MALE PATTERN FITNESS: sports Archives

April 03, 2007

Sore Winners

I haven't had many chances to celebrate championships. In all my years of playing sports, I was only on one team that won anything. That was my senior year in high school, when our football team won the conference championship. I remember celebrating in the usual way, by getting drunk. Unfortunately, I threw up after I got home. Even worse, I didn't come close to making it to the bathroom. (My older brother cleaned up the mess, and for that alone should be eligible for sainthood.)

As a fan, my favorite team has four championships in my lifetime: 1964 (when I was seven), 1967, 1982, and 2006. The only one I publicly celebrated was in 1982, when I was in downtown St. Louis, watching the climactic Game Seven in a bar that was less than a mile from the stadium. The post-game scene was both giddy and weird. Everyone out on the streets that night was smiling and shaking hands with everyone else. Race, politics, social class, hygiene -- nothing seemed to matter at the moment.

Given that experience, I've never understood why fans of winning teams feel compelled to riot. But I guess that says more about me, and perhaps about my hometown, than it does about typical sports fans:

A Cardiff University team quizzed 197 male rugby supporters going in and out of the city's Millennium Stadium.

They found those who had seen their team win or draw were more aggressive than those who had seen their team lose or had been questioned before the game.

Researchers said fans may get caught up by the euphoria of a win and lose perspective, increasing aggression.

I love that polite, nonjudgmental choice of words: "lose perspective." As in, "When I robbed a convenience store, beat five innocent people unconscious, and then set that police car on fire, I seem to have lost perspective."

The reason why fans lose perspective after their team's victory is both obvious and oft-cited:

"It is known that winning causes an increase in testosterone, which has been associated -- although far from established -- to increases in aggression."

I guess I just didn't have enough in me to make me think of looting.

That's not the only testosterone news this week. At the opposite end of the age spectrum is this:

Researchers monitored the amount of nighttime sleep for 12 healthy men, ages 64 to 74, and then measured their morning testosterone levels.

The study found that the amount of sleep was an independent predictor of the men's total and free testosterone levels in the morning.

"The results of the study raise the possibility that older men who obtain less actual sleep during the night have lower blood testosterone levels in the morning," study author Dr. Plamen Penev said in a prepared statement.

This does have some interesting implications, since we also know that poor sleep is associated with an increase in diabetes risk. But when we look at it side-by-side with the first story, we get a clear-eyed picture of the adult male's rise and fall:

1. Soccer hooligan

2. Work, marriage, kids, stress, more work, more stress

3. You'd rather sleep than have sex.

The more you think about it, the more you realize this isn't as crazy as it once seemed.

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:22 AM | Comments (2)

March 29, 2007

Freeze Now, Or Forever Fall to Pieces

If you haven't already frozen some of your stem cells, you could be behind the curve:

Some doctors and researchers say that in a few years the use of primitive stem cells from infants’ umbilical cord blood could grow new knee ligaments or elbow tendons creating a therapy that becomes the vanguard of sports injury repair.

Already, some sports agents are preparing to advise clients about banking stem cells from their offspring or from tissue taken from their own bodies as an insurance policy against a career-ending infirmity. Stem cell blood banks are promoting the benefits of stem cell therapies for the practical healing and rehabilitation of tendons, ligaments, muscle and cartilage.

I love the line I put in bold -- could any statement possibly be more speculative than "preparing to advise"? I mean, I'm preparing to advise my publisher to pay me a million-dollar advance for my next book. And if my talent and popularity increase a hundredfold in the near future, I just might follow through.

This, though, is the scariest part of the New York Times piece:

“If you have a child who has exceptional athletic talent at the age of 5 or 6, you might want to get a muscle or fat biopsy to draw and freeze some young stem cells,” said Dr. Johnny Huard, the director of the Stem Cell Research Center of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and a leading gene therapy researcher. “To have a pool of stem cells already removed would be enormously valuable. The practical use might be years away, but that’s the future of sports medicine.”

I hope that would qualify as child abuse.

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:38 AM | Comments (1)

No!

Who would've guessed that getting kicked in the head repeatedly would cause brain damage?

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2007

Stupid Elite Athletes!

My first year at Men's Health magazine was probably the roughest of my entire career. I'd had some success in my six years at Men's Fitness magazine, which is why my new bosses at MH had hired me and spent the money to move my family across the country. But at MH, everything I wrote or edited was getting smacked around, and I couldn't understand why.

