NBC Should Dump Dungy -- He's a Distraction

Tony Dungy earned his fame as a football coach first, but since he retired from that job he has been treated as some kind of ethical guru by the meatheads at ESPN and the NFL Network. Dungy stood up for Michael Vick after Vick was convicted of running a dog fighting ring in which animals were brutally, viciously killed, and represented the early wave of black head coaches who had been denied equal treatment because of baseless assumptions about the connection between their ability and their color.

Now Dungy says that he would not have drafted Michael Sam, the SEC Defensive Player of the Year, because Sam came as gay before the draft and therefore would be "a distraction." To clear things up, Dungy said it was not Sam's homosexuality itself that would be a problem, but the "media attention" it would get.

Michael Sam 

(Francis Page Jr./Creative Commons) at http://www.neontommy.com/news/2014/02/why-do-you-care-if-michael-sam-gay

Media attention? 

The only reason the NFL exists is to get media attention. Tony Dungy's sole remaining employment relating to football is as a commentator on NBC. The NFL is, itself, nothing but a giant, expensive distraction. Every day is a "media circus" because the NFL makes all its money from television coverage.

If Dungy wants to avoid distractions, tell him to quit his job.

On the Purpose of Rules

I am not a huge fan of instant replay in professional sports. There certainly are some instances in which it is helpful and right: the infamous case of Jim Joyce's missed call at first base to break up a perfect game comes to mind, for example.

Joyce was looking right at the play before he called the runner safe, negating the 27th out of a perfect game (nydailynews.com)

Most of the time, though, the calls that people want to check (and by "people," I mostly mean TV and radio commentators) don't really need to be checked.

Here's what I mean by "need." The point of the out/safe rule, for example, is that runners need to get to the base before the defense tags them or the base they are forced to go to.* This is the fundamental principle of the game, and so needs to be enforced as exactly as possible. But he question of ties is really interesting. The rule book says, in the case of a batter-runner going to first base, that the throw must be there before the runner, suggesting that ties go to the runner. In all other force plays, the rule reads that the runner must beat the throw, suggesting the opposite. This ambiguity is germane because it indicates that the rules-makers had a general idea in mind. Not only that, but it is a reflection of the fact that plays as close as a "tie" will be judged more-or-less arbitrarily, and such is life. The game moves on.

The same idea applies to the strike zone. The purpose of the strike zone is to make the game fair and to keep it moving along. Batters can't just stand there forever waiting for the perfect pitch to hit, and pitchers can't throw things just anywhere. This rule was put in place after the first iteration of the game had batters requesting certain locations for pitches, thereby eliminating the pitcher/batter conflict that is so central to the game's excitement.  To some extent, the strike zone is a matter of interpretation by the umpire, even at the major league level. What exactly is the "midpoint" of a batter's body as he is moving and shifting to hit the ball? There are limits beyond which a fair strike zone can't move, but to think that it is precisely measurable within an inch or so is a bit silly.

Note that the top of the strike zone is not "at the letters," though the practical effect is almost that high. Note also that the bottom is not "at the knee." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_zone)

At lower levels of the game, this type of interpretation is even more important. Baseball is not fun to play or watch when no one swings the bat and every at-bat takes five pitches resulting in a walk. For the game to work, people must swing. One job of the umpire, therefore, is balance fairness with the good of the game. Call too big a strike zone and hitters have no real chance; call too few strikes and the game comes to a halt. 

All the griping about umps and strikes, then, needs to be based o these principles, not the fantasy that there should be the perfect zone.

Baseball Umpires, Fairness and Justice

A couple of professors of management (of all things) wrote a piece of the New York Times Sunday Review last week explaining why the Major Leagues need to employ video replay more frequently than they do, and it bugs me. I am not always bothered by stats geeks, even when they talk about baseball -- some of my best friends are like that. But this argument reflects a serious misunderstanding of what an umpire does and why replay is not the answer to their complaints.

First of all, their last line represents a complete loss of perspective, and indicates exactly the problem with their perspective."The question is," they say "whether we, as fans, want our games to be fair and just, or whether we are compelled to watch the game because it mimics the real world, warts and all." Frankly, raising the question of "justice" in the context of baseball is absurd. Baseball is a game, and justice is too big a concept to fit inside a game. It amounts to hyperbole, and makes everything else easier to dismiss.

But every game does need fairness, and anybody has the right to expect that any contest is fundamentally fair. So, do King and Kim give us reason to believe that instant replay would make the game more fair?

They begin with this: "After analyzing more than 700,000 pitches thrown during the 2008 and 2009 seasons, we found that umpires frequently made errors behind the plate — about 14 percent of non-swinging pitches were called erroneously."* 

This claim assumes, of course, that their technology is perfect at judging balls and strikes. I am not convinced that this assumption is valid. Some of the technology I have seen on television appears, in my view, to make patently false representations of the strike zone: where the little white mark shows up in the little box does not correspond to the place the real ball crosses the plate, even on replay. For the sake of argument, though, let's grant them technological perfection.

