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.

Harshing my McCarver buzz

"Thank the sweet lord" my buddy Pizz wrote on his Facebook page, linked to a Deadspin story that Tim McCarver is retiring after this season.

''I wanted to step down while I know I can still do the job and proud of the job I've done,'' the 71-year-old McCarver said during a conference call Wednesday.
His health is good, McCarver said. So are his passion and energy for the game.
It was just time.
''It's not a tough call,'' he said. ''It's not a sad thing for me.''

I don't blame Pizz for invoking a higher power, given that I was hearing heavenly choirs of angels at the news myself and having my sometimes-shaky belief in a loving, caring God strengthened.

Then there was a knock at the door, which is unusual, because Mrs. Last Honest and I don't get a lot of visitors who aren't related to us, and both of our families are currently spoken for in and around their respective homes.

So it was with some curiosity that I checked to see who was there, and it was none other than my good friend Cy Nical, the man who can find a cloud in any silver lining.

"You seem awful happy today," Cy said to me.

"Well, just a few minutes ago I saw a story that Tim McCarver was retiring at the end of the season," I replied.

"That's cool. Did it say anything about Joe Buck?"

"No, other than him saying he learned more about broadcasting from McCarver than anyone, including his own father."

"Hmmm...that's a ringing endorsement. So Buck is going to stay?"

"As far as I can tell. Assuming McCarver is telling the truth, and I have no reason to believe he isn't, it seems like this is his call to retire, so unless Buck can't stomach calling baseball with anyone else, I imagine he'll stick around."

"You see, that's part of your problem; you actually believe people. But so we're still going to be stuck with Buck. Anything about McCarver's replacement?"

"Not that I saw."

"So they could hire anyone ... F.P. Santangelo, perhaps?"

And with that, right as I began cursing him for invoking the name of the man who could make Bryce Harper unwatchable, Cy took his leave.

And now it's all over

The first exposure to college basketball that I can remember was the 1984 Big East Tournament.

I was 11, and I hadn't ever seen anything like it. Cable TV was still fairly new back then, but we didn't live in a place that had it, anyway, but a local independent television station that's now a Fox affiliate carried the games. (At least I assume that's who it was. I can't imagine any of the other three stations we got showing it, and in later years the station would also show Celtics and Yankees games, which I watched religiously, even thought I hated the Celtics at the time.)

It was the year Syracuse's Pearl Washington put on a show before the Orangemen lost to Georgetown in the finals. I was enthralled, and it actually set the stage for a lot of my college basketball fan days since then: loving Syracuse, hating Georgetown and Syracuse mostly finding a way to blow it at the end, including tonight's epic collapse against Louisville.

In the years since, teams have come and gone, and some like TCU came and left before they ever arrived. But every March, Syracuse, Georgetown, Connecticut, St. John's, Villanova, Providence, Seton Hall, Pittsburgh and whoever else was in the league would gather at Madison Square Garden for the conference tournament.

It was my favorite team, in the best arena and the best tournament. How many tournaments have provided moments like Gerry McNamara's run, Kemba Walker's five games in five days or a six-overtime epic? And that's just Syracuse and UConn, and that's just since 2006? (By the way, I watched the entire six-overtime game. After two overtimes, I thought about going to bed; after four overtimes, I thought, "Screw it. I've put this much time into it, I might as well stay until the end.")

Of course, we've all known that it was all about to change in a big way. With Syracuse and Pitt leaving, how could it not? And then the Catholic 7 leaving ripped off any Band-Aid of thought that the conference might still look a little like the Big East we've grown to know and love. It was going to be, as Sean McDonough put it numerous times tonight, "the end of the Big East as we know it."

(For one, Mrs. Last Honest, a Connecticut fan who still doesn't know what the Huskies did to be the one kid without a chair when the music stopped and thinks the program is in serious trouble unless the ACC finally decides to take them in, has already said she refuses to call the Catholic 7 plus however many members they add the Big East.)

And then I read this week's Sports Illustrated story about the end of the Big East to see this:

“Syracuse’s departure would result in nothing less than a mutation in the conference’s DNA, the equivalent of North Carolina or Duke joining the Big Ten or SEC.” 

And this:

“That's why Syracuse's departure essentially finished the league. 'OK, BC left,' (Bill) Raftery says. 'Virginia Tech, Miami -- we can live without 'em. But 'Cuse leaving, that's the one that pierced everybody. Syracuse won the Oscar every year for interest, for reputation, and they always had a chance to win it all.'” 

