I know a sports post should be on anything but mid-season baseball. The Blackhawks here just won the Stanley Cup for the first time in 49 years, and the city is berserk about it. The World Cup is on the teevee upstairs, and will be for the next month. So, yeah, mid-season baseball seems like small stakes next to all that. But still. I want to say a couple of things: first, the Mets jumped the Phillies last night in the NL East standings. There’s a reason for that; for the last four weeks or so, the Mets have been a better team than the Phillies, and it’s pretty hard to deny. The Phillies are the far better team on paper, and I have no doubt they’ll be the better team at year’s end, but for the last few weeks, the Mets have been better. Why? Pitching. I also think it’s hard to deny that the Mets’ pitching – such a thorn in their side the last few years – is tight as hell. Pelfrey is having a career season; where he’s been a weak link in the past, he’s completely stepped it up: impressive at 8 and 1. Santana’s record doesn’t reflect his ongoing quality, though he’s been a little skittish from time to time (that inning against the Phillies in Philadelphia was a nightmare like I’ve never seen from him). Even Nieve – with a terrible 6.00 ERA – has started to light it up; it went largely unnoticed, but he damn near threw a perfect game the other night, retiring 27 of 28 in a one-hit complete game shut out. And Dickey even looks like the real deal with that wacky knuckler. And, and, and, the relief hasn’t completely collapsed: the Mets have actually won some extra inning and one-run games, which is a relief after last year’s endless late inning shenanigans. The Mets have the best home record in baseball by far. Hypothesis: we’re seeing so many triples and odd doubles at Citi Field that it’s clear many teams don’t know how to play outfield in the big park. The problem is that they have one of the worst road records. If this team can start winning on the road, they’re going to be trouble. I still think that Ike Davis can’t save us, as it were, at least this season. But the Mets actually look good, which is, to say the least, a surprise.
Alright people. I’ll give it to you straight. I like seeing Sidney Crosby have to eat shit as much as the next guy. Really I do. But all the U-S-A chanting breaking out over the US Olympic hockey team has me getting all gaggy. So Canada was favored to win the USA-Canada game, and the US won. Then all of a sudden every schmuck’s an expert, and every other schmuck is getting all teary-eyed about believing in miracles. Enough with the chanting. Enough with the Lake Placid. Basta, already. I’m announcing it here, after the Canadians just held off a mad third period rush by the Slovaks to force a gold medal rematch: I’m 100% for the Canadian team as of right now. When they hand out the medals for men’s ice hockey in Vancouver, I want to hear the best national anthem in the world. You know how it goes. You’re humming it right now.
The big Series match-ups don’t seem to be living up to it, especially on the Howard v. A-Rod side. Howard has been a non-presence at bat (he’s done well in the field). His numbers are just dismal: 3 for 17, with 10 strike outs, only one run scored, and only one RBI. Compared to that, A-Rod’s first and second game slump seems almost productive. He’s at 2 for 14, with 7 strike outs, 2 runs scored, and 3 RBI’s. Of course, A-Rod’s two hits came precisely when they were most needed, with the dinger off the camera setting off the offensive rally in Game 3, and the clutch double tonight plating Damon for the ninth inning go-ahead run. With situation factored in, Howard loses the contest badly so far. The fact that A-Rod’s been hit three times and walked twice in Game 3 is only gravy, especially with Posada making them pay for the pass. Where is Ryan Howard? I’m sure Yankee fans don’t want this guy to wake up – though he still might, but Utley and Werth are really out there alone if Howard’s bat doesn’t start working. Just for a final number here: A-Rod’s 3 RBI’s are better than every individual Philly with the exception of Utley, who has 4. That’s a pretty shocking figure, given that Rodriguez had about as awful a first two games in this series as anyone, and looked to be back to previous post-season form. It would be interesting (in a modernist symbolism sorta way) if A-Rod’s turnaround in the Series was kicked off by dinging one off the teevee camera.
