Sports Code

So I just watched Source Code, which I liked quite a bit more than I expected. Based on my Movie Plus-Minus -- which, damn, I still need to patent* -- I'd give it a plus-1.5 star rating, which is very good (I expected a 1.5 or 2 movie, and it was probably a 3 or 3.5 out of 5 stars).

*I did put an explanation for the plus-minus in the pages section of the blog.

Not to give away anything you don't already get in the trailer -- in Source Code this super-secret government agency is trying to catch a bad guy, and because of some vague scientific breakthrough that is only ridiculous if you think about it, they can send Jake Gyllenhaal back to the scene of a previous bombing for eight minutes. And they can keep sending him back, over and over again, eight minutes every time, though something quizzically called the "Source Code." For some reason, he doesn't just watch the past -- like Harry Potter when he goes into the Pensieve -- but he can actually change things. The Gyllenhaal character thinks he's really changing the past. The scientist explains he's only changing the source code. And so on. A lot of it doesn't hold up well to even mildly critical analysis, but it's a lot of fun to watch, and I'm strongly considering naming Michelle Monaghan as my top Hollywood crush.*

*I kind of feel I need to change things up: I've had Natalie Portman as much Hollywood Crush for too long (and Wynona Ryder was there for perhaps even longer). Meanwhile my wife Margo changes her crush every three minutes -- it's Daniel Craig … no, it's Ewan McGregor … no, it's Jude Law … not it's that Horatio Hornblower guy … no, it's Colin Firth … no, it's some British actor I've never heard of … she's just spending a lot more time on this than I am. So, I might just switch to Michelle Monaghan to keep her guessing.

Anyway, the whole idea of being able to go back and change the past made me wonder: What would be my Top 10 Sports Code moments in sports? That is to say: What would I go back and change.

There are only two conditions that I just invented for Sports Code.

Saving Bonds

My friend Bob Costas left a message for me yesterday. It was a very nice message -- Bob is a great guy -- but he also had a slight disagreement. Bob and I are very often on the same page when it comes to baseball, but he was reading a small essay I wrote in the magazine this week and he noticed this line:

"(Barry) Bonds and (Roger) Clemens are two of the best who ever played the game. If not for the steroid noise that surrounds them, you could make a viable argument that they are simply the two best ever."

I should say that my thinking, when I wrote the line, was simply that if you took their numbers and performances at face value, you could make the viable argument that they are the two best ever. Bob, though, read it differently. He thought that I was actually saying without steroids Bonds and Clemens are two of the best ever, perhaps even THE two best ever. This did not bother him so much for Clemens, but it did bother him for for Bonds. He strongly disagrees.

The College Connection

My great good friend Michael Rosenberg has a wonderful knack of writing things that strike powerful disagreement inside me. It is one of his many gifts. This is not to say that I always, or even often, disagree with Michael. I don't. I think Michael's one of the best sportswriters in the country and we see things the same way the vast majority of the time. Maybe that's why when I DO disagree with him -- like I did with a Tiger Woods column he wrote a couple of years ago or the let's pay the stars of college sports piece he wrote this week -- it's a pretty strong emotion, the sort of emotion that pushes me to mumble to myself and to start a new file on my computer.

There is something I have wanted to say for a while about big-time college athletics, but it is one of those weird thoughts that is both blindingly obvious and strangely difficult to put into words. That's why I had never written it before. It was reading Michael's piece, and this sentence in particular -- "If we wanted to be completely fair, then football and basketball players would not be forced to subsidize non-revenue athletes" -- that opened the door. It has been a long time since I read a sentence I more strongly disagreed with.

And that led to the words that form the heart of this piece … words that, I have to say, surprised me: "College athletics are NOT about the players."

You are more than welcome to stop reading now.

Meals And Squeals

Today seems to be a day when I will be writing about things that friends wrote … and how I sort of, kind of disagree with them. Later, I'll have a longer post on this by my great, good friend Michael Rosenberg -- in it Michael is talking about how college players should be paid, an argument I've made myself in the past and am sympathetic to. But, well, I wrote on Twitter that I disagree with 63% of the article, but that it's 100% goodness. Read. We'll discuss later.

Meanwhile: E-migo Rob Neyer has an interesting post that he titled: Jerry Meals might have been right. Seriously.

Once again, I disagree with 63% of it. Maybe 64%. I don't think that the word "might" is wide enough to cover the chance that Meals was right on the call that ended Tuesday's 19-inning game between Pittsburgh and Atlanta. Well, I suppose if you want to use "might" in the grand sense, as in: "Lady Gaga might be Mozart reincarnated," or "newspapers might be the hot business model for the next century," then it could work. But if might represents something that actually MIGHT be true, then no, I don't think there's almost any chance that Meals got the call right.

