Too far ... way, way too damn far

Like President Barack Obama, don't like President Barack Obama, I really don't care. I tend to like him more than not, but everyone's entitled to his or her own opinion.

But this, this is not acceptable. (Be warned; right from the title, there's a lot of a certain word starting with "n.") It would be bad enough if people were complaining that the president talking of an unspeakable tragedy was interrupting their football, but the language is vile and racist and unbecoming anything other than a sub-human.

(My friend KB sent me a note that while some people seemed proud of themselves when she checked the Twitter machine afterward, a bunch deleted their posts, deleted their accounts or apologized. Having not checked myself, I'll take her word for it. I'm guessing there are a lot of people who thought they'd never be found out in the vast Twitterverse and are feeling a serious bout of blabber's remorse.)

Is this what we've come to as sports fans, that the understandable desire for watching sports to be an escape -- more than once this weekend I switched to a random college basketball game to get away from Newtown coverage for a little while -- that we respond to real life daring to intrude with "stick to sports" at best and outright racism at worst?

No, I know we haven't. But it still makes me sad.

P.S. -- My guy Poopsie and I had been having a conversation on Facebook about my recent sabermetrics post, and he sent me a note that he had some new information on Adam Dunn, but didn't feel right, given current events. I told him to lay it on me, that the diversion would be nice for a few minutes. He did, and then I told him something I noted watching the Rockets-Celtics game after reading a story on the Rockets in Sports Illustrated. It was nice.

Youk to the Yanks? Why not?

Ken Tremendous had this to say on the Twitter machine yesterday.

@KenTremendous The great thing about Youk to the Yankees is imagining how much both Sox fans and Yankees fans would hate it.

So yes, it appears that the Yankees have some interest in signing Kevin Youkilis to play third base while Alex Rodriguez is out after knee surgery. And while Ken may be thinking that Red Sox fans would hate it because Youkilis is a Yankee while Yankees fans may hate it because Youk is over the hill, I'm going to guess he meant Yankees fans would hate the idea of him in their uniform.

To get a highly unscientific feel of how my fellow Yankees fans feel about the possibility, I consulted the Yankees Facebook page I follow, and these were some of the comments. (False equivalency alert -- I did not count to see how many of the 644 comments were pro-Youkilis or anti-Youkilis. I'm only listing certain comments to show that there were people who liked or disliked the idea.)

 "Good player .I think he would be a good fit."

"Even though he is a former Blow Sux, he is a gamer and would help while A-rod is on the mend. Look at what former Red Sox have done for us in the past."

"Might have to quit watching for first time ever..........besides he's old and mean"

"no!no!no!no! My most hated Red Sox player!!! Nooooooooo!"

There were also a couple people who like the idea because Youkilis is Jewish, which immediately made me think of this.


So how do I feel? It's pretty simple.If Youkilis can help the team, I hope the Yankees sign him. If not, I hope they don't.

I couldn't care less if Youkilis played for the Red Sox. I accepted Roger Clemens. I accepted Wade Boggs. I accepted Johnny Damon. A couple years ago, Mrs. Last Honest asked me how I would feel if Jonathan Papelbon signed with the Yankees. I told her I'd learn how to dance a jig.


The one Red Sox player who I could never have abided as a Yankee was Jason Varitek. There's no way I could have tolerated a man beloved in Boston for a cheap shot being in pinstripes.

Other than that, it doesn't matter who someone played for before New York. I only care about what they do in New York.

The experience of being there

The other night, my friend Pizz wrote this on Facebook:

"The emotional connection man has to sport is just one of those things. It's the reason why, every time I go to Fenway Park I feel like a six-year-old seeing the Green Monster for the first time. And it's the reason why Adam Richman takes a moment away from eating 100 oz cheeseburgers and visiting his favorite English club and tears up.

I'm building up a knowledge and love of Everton and someday when I make my way (to) Liverpool, I'll probably have the same US in the UK moment."

I went to Yankee Stadium for the first time when I was 8 years old. I wish I could remember how I felt when I walked into the ballpark, but I can't. I do remember it was a bus trip, that we sat in the upper deck, that Doug Bird pitched for the Yankees, that a Royals player hit a home run off the foul pole (based on this box score, which I think is the right one, it would have been Clint Hurdle) and most importantly, Reggie Jackson hit one out.