1. Series Match-Up – I like a Yankees-Phillies series. First, it’s old school. I don’t know what a Colorado Rocky is, but its only barely a baseball team. In general, I don’t trust baseball teams that purport to represent entire states. That’s right. I said it. A baseball team should represent a city, not a state. Now, before you go off all half-cocked telling me that the New York Yankees and the New York Mets represent the state of New York, let me just stop you. The Yankees were founded long before such nonsense existed – when all teams were indexed to a city. The Mets, for their part, could never be mistaken for representing, say, Watkins Glen, New York, first because they are the Metropolitans, and second because their colors very obviously refer to the colors of the City of New York, and not the state of New York (the nonsense about the Mets colors referring to the Giants and Dodgers old colors is just silly, and hardly worth a mention). So much for that. But Florida? Arizona? Texas? Colorado? This is some new and painfully corporate contrivance meant to produce wide demographic identification (the worst offender appears in another sport – the Carolina Panthers: they don’t even bother restricting themselves to a state). I like World Series when they are Philadelphia v. New York, or Chicago v. Boston, or Detroit v. Los Angeles. This Colorado v. Texas shite has got to go.
Second, these teams are pretty evenly matched. Yankee fans who think the NL team will be a push-over this year, in the style of the hapless 99 Padres, have another thing coming. Indeed, I’d say that Philly is the stronger team at this point, largely because the Yankee offense has been so uneven, especially with runners in scoring position. When the bottom of the line-up hits, and the top of the line-up do their thing, the 09 Yankees are essentially unstoppable. We saw this on display in Game 4 – with all pistons firing, the Angels looked like what they were: a pathetically outmatched team. But there have been real offensive problems, and I don’t just mean Swisher’s performance (though his defense has certainly argued for his continued inclusion in the line-up). The Yankee bats have been iffy at best, which of course can’t be said of the Phillies. NY has been saved by three factors: opponent errors, stellar pitching, and clutch A-Rod. (For just a signal of how A-Rod smacked down Mike Scioscia’s strategy, he was on base five times last night, with two singles and THREE walks, all of which involved Angel pitchers trying to keep the ball the fuck away from his wheelhouse, which itself seems massive at this point. They even walked in a run pitching around A-Rod. Compare games 1 and 2, when Scioscia tried to pitch Rodriguez with impunity, hoping to break his confidence. Bzzzt. Try again next year.) On the other side, of course, is Ryan Howard, who has been tearing up anything in his path since Game 1 of the postseason. Clutch v. clutch. Tight pitching v. tight pitching, and even the Phillies pen didn’t seem all that bad. And Jeter v. Rollins? This should be interesting.
A few posts back, Chuck from Austin suggested that a better metric for predicting playoff success might not be the two that I offered (road record, late inning runs), but rather performance during the last two weeks – or last ten games – of the season. Having mostly gotten over the halfway point on that metric, here are the results so far:
New York: 6 – 0 (with 4 games left)
Detroit/Minnesota – I’m not even touching this one. Ugly for Tigers fans right now.
LA Angels: 3 – 2 (with 5 games left)
Bosox: 0 – 5 (with 5 games left) (!)
Phillies: 2 – 3 (with 5 games left)
Cardinals: 1 – 4 (with 5 games left)
LA Dodgers: 2 – 4 (with 4 games left)
Rockies: 3 -2 (with 5 games left)
It’s a big ouch for Boston, first of all, if the metric means anything. Oddly, the Cards performance is not a whole lot better, but the whole NL leader group looks like it’s fizzling. The Yankees keep winning games late, and did so last night with a bunch of guys nobody’s ever heard of – their 15th walk-off win this year. It might yet happen, of course, that the Yanks collapse in the first round, or that they walk into Tampa Bay and lose three straight and take that sting into the playoffs or something. I think the point here is that any way you slice it, they look formidable. Even on this “Last 10″ metric, it’s not close to a contest.
