The following is the text of a letter I just wrote to SI.
Not to suggest that the overall impact of Title IX has been a net negative, but…. 22 pages, and not one word to acknowledge the thousands of men who, as an objective, undeniable matter of fact, have had their opportunity to play college sports taken away by Title IX? Not one word to suggest that the issue might contain some nuance?
Are you serious? No, clearly, you are not.
In the April 23 issue of Sports Illustrated, Joe Sheehan had a short piece debunking the closer myth.
Sub-head: “The save started out innocently enough, but the obsession with racking up the stat has thrown bullpen usage, roster management and the pitching salary structure out of whack. Here’s the fix: Get rid of it.”
The Phillies have illustrated Sheehan’s point superbly. They’ve lost four games already this year in the other team’s final at-bat. Walk-off losses, in essence. Jonathan Papelbon, their very good (0.91 ERA, .162 opponents’ BA so far), very expensive (five-year contract for $63 million) closer, has appeared in none of those games.
Papelbon has thrown 11 innings through Saturday, all in one-inning stints, all in the ninth inning, all in games in which the Phils have had leads of two runs or more. In other words, Papelbon has been about as good as you can be, but entirely in mop-up duty in games his team would almost certainly have won without him. Pete Orr has had more impact on their won-loss record. To express that statistically… Papelbon has nine saves in nine tries. In effect, the Phillies are more interested in helping Papelbon compile stats that in putting hi in optimal position to help them win.
Let’s say Charlie Manuel had used Papelbon only when the game truly hung in the balance, regardless of the inning, regardless of whether or not it was a “save situation.” Does anyone doubt that the team would have a better record right now? If anything, that’s being conservative.
This is not a shot at Charlie- pretty much all managers do it, especially if they have a Papelbon.
This all reminds me a lot of the closer myth in basketball – I honestly suspect it’s close to 100 percent bullshit, but that it contains a sizable amount of bullshit is undeniable and in fact provable.
The reliably terrific Joe Posnanski has an excellent post on this general topic here, from which I’ll borrow a couple killer facts.
1. Since Mariano Rivera – the greatest closer ever – got that job for the Yankees in 1997, the Yanks have won 97.3 percent of the time after holding a ninth-inning lead. From 1951-1962, when the Yankees had an ever-changing bullpen and no closer at all as it’s now defined, they won with a ninth-innings lead…. 97.3 percent of the time.
2. In 2010, big-league teams won 95.5 percent of the time they took leads into the ninth. In pre-closer 1952? 95.5 percent.
Penn State will play back-to-back night games with Iowa and Ohio State Oct. 20 and 27, the Big Ten announced Tuesday.
The Iowa game is at Iowa City, an 8 p.m. start on the Big Ten Network. Ohio State will be at the Beav at 6 p.m. on one of the ESPN dysfunctional family of networks.
Penn State has played Iowa in prime time three of the last four seasons. Recall the 24-23 loss at Iowa City in ’08, the Nits’ only loss before the Rose Bowl. It will also be Penn State’s fourth prime-time meeting with Ohio State since ’05, and the Nits have won two of the other three.
Since Iowa is in the Big Ten’s other division, the Legends, Penn State won’t play the Hawkeyes at all, after this year, until 2015 at the earliest.
Also, Penn State has announced that it will play UMass at the Beav in 2014. UMass is moving up from FCS to FBS football starting next year.
Yet another thing that’s going to be much, much different under Bill O’Brien is the annual spring intrasquad scrimmage.
O’Brien’s actually going to coach in it, for one thing, calling all the plays. Joe watched, and did color commentary on radio, from upstairs.
More substantially, the game won’t be scored like regular football. White will be offense, and Blue will be defense. In addition to the usual points for touchdowns, field goals and PATs, the offense will get two points for consecutive first downs, and two points for single plays of 15 yards or more.
The defense will get seven points for a touchdown, six for a turnover, four for a sack, two for a tackle for loss and one for a three-and-out.
A lot to take in. On quick read, it seems odd that the defense gets more points for blowing up one play than for “getting off the field,” i.e., a three-and-out.
On the macro level, I suspect this will make the game a bit harder for fans to watch, enjoy, and grasp what’s going on. It may even compel factions within Nittany Nation to jump on board the movement to scrap these things entire in favor of exhibition games against actual opponents.