In December of that year, one of the company's legendary editors, Mark Bricklin, came in to give our staff a talk. Bricklin, longtime editor of Prevention, may have invented the type of service journalism we did at MH. Several of the magazine's top editors had started out working for him at Prevention. The talk was a big hit, and did more to help me understand what I was supposed to be doing at MH than all the disparaging notes and comments I'd received from my fellow editors combined.

The biggest lesson was this: A service article is only as good as its converse. If the converse of your story can't possibly be true, you have no story. There's no point writing a story about why vegetables are good, because everybody knows vegetables are good, and nobody says they aren't.

This was the opposite of the editorial mission at Weider, which owned Men's Fitness. We did lots of earnest, straightforward stories about this and that, but we never quite got the hang of the style of service journalism practiced by MH. To make it worse, we were under constant pressure to be even more earnest and straightforward. I remember one meeting in which Joe Weider lectured my boss and me about the sorts of things we should be writing about. "Weight belts. There's a story. Lifting straps. There's another story."

Since he was the owner of the company, we couldn't ask him the obvious question: "What's there to say about weight belts or lifting straps that we haven't already said?" If someone came up with a new and improved weight belt or lifting strap, sure, we'd jump all over that. Otherwise, why would we write about those things? We understood what Weider wanted us to do. We also understood that you don't provide service to readers by telling them what they already know.

Still, in my six years at MF, we never figured out the ideas that Bricklin had perfected and codified. We might stumble on the occasional counterintuitive story, but we didn't understand that our mission was to seek those stories out. And we certainly didn't understand the law of converses, or that our mission was to surprise readers, rather than merely keeping them informed. That's why MH was selling almost five times as many magazines as MF by the time I decided to switch teams.

Bricklin and his editorial descendents at MH weren't the only journalists who'd figured out the value of providing readers with counterintuitive information. Political journalists have been doing it for as long as that profession has existed. One of the modern masters is Michael Kinsley, who's made a career of zigging when others zagged. He's often the first to go against the conventional wisdom in his opinion columns, even if doing so rankles his most loyal readers.

Kinsley founded Slate, the online magazine, in 1996, and from the beginning its editorial mission has mirrored Kinsley's instincts. It proudly challenges the conventional wisdom in many of its columns and features, even when the conventional wisdom is probably right.

And that brings me to the real subject of this post, which is Slate's "Explainer" column on human growth hormone. The title, "The Growth Hormone Myth," is a pretty good tip-off that the writer is going to tell us that we're all misinformed about this performance-enhancing drug. Or should I say "alleged" performance-enhancing drug?

[I]t's just plain wrong to put growth hormone in the same category as anabolic steroids. ...

For starters, we know that a baseball player can beef up on steroids and improve his athletic performance. But most clinical studies suggest that HGH won't help an athlete at all. The other key difference is that while steroids cause a bevy of nasty side effects -- testicular shrinkage, an increased risk of stroke -- taking HGH doesn't seem to be that bad for you.

If growth hormone doesn't help, why are athletes breaking league rules to get it? And if it doesn't hurt, why are there league rules against it in the first place?

You see the problem here, which was noted by reader Rob B. when he sent me the link: "It struck me as a similar argument to the one that scientists used for years about steroids." It strikes me that way as well. Medical doctors and exercise scientists were wrong about steroids, and remained militantly ignorant about the subject until the mid-1990s. That gave athletes, coaches, bodybuilders, and recreational gym rats a third of a century to get used to ignoring anything doctors had to say about anabolic drugs. They developed their own drug protocols, with thousands of athletes acting as self-selected lab rats, and found their own ways to share this information.

That's why, until recently, the average powerlifter or professional wrestler knew far more about performance-enhancing drugs than the average doctor or exercise physiologist.

The cycle seems to be repeating itself with HGH. The Slate columnist, Daniel Engber, starts off with the assumption that clinical studies tell the entire story:

At the very least, treatment with HGH does seem to reduce body fat and increase muscle mass. Growth hormone may not lengthen your lifespan, but it can certainly improve your looks. ...

That doesn't mean very much for athletes: A chiseled physique won't help you hit a baseball or throw a punch. So far, no one has been able to connect the increase in lean body tissue caused by HGH with enhancement of athletic performance. Unlike steroids, growth hormone hasn't been shown to increase weight-lifting ability; in the lab, it has a greater effect on muscle definition than muscle strength.