BUT, I think Rob's larger point is dead on.

Pitching And Defense

The most amazing part in my mind is not -- NOT -- that the Seattle Mariners have lost 16 games in a row. Have you seen that lineup? That team could lose ONE HUNDRED games in a row, and it should not be surprising. The Mariners cleanup hitters are slugging .277. Their best every day hitter is hitting .227. Last year, the Mariners were the worst offense in 25 years, and this year the offense in many ways is even worst than that.

2010: .236/.298/.339
2011: .226/.289/.334.

The 2011 Mariners are averaging a 10th a run or so more per game -- maybe because a higher percentage of the few hits they're getting are for extra bases. But, as a friend of mine says, distinctions on a certain level are not worth making. The Mariners offense was in full bloom of stinkiosity in 2010. And it's no better in 2011. The losing streak should be no surprise.

No, the surprise is this: Before the losing streak the Mariners had a .500 record.

The Future of the Hall of Fame

The Hall of Fame voting lately has been interesting in the way that a good opening band is interesting. We learned a few things this year. We learned that persistence pays off -- Bert Blyleven's 13-year odyssey driven by the stubborn persistence of his numbers has been fascinating to watch. We learned that writers like to send messages -- Robbie Alomar fell four votes short of the 75% he needed in Year 1. This was apparently a way to admonish him for the spitting incident that marred his career. In year 2, voila, he got NINETY percent of the vote. We learned that players who can do EVERYTHING well like Barry Larkin, but perhaps nothing legendarily well, will have to build momentum. Larkin should get his most deserved call next year.

Still ... this is all just the prelude. We are about 18 months away from the craziest Baseball Hall of Fame election ever, the one that I think will define Cooperstown for future generations. This class will be even crazier than the FIRST Hall of Fame election, I think. Six remarkable players will become eligible for the Hall. All six may end up in the Hall of Fame. Then again, none of the six may end up in the Hall of Fame. It all depends on how the wind blows.

Idoca

So, we were driving through West Virginia when my wife Margo said something about how blueberries were in season for a few more days somewhere or other in America. It should be noted that the "somewhere" was not actually in West Virginia or anyplace that we would be visiting. She was reading aloud one of the 10,000 fresh food emails that she has signed up for through the years. We had reached that part of the trip.

I was going to say "I don't care," because, to be honest, that's the sort of thing that I say when I'm driving and we had just made another unscheduled rest stop for one of the daughters, and there's a car hovering just behind me in the left lane, and we're behind schedule. But the truth is, I didn't even care enough to say "I don't care." Blueberries? Somewhere? I could not muster the necessary energy to pull "I don't care" out of my vocal chords.

And so I said: "Idoca."

So that's my newest word: "Idoca (EYE-doh-kah), noun, an exclamation made when prompted by something so uninteresting to you that you cannot summon the passion to enunciate the entire phrase: 'I don't care.'"

Brought To You By Brilliant Readers

Every day, more or less, I get at least two story suggestions from brilliant readers. This is (1) Incredibly awesome and (2) Incredibly frustrating. The awesome part is easy: People send in all sorts of great ideas. It's funny, I remember when North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams was at Kansas (and I understand he still does this), he would act furious whenever a fan said to him something like: "Have you ever thought of ..." It didn't matter what followed the ellipses either. His face would go blood red, and he would stop the fan short, and he would say something like: "Anything you've thought of, we've already thought of. It's our JOB to think of it." I suspect Roy Williams probably HAS thought of anything anyone might suggest -- he's that obsessed. But, I don't know: my reaction is quite the opposite. I'm constantly surprised and taken by reader ideas. I hadn't thought of many of them.

The frustration part is easy too: I just can't get to ALL the good ideas or MOST of the ideas or even SOME of the ideas. Every now and again, I can get to one. But that's about it. There just aren't enough hours ... well, you know.

So: Here's an effort to beat the frustration. I threw a few reader ideas into one blog post.

Meditation On A World Cup Final

Every now and again, I begin a blog post without having any idea where it's going. OK, that's not exactly true -- I start MOST of my blog posts that way. But I start this one even more uncertain than usual. The following is just an emptying of my mind. There are four topics clanking around up there. The intentional walk. The dunk. Phil Mickelson. The U.S. Women's soccer team. As far as I know, they have nothing to do with each other. And I don't really know what I feel about ANY of this. There are no conclusions that follow, no hard opinions, no certainties whatsoever. It's just throwing paint against a wall ...

