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RotoWire.com Blog Post by Chris Liss
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| The Righteous Andy Pettitte |
| I've often slagged players and coaches for being "religious nuts" - Tony Dungy for singling out Lovie Smith as a Christian coach in the Super Bowl, or Jon Kitna for asserting that the Lord allowed him to play despite a concussion. But that Andy Pettitte was driven to take responsibility for his HGH use and confirm that Brian McNamee was telling the truth (as least with respect to Pettitte) largely on the basis of his religious faith is refreshing. Instead of seeing religion as a reason to exclude or moralize or fantasize, Pettitte saw it as a basis for doing the honorable thing - telling the truth and coming clean even though it was a difficult choice.
I'm sure everyone has their own views on religion, but for me, this should be the reason anyone would be religious - to act as a foundation for moral and just behavior.
As a Yankee fan, I always liked Pettitte - his enormous 1-0 Game 5 win over John Smoltz in the 1996 World Series (that I watched on broadcast TV in a motel in Missouri while I was driving to California from New York by myself) was one of the best baseball games I've ever seen. And I think the way he acquitted himself over the last week or so only reinforces that.
Posted by Chris Liss at 2/19/2008 8:13:00 AM |
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| Michael Vick Should Be Pretty Ticked |
| It's come out recently that several prominent Dominican players like Pedro Martinez and Aramis Ramirez are heavily involved in cockfighting in their native country. Ramirez in particular, was ''prominently featured in a recent issue of a Dominican cockfighting magazine, En La Traba, in which he's pictured with several roosters that he raises for fighting. Of the roosters, he said in the magazine, 'When I'm in the Dominican Republic, I'm dedicated entirely to them.'''
Now, in America we eat more than 35 million pounds of chicken every year and also keep them in horrendous conditions and "mutilate them while they're alive", so we really can't get too worked up about a little cockfighting. But it makes you wonder about the harsh prison sentence given to Michael Vick who did the same thing Martinez and Ramirez did - only on American soil and with a different, albeit more lovable, species. Because even if it's legal to cockfight in the Dominican Republic, baseball could surely seek to ban those two players if it wanted to take a stand.
But it won't, and probably shouldn't, in my opinion, precisely because of the way we treat poultry in the U.S. - it would be hypocritical. So why the harsh punishment for Vick? I'd say there are two reasons (1) Because he was considered sort of a dirt bag generally with the "Ron Mexico" incident, his flipping off the fans and the behavior of his gun-toting younger brother; and (2) Because we love dogs (and most of us don't eat them) in America, and the idea that Vick would dogfight pushes emotional buttons in us.
But both of those reasons are flawed - (1) might be true, but has nothing to do with the offense in question and (2) isn't a sound basis for judging. If Vick had gone to trial on the charges, for example, it would be reasonable to disqualify jurors who owned dogs, just as jurors are disqualified all the time when there's reason to believe they'd be too emotionally involved to be objective.
I'm not defending Vick or the Dominican cockfighting baseball players - just pointing out that the application of justice here is woefully uneven.
Posted by Chris Liss at 2/15/2008 10:32:00 AM |
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| One Reason Why Sports Scandals Get So Much Play |
| It's annoying that Congress is getting involved in the Patriots cheating scandal and also Roger Clemens issues and steroids in baseball generally, but we've had an awful lot of scandals in major sports lately. The Pats were cheating, assuming you agree with Roger Goodell that videotaping opponents is cheating, and Tim Donaghy really did cheat on behalf of his betting interest in the Spurs. That only calls into question the last NBA championship (and who knows how many others?) and three of the last six Super Bowls. (The Seattle Pittsburgh SB was one of the worst, though no fault of the teams, but the officiating was horrendous).
The steroids/HGH issue is hard to spin into calling a World Series title into question, but certainly some all-time records and interest in the game generally are damaged by it. The Hall of Fame now has a separate question about steroid use to entertain - not just performance - and the whole thing becomes a bore because it can't be settled. If you want to argue whether Tony Perez belonged or not, we can look at the numbers and what he did on the playoff teams he was on. If you want to argue about Don Mattingly or Tony Gwynn or George Brett, that was interesting - there was something to go on. But throw the steroid question in there, and I don't care anymore, either way. Was Bonds the greatest hitter ever, Clemens the greatest pitcher? That question can't be answered without delving into the nebulous and unknowable area of what they did when, and what constitutes fair play. Basically, it takes the fun out of it.
In cycling, Tour de France champ Floyd Landis cheated, and then tried to blackmail Greg LeMond into keeping quiet about it. This after proclaiming his innocence and outrage so insistently.
Of course, it's no different than what's going everywhere else in society, but it's particularly troubling in sports because that's our one place of refuge from bullshit. I was talking to Mike Salfino on my XM show last week about how it's interesting that Dems and Republicans tend to defend the awful performance of elected officials in their own parties when you'd think they'd be even more upset. Just the opposite happens in sports where hometown fans are harder on their teams than anyone else. As a Knicks fan, I hate Isiah far more than a Laker fan could because he's ruining it for my team. Salfino said something to the effect of "that's because the lawyers can spin anything in politics, so that white is black and black is white. But that's why we like sports - because there's a scoreboard."
In other words, sports fans know when their team has succeeded or failed, and there's not much anyone can do to spin it. But when cheating's involved, even that's not sacred. Now if you're a Rams, Eagles, Steelers, Colts, Chargers, Raiders or Panthers fan, you have to wonder whether the videotaping impacted some of those extremely tight games. We could just dismiss it all and accept the results at face value, but then sports is merely about who's crowned the winner, and that's not very satisfying. We want to know who the best, most deserving team was. At least I do.