I've seen a lot of sporting venues since then, mostly for games, but also on tours or walking through whatever open doors happened to present themselves, including the time I took a left turn and found myself on the darkened court at Cameron Indoor Stadium. The moment that always strikes me is when I step inside the field, court or racetrack, and the scene opens up in front of me.

It's the new Yankee Stadium, and I'm a lot older.

 

 

My first (and so far, only) time at Camden Yards. I was in awe. It was everything I was told it would be, and more.

Yet I find the stronger connections are when I can attach a place to something in particular, like when Mrs. Last Honest and I visited Lake Placid not quite two months ago. The connection isn't always a magical one, however, like realizing the Vancouver Olympic speed skating oval was in the back of a business park or the ice skating arena was tucked between a residential neighborhood and an amusement park.

There's probably a good reason why NBC stuck to indoor shots when they cut to figure skating.

But I find the strongest connection with objects; they bring what I saw, listened to or read about to life. I've lost the picture to various computer changes, but it was amazing to see the actual car that Dale Earnhardt won the 1998 Daytona 500 with at the Richard Childress Racing museum. I watched that race on television, barely able to sit the last few laps until he came to the final caution and I knew he would finally win the race.

It's the reason why I'm such a geek for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. It's baseball history, right there, including the Dave Righetti no-hitter from July 4, 1983, that I was listening to on the radio and left to do something else, even though I knew he was throwing a no-hitter. (What can I say? Sometimes I'm an idiot.)

I still kick myself for leaving to this day.

Pizz is looking forward to going to Liverpool someday to see Goodison Park, although I, of course, would have him see Anfield on the proper, red side of Merseyside (something I'd like to do myself someday). Of places I haven't seen other than Anfield, the first three that come to mind that I'd like to see from the inside are the Rose Bowl, the Los Angeles Coliseum and Madison Square Garden.

But one thing about sports is that no matter the venue, no matter the time, no matter the event, something can happen that creates a memory for a lifetime, a permanent connection, when you least expect it.

A baseball peace offering

Since the debate started over whether Miguel Cabrera or Mike Trout would be the American League MVP, I've always felt it was more than the standard debate over who was the league's best player this season, but perhaps the climactic battle between old and new ways of looking at the game.

The American League Cy Young Award selections of Zack Greinke and his 16-8 record and especially Felix Hernandez and his 13-12 record in 2010 were major achievements for the sabermetrics crowd (the type I usually call "stat-geeks," but I'm not here for reasons that will be clear below), in that one of the major points is that wins are a lousy way to judge how good a pitcher is.

But if Trout had won the MVP, it would have been their crowning glory, as the guy who won the first Triple Crown in 45 years would have lost largely because of statistically based arguments that Trout's prowess in the field and on the bases outweighed Cabrera's achievements, including leading the league in two of the great scourges of the sabermetrics movement -- batting average and RBI.

However, Cabrera won, which left people like Brian Vaughn of Call to the Pen more than a little disappointed.

 First off, David Price took home the AL Cy Young narrowly over Justin Verlander without actually ever being better than him at anything. Then we have Miguel Cabrera just crushing Mike Trout in the AL MVP voting despite only topping him in one aspect of the game, and narrowly at that. Maybe we’re not quite as advanced as I was starting to think.

And then Mitch Albom got loose.

In a battle of computer analysis versus people who still watch baseball as, you know, a sport, what we saw with our Detroit vision was what most voters saw as well.

Today, every stat matters. There is no end to the appetite for categories -- from OBP to OPS to WAR. I mean, OMG! The number of triples hit while wearing a certain-colored underwear is probably being measured as we speak.

We need to slow down the shoveling of raw data into the "what can we come up with next?" machine. It is actually creating a divide between those who like to watch the game of baseball and those who want to reduce it to binary code.

As you might imagine, his comments did not meet with universal approval.

And King Kaufman was also something less than amused on the Twitter machine.
  

People are going to look back on Trout's 2012 and say, "My gosh, those idiots didn't know what they were watching!"

If you'd told me 30 years ago that one profession would come to embrace ignorance as a virtue, I NEVER would have guessed journalism.  

I bet you wouldn't be able to find me an MLB GM who would trade Trout's 2012 for Cabrera's 2012, age, etc. not considered.

I actually agreed with the main ideas of Albom's column, that Cabrera should have been MVP and that anayltics don't have all the answers, but insulting the people who disagree with you isn't going to help your argument. The same goes for Kaufman, who, to be fair, also said that Cabrera was "stupendous" this year and is headed for the "inner circle Hall of Fame," which apparently is the very best of the best.

It is in this spirit that I would like to make a peace offering to the sabermetrics crowd, including my ambassador to analytics, my guy Poopsie out in Chicago. In the interest of peace, here are the things I'd be willing to concede:

1. Batting average and RBI aren't the be-all and end-all -- If the point of the game is not making outs, on-base percentage is a more-precise way of measuring that, and RBI require having men on base in front of you, unless you hit more solo home runs than anyone else has ever hit home runs.

2. You don't have to win a lot of games to be a great pitcher -- If Felix Hernandez played for a team that had even an average offense, he might never lose.

3. Fielding percentage and errors aren't the best ways to measure defense -- We can also call this the "Yes, I know Derek Jeter doesn't have great range" concession.

4. No, I don't know exactly what "clutch" is, or even if it exists.

5. Just because I don't know how to calculate VORP, WAR and endless other statistics doesn't necessarily mean they're worthless.

And these are the concessions I want in exchange:

1 Adam Dunn is no better than a decent hitter, and often a terrible one -- It's great that he has a great eye, and when he hits balls, they stay hit, but with a lifetime batting average of .240, if a pitcher can manage to throw the ball over the plate, Dunn will make outs more than 75 percent of the time. He hit .204 this year, meaning he made outs close to 80 percent of the time in those circumstances. Dunn is an extreme example, but it shows that batting average has some value, in that it does measure what someone does when a pitcher throws strikes.

1a. If RBI are a team stat, so are runs -- If you're going to say that driving in runs is a function of men getting on base in front of a hitter, you also have to say that scoring runs is a function of the hitters behind a baserunner, unless he steals home a lot.

2. Good pitchers tend to win a lot -- There have always been Greinkes and Hernandezes, pitchers who pitch better than their records on terrible teams. Take a look at Nolan Ryan's 1987, for instance. In general, however, if a pitcher wins a lot of games, he had a good year.

3. Range is great, but so is making the plays you should make -- Call it the "At least Derek Jeter isn't giving teams four outs an inning" concession. If you can't stomach saying that, watch Eduardo Nunez play shortstop; you'll be crying for Jeter in no time.

4. If "clutch" doesn't exist, explain your first thought when David Ortiz or Alex Rodriguez come up in a big spot.

5. People are always going to be skeptical of any statistic they don't understand.

But even beyond the way we look at baseball, there's one more trade-off I'm willing to make.

I won't call sabermetric types geeks, if they don't call skeptics stupid.

Deal?

Is there a pitching Miguel Cabrera out there?

Miguel Cabrera is this year's American League Most Valuable Player, Cabrera's Triple Crown outweighing Mike Trout's all-around excellence.

Although I wouldn't have bemoaned the horrible injustice of it all if Trout had won, I thought Cabrera should get the award, and yes, it was because of the Triple Crown. Call me an old fuddy duddy, but I think batting average and RBI have some value, so to lead the league in both of those, plus home runs ... 45 years after the last guy did it ... that's an MVP to me.

Although Cabrera was the first guy to win the Triple Crown since Carl Yastrzemski turned the trick in 1967, theoretically anyone could have done it, just like a 56-game hitting streak, a .400 batting average, 73 home runs, 190 RBI or most other statistical milestones or records can mathematically be surpassed. The games are there to play; someone just has to put up the numbers.

But there's one single-season mark that I'm not sure will be reached, and it happened the year after Yaz's Triple Crown.

Thirty wins.

To explain why, let's look at some of the top pitching seasons since 1968.



Here's the last guy to do it:

Denny McLain 1968 -- 31-6, 336 innings pitched, 41 starts, 28 complete games.