METRICS UPDATE, October 4
New York: 7-3 Detroit: 4-6
Minnesota: 7-3
LA Angels: 7-3
Bosox: 4-6
Phillies: 4-6
Cardinals: 2-8 (ouch!)
LA Dodgers: 3-7
Rockies: 6-4
I gotta think that having Sabathia get beat up like that on Friday night tweaks the last ten stat for the Yanks. That was brutal, and probably will make him a bit tenuous in his first playoff start. But still, the Cards record is ugly, and there’s not anything that much better in the NL. I sputtering close. I’d bet on Detroit to hold on. Reason: they’re not the friggin’ Mutts.
Just noting here the current road record of the top teams in each division:
Yankees: 42-30
Tigers: 32-40
Angels: 42-32
Phillies: 43-28
Cardinals: 41-31
Dodgers: 42-30
Notice any consistencies? Any outliers? I would say that Detroit’s basically done for in the first round, but that’s not a particularly stunning revelation, since they would be at least six games out of first in any other division. Texas, which likely won’t catch Boston for the AL Wild Card, leads Detroit by two games in the standings right now. Minus the Tigers’ severe deviation, however, I think that’s a pretty tight grouping.
Second, I wonder if there’s some way to get the stats on late inning runs, say 7th, 8th, and 9th. I have to believe that the Yankees would be leading in that metric by a lot. It would seem to suggest a team that’s really come together as a team.
After the last two fiasco-capped seasons, I’ve been hesitant to start up again with the baseball posts, though I did reactivate the baseball links. One can only stand so much late-season collapsery before even glancing at mid-season ball becomes a little painful. I did not re-up my MLB.TV subscription this year, in any case, even though that’s partly becaiuse I’m too busy. But I have been watching and listening (baseball will always be a radio game to me), at least when I can. But I have to chime in here, even though the Mets just stomped the Cards in Queens, and pulled back to within a game and a half of the Phils. But thatr’s what I want to talk about. The Phillies should, by all rights, be up five or six games right now, if not more. This isn’t a Philly bashing session typical of Mets fans. It’s a Philly What-the-Fucking session. So, Phils, what the fuck? After the Pirates inscrutable sweep of the Mets in Pittsburgh – which came just after they seemed to have gotten over a sweep by the Dodgers, Philly should have run away with the division before the break. They have the talent (though with injuries), and every other team was playing like shit, the Metropolitans included. The last week and a half is really the capper, with the Phils dropping now seven of their last eight, most of those at home, leaving them with what really should be considered the most scandalous home record in baseball: they’ve won only one more game at home than the hapless Washington Nationals. But the disease seems to be of eastern origin. Just as a painful fact as of this writing, San Francisco – currently eight games out in the NL West (admittedly, the Dodgers are having a sick season) – would be in first place by half a game were the Giants to have stayed in the Polo Grounds (yes, that would be hard…). The Rockies, currently third in the NL West at 10 games out, would be nipping at the Phils heels. As for the prat falls and other nonsense going on the in NL East (Castillo’s dropped pop up that gave the Yankees one in the Bronx deserved to be amplified even more than the chortling New York media could), well, it’s getting hard to watch.
I have not watched an entire college basketball game all year. In fact, I haven’t watched a complete basketball game in probably a few years. Here are the results of my brackets for the NCAA tournament, with the coming week’s games excluded:
All in all, not bad, I’d say. I could still have a complete sweep of the Elite Eight at this point, supposing all goes the way I thought it would (which I guess gives away three of my picks for the next round). But 24 out of 32 for the first round, and 13 of 16 for the second? Is that good? I don’t even know. It’s a little over 77%. It seems alright to me. I did better than most NY Times sports columnists.