 They go on:

We also found that the pitch count had an influence over the umpire’s perception of a pitch. When the count was 3-0, and another ball would end the at-bat, the umpires mistakenly called a strike 18.6 percent of the time, compared with a 14.7 percent error rate when the count was 0-0. But when the count was 0-2, with another strike yielding a strikeout, the umpires expanded the strike zone only 7.3 percent of the time, half the error rate for 0-0. The umpires, in other words, appeared biased against ending an at-bat.

This is an interesting thing to consider. Players and coaches have known of this bias for time immemorial. Taking a pitch on 3-0, especially in an obvious way, often will result in a called strike if the pitch is close. This fact is not generally considered unfair, because at any level below the majors, everyone involved does in fact want to avoid "ending an at-bat" in this way too often. Walks have the potential to kill a game, and even the winners of a game riddled with them sometimes regret the experience. 

In other words, the sport benefits when players swing the bat rather than watching pitches go by. You can argue, of course, that in the major leagues this kind of consideration should be taken into account, but the players even at that level understand the way the game operates. This kind of error, therefore, may not be unfair. It is expected as normal business, and does not disadvantage any group in particular, especially in the long run.

Another example from a game I saw last week comes to mind, as well. The runner on first base ran on the pitch, and successfully beat the throw and the tag into second base. His slide, however, brought him over the base, and when the runner stood up he lost contact with the base for a split second. Through the whole move, the shortstop, who had the ball, held his glove on the back of the runner, so when the runner lost contact withe the base he was technically out. The defensive manager called for a replay, and the replay booth confirmed, despite a view from the camera that showed day light between the runner's belly and the bag.

This was the right call. It was fair and -- if we are going to inflate ourselves as King and Kim do -- just. The purpose of the rule is not to catch people in this way. If we allow replay to take over in this way, we will subvert the game rather than supporting it. The same can be say of the famous "neighborhood play" on double plays, which is specifically exempted from replay because the way the game has always been played encourages second basemen turning two to avoid anchoring themselves on the base. We get more double plays -- which are fun -- and fewer injuries -- which are not fun -- as a result.

In other words, the "right" call is not always purely objective. It requires judgment. That's the "human factor" so many people denigrate.

*I would suggest, parenthetically, that if you have analyzed 700,00 baseball pitches, your boss needs to ask more of you.

Replay continued

The Mets lost a game yesterday in the 10th. With two outs in the inning, a Braves batter hit a ground ball to the infield and was called safe by the 1st base umpire. Replay showed that the batter probably was out "by an eyelash," to use Gary Cohen's phrase. Next guy up hit a three-run home run and one player and the manager were ejected.

For the rest of the game, Cohen and Keith Hernandez referred with increasing frequency the "blown call" that allowed the Braves half to continue. This is perhaps false, and anyway is a waste of time and energy.

First, it is not for sure that the film speed of the cameras used by SNY is fast enough to have gotten the call right. The difference in the play may well have been less than one frame, and if that's true then the camera would be not better than the umpire's eye at getting it right. Second, it was so incredibly close that everyone needs to accept that it could go either way and move on. The game was lost by the first pitch fastball the Braves hit into the stands.

Bottini Nails the Election

Here's a post from Race Bottini at Off the Bench.

I was doing something else today, but this is much better.

http://offthebenchbaseball.com/2012/08/20/a-baseball-fans-guide-to-the-presidential-election/

The premise: "we’re going to assign each candidate an MLB Manager Equivalent. "

The conclusions: Obama is either Jim Tracy or Kirk Gibson, and Romney is either Bobby Valentine or ... Bobby Valentine.

Bobby Valentine is No Genius

Although every commentator at ESPN save Michael Wilbon thinks Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine is "smarter than everybody else in the room," most of what he does suggests the opposite. His own view seems to be that managing a baseball team well is akin to rocket science -- it's a highly technical matter that only people with large brains can do. He imposes wacky and ineffective "innovations" on his players, like making the first baseman dance around behind a runner instead of holding the guy on in the way that thousands of other coaches and players have determined to be best.

I detest Valentine's attitude, not because I think good managers and coaches are not intelligent, but because the best ones understand that it's not technical intelligence that makes them good. Ron Gardenhire is a great coach because almost every year his teams get better over the course of the summer. His success stems not from creating new ways of playing, but from insisting on sound fundamentals and from earning the trust of his players. Valentine alienates the people he works with by trying to prove all the time how smart he is.

Valentine's most recent foolishness came in the form of a call to have machines call all balls and strikes. As part of his rant against human umpires, he cited a "study" showing that the human eye is incapable of tracking a 90 mph fastball all the way to the plate. I don't know whether Valentine has read the paper or not, but I have. It was written in 1984, by Professor A. Terry Bahill of the University of Arizona, and Valentine does not fairly represent its content. Bahill does indicate that professional baseball players can track a ball much more effectively than most people, and that the eye can not literally track the ball all the way to the bat. To quote:

Although the professional athlete was better than the students at tracking the simulated fastball, it is clear from our simulations that batters, even professional batters, cannot keep their eyes on the ball. Our professional athlete was able to track the ball u n t i l it was 5.5 ft in front of the plate. This could hardly be improved on; we hypothesize that the best imaginable athlete could not track the ball closer than 5 ft from the plate, at which point it is moving three times faster than the fastest human could track.