From there, he speculates about why athletes continue to use HGH, even though it clearly doesn't work the way they hope it will. First he suggests, reasonably, that athletes may get small improvements in performance that wouldn't register as significant in a clinical study. He also says athletes may use it to recover faster from injuries, rather than enhance performance directly, which is another fair point. And, finally, he notes that HGH may have different effects when combined with other drugs than when used in isolation, and that's something I've heard for years from my informed sources.

But then he goes off the rails with this:

The most likely reason that athletes use HGH, though, is superstition. ... The fact that the major sports leagues have banned growth hormone only encourages the idea that the drug has tangible benefits. Why would they ban something unless it worked?

But he never asks the most obvious question: What if athletes are taking growth hormone in much higher doses than the ones used in clinical studies? And what if they're doing this not because they think it works, but because it does work?

You can make fun of bodybuilders all you want -- heaven knows I do at every opportunity -- but you can't say that they aren't aggressive with their drug protocols. (Even if massive doses of growth hormone don't always produce the best aesthetic effects, as evidenced by the profusion of bodybuilders with 40-inch waistlines.) That's why generations of athletes have taken their doping cues from bodybuilders, who're willing to try anything, in any amount and at any expense, to get bigger. By the time the protocols reach the athletes, they've been refined through years of trial and error.

And that explains why athletes use growth hormone. They aren't stupid. They know the drug works. The fact doctors and scientists haven't been able to figure out why or how in their labs doesn't mean anything except that doctors and scientists aren't as smart as they think they are. If they were, they'd have learned their lessons from more than three decades of being wrong about steroids, and realized that drug-using athletes are always ahead of drug-studying scientists.

Gut reversal

When I was trolling the web for pictures of GH guts, I came across this article on how to control a protruding abdomen.

It includes this exercise, which has a name I won't even try to pronounce:

To practice Uddiyana Bandha, empty the lungs with a quick, forcible exhalation. As soon as the lungs are empty, the diaphragm rises naturally into the thoracic cavity. When there is no interference from the diaphragm, draw the intestines and other organs toward the back as far as you can. The stomach rests near the back of the body, in the thoracic cavity.

The technique can be practiced in either a sitting or standing position but standing is better. While standing, place your hands firmly on the thighs, keep the legs apart, and bend your trunk slightly forward. Don't attempt to hold the abdomen in this position for very long at first. With practice, you'll be able to keep the abdomen in this position as long as you can hold your breath outside your lungs. This technique can be repeated five to eight times with brief intervals to catch your breath.

I had no idea that exercise came from the yogic world. I've read that early bodybuilders did it, including Eugen Sandow. I wonder if they knew they were doing yoga?

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:22 AM | Comments (2)

March 22, 2007

Thursday Blog Meat: Satan, P&G Had no Operational Relationship; U.S. Defends Decision to Invade Anyway

As Rannoch Donald said when he sent this link, "unfuckingbelievable":

The Devil is not in league with global consumer brand Procter & Gamble, a U.S. court has ruled. P&G won a $19 million lawsuit against four distributors of rival Amway over rumors tying it to Satanism.

The court concluded a 12-year lawsuit in P&G's favour, after it ruled that the four had spread a false accusation that P&G subsidised Satanic cults. The case is one of several unfair competition suits P&G has brought refuting the Satanism slurs.

According to P&G, the four distributors had passed on to customers the notion that its logo -- featuring a bearded man looking over a field of 13 stars -- was a symbol of Satan.

According to Snopes.com, the bearded-guy logo was trademarked in 1851, and the 13 stars represented the country's original 13 colonies. I found that in five seconds. So why did it take a court 12 years to sort it out?

How much wood would a right-handed pitcher chop ...

This story about ballplayers' unusual off-season training programs is a fun read.

I got that link from Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus, who in the same entry linked to this, a loving compendium of HBWs: hot baseball wives.

If you can't do the time, you'd better hope you're attractive enough to sway the jury against sentencing you to do time

This isn't much of a surprise:

Juries trying criminal cases are likely to be more lenient when the person in the dock is physically attractive, psychologists say.
Scientists gave a fictitious transcript of a mugging to 96 volunteers, along with a photograph of the defendant.

The York and Bath Spa universities team found the jurors were less likely to find attractive defendants guilty. ... Unattractive black defendants were given the harshest sentences, irrespective of the ethnicity of the "juror."

So if you're an unattractive black guy, try to stay out of trouble. Or play in the NBA.

Global warming? Yeah, that sounds scary. But what about Al Gore's waistline?