But I also suspect players and coaches will get more out of it this way, just in the obvious sense that, for example, all three QBs will get to work with the same offensive personnel against the same defense.
I’ll certainly be paying more attention to the game. In the past I wrote a column off Joe’s pre-game press conference during the game and mostly ignored it.
Will there be stats? What stats? Plus-minus numbers for individuals, especially QBs, would seem apropos, but I’ll be mightily impressed if the sports-info folks deliver on that.
Expect applause for formations, as when the offense comes out in some edgy five-wide, two-tight-end, shotgun deal. Expect sloppiness, because all this edgy stuff is still no new. Expect tributes to JoePa throughtout the stadium and the day.
Expect rain, unfortunately. Thunderstorms are in the forecast. No biggie. It’s only the Blue-White game.
One thing that would concern me, just a little, if I was a Penn State fan: Whenever Bill O’Brien has been asked for any assessment of his team, or even any segment of the team, he speaks entirely in terms of intangibles. They’re hard workers, they’re smart and coachable, I enjoy being around them, etc.
Nothing about talent. Nothing about athleticism. Nothing about skill.
Hmmm…
This could mean a couple things.
1. They’ve only had like 12 spring practices. They have over 100 football players, and he’s used to working with half that many. Maybe he really doesn’t know them well enough yet. He has said that a sizable amount of his evaluation of the squad will come in the weeks after spring practice, when they get all the film cut up and fully study it.
2. The only evaluation that matters, really, is in comparison to the rest of the Big Ten. It’d be pretty hard for O’Brien to have much knowledge of the Big Ten right now.
3. He is actually somewhat unimpressed with what he has, but is of course unwilling to say so.
I intend to ask O’Brien about this after the Blue-White game Saturday.
The whiffer this time is Charles Blahous, a senior something-or-other at Mercatus, a research group at George Mason University.
Blahous issued a report last week claiming that Obamacare will cost $340 billion more than Congressional Budget Office estimates, which means at least the feeble intentional misread of the CBO’s work from a couple weeks ago has been scrapped by the right wing echo chamber.
Blahous is wrong, of course. Here’s why: Some of the cost savings under Obamacare will come from Medicare spending cuts. Medicare is trust-funded. Blahous’ math assumes that when the trust fund runs out, Medicare won’t be funded at all, thus the cuts won’t count as a positive on the revenue side for Obamacare.
This is nonsense. Benefits from Medicare, like Social Security (also trust-funded) are guaranteed by law. Hence the term, “entitlements.” If Blauhaus was right, we’d have no long-term budget deficit problem at all, no need for the “entitlement reform” the Republicans are so big on. Take note, Paul Ryan et al: The trust funds run out, no more Medicare, no more Social Security. No deficit. Relax, everybody!
In some circles, much has been made of the fact that Blahous is an “Obama appointee.” He’s part of a two-person oversight panel for the Medicare and Social Security trust funds. Traditionally, one appointee is a Democrat, the other a Republican. Blahous is the Republican. The Democrat, Robert Reischauer, had nothing to do with the report.
Guess who did have something to do with the report – Mercatus is funded by, wait for it… Koch Industries.
None of this discouraged that commie pinko left-wing Washington Post from putting the report on page one last week (although, in fairness, many of the Post’s pundits debunked it elsewhere). In a real dog-bites-man item, Charles Krauthammer, brought to you each week by your Lancaster Sunday News, was among the media frauds who ran with it.
Really looking forward to the rich, intellectually rewarding experience this year’s election is going to be.
Golf’s majors deliver. Again.
The fallout:
Augusta National: The streak of brilliant drama/lunacy in one major after another has to end sometime. Could be at the U.S. Open in June. The venue, Olympic, in San Francisco, is as I remember almost claustrophobically penal, and thus unlikely to yield swashbuckling golf.
That isn’t a problem at ‘ol Augusta. The players seem to have caught up to the extreme lengthening that look place a few years back, and the rough last week was a complete non-factor. It’s still not as dangerous a course as it once was, but look at the numbers: 29 eagles, a double-eagle, and 155 double-bogeys or worse. That’s what I’m talking about.
Bubba: It’s about time the ability to hook and slice wedges on demand gets rewarded. This guy might be more unorthodox than John Daly, but he plays golf, as opposed to playing golf swing, like, um, some people we could name. Much has been made of the fact that he’s never taken a lesson. That is amazing, but more amazing to me is that he’s never sought treatment for what is evidently world-class ADD, for fear of what a doctor, poking around inside that head, might find.