His point is that the advice to "keep your eye on the ball" is not possible to follow.

But here's the part that Valentine did not know or understand:

[this data] makes it d i f f i c u l t to account for the widely reported claim that Ted Williams could sometimes see the ball hit his bat. If Ted Williams were indeed able to do this, it could only be possible if he made an anticipatory saccade that put his eye ahead of the ball and then let the ball catch up to his eye. This was the strategy employed by the subject of Figure 5: this batter observed the ball over the first half of its trajectory, predicted where it would be when it crossed the plate, and then made an anticipatory saccade that put his eye ahead of the ball. Using this strategy, the batter could see the ball hit the bat.

In other words, the batter (or the umpire) does not need to follow the entire trajectory of the ball to know where it will end up. People with natural talent and training can anticipate with very high accuracy where the ball will be at the end of the track. And the umpire has an even greater advantage over the batter, in that he has a second to make a decision after the ball has stopped, whereas the batter does not.

Nobody at ESPN appears to have tried to find the source of Valentine's supposed immense knowledge. Valentine does not claim to have done "the study" himself, so why not ask him about it? Did he actually read it? Does he need help understanding it, despite his enormous intellect? Or is he being disingenuous?

Hm.

The NFL Bounty Hullaballoo

ESPN, in its endless coverage of the NFL, even when nothing really is happening there, has devoted the last few days to the issue of bounties paid by the New Orleans Saints to its players for "cart offs" and "knock outs." According to documents leaked from NFL offices to ESPN, the Saints' defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams offered $1000 to anyone who knocked another player out of the game, and $1500 if the player had to be carted off the field.

The issue here is not the violence of the results. No one can deny that professional football -- or football at any level -- is a violent sport, in which injuries are inevitable. Some of those injuries are immediately catastrophic, and some accrue over a long period of time, like those caused by concussions. Frankly, I think football may be at its apex as a result, because I think thing the league is going to have to change or suffer serious legal consequences for the fact that it encourages such injury.

In the current kerfuffle, however, the problem is about a certain kind of lawlessness. As Greg Easterbrook of ESPN notes, "American law places considerable emphasis on intent. Intending to harm your opponent changes football from something manly and sportsmanlike into something brutish and disgusting." As bloodthirsty as many fans may sound  -- or even be -- the moment when a player lies on the turf waiting to be carried away, when we don't know whether he will stand or walk again is always solemn and sad. The players on the field appear anxious, the one who caused the injury appears regretful. If we led to believe that such moments are actually encouraged by coaches, they become something else again. 


And on a side note, it's one thing, in my view, for players to have side bets on big hits, and quite another for coaches to do it because the coaches sit safely on the sidelines. Would Greg Williams encourae "cartoffs" if he was vulnerable to them?

Why it's Ridiculous to Complain About the "Human Factor"

Two nights ago the Pittsburgh Pirates and Atlanta Braves played a 19-inning game with playoff implications. It ended on a play at the plate that commentators immediately screamed was wrong. As has become the routine, people called once again for the use if instant replay to fix the "terrible calls" by umpires.

One of those (literally) yelling yesterday for instant replay was ESPN's Mike Greenberg, who used the typical line about the ridiculousness of preserving the "human element." "In every other area of life we try to mitigate human weakness, but not in major league baseball," he said.

This morning, however, he changed his tune, though without acknowledging it. When it was pointed out that by NFL standards requiring "indisputable visual evidence" to overturn a call this one probably would not have been changed, Greenberg said that in this case the approach should be different. "When the throw beats the runner by five feet like this one did, I think the umpire needs to see indisputable evidence that the defensive player did not tag the runner ... that's just common sense." When Greenberg's partner, Mike Golic, disagreed, and said that the only question should be whether the tag was actually applied ("we see a lot of phantom tags in baseball") Greenberg insisted that the situation should matter.

In other words, it's not only a factual question (whether the catcher tagged the runner or not), but an interpretive one (whether the situation ought to call for a default judgment.) That's something only humans can do.

And despite the vehemence of those on talk radio, I'm still not certain the guy was out.

American Sports and the Concept of Fairness

This is only a partially-formed thought, derived in part from my previous post.
I find it odd, though, that American sports commenters have a different idea of fairness that much of the world. On ESPN yesterday Scott Van Pelt whined about how "you can hit a perfect shot" at the British Open, "and still end up off the fairway." He said "you wouldn't design a golf course like that now, but it's called 'Royal' so what are you going to do?" My colleague in favor of disposing of plate umpires said the same thing: if you were inventing the game now, you would not use human umpires."
Somehow these people have reached the conclusion that if a player or a person does his job perfectly the sport owes him success. But that's not true. Success is not owed. Sometimes we do everything right and fail. Sometimes we get lucky and succeed despite ourselves.
Only the most privileged people on the planet, as we Americans are, could believe that bad luck should never play in.