I understand that people want to speculate on whether or not Al Gore's going to run for the presidency. And I understand that someone connected to Hillary Clinton said they'd start worrying about him if it looked like he was losing weight. And I fully understand that right-wing hacks like Glenn Beck are going to take their shots at the guy no matter what he does.

What amazes me, though, is how many fat guys -- including the megachinned Beck -- are yukking it up over Gore's waistline. Even on the relatively liberal MSNBC, Chris Matthews and David Shuster took their shots.

Shuster looks to me as if he's gained 10 pounds in his face alone since I've been watching Hardball. Check out his bio picture, then look at this recent clip. Even on the tiny screen, you can see his surplus chin flesh bobbing along like a milk jug on the ocean.

So why are all these guys spending so much time talking about Al Gore's weight? Especially when Gore isn't even pretending to be running for office, and in fact lays out such stringent anti-global-warming measures that he couldn't possibly by elected?

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:30 AM | Comments (1)

March 21, 2007

Ya Think?

Here's a bit of news that isn't remotely surprising: David Wells, the beer-bellied pitcher for the San Diego Padres, has diabetes.

But on the bright side, he's saying the right things about it:

“From the time I found out, I made changes. No more starches and sugar. No more rice, pasta, potatoes and white bread. No more fast food. I've cut out alcohol.”

That's right, Boomer Wells has given up drinking. Well, not entirely.

“I can still have a glass of wine now and then,” said Wells. “I can still run with the guys. But I've got to watch what I'm doing."

But then he says things like this:

"I don't want this going to Type 1 diabetes."

And this:

"I'm eating like a rabbit . . . salads, fish, chicken.”

I just hope that none of the children listening come away thinking that what Wells has -- diabetes mellitus type 2 -- can become type 1. Or, for that matter, that rabbits eat fish and chicken.

Wells is no stranger to lifestyle-related health problems:

He has battled gout at times. He is allergic to shellfish. And he has a history of high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

I wish him luck, of course, but I do see one ominous sign: His manager's name is "Bud."

UPDATE: Just to clarify ...

Shortly after I posted this, I got emails from Steve Adam and Adam Campbell pointing out that I misunderstood what David Wells said about type 2 diabetes turning into type 1.

While one can't literally turn into the other, as a medical diagnosis, it's an unimportant distinction. If you have type 2 and leave it unchecked, your body eventually will become unable to produce insulin. Then you'll be insulin-dependent, same as if you had type 1 all along.

Adam Campbell says that Dr. Michael Eades calls this "type 3" diabetes.

So I apologize to Wells. But, in my defense, I'm pretty sure I'm right about rabbits ... unless they really do eat fish and chicken, in which case I'll have to apologize to Boomer for that, too.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:12 AM | Comments (2)

March 17, 2007

Iron Maidens

This just may be the coolest story the New York Times has ever published. Just read it. (Be sure to watch the video clip as well.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:04 AM | Comments (1)

March 14, 2007

Bats Out of Hell

When politicians get involved in baseball, it's usually to grandstand about steroids. But in New York City, the controversy is over a very different kind of performance enhancer:

The latest fight over performance-enhancement in baseball isn't being waged at spring training, and it has nothing to do with HGH. It's taking place in New York, where a bill banning metal bats in high school games is expected to pass the city council by a comfortable margin Wednesday afternoon. If the measure gains traction, it could change baseball forever.

Or not.

New York is a big town, but it's still only one, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg might yet veto the measure. Beyond that, chances the manufacturers would sue even before the ban takes effect next fall are about as good as Mariano Rivera protecting a ninth-inning lead. And it's been an emotional, expensive debate already.

"And I'm a conservative Republican," said James Oddo, the Staten Island councilman who led the push for the bill. "I hate government intervention."

The issue here is the safety of ballplayers. Metal bats can make baseball a much more dangerous game, particularly for pitchers, who have the least time to get out of the way of a line drive. There are plenty of anecdotes to back that up, and this study from Brown University showed the difference when bats come from the foundry instead of the lumber yard:

The average speed of a hit off the fastest bat, a metal model, was 93.3 mph; the average off the slowest bat, a wooden model, was 86.1 mph. Only 2 percent of hits made with wooden bats exceeded 100 mph, while 37 percent of the hits with the fastest metal bat [were] more than 100 mph, according to Joseph J. Crisco, associate professor of orthopaedics at the Brown Medical School. However, researchers also found one metal bat performed similarly to wooden bats.

