It's the Baseball Hall of Fame ... that should be enough

A shrine for everyone to see.

Kevin Paul Dupont has a story in the Boston Globe about the Baseball Hall of Fame, specifically that there's so much Red Sox-related stuff there that it justifies a Boston fan going. 

"It would be virtually impossible for a true Boston fan not to fall immediately into a state of awe and wonder over all the Hall’s offerings specific to the Sox. It blends the good and the bad, the splendor and the horror, including exhibit odes to such icons as Cy Young, Babe Ruth, and (Ted) Williams, along with other greats such as Carl Yastrzemski, Bobby Doerr, Carlton Fisk, Jim Rice, and others."

'“It’s not unusual to see adults walking around in baseball uniforms here,'’’ said (Hall of Fame president Jeff) Idelson, noting the Hall’s ability not only to turn back time, but turn adults into kids. 'It’s like you or me going out on Halloween and wearing our Carl Yastrzemski Little League uniform. Hey, this is the place to do it. This is the ultimate fantasy camp for baseball.'

Especially for those who wear their Red Sox."

People actually sent this stuff to Jackie Robinson

My first thought was that here was another parochial Boston piece, because it seems that nothing in this town matters at all unless there's some sort of local connection. Not that localizing a story isn't common in the media, and there is an obvious Red Sox connection with Pedro Martinez being enshrined in the Hall of Fame soon, but to my mind, there are some things that shouldn't require a local hook.

But then again, the night of the Kentucky Derby, it was one of the lead stories on a local newscast, not because it was the Kentucky Derby, but because a bunch of Patriots players partied there!

I met Nolan Ryan in the days before he was enshrined. You can imagine how I felt about this.

Then I had a second thought -- what if this wasn't yet another sign of Boston parochialism, but another sign of what we've become as sports fans?

We live in a world where more sports are available than ever before ... until the next thing that happens to make even more available. As a whole, this is, of course, awesome. However, I think a side effect is that you don't actually have to be a fan of a sport anymore; you can be a fan of a team.

Baseball seems especially vulnerable in this regard. Thanks to regional sports networks, which draw big ratings even as national ratings are low, and MLB.TV, most people can watch all 162 games of their favorite team (unless you're a Dodgers fan in Los Angeles, which is cruel, because you miss out on Vin Scully).

I even find myself mostly watching Yankees game these days, even with my online package.

Pete Rose is in the Hall of Fame, even if he's not. (And I think he will be eventually.)

But none of that should matter, whether you devour all the baseball you can or stick to one team. It's the Baseball Hall of Fame ... just go.

Do you know what you'll be doing an August weekend five years from now? He does.

The problem is TV and money, not just TV

"The view a fan gets at home should not be better than that of the fan in the worst seat in the ballpark." -- Baseball commissioner Ford Frick (quote from "Monday Night Mayhem" by Marc Gunther and Bill Carter)

Although I didn't specifically remember it coming from Frick until I looked it up, I thought of the quote almost immediately when I read Will Leitch's Sports on Earth piece about people not attending football games after a weekend in which three of the four NFL playoff games where threatened by blackouts.

Leitch writes:

"There are many reasons for this, most of them apparent: Games are too expensive to attend, it's often cold, the beer is lousy and overpriced, football games have a dramatically higher lout-to-normal-human ratio than any other sport (and perhaps any other recreational activity, with the possible exception of a Wall Street bachelor party). But the main reason, clearly, is television. Put aside expense, or possible proximity to this person. Football is a sport that is more fun to watch on television than it is in person, and I'm not even sure it's all that close."

I agree ... and I don't.

First of all, the TV-versus-at-the-game issue is not limited to football, and it's nothing new, as the Frick quote above points out. After all, he was baseball commissioner during the 1950s and 1960s.

With the possible exception of hockey because it can be hard to see the puck, despite Fox's best efforts, any sport is better on TV than it is in person and always has been. I remember when my father went to his first NASCAR race in Dover several years ago; he said one thing that took some getting used to was that he wouldn't be able to see a replay when an accident happened.

If you come across an old game on ESPN Classic, MLB Network or elsewhere, even those prehistoric broadcasts make for a better viewing experience than at the game itself. Since I was watching the "Studio 42 with Bob Costas" interview with Reggie Jackson this morning, I'll use his three-homer game in the 1977 World Series as an example.