This Time It Clanks

I may have mentioned this: I am on seven-day baseball trip. The trip began with a cross-country flight Los Angeles (where I spent a little time with Vin Scully). Then I caught a red-eye to New York (in time for Jeter's 3,000), jumped on a plane to Kansas City (where Bill James and I watched Justin Verlander pitch), hopped on a plane to Phoenix for All-Star festivities (yes, I do jump and hop on planes) and I'm now on a plane heading East for my final day, a pilgrimage to Cooperstown. This odyssey, I am assured by editors, will lead to a well-crafted essay about baseball in 2011. It's not impossible, I suppose. At the moment, though, the only working thought humming in my mind is "BALLOOMOBA!" I am considering that for the lede.

Ducks On The Pond

You might know that one of the big topics among those of us in MBG* is how much baseball lineups really matter. That is to say, people who study the game have spent a lot of time trying to devise what the optimum baseball lineup really looks like, and also how much it actually matters.

*Mother's Basement Geeks. I am hoping to have membership cards made.

A Blunder From The Past

You may have read Sam Mellinger's takedown of the Kansas City Royals because they decided to save a few bucks and not spring for Negro League uniforms for Negro Leagues Day, which will played today in Kansas City. If not: Read it. I'll wait. I'll also sum up best I can: Every year, the Royals have a Negro Leagues Day. This makes sense since the Negro Leagues were formed in Kansas City, and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is in town, and the beloved voice of the Negro Leagues, Buck O'Neil, called Kansas City home and called the Royals his favorite team.

As part of the celebration, the Royals players and the opponents usually wear Negro Leagues replica uniforms. This is a nice gesture that gives the game a special feel. Later, they auction off the uniforms to raise some money. It's a nice, easy, and relatively cheap way to make the promotion a little bit better.

This year, the Royals decided not to wear the uniforms. The reason for this is generally unclear -- the explanation in Sam's column is that the Royals just wanted to try something different -- which strongly suggests that, once again, they were too cheap to do the thing right.

If the Royals had a strong history of doing things right, of course, you would give them the benefit of the doubt and say it was just an innocent mistake. But they don't have such a history. In fact, while reading Sam's column, I felt a shudder of memory: I wrote about the Royals being too cheap to wear Negro Leagues uniforms NINE YEARS AGO. At the time, the Royals were a wreck financially and structurally. Their connection to the community had become frayed to the point of breaking. They were, essentially, a national joke.

Things are supposed to be different now. The Royals are supposed to be going in the right direction. They are supposed to be building a model franchise. You may or may not care about Negro Leagues Day. You may or may not think they should even have one. But that's not what this is about. If they are going to HAVE a Negro Leagues Day, they should not let a few grand keep them from buying special uniforms for the players and the event. But they did.

Anyway, Sam's column sparked me to go back and find my original column. It ran June 28, 2002 in The Kansas City Star. With a mere changing of the names, it could run today. I enclose it here:

The Frenchy Formula

Here's something I found kind of interesting.

Jeff Francoeur this season is hitting .269/.312/.451.
Jeff Francoeur in his career is hitting .268/.310/.427.

In other words, Frenchy is hitting EXACTLY like he has hit his entire career. Well, not exactly -- over 369 plate appearances, has basically has one more hit and eight more total bases than his career numbers would predict. But it's almost mathematically and logically impossible for a player to hit MORE like his career numbers halfway through the season.

So: Frenchy is Frenchy. No better. No worst. Exactly the same.

But ... he is better. Why?

The Cradle Of Managers

The 1956 Kansas City Athletics lost 102 games. That was a terrible team. But that team did have a left-handed pitcher who went 0-4 with a 6.15 ERA and had an amazing 28 to 45 strikeout to walk ratio. That is in the right order, yes, 28 strikeouts, 45 walks That left-handed pitcher was known mostly as Tom in those days. Later he would become Tommy Lasorda. He would manage his teams to four pennants and two World Series championships.

The 1957 Kansas City Athletics lost 94 games. That was still a terrible team. They finished dead last in the league in runs scored and next-to-last in runs allowed, and that will often prove to be a nasty cocktail for a baseball team. But that team did have a 29-year-old bantamweight of a second baseman who had been a World Series hero. That was Billy Martin, who would manage his players to two pennants, a World Series championship and many, many hours of therapy.

3000 Words About Derek Jeter

Derek Jeter will not be remembered for reaching 3,000 hits. None of them are. That's not how it works. Each of the 27 men who have batted safely three thousand times in a career is known for something else, something visceral, something that inflames the memory. Clemente's arm. Ripken's daily persistence. Rickey beating the tag. Mays' hat flying off. Yaz's stance. Musial breaking out of the box. Aaron's unassuming home run trot. Cobb's sharpened spikes. Rose in head-first flight ...