Then there are the two guys who have come closest since then:
Steve Carlton 1972 -- 27-10, 346.1 innings pitched, 41 starts, 30 complete games.
Bob Welch 1990 -- 27-6, 238 innings pitched, 35 starts, two complete games.

And the Cy Young and MVP season of the guy who I believe is the best pitcher in baseball:

Justin Verlander 2011 -- 24-5, 251 innings pitched, 34 starts, four complete games.

And this year's Cy Young winners:
David Price -- 20-5 (tied with Jered Weaver for the league lead), 211 innings, 31 starts, two complete games.
R.A. Dickey -- 20-6 (second to Gio Gonzalez's 21), 233.2 innings, 33 starts (plus one relief appearance), five complete games.

In 1968, McLain won 75.6 percent of his starts, and received a decision in 90.2 percent of his starts.

Carlton (on a team that, let's not forget, won 59 games the whole season), won 66 percent of his starts, and got decisions in the same 90.2 percent as McLain. If the Phillies had been any good that year, Carlton probably would have won 30.

For his part, Welch won 77 percent of his starts, and got a decision in 94.2 percent. At the same pace, he would have gotten to 30 with four more starts. If he made 41 like McLain and Carlton, he could have won half of the six extra starts for 30.

Verlander won 70 percent of his starts, and got decisions in 85 percent of them. At that rate, he would have needed to make 43 starts to win 30 games, or nine more starts than he actually made.

And then there are Price and Dickey. To win 30 games, Price would have needed to win all but one of his starts this year, and Dickey would have needed to win all but three. At their winning rates of 64.5 percent for Price and 60.1 percent for Dickey, they would have needed to make 47 and 50 starts, respectively, to get to 30.

Simply put, between five-man rotations and pitchers working fewer innings per start (Dickey, who led the National League in innings pitched, averaged just under 7.1 innings per start, a full inning less than either McLain or Carlton), there aren't enough chances for someone to win 30 games.

And if someone did, believe me, there would be people who believe he shouldn't win the Cy Young Award. After all, wins don't matter.

My Sportsmen: Two guys who said it was OK

Every year, Sports Illustrated names a Sportsman or Sportswoman of the Year (or both, like it did last year). Sometimes, it's for someone who achieved something great during the year, like Michael Phelps in 2008 or Drew Brees in 2010. Other years, it's a combination of that year's achievement and a lifetime achievement award, like Mike Krzyzewski and Pat Summitt last year or Derek Jeter in 2009.

If I had to hazard a guess off the top of my head, I would guess LeBron James or Miguel Cabrera, maybe Gabby Douglas, but I'll also be interested in reading who SI's writers in the "My Sportsman" pieces it runs on its website. (An example, Richard Deitsch's nomination of Maya Moore last year.)

This year's pieces haven't started yet, but given recent events, I'd like to throw in a couple nominations of my own.

* * * * *

Chris Kluwe got mad, and so he wrote himself a letter. Perhaps you heard about it. It was brilliant; it was profane, and it basically set the Internet on fire. It also made him kind of famous, for of all things, smacking down a Maryland state legislator complaining about someone supporting same-sex marriage. (Quick, name three other NFL punters. I got Mike Scifres of the Chargers, Zoltan Mesko of the Patriots and Steve Weatherford of the Giants.)

Kluwe wrote some other stuff, like after former teammate Matt Birk wrote an op-edit piece against same-sex marriage. And he did it without one profanity. When he thought the stance the newspaper he wrote for took on the proposed marriage amendment in Minnesota was dishonest, he stopped blogging for them.

After the amendment failed on Nov. 6, he had this to say:

 Together, we made a statement that America is tired of division. America is tired of discrimination, of exclusion, and of unthinking oppression—the belief that people have to live their lives according to someone else's views rather than their own free will.

 Together, we made sure that the world our children will grow up in is one step closer to tolerance, love, and equality; a world where our children can make their own choices instead of being shackled to dusty hate from the past.

But let us not forget who Kluwe was defending in the letter that made him famous.

* * * * *

I've written about Brendon Ayanbadejo before, and why his advocacy of same-sex marriage got Emmett Burns Jr. all worked up in the first place, but absent a Sports Illustrated profile of him, I didn't know much about him or his motivation for supporting the cause, so I looked it up. In addition to his background, there was this:

The linebacker spent critical adolescent years living in a building designated for LGBT students at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His stepfather worked as the resident director, and the family lived in an apartment at the base of the dorm.