One of the reasons I think the Super Bowl was so uplifting this year (and not only to Giants fans like myself, but to a lot of non-Pats fans who I've talked to) is that it really felt like in that game - and throughout the playoffs - they went out and claimed that title. They made the plays, and the refs didn't decide the game, and there was no indication of foul play, and they were genuine underdogs playing inspired ball. Unfortunately, that's felt like the exception in sports of late rather than the rule.
Posted by Chris Liss at 2/13/2008 9:46:00 PM |
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| How To Tone Up for Bathing Suit Season |
| Apparently, Roger Clemens' wife might have taken some HGH to look hotter for her SI swimsuit photos. Roger's trainer claimed he injected her, too - at Roger's behest.
It makes you wonder what non-athletes are on that stuff. I always thought Holly Hunter and Hilary Swank were on the extra-jacked side - and who knows? A little HGH can save a lot of hours at the gym. I'm postive Lance Reddick (Cedric Daniels) of the Wire is on that stuff. The guy looks like he could play in the NFL, and he's what, 50?
Posted by Chris Liss at 2/11/2008 5:59:00 PM |
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| RotoWire Fantasy Sports Hour Monday |
| Good idea by Erickson to post here who'll be on.
We've got Jonah Keri (ESPN.com) on to talk about God knows what. Probably a little college hoop and a little baseball. Maybe a little Obama/Clinton.
Then we've got Dalton Del Don (who you know if you read these blogs). We'll be talking about how he probably owes me money for some bet we made at some point that I can't remember. Also, his personal problems of which there are many. (Strained relationship with his ex-wife who just got out of the nut house).
Show's at 11 PM ET Mon and Tues. Noon and 7 PM ET Saturday. 1 PM ET Sunday. Also podcasts are available on RotoWire:
http://www.rotowire.com/podcast/index.htm
Posted by Chris Liss at 2/11/2008 10:14:00 AM
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| New XM Radio Schedule for the RW Fantasy Sports Hour |
| Starting this week, my show's going to be on from 8-9 pm PT (11-12 ET), Mon and Tues.
And also on Saturday morning 9-10 am PT, 4-5 pm PT and Sunday morning 10-11 am PT.
We'll be doing mostly baseball with other sports (chess, Tai Kwon Do, etc.) mixed in.
It's on XM 144.
Posted by Chris Liss at 2/3/2008 11:57:00 PM |
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| What the Giants Win Shows |
| Let's set aside for a moment how beyond sick the Giants run was for their fans like myself - it still hasn't quite sunk in - and also how incredible the game was (for me personally, it was the greatest four hours of entertainment in my life).
I want to talk about what the win means for football analysis generally.
First off, I think it shows that the quality of teams is much more fluid than we generally assume. The Patriots were exposed midseason by the Eagles, and other than in the Steelers game, they never reasserted their dominance again. The Giants turned the corner in Week 3 against the Redskins, fell into a lull in the last quarter of the season, and then turned it on again in the playoffs. Any evaluation of either of those teams in Week 6 or Week 8 or Week 14 would just be a snapshot - and one that's not dispositive of their ultimate quality. We should remember that next year when making our calls - uncertainty is pervasive.
Second, football is the ultimate team game, and it doesn't yield entirely to statistical analysis - or if it does then it needs to be something light years ahead of Net YPA. Things like growth rate need to be factored in. Looking at the season-long stats, the Giants run was a fluke. Watching the games, it was no fluke - both the NFC title games and Super Bowl weren't as close as the scores. You could only predict that ahead of time if you gave the Giants credit for growth, both in preventing turnovers (Manning led the league with 20 picks on the regular season) and on the defensive side of the ball (the unit played at an elite level in the playoffs against the league's three top offenses). There's also a "will" component or a "physicality" factor somewhere, too. One thing that was striking about watching the Giants on their playoff run was that they were in every game the rougher, meaner, more physical team. In football that matters. The Patriots were a finesse team, and like the Colts who have lost a lot of big playoff games over the years, the finesse team is often more vulnerable to an upset than the physical one. The '85 Bears rolled. The 2000 Ravens crushed the Giants in the SB after beating a very good and very physical Titans team. The Warner/Faulk Rams barely beat a wild card Titans team and then lost to the 2001 Pats. The NFL is a passing league these days, but knocking the QB around and drilling the WRs after the catch is important.
Third, the quality of players is more fluid than we normally assume. Eli Manning played like a Pro Bowl quarterback in the biggest games of the year against some of the league's best defenses. Corey Webster was the weak link in the team's secondary for two years, and emerged as the one of the key players in limiting Randy Moss and Terrell Owens. Quarterbacks, especially, which don't depend that heavily on physical qualities, are harder to read. Vince Young could be a star next year. Brett Favre was a star this year. Philip Rivers went from being a rising star last year, to a scrub for three-quarters of this year, to a rising star again in the playoffs. Other than at the extremes (Brady, Peyton Manning) and (Trent Difler, David Carr), uncertainty is pervasive.
Fourth, sometimes, the public is right - 63 percent bet the Giants.
Not that any of this is breaking news, but it's worth remembering from time to time. When you become too much of an "expert," you can cut yourself off from seeing all the possibilities - (Eli sucks, Favre is done, etc., etc.).
Man, I'm still getting chills from watching replays of the game-winning fade to Burress.
Posted by Chris Liss at 2/3/2008 9:49:00 PM |
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