I’m not a big gambler. I like playing poker, but even then, I play “tight,” which means I don’t gamble a lot. I’m alright with that. I never gambled on sports, and apart from a little sidewalk game we played growing up (called Cee-Low), I never really liked dice. But when I was growing up, all my friends bet sports, and one summer it was particularly out of control, with bets into The Book on hockey, on baseball, ridiculous. It does make the games more interesting, however, when you’re watching with people who have money down on them, and you’re wtaching not the raw score, but the spread. One thing I learned from this was that The Book is mostly right. That’s the principle here. In the East and South brackets, the 1 through 4 teams end up in the Sweet Sixteen. In the Midwest and West brackets, the 1 through 3 teams end up in the third round, with only minor variations after that: Purdue as the fifth ranked team gets through, and then you have the anomaly of twelfth-ranked Arizona getting in after the blow-up of Wake Forest. Lesson: The Book is mostly right. The key is to pick and choose the slight variations where The Book is wrong – harder in the first round than overall. But I did manage to pick a few even there (Maryland over California, USC over BC, and – my triumph thus far – Western Kentucky over Illinois). I picked Portland State over Xavier as a kind of wacky upset, but that effed up my East bracket. If I had kept to the principle, I’d be in better shape. The 8-9 match-ups are you-pick-ems, and I won some (Siena over Ohio State) and lost some (Oklahoma State over Tennessee). Note that both these games were extremely close, with Siena winning in the last three seconds of double-overtime, and the Oklahoma State-Tennesse match-up decided by only two points (74-72). Like I said, you-pick-em. Now, of course, it gets harder, since 1-4 and 2-3 match-ups are all kinda like 8-9 match-ups. This is where people who know far more than I do come in with injury reports and player-on-player match-ups, and all the other stuff that leads The Book to be mostly right. We shall see.
Some random thoughts on the Super Bowl. First, I should say that I haven’t watched football seriously in more than ten years. It’s getting to be like Easter for the semi-Catholic: I watch the Super Bowl, and maybe a playoff game or two. I have better things to do with my Sundays. OK, I don’t have better things to do, but the game bores me, which is strange, since I used to be really into it until just after college. In any case, watching the very exciting closing minutes of this year’s Super Bowl, it occurred to me – as it no doubt did to many others – that I’d seen this game before, like, last year. So I wondered, Descartes-style, whether there might be an evil genius who scripts these things, and, if so, how the script works. Because there does seem to be a formula. So, first, what are the problems that have to be overcome by the Super Bowl script. The obvious first problem is the blow-out. Nobody but the fans of the winning team keep watching a game that looks like a blow-out, and many of the Super Bowls of my youth were just that. If the advertisers are paying so much money, the second half slots have to pay off. So, you need a close game, or at least one in which the possibility of a come back remains very real until well into the fouth quarter. Second, you want to promote football itself, while also including the sports channels and shows, which would have to be in on the con. So, it should be exciting, with numerous back and forths and big plays, and it should have two or three really serious highlights for the sports shows, preferably dazzling catches or impossible runs. Not only can these be run on a loop as a “signifier” for the game, but they are also sought after by fans and others trying to relive the experience of having seen the event live. So the David Tyree helmet catch from the 2008 game or this year’s toe-tap game winner by Santonio Holmes will serve as little snippets of marketable code. The script, given this set of problems, becomes clear. The teams battle back and forth, but stay within two touchdowns for the first three quarters. Everything then loosens up in the fourth quarter. The then trailing team springs to life, just as we always knew they would, and suddenly takes the lead, preferably with a magnificent drive led by their legendary quarterback. The team that had been leading, that had sensed victory just minutes before, is crushed. They get the ball back with two to three minutes remaining. It all comes down to this! Everything seems doomed, but they claw back and push and push. The final drive – which ends in a dramatic touchdown with under a minute remaining – is either capped by or includes an amazing play that will be the pre-packaged “memory” for the viewer…I saw that catch live, sonny, etc. The team that had come back, but now trails again, gets the ball back with 30-50 seconds left, just enough to keep viewers watching and anxious until the final play of the game, and transitioning them into the post-game show. The last two Super Bowls followed this general script exactly. Diagnosis: sound stage in Burbank! (The innovation in this year’s script was the miraculous interception and run back to close the first half: why waste even a second of ad time, and why not give the viewers a treat to remember?)
