Odds And Ends…

Let me take today as an opportunity to purge my clipboard of items that have accumulated there over the past several weeks.  I do not know what my writing schedule will be next week; so perhaps this is going to be a way for me to start afresh in the new year.  Consider the following as a “warning”:

• If you see any sort of common thread among the items in this piece, it is purely by accident.

The University of Pennsylvania – my alma mater – has a transgender woman on its women’s swim team.  Lia Thomas had been a member of the Penn men’s swim team for 3 years prior to declaring as a transgender person.  She has gone through the NCAA regimen of year-long testosterone suppression and was declared eligible for the women’s team.  Lia Thomas is setting records as a female swimmer.  As you might imagine, her situation has led to controversy.

Last week, the Editor in Chief of Swimming World wrote an Op-Ed where he compared Lia Thomas’ accomplishments as a female swimmer to the accomplishments of other athletes who used Performance Enhancing Drugs.  Here is the core of the problem according to this Op-Ed:

“Despite the hormone suppressants she has taken, in accordance with NCAA guidelines, Thomas’ male-puberty advantage has not been rolled back an adequate amount. The fact is, for nearly 20 years, she built muscle and benefited from the testosterone naturally produced by her body. That strength does not disappear overnight, nor with a year’s worth of suppressants. Consequently, Thomas dives into the water with an inherent advantage over those on the surrounding blocks.”

Take a moment and read the Op-Ed here; it does not matter if you agree with the position or not, it is a well-written piece that asserts its position strongly but not stridently.

Moving on…  Jim Kaat was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this year at the age of 83.  Kaat had a lengthy career as a pitcher and is still active as a broadcaster.  His view on analytics in baseball today reflect his age and the game as it was when he was playing:

“My big wish, and I don’t know if it’ll happen in my baseball lifetime, is that they take the exit velocity, launch angle, all the shifting, and throw that away and just throw the ball out there and say, ‘Hey, use your intuitive skills and let’s go play ball for nine innings.’ They have all these statistics. For me, the biggest statistic has always been if we get 27 outs and we have one more run than the other team, we win the game.”

Life was simpler back in 1959 when Kaat first arrived in the major leagues and baseball did not have anything near the depth of statistical analysis that it does today.  In the end, Kaat is correct; the standings will be decided by the team with the most wins and not by any of the thousands of numerical calculations that go into things like Weighted Runs Above Average or Win Probability Added or Fielding Independent Pitching.  At the same time, his wish is unlikely ever to be fulfilled; for those like Jim Kaat who are not fans of baseball analytics, the genie is out of the bottle, and the genie does not want to go back inside.

Probably the most visible manifestation of modern analytics is “The Shift”; it certainly gets a lot of criticism from a portion of the baseball community.  I am not enamored of “The Shift” but I am a bit skeptical about rules that might try to eliminate it or marginalize it.  So, just for fun, here is a proposal:

• First, you have to define what “The Shift” is and what it is not.  That definition has to be unambiguous – like the distance from home plate to first base; it has to be right or wrong without any grey area.
• After that definition is written into the rule book, allow both defensive teams to deploy “The Shift” a fixed number of times per game and no more.  Maybe a team can use it against 6 batters in a game.  If that is too many for your taste, how about 4 times per game?  Do I hear 3 times…?
• Just a thought…

Switching gears …  I have mentioned this before, but I want to emphasize it again:

• The best thing that happened to sports broadcasting in 2021 was the debut of the “ManningCast.”

I thoroughly enjoy those telecasts and I fear that their popularity and their critical acclaim are going to spawn a series of imitators and I think all of the imitations are going to lack what I see as the fundamental ingredient in the “ManningCast” that makes it so good:

• The two participants are friends and have been for a long time.  Their banter has a quality of familiarity and closeness that cannot be feigned; it is as critical to the show’s success as water is to life.

There is an analogous situation in sports broadcasting that supports my argument here.  Pardon the Interruption (PTI) has been on ESPN for more than 20 years now; in a sense, it defined the concept of a “debate format” for sports broadcasting for better or for worse.  For me, it is still the gold standard of sports commentary on television.  I believe that the reason it has been a success since its debut in 2001 is that Kornheiser and Wilbon had been friends – and had worked alongside each other on the Washington Post sports staff – for more than 20 years before the show went on the air.  That depth of friendship and mutual respect cannot be manufactured overnight.

Finally, apropos of nothing, let me close here with John Barrymore’s definition of love:

“Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………