My attitude about Syracuse -- seen through Orange-colored glasses, no doubt -- has always been that going to the ACC was what they had to do and what anyone else would have done, that in a world where football and the TV money that comes with it makes all the decisions, they had to get in the best place for themselves and that the ACC was that place. The thought of conference games with Duke and North Carolina didn't hurt, either.

But still, it's hard when your wife talks about Syracuse in slightly bitter tones, especially considering that an athletic director at Boston College who did wonders to wreck his own program before retiring apparently kept UConn out of the ACC all by his lonesome. I don't blame her for it, but it's still hard.

And now, even though the Big East was likely always going to meet a bad end because it made all the wrong moves regarding football and money -- I've long thought that they should have seized their own bowl when the BCS first started, instead of being a floater that could easily be cut off -- it's also kind of hard to read that  their leaving might have been the beginning of the end for the league.

So it was a little sad watching tonight's game (even though as I write this it's now early the next morning), even before but especially after Syracuse tossed up its massive fail of a second half. What I first discovered as an 11-year-old has ended.

Sure, I probably won't think about it when Syracuse plays at Cameron Indoor Stadium, North Carolina comes to the Carrier Dome or they hopefully kick the crap out of BC, but it'll probably hit home sometime next March, when instead of settling in to see the Orange at MSG, they'll be playing in Greensboro in front of crowds that will always see them as the outsider.







 

Basketball from back home

My buddy Rob posted this on his Facebook page the other day:

"Who remembers the 1988-89 Siena men's basketball team? And who remembers where they were the day the Saints marched into the NCAA Tournament for the first time by beating Boston University in an empty Hartford Civic Center due to a measles outbreak that started in Loudonville?"

I don't actually remember where I was that day, just reading about it in the paper the next day, or that the tournament was in what is now the XL Center. Not only did the tournament have no spectators, but its winner had no nickname most of the year, as Siena had dropped its Indians name that season and didn't choose its current Saints moniker right away.

I do remember it being an exciting time for all of us in the towns small and large around Albany, NY, as Siena's Loudonville campus is just a short ride up the Northway from New York's capital city. (Rob still lives a stone's throw from the campus, and I used to live a couple miles away.)

Like a lot of New York, except for maybe the immediate New York City area, I grew up in Syracuse country. When Syracuse won the 2003 national championship, they played the East Regional in Albany, and the only way they could have had a bigger home-court advantage was if the games were in the Carrier Dome itself.

Yes, the RPI men's hockey team won the 1985 national title, but where I grew up, big-time college sports meant Syracuse, much in the same way that professional sports mostly means the New York City teams and the Buffalo Bills, at least when the Bills are good. Rob has actually lamented on this often over the years.

And then Siena came along. I was a high school junior, and my social studies teacher/baseball coach promised us that if Siena beat Stanford in their first-round NCAA tournament game, we wouldn't have a quiz  the next day. During baseball practice, we got the news ... Siena had done it! I happened to be standing next to the coach when we found out, and he sort of gave me a hug.

(Because of the quiz being called off, I've always remembered that the game was on a Thursday, because our quizzes were Fridays.)

We taped the game at my house, and as soon as I got home from practice, we all watched it together. If memory serves, CBS had the rights for all the tournament games back then, but didn't produce all of them for broadcast, including the Siena-Stanford game, so the NCAA produced the game in-house and made it available locally on the CBS affiliate.

It was amazing to watch back then -- and I am so going to have to watch the video of the game linked to above -- but not just because the local team pulled off the huge upset. It was almost certainly the first time in my and my friends' lives, and probably the first time for most of the people I knew, that our region had hit the big time in sports.

Siena has made other NCAA tournaments since then, and even sprung another big tournament upset. Of course, they were all exciting, but for me, there will be nothing like standing in my high school gym, next to my baseball coach, and having someone tell us that Siena had just knocked off Stanford.

* * * * * 

Things haven't been as good for the Saints lately. Their history since the mid-1980s has been success when they get the right coach (Mike Deane, Paul Hewitt, Louis Orr, Fran McCaffery) and failure when they don't (Bob Beyer, Rob Lanier, the recently fired Mitch Buonaguro). However, the University at Albany Great Danes have stepped into the Capital Region void, advancing to this morning's America East championship against Vermont.

My master's degree is from UAlbany, but I'd be lying if I said I have especially fond memories of the place. It wasn't horrible, but the good times were more about living on my own in an apartment for the first time, the woman I dated at the time (no, not the one who ultimately became Mrs. Last Honest) and the radio station I worked at for my graduate internship and the friends I made there.