Don’t see him winning a bunch of majors. He’s already 33. But he could do plenty more good things in the game. Get used to him in the Ryder and President’s Cups. He’s a freakish talent, and the game is better for having him around it.
My favorite moment of his post-round press conference was when he referred to the fans as “patrons,” in the pompous manner the Lords of Augusta insist on, and then admitted, “First time I ever said that word.”
Louis Oosthuizen: This dude can really, really play golf. The swing is gorgeous, powerful, and technically immaculate. Seems to have all the shots, and is almost spookily comfortable, poised and self-possessed under the gun. Also: He looks like Shrek (also spookily comfortable, poised and self-possessed under the gun), so he’s got that going for him, which is nice. The question now becomes why on Earth doesn’t he win more? Louis, not Shrek.
Phil: The last couple years he sort of willed himself into the hunt in majors, but really didn’t play much good golf in 2010-11. He seems back, I suspect at least partly because the health issues, his own and his wife’s, have eased. The triple-bogey Sunday came at the par-3 fourth, which is one of the few holes at Augusta where lefties might be at a disadvantage.
He did get a bad break there. With a neutral kick he probably makes four, or no worse than five. Still, I thought he portrayed it, in post-round interviews, as a better, or less bad, tee shot than it actually was. He flew it into the bleachers to the right of the green on a par-three, for God’s sake.
Still love his attitude and fight. Can’t think of a worse course for him (or Bubba, come to think of it) than Olympic, but I give him a shot at the British and PGA.
Rory: Still think we’re jumping the gun just a little on annointing him the next big thing. Hard to defend 77-76 over the weekend. Hasn’t won, at least in America, coming from behind, or even in a tight duel with one or several players. Everybody said Sergio was a great pairing for him Saturday, but watching them yuk it up while playing themselves out it looked to me like an impressionable adolescent spending time with a bad influence. Rory’s starting to seem a little too comfortable in his own skin. On the other hand…
Eldrick “Tiger” Woods: First of all, I don’t give a damn that he tossed and then kicked his club. It was five seconds of acting out in five hours of utter frustration. The kind of thing people act offended by because they think they’re supposed to.
Didn’t think he’d win. Never dreamed that he wouldn’t contend. Recall that he finished fourth here the last two years when he had nothing, and was tied for the lead on 12 tee Sunday a year ago.
I continue to be astounded, beyond fascinated, by his career as it plays out. He once caused me to actually lose respect/love for golf because if anyone could be as good at it as he was, it couldn’t be as hard as I used to think it was. But he let golf up off the canvas, and the old bastard is getting his revenge now, isn’t he?
Who’d want to be Tiger Woods right now? What were the odds, say 10 years ago, that that question would ever be seriously asked?
Tell me you wouldn’t watch a sitcom with that title?
Ozzie Guillen is one of those sports figures – Charles Barkley and Johnny Miller are good examples – whose public image and self-image and ego come, to a large extent, from being perceived to be outspoken. Candid. Shoot-from-the-hip.
Many in my business say they find this “candor,” “refreshing,” which tells you too much, I’m afraid, about my business.
Barkley and Miller are smart people. Guillen, I’ve always suspected and am now certain, is not. He was quoted the other day saying that he feels awful, not because he said he loves Fidel Castro, but because of how upset people were by it. Again: Not because he said he loves the murderous dictator of Cuba, as the face of a franchise in a community with a huge Cuban population, but because people in that community were upset by it.
This is a little like saying you feel awful not because you opened machine-gun fire in Grand Central Station at rush hour, but because some people got shot.
And as nuts as it was to say it, it’s equally nuts to think it. Fidel Castro has influenced world affairs for more than a half-century, and all of that influence has been awful, much of it tragically so, because he is without qualification an awful person. Ozzie loves him.
Outspoken is overrated. Dumb and outspoken is a vicious combination.
Have you ever seen a younger team that played older – in all the good ways – than Kentucky?
I’m less blown away by the Wildcats’ talent than their intangibles.