With a few exceptions (perhaps the people in the right field stands), hardly anyone at Yankee Stadium that night had a better view of what happened that night than the folks watching on TV. But the people at the stadium where there, and they can brag on that for the rest of their lives.

I wrote about the concept of "being there" a little more than a year ago, but being at the ballpark, stadium, arena, rink, racetrack or pitch is the reason to go, even if nothing historic happens. It's about the experience.

The problem is that we may have reached a tipping point, that during a time when television can present the game in more and different ways to people in the comfort of their living rooms than ever before, the cost of being there has maybe, just maybe outstripped the allure of being there.

Fans get angry ... that's what they do

I'll give Seth Davis this much ... he called it.

"I wonder which call is going to be cited by fans of the losing team as the reason they lost. Whatever it is will be the worst call ever."

That Twitter message came during the middle of last night's Final Four game between Syracuse and Michigan, and sure enough, we Syracuse fans came out of the game howling about the officials, in particular the fourth foul against Michael Carter-Williams with 1:40 left, in which he got pushed to the ground (he fouled out with 1:14 remaining), and the charge against Brandon Triche with 19.5 seconds left (his fifth foul) in which the defender slid under Triche while he was in the air.

Needless to say, Davis crowed after the game ended.

"Told you the losing team's fans would have a call to blame. So much easier than admitting you got outplayed."

Not blaming refs, even as he admits they're terrible, is kind of a thing for Davis. Since there are a couple things he seems not to understand, I, as a service, will enlighten him. (My good friend Cy Nical weighs in with the theory that Davis may not understand because his alma mater, Duke, seems to get all the calls that other teams' fans howl about, but I will not stoop to that level.)

The first is that a team can play badly enough to lose on the merits, and still be screwed by the refs. Had the game turned out the exact same way without the bad calls, Orange fans would have had plenty to be upset about: falling down by double digits and never being able to come all the way back, Carter-Williams' poor game (two points on 1-6 shooting, two assists and five turnovers), James Southerland's five points, including 1-5 from three-point range; Syracuse's 2-3 zone not being as effective against Michigan as it had earlier in the tournament.

But to deny the calls had an impact, especially when Syracuse had to rely on Trevor Cooney to handle the ball on its most-important possession of the year because the starting backcourt was fouled out, is folly. When my new best friend fortyfourist and I tried to make this point to Davis, he didn't have anything to say.

The second thing Davis seems not to understand is that fans are ALWAYS going to scream about bad calls, especially when they have the added advantage of being right.

As stated above, teams that lose, like Syracuse did last night, generally lose for any number of reasons, but officials are always going to take a rap if there are any controversial calls. It has always happened. It will always happen.

* * * * *

So that was how yesterday ended. It started with this delightful bit of nonsense from Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe, bemoaning the fact that Blue Jays fans John Farrell Friday night when the Red Sox played in Toronto for the first time since Farrell left the Jays (with a year left on his contract) to take over the Red Sox.

"Jays fans are mad. They feel betrayed.
When will sports fans understand that people come and people go? People go for the money, for a better situation, for a better life for them and their families.
Farrell simply did what any Canadian or American would do — he sought to improve his life."

Yes, when will sports fans learn, like the ones in Boston who booed Johnny Damon for years because he went to the Yankees, or the ones in Boston who booed Ray Allen when he returned with the Miami Heat this season? Surely Cafardo remembers that, right? Has he ever taken Boston fans to task for that? If he has, I'd love to see it, and I would stand corrected. (I asked him about Damon on Twitter yesterday; like Davis, he didn't respond.)

Cafardo is right when he says people change jobs to improve their lives, and in a perfect world, fans would not be angry if a player leaves because they're seeking better situations for themselves. In a perfect world, it would also be possible to go to an Italian restaurant and have the wait staff keep bringing me plates of spaghetti until I got tired of eating it and never getting fat; that's not going to happen either.