As for the actual grad-school experience? Meh. I went to my office hours for my advising job in the communication department, went to classes and went home. I don't have any friends among my professors or classmates, and if I talk about it, it's mostly about the idiot undergrads I dealt with. (I once had one threaten to sue because I wouldn't let her keep an advising appointment for missing a mandatory meeting that was cleverly called the "mandatory meeting" and spelled out in black-and-white on a letter. Her excuse? She hadn't read that far.)

It's basically the difference between a school being a place where you go and a place where you are, such as my undergrad days.

So I haven't really kept up with the Danes. I don't know who anyone is on their team. I'm glad to see that Will Brown is still the coach, though.

But today? With a chance to go to the NCAA tournament? I'm watching ESPN2 as I type, and today, I change from an ambivalent alum to an excited one.

Is it jumping on a bandwagon? 

Yup. 

Do I care?

What do you think?

Great, someone let the idiots out again

Last night, Deadspin did us all the valuable service of exposing various morons who weren't thrilled with ESPN showing the World Baseball Classic game between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in Spanish by simulcasting its ESPN Deportes feed, which it could do as the Spanish-language rights-holder while MLB Network showed the game in English.

But being the kind soul I am, even as I condemn people who say stupid, racist things for being ... well, people who say stupid, racist things, I want to offer them help. So I have a few suggestions. Feel free to share as necessary.

1. Stop, just stop -- Really, pull this one off, and everything else solves itself. While asking if ESPN has been "taken over by wetbacks" may be popular in certain precincts, it's actually not cool, and neither is the attitude that leads to questions like that.

2. If suggestion No. 1 doesn't suffice for the people who just can't drag themselves into the latter half of the 20th century, much less the 21st, try to be a little less stupid -- I realize that Mexicans are the all-purpose boogeyman these days, but there is no "Mexican" language any more than there's an "American" language. We mostly speak English; they mostly speak Spanish. Furthermore, while Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, like Mexicans, are Hispanic and are very likely to speak Spanish, they're not all the same. And let us not forget ... Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.

3. Step away from the Twitter machine -- I really thought we had figured this out with the whole Obama-speaking-during-Sunday-Night-Football thing, but Twitter is no friend of the stupid racist (No one or nothing else should be, either, but we're specifically talking Twitter here.) Everybody can see anything anyone writes, as long as they look in the right places, and if Deadspin gets hold of it, they will publish it, by name.

And sometimes there are even consequences.

Bo Ryan don't need your stinkin' stats

I was watching the Wisconsin-Purdue game today on ESPN when Bob Wischusen and Dan Dakich broke out the statistic that Wisconsin had won 19 or more games four times in its history (which dates back to 1898) before Bo Ryan came along in the 2001-02 season, and they've done it every year since.

It was at least the second time this year I've heard that statistic, and it smelled funny both times. So I decided to do some research (if looking at the program's Wikipedia page -- grains of salt being tossed -- counts as research) and found it smelled even worse than I thought, for a few reasons.

1. It assumes that Wisconsin basketball was terrible that whole time -- The Badgers actually had a pretty illustrious history through the late 1940s, with 14 conference championships and a national title in 1941. Granted, they only won 19 games a couple times during that span (1915-16 and 1940-41), but they didn't play much more than that. For example, in that 1940-41 season, the national title season, they were 20-3.

Things kind of went downhill after 1947, if you consider no postseason tournaments for 42 years and no NCAA bids for 47 years to be downhill. Nearly 50 years of futility is pretty impressive, but it pales to more than 100 years.

Which brings me to my next point.

2. Ryan finished what others started -- I mentioned two of the four 19-win seasons; the other two were in 1998-99 and 1999-2000 (22 both years, with a Final Four appearance in 2000) under Dick Bennett. They also won 18 in 2000-01, the year before Ryan became head coach. Overall, the Badgers made four NCAA tournaments and one NIT in the six years Bennett was there, if you count 2000-01, where Bennett retired just a few games into the season and Brad Soderberg coached the team the rest of the way.

In other words, while Ryan has taken the program beyond what anyone had done since the first few decades of the 1900s, the turnaround had started before he got there.

3. Why 19 or more? Why not 20 or more? -- This one should be easy. Ryan's win totals at Wisconsin have been 24, 25, 25, 30, 31, 20, 24, 25, 26, 20 (so far this year) ...

... 19 and 19.

Even though the "four times winning 19 games before Bo Ryan" would have still been four times winning 20, it doesn't sound quite as impressive to say Ryan has won 20 games every year but two in Madison. It's equivalent to NASCAR announcers saying "Driver X has seven straight top-13 finishes;" that means there's at least one 13th-place finish in there.

Today's inexplicable loss to Purdue notwithstanding, Bo Ryan is a terrific basketball coach, and it doesn't take overblown, manipulated stats to show it.