Of course, I don’t really believe this. On average, if you watch a lot of football, I suspect many of the games play out in this way owing to the various forces at work through the rules, within the coaching tradition, and on the field itself. (Example: I’d still argue that a “prevent defense” is a terrible idea, though I’d bet that coaches have clear statitistics on how it works more than it fails.) But it is odd that the last two Super Bowls have operated according to what would seem a strict formula for maximizing viewership at all levels (current, future, and auxiliary programming such as ESPN and DVD sales).
On the commercials: meh. The first half featured the usual “Women are better naked” misogynistic crap. The Bob Dylan/will.i.am commercial was somewhat memorable (the graffiti evolution bit helped). But two struck a chord with me. First, the Denny’s “Serious Breakfast” commercial. The premise is that three mafiosi are sitting in a diner discussing a future hit on an informant. But just as the mob boss tries to order the hit, a waitress comes over and starts spraying a whipped cream happy face on his pancakes. The noise of the whipped cream container interrupts the serious discussion a few times, and then we cut to the catch phrase: Isn’t it time for a serious breakfast? Cue bacon close-up, etc. The commercial is funny in its own right, but it reminded of of a phenomenon I’ve been noticing on Facebook. Specifically, when I compare the friends I had growing up with the friends I’ve made since college, I notice the glaring imbalance of Italian names. When I was growing up in Queens, I just assumed that a prevalence of Italian names was common across the country. You had your Massimo’s and Vito’s and Angelo’s and Rocco’s, your Francesca’s and Concetta’s and Rosanna’s, and even where the first names were anglicized, they were anglicized in a certain way (no Dave’s or Gary’s, but all Mike’s and Joey’s and John’s), and you had the last names to get you through: the Mastaciola’s and DiPietro’s and Pallazzolo’s and Capparella’s. And when I look at my friends list, I see it, all those Italian names, and then I look at their friends and it’s even more so, with something like half of all names being Italian in origin. But not so much the friends from college and afterward. The names have all changed since I hung around, so to speak. And when I think about the people I grew up with, I notice that most – including me – had at least one parent who wasn’t born in the United States, who had an accent (Irish, Italian, Greek, Croatian), who arrived here in the late-1960′s or early 1970′s, or later. I thought this was normal. But, of course, it’s not. What I realized only later is that I grew up in what was essentially an “ethnic enclave,” a strange thing when you think on it, but not uncommon for big east coast cities. I’ve never really considered myself “Italian” or “Irish,” though my father is to this day an Italian national, and my grandmother emigrated from Ireland in the 1920′s, and kept her brogue until the day she died. I’m American, and I think I’ve always been a little embarrassed of the whole “claiming your cultural heritage” bit. I still am. I certainly don’t get all worked up about “images of Italians in the media” and other such issues, because I’ve never really thought of myself as Italian, and I always assumed that anti-Italian discrimination – in terms of actual life effects – was really an early-to-mid 20th century thing. But two incidents.
First, I was visiting a (midwestern) school while I was deciding on PhD programs, and one of the graduate students who was showing me around kept introducing me to people as “[insert stereotypical Italian first name here] from Brooklyn,” and he kept saying it with a really obnoxious Vinny Barbarino accent. He was thoroughly amused by this, and the fake New Yawkah accent grew thicker and more insulting as the day went on. He was a Southerner, from Alabama if I remember correctly, and he didn’t pull off the Barbarino bit particularly well, but the message was clear enough. I remember being annoyed, thinking it was disrespectful, though I just smiled along wanly, fuming. I was careful to eliminate any hint of a New York accent from my diction when I said “Hi, it’s nice to meet you” after his little performances. I bumped into the guy again at a conference in New Orleans last year, and one of my friends introduced me to him. He knew perfectly well who I was, but I used my full name, decidedly unanglicized, emphasizing its vowels. It was all I could do to keep from tagging the guy with a right hook on the fucking spot. Spread love: it’s the Brooklyn way. Second, I was at a job interview at another midwestern school, and I was on my last event, having breakfast with some graduate students. I don’t remember how the question came up, but one of the students asked, and I do remember it was out of the blue, whether my father was in the mafia. In the fucking mafia! In 2007! Needless to say, I replied “that’s right,” and kind of laughed it off. But on the plane back home, I grew increasingly agitated (I had da agita ovah dis fuckin’ bagiagaloop!) by the question. Like, what the fuck? In the mafia? Really? As an innocent question – playful or not – at a graduate student breakfast with the prospective professor? Ey, ya fuckin’ skootch, isn’t it time for a serious fuckin’ breakfast?