I’m pretty sure I’m a cult of one in this regard, but I think their talent has become a teeny bit overrated. Kidd-Gilchrist and Davis are the only two I see with much chance to be NBA impact players, and I’m not sold on either of them as future, no-brainer NBA all-stars. K-G is a bit of a tweener who’s going to have to develop a perimeter game. He may, of course. He’s a teenager, for God’s sake. But it’s not there now.
As for Davis- don’t get me wrong. He’s fabulous, the best player in the college game at the moment. But some of the “once-a-generation” hysteria is because of a perennial tendency of even smart basketball people to go ga-ga over shot-blockers. Just from Sixers’ history, think of Larry Brown with Dikembe Motumbo, or Jimmy Lyman with Manute Bol.
Think of the top 20 basketball players ever. How many of them were shot-blockers? Sure, they all blocked some shots, but for how many was shot-blocking (or shot altering, or “changing the game with their defensive presence”) an essential element of their greatness.
I’d argue one: Bill Russell.
Again, speculating about teenagers is a crazy game, but it says here Davis has a better chance to be Pervis Ellison or even Emeka Okafor – both of whom were almost as big an object of media crushes when they won their NCAAs – than a 21st Century Russell. Honestly, I suspect Davis’ ceiling – his ceiling, I’m saying – is right around Kevin Garnett. That’s not a bad thing.
As competitors, though, I love Davis and Kidd-Gilchrist and all their playmates. I love their unselfishness and cohesiveness and relentlessness and poise that borders on superhuman, from a starting five of three freshmen and two sophomores. It appears to go without saying that they all hold each other accountable. Calipari deserves enormous credit for that, but so do his kids. It’s obviously who they are.
Rock, chalk, whatever: Kansas is good, too, but obviously not special. The Jayhawks sort of survived their way here as Final Four and final-game participants often do, helped greatly by North Carolina (a team with as much talent at Kentucky but, despite being more experienced, much less of all that other stuff) losing its point guard. I like their team and their coach, but honestly, they’re not all that relevant tonight.
If they win, it’ll be because they happened to be standing there when Kentucky lost the magic. And the Wildcats seem the most upset-proof team in this sport since the last truly, historically great college team. That would be Kentucky, 1996, which, come to think of it, had no NBA all-stars.
Kentucky 73, Kansas 60
My newspaper runs conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer’s column each Sunday. In last week’s paper he wrote a column about Obamacare that includes the following:
Cost:
Obamacare was carefully constructed to manipulate the standard 10-year cost projections of the CBO. Because benefits would not fully kick in for four years, President Obama could trumpet 10-year gross costs of less than $1 trillion — $938 billion to be exact.
But now that the near-costless years 2010 and 2011 have elapsed, the true 10-year price tag comes into focus. From 2013 through 2022, the CBO reports, the costs of Obamacare come to $1.76 trillion — almost twice the phony original number.
This is – and I’m fracturing vertebrae here bending over backward to be kind – false.
The CBO report includes estimates of the raw costs of insuring people through the Affordable Care Act, and also revenue, though taxes, penalties, and cost cuts, which come mostly within Medicare. The $1.76 trillion figure is raw costs and nothing else. The supposed accounting trick Krauthammer imagines refers to the fact that the CBO’s original report, prepared several years ago, includes 2011, in which health-care reform had not yet kicked in.
The entire report, linked to in a previous post, is clear to anyone with no axe to grind and a sixth-grade reading level: When the Affordable Care Act became law, CBO estimated that the net result would be to reduce the deficit. Now, with this revised estimate, CBO has decided the law will reduce the deficit by even more money. In short, the “real” number, according to Krauthammer, is better than the “phony,” one.
Unsurprisingly, most of the conservative media echo chamber, led by Fox News, was throwing around the $1.76 million number hours after the report came out. So was Tom Price, the dunce-like chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee.
But Krauthammer’s column ran almost a week later. The nonsense had been thoroughly debunked. For him to trumpet it in a nationally syndicated column ought to, but won’t, ruin any credibility he may have had. It’s either willful deception or he’s an idiot. He’s not an idiot.
Meanwhile, of course, the big news right now surrounds Obamacare’s constitutionality, an admittedly tricky (although entirely politically motivated) question.
But the numbers are what they are. As Jon Chait summarized in The New Republic, ” CBO still thinks it will mean about 30 million additional people get insurance, that insurance will become more secure for those who have it, that the law will more than pay for itself in the first ten years, and that, over the long run, the law will reduce the deficit.”