“It was sort of their safe haven, where the students could be themselves," Ayanbadejo said. “I was in eighth or ninth grade, and we’d do these activities with everyone, skits or plays with me and my brother and sister. Men would be holding hands with each other, and women with women, and I was so young I didn’t really think much of it. Now, I kind of rejoice when I see same-sex couples together, sharing their love, and being able to be themselves outside, not just in their homes."

I wasn't exposed to gay people in any serious way until I was an adult, when I worked on the Outer Cape in Massachusetts, where there a lot of gay people, including one of the couples involved in the lawsuit that brought same-sex marriage to Massachusetts, who I came to know through my job.

A funny thing happens when you spend time around gay people ... they stop being "strange."

When Maryland voters approved same-sex marriage Nov. 6, Ayanbadejo said, "It's like I woke up and it was Christmas."

I'm normally against any references to Christmas before Thanksgiving, but this time, I'll make an exception.

* * * * *

We are eight years removed from a presidential candidate possibly being helped in his re-election by state ballot measures restricting marriage to one man and one woman. Until Nov. 6, same-sex marriage had lost more than 30 times at the ballot box.

Kluwe and Ayanbadejo are not the only sports figures to support same-sex marriage and gay rights. Scott Fujita and Sean Avery made videos supporting marriage equality (as, by the way, did one of the daughters of the president who probably benefited from the anti-same-sex marriage initiatives). Teams and athletes have recorded "It Gets Better" videos. (I picked Sergio Martinez's because I'm a fan.)


But Kluwe's and Ayanbadejo's activism this year was during a time when the people of the states where they play football were deciding on same-sex marriage, and those states, along with Maine and Washington State, accepted it.

I don't know how much of an impact they had on the vote, but I can't imagine it hurt to have football players tell football fans, their fans, that it was OK to support gay rights.

They still ... don't get it (at least some people)

"You're a North Carolina grad. Did you take those classes when you were there? The ones that didn't exist?"

I confess, when I saw that Sports Illustrated had an article in this week's edition called "We Are Still ... Penn State" (the link isn't to the article itself, which I couldn't find, you'll have to see the magazine), I was prepared to hate it. I figured it would be a story about how everything at Penn State was fixed because the football team won a few games ... see also the Saints winning the Super Bowl or the Yankees and Mets in 2001.

However, it actually wound up being a more-complete picture of life a year after Jerry Sandusky. Yes, it notes that the team is actually pretty good, and there is some realization that something bad did happen there.

Unfortunately, there are also the "We Are ... Pissed Off" T-shirts (which you can actually buy), booing college president Rodney Erickson because he signed the consent decree that led to the NCAA sanctions against the school, the placing of flowers near the site where the Joe Paterno statue once stood.

There's the talk of "collective punishment," the idea that everyone at Penn State, even those who had nothing to do with football, has to be punished for what a few people did. First of all, people who complain of collective punishment have to realize that the scandal isn't that something happened to them.

Secondly, the football team at Penn State in general and Paterno and particular defined the university, providing a collective relevance to everyone who went there ... even if they had nothing to do with the team or any interest in football. They can't have it both ways.

Which brings us to the quote at the start of this post. The speaker was Russ Ross, the women's volleyball coach at Penn State, a 33-year employee of the school who was apparently upset about author and Tar Heel S.L. Price questioning the Penn State culture, because "That isn't the Penn State I know."

Price spends the next several paragraphs explaining that Ross sort of had a point about Penn State and North Carolina basically both believing that their stuff didn't stink, but sort of didn't for some reason or another.

What I wish Price would have written is that it takes a lot of nerve to equate an academic scandal to school officials, including the most-powerful one (hint: the guy who was the football coach) allegedly allowing a child molester ... let me say that again, A CHILD MOLESTER ... to walk around campus and covering it up.

Perhaps Ross should spend more time in Penn State's Principles and Ethics of Coaching class, which "examines the challenges of today's coaching profession through societal norms and expectations from the past and present."

It shouldn't be too hard for him.

He teaches it.