If a player (or manager) leaves, fans are usually going to boo. Red Sox fans booed Damon. Celtics fans booed Allen. Cleveland fans boo LeBron James (and they get to, everyone else needs to shut their pie holes about him going to the Heat). Texas fans booed Josh Hamilton the other day. And fans will never see the hypocrisy of booing someone who leaves (particularly as a free agent, but demanding to be traded also applies), but cheering someone who left his fans to play in their city.

It's not right, but I understand.

But maybe Cafardo doesn't think anyone who goes to Boston should be booed, because it's the center of the sporting universe and all.

Don't just use stats for their own sake

When I was a freshman in college, I had a friend who was on some kind of philosophy kick or something (maybe it was a class she was taking), so she used to walk around and ask in a joking, whiny voice, "What does it meeeeeaaannnn?"

As part of my job involves trying to make things relevant for people, I ask myself and the people who work for me that a lot. In honor of her last name, I call it "Sullivan's Question." In my business, if you can't make something meaningful for people, you're wasting your time.

I got thinking about Sullivan's Question outside of work recently when I came across Jay Jaffe's Sports Illustrated blog about sabermetrics starting to make their way into baseball broadcasts (he likes the idea), which linked to a New York Times article on the same subject.

I will never buy into sabermetrics completely, but I also don't want to be so closed-minded that I can't see where they may have value. I think MLB Network's new show "MLB Now" could be a really good show it it features smart conversation between a true believer in sabermetrics in Brian Kenny and Harold Reynolds, who's more of a skeptic, so I hope it isn't just a forum for them to automatically disagree all the time.

But both the Jaffe post and the Times piece point out what will be the major issue with bringing advanced stats into the booth.

"Now, as the two (Robert Ford and Steve Sparks) settle into the Astros’ broadcast booth, they and their colleagues across the country face a balancing act. How much do listeners want to know about these advanced numbers? How much is informative? And how much would prompt the audience, a group that spans all generations, to tune out?
Listeners and announcers alike say that striking the right balance will be a challenge."

The challenge of that balance is going to be making those statistics meaningful to people, to answer Sullivan's Question, and not just spouting off numbers for the sake of it and hoping people figure it out. (I have a term for that, too, the "Graveyard of Numbers.")

Some are easy. WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched) and OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging) are simple addition. I happen to think they can be superfluous in that people can figure out if a pitcher doesn't allow a lot of baserunners, a batter gets on base a lot and/or tends to do a lot of damage without them, but I don't find them offensive and they can perhaps be helpful.

However, those stats are easy for fans to grasp because they're simple math. What about the harder ones? Even though I can't think of them by name off the top of my head, I believe there are several stats intending to strip out luck and ballpark factors and quality of the team someone plays for; can those be implemented in a way that intelligently spells out for fans something they may already know instinctively if the math behind them is complicated?

Or what about something like WAR (Wins Above Replacement), the formula to which I find incomprehensible? In the future, will it be enough to just cite someone's WAR and people understand what that means, or will the math involved be its undoing?

My first instinct was to say no, that Mike Trout's 10 WAR last year, which from what I've read is sensational, could be meaningless to fans because they wouldn't be able to understand where those numbers came from.

But then I thought about it some more, and realized there are numbers in life that are relevant and meaningful to people who aren't familiar with the statistical methods used to acquire them. For example, how many people who don't know the science of television ratings or political polling read the numbers and think "Wow, Show X is really popular" or "Gee, Candidate Y looks like he's going to win"?

So it's possible, over time, for fans to become as comfortable with advanced statistics on the TV or radio as we are with terms like batting average that we've used forever and know what they "mean" (this point provided by Poopsie, my ambassador to analytics, with whom I am chatting on Facebook as I write this), but at least for the time being, it's probably going to take a skilled practitioner to answer Sullivan's Question and give them meaning.

I think we can all agree that John Sterling, quoted in the Times piece as avoiding advanced numbers, is NOT that guy.

I will close with a brilliant example that Poopsie just gave me.

"I would LOVE for a ground ball base hit to roll into left field, and then the announcers be able to call up video of that shortstop giving up ground ball hit after ground ball hit all in that same location.
The announcer could say 'According to data complied by Baseball Info Solutions, this guy only fields 30 percent of grounders hit 7 feet to his left, a league average SS gets them 60 percent of the time.'"

Now that would work.