The issue concerns more than safety; there's a real cost to teams when they shift to bats that break. And the companies that make metal bats have a lot on the line as well, according to Councilman Oddo:

"They went from a $50-million-a-year business to $300 million by pushing high-end, high-performance bats, and I had a kid in Staten Island eat a ball a while back. I just don't believe they have the best interests of my constituency at heart."

Popping wood

Meanwhile, wood bats have been evolving as well:

Bats have been engineered with larger heads and smaller handles to produce a whip-like effect.

"It's the biggest change in baseball that people don't realize," said former Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer, who is now a special advisor to the Devil Rays. "When I played, the bats were a lot heavier and bigger in the grip. I brought in one that I had used to the ballpark and players couldn't believe I had used it. Now, when you see a guy swing at a ball, you see half the bat land in the outfield.

"Today, there are bats that crack in half if you don't get the meat of the sweet spot on it. But I guess it works also. And they don't have to worry about the supply as well."

That's why players today order as many as 100 bats per season, four times as many as players used a generation ago. Another change is the shift from ash to maple:

Companies have started to make more and more bats out of maple instead of the traditional ash wood. Maple became popular several years ago when Barry Bonds started using one.

Which is good, because ash trees could very well be endangered:

Since arriving in North America, the emerald ash beetle has killed more than 20 million ash trees and caused economic losses running into the tens of millions of dollars. Rob Lawrence, a forest entomologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, said the pest could be equally devastating in Missouri, where green and white ash trees are important components of native forests. He noted that ash trees are even more prevalent in urban areas, where their straight trunks and vigorous growth has made them popular park and residential landscape trees. "This beetle has the potential to devastate both rural and community forests," said Lawrence.

Gratuitous spring-training reminder

This is the time of year when players you've never heard of look like superstars, and legitimate major-league regulars look ordinary. If you're a fan, it's important to keep in mind that the players who need to make the team out of spring training are going to come into camp in peak form, able to play at full speed. The guys with guaranteed jobs are going to take it slower, with the goal of being in top form when the regular season starts in April.

I wrote about this last spring, and I'm shameless enough to repeat myself here:

Most of us who aren't athletes tend to think of pro jocks as guys who can turn it on whenever they want. Indeed, their worst game is many times better than our best game. But these guys still have big gaps between the type of performance they're capable of when they're in midseason form and the way they'll play now. No matter what you call it, the professional ballplayers are in spring training. This is their preseason.

Even the idea of "midseason form" is kind of a misnomer. A couple years ago I heard a fascinating lecture by Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a sports scientist who worked in the Soviet Union during the height of the Big Red Sports Machine and is now a professor at Penn State.

He said that an athlete can only achieve what he called "sports form" -- peak condition -- for about four weeks at a time. Some sports, like track and field, are designed for this, and fans get to see athletes who've trained all season so that they peak for the year's most important competition.

Players with long seasons have to make choices. Maybe they never train to hit a peak at any specific time. Maybe, if they're superstars playing on championship teams, they try to peak during the playoffs. But most athletes don't have that option. Marginal players have to peak during the preseason just to make the team. That's why, every year at this time, you read about guys who come from nowhere to make it onto big-league rosters because of their sensational performance in spring training.

These guys rarely go on to have successful seasons, for one obvious reason -- during the regular season, they're going up against seasoned professionals who're starting to hit their peaks -- and one that's not so obvious: The fringe players had their "preseason" in January and February, and by March were in "sports form."

(Thanks to Michael Navin for the heads-up on the metal-bat ban.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:32 AM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2007

Quick Question

We now know that obesity in childhood can trigger early puberty in girls:

Lee noted that girls in the United States are entering puberty at younger ages than they were 30 years ago. Over that same time, there's been a significant increase in obesity rates among American children.

"Previous studies had found that girls who have earlier puberty tend to have higher body mass index (BMI), but it was unclear whether puberty led to the weight gain or weight gain led to the earlier onset of puberty. Our study offers evidence that it is the latter," said Lee, who is also assistant professor in the department of pediatrics and communicable diseases at the U-M Medical School.

We also know that Shaquille O'Neal is trying to help kids with health and weight-control issues:

Shaquille O'Neal will be taking a shot at a TV reality show focused on childhood obesity and health. The ABC summer series will feature the Miami Heat star and his effort to help Florida schoolchildren lose weight, ABC said Monday. ...