The second memorable ad was for Career Builder dot com. It starts with classical music playing in a lush office, obviously the well-appointed digs for some hotshot CEO. The camera then zooms in to the magnificent moosehead on the wall, an impressive trophy. Then, in a continuous shot, the viewer is led out of the executive’s office and around to another office directly adjacent, and here’s where we see the joke. The classical music transitions into the repetitive sound of a printer, and we find in the second office a man at work on the computer, trying valiantly to type away. It turns out the the stuffed moose’s head was not removed from the body, but merely stuck through the wall with the rest of the mooses body – to wit, the ass-end – residing in the poor man’s office, and, indeed, standing directly on his desk with the ass just above his head. He has to work with a moose ass in his face all day. He looks unpleased. The catch line is something like “Time for a new job?” Conceptually and technically brilliant ad, in my view. But, really, what a metaphor for class consciousness! The apparent splendor of the boss’ office mirrored on the back end by the misery of the working conditions, with the two intimately connected through the same device: the body of the moose. When you look “beneath” the luxury of moosehead (and a traditional signifier here), you get the cost of that luxury on the worker. If I wanted to start a propaganda outfit, I’d want the writer of this ad on my team. Just great.
Given the fact that my posts on this very blog – specifically those predicting that the Mets would now easily win the NL East – were directly responsible for a massive jinx and late-season collapse, I’ve been cautious about any postings this season. I noted the Mets’ season changing winning streak right before the All Star Break, but I’ve otherwise suffered in silence, watching Manuel put together a passibly good team, and watching Delgado make a bid for MVP. So tonight I’ll right, with the Mets enjoying their largest lead of the season thus far, though that lead is only 3.5 games over the Phillies, who overcame a 7 game deficit last year.
I won’t predict that the Mets will win the East, but I will say that they’ve quietly assembled an interesting set of weapons, and an offensive line-up that any team in the NL would do well to fear. Their absolute thrashing of the Brewers last week was a wake-up call for the NL: if the Mets hold on to the East and claim a spot, you shouldn’t expect them to go out easily. These last few weeks have also seen the Cubs stagnant (they were damn lucky, in fact, that the Mets walked into Milwaukee when they did), and the Brewers limping along, so the Mets, a sub-500 team until just before the break, are within shooting distance of the NL leaderboard’s top spot. The Phillies will have their own chance against the Brewers this week – and at home. It’s a crucial series for them. They’ve lost three straight since pulling within a half game of the Mets, so any continued backsliding might be demoralizing as October looms. The Mets, for their part, will have to stay focused and try to pull a few games while the Phils struggle with Milwaukee. I said earlier this year that the wild card team would certainly come out of the NL Central, since St. Louis, Milwaukee, and the Cubbies were all leaps and bounds ahead of the East and West teams at the time. Now I’m not so sure. If the Phils sweep the Brew Crew, and the Mets put together some wins as well, that would place both Philly and NY in shooting distance or past the Brews record. What we’ve actually seen these last three weeks, in addition to strong play in the NL East, is the collapsing fortunes of the NL Central. With all the hype and amazing play by the Cubs, any further erosion of the now expected World Series bid will seriously bum this town out. I’ll be wearing the Orange and Blue though, so I won’t be too sad about it…
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