Any day now, Derek Jeter will become the 28th man to reach 3,000 hits. And Jeter, like the rest, won't be remembered for that. Hey, how do you remember 3,000 anything? You don't. Nobody remembers the sales figures. With Jeter, people cannot help but remember the moments because there were so many moments and we saw them all.

What Might Be Coming

I've been thinking lately about a classic scene from Singin' In The Rain. It's the scene where the movie studio is trying to make "The Dueling Cavalier" into its first talking picture. And it's a disaster. They don't know where to put the microphone - -they put it in a plant, in Lina Lamont's dress and so on. They let the silent stars ad-lib, which they have no ability to do. The sound effects are terrible, at one point the sound and film become unsynchronized, it's a holy mess.

That, more or less, has been the short and happy history of the Poscast.

McGriping About McCutchen

On this week's Poscast -- which, I think (can't promise, but think), actually recorded well enough that you will be able to hear both participants -- Parks and Recreation czar Michael Schur and I talk a lot about what's wrong with the All-Star Game. If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing,* I can probably sum up the many problems with one word: Everything.

*Though, there could be prizes involved. I'm just saying.

The biggest issue, we both think, is that the All-Star Game isn't about anything anymore. It's an exhibition that claims to count. Or it's a game that counts except that nobody who participates in it cares. The All-Star Game knew what it was once -- it was an exhibition game featuring the best players as voted by the fans. It didn't mean anything, no, but it DID mean something because in the All-Star Game's best days America still had an enthusiasm for meaningless but interesting events. Match races. Battle of the sexes. Battle of the Network Stars. Non-championship bouts. Grudge matches. That sort of thing. The All-Star Game was an event because, well, when else were you going to see the best players in the world?

That was then. Now if you have the baseball package, or you just watch Baseball Tonight, you can see the best players in the world EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. We are overloaded. Our attention must be wooed and recruited and captured. The idea that our nation would be riveted by a consolation game, much less an exhibition game for nothing at all, seems as quaint and old fashioned as the rotary phone.

All You Never Wanted To Know: Quality Starts

I have an editor friend who is astonishingly forgiving. If you show up an hour late for lunch, she will pleasantly lie that she just got there herself. If you bump into her car, she will say that dent isn't even noticeable. And so on. But if you use the word "quality" to mean "general excellence," she will unfailingly turn schoolmarm.

"You mean HIGH quality," she will snap. Dictionaries allow for "quality" to mean "superiority in kind" (Merriam Webster) or "general excellence" (Oxford) but my friend will tell you that this is because dictionaries have become wimpy and won't stand up for anything ("Dictionaries are of low quality these days," she might say). In her world "Quality" will always mean a DEGREE of excellence, meaning the word will always need a modifier to make it say anything. Something can be of high quality, low quality, barely acceptable quality. But to say something like "This is a quality sandwich," or "She is a quality human being," will make her insane.

14 Crazy Baseball Facts

First: Nothing that follows is serious. None of it. You know how David Letterman, before Stupid Pet Tricks, would always say: "Please, no wagering." I want to say "Please, no conclusions." Because what follows is just a list of 14 baseball facts that shocked the heck out of me ... nothing more. I am not saying, suggesting or even hinting that Luis Gonzalez should be compared to Al Kaline or that Dan Quisenberry was better than Mariano Rivera. That's not the point at all. This is supposed to be pure fun. I hope, at least one, you might read it and think: "Wow, I wouldn't have guessed that."

The idea for this list sparked this week when Johnny Damon got the 2,654th hit of his career. This tied him with Ted Williams. And it AMAZES me. It doesn't amaze me in the larger context. Damon has 1,500 more at-bats than Williams. When I tweeted about, people immediately sniped with the point that Ted Williams went to war twice -- a fact that, it is at least possible, I already knew. But that's what I mean about taking stuff seriously. I'm not suggesting that Johnny Damon is as good a hitter as Ted Williams or half as good or a quarter as good. Johnny Damon's BEST full offensive season (2000 was no slouch of a year -- for Kansas City, he hit .327, scored 136 runs, led the league with 46 stolen bases) was probably not as good as Ted Williams WORST full offensive season (1956, when he hit .345/.479/.605 in 503 plate appearances).

And yes, Ted Williams went to war. Twice.

But that does not change this: Johnny Damon has as many hits as Ted Williams. If you phrase the question right, you could probably win a free beer with the next time you're at a bar with that one. It's something fun to talk about.

So, I spent a day just looking around and came up with 14 little baseball facts -- maybe they are conversations starters, maybe they will win you a bar bet, maybe they will just give you a fun little buzz. And maybe they will inspire you to write in the comments: "So, wait, are you crazy? Are you really saying that Ron Kittle was better than Lou Gehrig?"

Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying.