Does Not Compute

Far be it from me to criticize Fire Joe Morgan, quite possibly the best web site out there on the subject of firing Joe Morgan. But I do have to take slight exception with one of their arguments in a recent post about instant replay. The FJM guys are in favor of the introduction of instant replay in baseball, which is good, because the people opposing it tend to rely on the same flimsy "preserve the sanctity of the game, you can't change the way it's always been" arguments that could just as easily have been used to oppose, say, having black people on your team. And since Ken Griffey Jr. is my all-time favorite player, I tend not to like those arguments.

So, Mose Schrute & Co. seem to be on the right side of things, except a little farther down in their post, they say this:

"If this plan were to take QuesTec and create a LASERTechnoGrid™ on every batter and put a chip in the ball and have the LASERTechnoGrid™ turn red for strikes and green for balls, then yes, I would say, that's silly, and let's let humans be humans. But huge game-altering HR calls? That can be corrected with like a minute's review of normal TV camera work? Why not do that?"

See, right now, instant reply is being proposed only for use in home run calls, and FJM is in favor of that. But when it comes to balls and strikes and other more mundane determinations, they come down in favor of human umpires. And while I could spend years arguing against people who are against replay altogether, it seems more fun to take on this more nuanced position.

At the risk of offending the all-powerful Umpires Union of America (not to mention the guys at FJM, who I probably respect much more than I should considering I have never and will never meet them), I don't see why we can't computerize whatever the hell we want. Sure, a blown home run call is much more likely to affect the course of a season than a blown strike call, but why risk blowing any calls now that a computer can just tell us what's a strike and what's not? Robotic umpires may seem scary, but I think we have to get over that. Shoeless Joe Jackson said he didn't like the stadium lights in Field of Dreams, but we installed the damn things anyway, so we could have Red Sox-Yankees games that go until 1 AM and slowly drive us insane. The system works.

Is it that we don't want certainty? Do we not want to pin the strike zone down? The strike zone is famously fickle, expanding for marquee pitchers, no-hitters, etc. I can see the legitimacy in the argument that we're better off keeping that rather charming element of baseball. But I disagree with that--I don't want to gawk at a pitcher's stats or enjoy a no-hitter unless I know for sure all the calls are legit. Sometimes, when I watch the replay of the last out of Clay Buchholz's no-hitter, I think that curveball might just have been half an inch off the plate. If I knew for sure, I'd be able to celebrate in peace. And if the last game of the World Series did come down to a questionable strike call, I think the last thing I'd want to do is let humans be humans.

What's Up, Doc?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the 2007 New England Patriots. The Pats were heavy Super Bowl favorites, but they had also just come off of a particularly trying and exhausting undefeated regular season. The NFL playoffs, of course, are always win (every game)-or-go-home no matter what you did during the season, but that's a harder mentality to deal with when you've already been playing under that burden for 17 weeks, and eventually, the Patriots just couldn't take it anymore. The end of a grueling season came one game too late.

We all remember what happened in the Super Bowl, but the signs were there in all the other playoff games, and even a few regular-season games. The Patriots were one of the best teams ever assembled, but they began to buckle under the weight of their expectations. One of the most dominant teams of all time was forced to hold off the likes of the Philadelphia Eagles and the Baltimore Ravens, not exactly top-tier teams, with little more than smoke and mirrors. In those games, and in playoff games against Jacksonville and San Diego, the Patriots still won, but every down felt like a strain. They strayed from the game plan that made them successful in the first place, opening their games by passing on every down as though they were down by 10 in the fourth quarter. Despite always being the superior team, they played as though they were desperate underdogs.

So why am I talking about the 2007 Patriots in May of 2008, especially when I underwent months of intensive electro-shock therapy to cleanse all thoughts of the 2007 NFL playoffs from my mind? Because the Celtics are starting to cause me similar heart palpitations. They're definitely the best team in the East, perhaps the best team in the NBA, and all of a sudden they're the team that has to pull out all the stops to dispatch the Atlanta Hawks. Now that they're in the playoffs, they've strayed from the game plan that got them there. As many have already pointed out, they didn't exactly play like champions in the fourth quarter last night, and any win where their opponent scores in triple digits is not the way the Celtics want to win. Their defense suddenly appears porous, while their offense at times becomes the basketball equivalent of passing on every down.

So yes, there are similarities between the Boston Celtics and the New England Patriots of this past year, but there is also one important difference: the Patriots had an excuse. To me, the 2007 season was proof that no team will ever go 19-0 (and especially not 20-0, if that 17th game ever does get added to the regular season). My personal opinion, after watching every down of that Bataan death march to the Super Bowl, is that the pressure of going undefeated is too much for any team to take now that the schedule runs 19 games. Given that, it's hard to blame the Patriots' coaching for their psychological collapse. Bill Belichick, controversies aside, is an undeniably brilliant coach, and if his team couldn't make it, I'm willing to believe no one could. It's not his fault.

The Celtics, however, have no such excuses. Sure, there's pressure on their heads--two newcomers and Paul Pierce have basically been charged with the task of triplehandedly restoring Boston's love for basketball, and that's no easy job. But it's no undefeated season either--we're just asking them to win, not win every time. One team does it every year, and it's certainly doable for the Celtics this year. And yet, they seem to be caving in to pressure much in the same way that the Patriots did, even though they face much less of it.

And that's what it boils down to: Doc Rivers is no Bill Belichick, and probably isn't even a Pete Carroll. His team has more talent on paper than any other team in the East, so theoretically a Yorkshire Terrier should be able to serve as coach and just watch the team win from the sidelines (and it would get to wear a little suit, which would be adorable). No one's asking Doc to be a miracle-worker; his only job is to make sure that his team plays up to its potential. And when all the series go to seven games and the Celtics have just one win on the road, it starts to seem as though all the intangibles that Doc is supposed to deal with are really dragging this team down. It makes you wonder what this team could do with basketball's version of Bill Belichick at the helm. Or even Pete Carroll.

Something Foul

It’s the perfect time for me to write this. I’m biased, like everybody who cares about sports, and my particular bias happens to be in favor of Boston teams. Tonight, I saw the Boston Celtics lose 94-75 to the Detroit Pistons, and of Boston’s 75 points, 32 came in the form of free throws (out of 39 attempts).

I say that this is the perfect time to write this because my main point is going to be, if you read down a paragraph, that 39 free throws is far too many, and tonight, the foul calls went decisively in favor of the Celtics (Detroit was 20 of 26 from the stripe). If anything, my inner Boston bias should have inspired me to post a 14-line Shakespearean sonnet dedicated to Dan Crawford and his officiating crew. But I can’t do that; this was the least fun-to-watch basketball game I’ve seen in a while, and not just because my team lost.

There need to be fewer foul calls in the NBA. My team scored almost half its points because its opponent broke the rules, and watching people break the rules isn’t fun. If a football team gained half of its total yards on penalties, or if a hockey team spent more than half the game in the penalty box, or if a baseball team gained more than half of its total bases on balks and catcher’s interference, no one would be happy. So why shouldn’t I be fed up when it happens in basketball?

Reducing the number of foul calls, as far as I can see it, can be basically done in two ways: reduce the number of fouls, or reduce the number of calls. The latter would entail relaxing the rules a little bit, raising the bar for the amount of contact that is required to blow the whistle. This is the ideal solution, I think, but it’s also an idealistic solution. There are tons of phantom fouls (and flopping, if I ever get around to writing about it, merits a 2,500-word diatribe, but it’s only getting a parenthetical mention here), but there are also tons of legitimate fouls. I would love to say that relaxing the standards would get rid of the phantom calls and keep the real ones, but I just don’t think it would work that way. The end result, I suspect, would be that phantom and real calls would decrease just about equally, and ultimately I think that’s too unfair to offensive players.

The other solution is not to change the ways that players’ behavior is regulated, but to change players’ behavior. The best way that I can see to do this would be to reduce the number of personals required to foul out from six to five. With less leeway, players would be forced to play less physical defense, and you’d see more baskets and fewer free throws.

There are obvious objections to this proposal, the most noteworthy being: “but you’re reducing the ability of players to play defense!” Well, yes, that’s exactly what I think should happen. Is that so bad? Imagine the NBA had no foul limit whatsoever, and someone suggested a six-foul penalty. The result would be the same, and the only reason we don’t think the six-foul limit is crazy is because it’s always been there. As a bonus, this plan would increase scoring, and even though I’m in the minority in that I’d rather watch great defense, this plan seems like it would give the people what they want.

Another, related complaint is that the six-foul limit is a part of basketball and you can’t just change it. But this argument is completely counter to the very thing that makes sports so great: they’re completely arbitrary. We create a series of rules that we think will result in interesting outcomes, and if the outcome isn’t interesting, we change the rules until it is. We decided that it would be fun to see a guy lob an oblong ball in a perfect spiral sixty yards downfield for a touchdown, so we added the pass interference rule so the receiver doesn’t get decked at the line of scrimmage. There’s no inherent reason the defense shouldn’t be able to do that, we just don’t want to see it, so we tell them not to.

Well, I don’t want to watch Paul Pierce throw himself into three Pistons in the paint in the hope of hearing a whistle, and I want to see that changed. Maybe I’m idealistic, but I’d like to see success in sports determined by how well you play. And when hoping that your opponent will break the rules, or trying to get them to, becomes a legitimate strategy for winning, it gets less fun for me. So let’s change it. Because we definitely can.