair point guards be a part of the action.

Forget that I can’t make a three pointer without a running start.  Being a part of March Madness is as simple as filling out a bracket and spending the first two weekends of the tournament following the action, rooting for underdogs, and enjoying (or bemoaning) the upsets.  Most brackets are destroyed by the time the Sweet Sixteen rolls around, but it never seems to matter.  We still want to participate.

This is the appeal of the NCAA Tournament, and it is exactly why the new 68-team format is so dangerous.

The all-important Tournament Bracket has been the basis for office pools and friendly wagers for years.  For the three days after Selection Sunday leading up to the tournament, NCAA basketball owned the water cooler, and bracket advice ruled ESPN and the sports talk radio airwaves.  Even the addition of the single play-in game for one of the just-happy-to-be-here 16 seeds didn’t affect the format too much.

Creating play-in games for the 16 seeds in each brackets might have been a passable way to get to 68 teams.  The problem comes from where the play-in games are in the bracket, this year deciding two 16 seeds, an 11 seed and a 12 seed.  The 12 seeds are famously ripe ground for upsets, but that depends on the matchup.  By sprinkling the play-ins throughout the seeds, the NCAA made it very difficult to fill out a bracket before Wednesday or Thursday, when the final field of 64 was determined and most brackets were due.

People now have less time to put together a bracket.  More important, there’s less time to organize an office pool, distribute brackets, and harass participants for entry fees.

Cynics will say the NCAA’s Tournament expansion is all about money – charging tickets and television fees for extra games on top of an already lucrative month-long event – as well as bringing more teams into the fold.  Capping the number of teams, even at the comically large number of 64 or 65, would seem to be a purist’s argument about retaining the integrity of competition.

But let’s make it cynical anyway.  If the appeal of March Madness lies in the participation of filling out brackets, why adopt a format which puts up barriers of entry to that?  If a 68-team tournament fails to generate the same appeal as a 64-team tournament, then the extra teams aren’t creating more money after all.  Even in college basketball, there’s a law of diminishing returns.

Honoring the code

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

My daily drive into Your Nation’s Capital is usually spent listening to sports talk radio, splitting time between the national (ESPN’s Mike and Mike) and the local (106.7’s Sports Junkies).  Today, both dealt with the first bracket-buster of March Madness: the news that Brigham Young University’s Brandon Davies was kicked off the team for having consensual premarital sex.

If you talk to most Division I coaches, their second best player shtupping some coed when the team is on the verge of a national title run might would likely be a fine violation.  In the realm of athletic transgressions, it certainly beats having some booster offer a nuclear surfboard or whatever it is that John Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats will get accused of the year after he leaves.  But Davies chose BYU and its strict rules – and when he misstepped, he admitted it and suffered the consequences.

In the interest of giving credit where due, the tone of the coverage has been surprisingly exceptional thus far.  Mike Greenberg in particular lauded BYU for sticking to their guns.  Even commentary that falls short of glowing praise for BYU at least understand that, though the merits of BYU’s code may be debatable, the code itself irrelevant to the discussion.  Davies opted to hold himself to that standard when he chose BYU (and even more so when he honorably chose to fess up).  In fact, BYU alums have pointed out that the honor code is far from fine print.

Davies is an important player, and dropping him from the team will impact BYU’s chances in the NCAA Tournament.  One wonders if other colleges – including religious schools with renowned athletic programs – would do the same.

It would be nice to spend lots of money, but is it smart?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Has anyone noticed that Washington, D.C. and St. Louis have some eerily similar discussions going on?

The last decade or more has demonstrated that bloated budgets are inefficient at best and simply untenable at worst.  While it would be nice to allocate large amounts of resources on the things we want for the next few years, those decision will come back to haunt us in the future.  We must establish a plan and maintain discipline.

That could be the mantra of the budget hawks freshly minted from the tea parties of 2009-2010, or it could be the rationale behind the Cardinals telling Albert Pujols to go find himself a better deal than the reported offer that was on the table.

Just as the Republicans wear the black eye of the Bush-era spending increases, the Cardinals must answer to Pujols – and their fans – how they signed Coors Field product Matt Holliday to a contract which paid him $16 million per year, but would be willing to let the far superior Pujols walk because he’s too expensive.

Republicans are likely fearful of the Democrats accusing them of ripping Social Security checks from the arthritic hands of World War II veterans.  The Cardinals can’t be looking forward to the sports page headlines and the talk radio chatter in St. Louis the day Pujols signs with the Seattle Mariners.

But in each case, the powers that be must recognize two realities.  First, bad decisions in the past do not justify bad decisions in the present.  Second, voters and fans are smarter than most people give them credit for.

And since the baseball problem is easier, here’s something to consider: teams lose superstars all the time and go on to have success.  Seattle lost three franchise cornerstones – Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., and Alex Rodriguez – in consecutive years, and actually got better each year.  Johan Santana left the Twins, and they still find their way into the playoffs with regularity.  The Marlins won the World Series in 1997, dumped almost their entire roster, and rebuilt another championship team within six years.

On the other hand, teams just as frequently make signings that seem like great ideas at the time, but turn into albatrosses as players age.  The Mets surely wish they could trade Carlos Beltran, and might try to murder Luis Castillo to get him off the roster.  Vladimir Guerrero was a great pickup for the Angels in 2003, by 2009 they couldn’t get him out the door fast enough.  And don’t you think the Cubs wish they could take a mulligan on the eight-year pact they signed with Alfonso Soriano in 2006?

Just as voters want a responsive, healthy economy, baseball fans want a winner.  The Cardinals have to know that they more likely to successfully recover within a few years after Pujols walks away than to sign him to a deal that truly works out for the team.

The budget battle in St. Louis, just as the budget battle in Washington, is best viewed through the lens of recent history.