The series, being filmed in Broward County, Fla., will track the lives of the children involved. O'Neal will be on hand as booster and, in episodes yet to be shot, will lobby politicians on causes including school nutrition, Daily Variety reported Monday.

The show is an adaptation of the British series Ian Wright's Unfit Kids, which featured the former soccer star.

O'Neal, a father of six, has been outspoken about the issue of children and weight problems.

So this mean we'll someday realize that Shaquille O'Neal prevents early puberty?

That would be a hell of a line to have on your resume:

"... and from 2007 to 2012 I prevented 46.7 million children from reaching early puberty."

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:44 AM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2007

The Juice is Goosed

I'm on deadline and had no plans to blog today, but the headlines are just too good.

You probably know about the big steroid/growth hormone bust in Florida.

Two specific names have been linked to the raid: Gary Matthews Jr., who had a career year for Texas in 2006 and signed a $50 million contract with the Angels this offseason; and a team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But what really caught my eye is the new paperback version of Game of Shadows, the book that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Barry Bonds hadn't just used steroids, he'd used them in massive doses.

Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci offers some of the fresh dirt in the new version:

My favorite fact: the authors detail in their afterword the freakish growth of Bonds' body parts in his years with the Giants: from size 42 to a size 52 jersey; from size 10 1/2 to size 13 cleats; and from a size 7 1/8 to size 7 1/4 cap, even though he had taken to shaving his head.

"The changes in his foot and head size," they write, "were of special interest: medical experts said overuse of human growth hormone could cause an adult's extremities to begin growing, aping the symptoms of the glandular disorder acromegaly."

I'm a sucker for a good acromegaly reference. Photos here.

Wonderful you

In related news, a new study says that college students are more vain than in previous generations:

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to."

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

This is my favorite part:

The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before, said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.

Now, I don't mind if a researcher publishes a major study with the goal of validating a conclusion she's already reached in a book she's already published. But I wonder if she's pointing her accusing finger in the right directions.

For example, she blames the "self-esteem movement" of the 1980s as being responsible for this epidemic of narcissism, along with more permissive parenting. So, clearly, it's the fault of the hippies and parents, especially, I assume, hippies who then became parents.

But couldn't someone argue that powerful forces in society are more responsible than a bunch of pacifist utopians whom none of us paid much attention to in the first place?

For example, could the fact that good-looking people make more money play into an increase in self-consciousness about one's looks?

Could the fact that even relatively prosperous people feel increasing anxiety about their economic security have an effect on their kids, making them focus more on wealth and fame than on goals that might contribute something useful to society?

No, no, talking about that stuff would cause too many of us to question our assumptions about the direction our country has taken in the past quarter-century. It makes us wonder if perhaps we've placed too much emphasis on wealth and status and not enough on what used to be called the common good. It makes us reassess our worship of presidents like Reagan and Clinton, who were celebrated for unleashing the forces of prosperity, and makes us wonder why in the world our celebrity journalists poked such vicious fun at Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, the only two political leaders in a generation who stood for anything besides unmitigated greed and personal power.

No, we can't think along those lines. We can't stop and wonder who decided it was so important to focus on Al Gore's wardrobe and waistline in the 2000 election campaign, rather than on what he might actually do for the country as its chief executive. Or on what his opponent might not do (pay attention to warnings about imminent terrorist attacks, for example).

It's a lot easier to just blame the hippies. They're too busy tending to their patchouli to even notice.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2007

It's the Time of the Season ...

Spring training is the best time of year for most baseball fans. The rookie with the skillet for a glove is learning to catch fly balls. The manager and superstar have ended their spat. Injuries have healed. The former phenom, the brilliant lefty who crashed and burned, has matured. (Oh, and he's finally healthy, as well.)

Lifelong fans like me figured out a long time ago that you can't really believe much of what you read in spring training. The regular season -- April through September, and then into October if your team justifies the optimism of its spring-training headlines -- is the only barometer that matters. If the players are really healthy, mature, and improved, they'll prove it over six months and 162 games.

In other words, spring is for optimism, summer is for reality, and fall is for pessimism bordering on despair for most fans.

But this spring-training story, by Jeff Pearlman, is different from the rest of its genre. It covers the entire spectrum of a fan's emotion -- from sweetness and light to crushing cynicism:

Barry Bonds reports to Scottsdale with the Giants, throws darts at the media, treats the team's equipment managers and publicists like dirt -- then goes all cute and cuddly on us.

Remember last year, when Bonds dressed up as Paula Abdul (only with larger breasts -- which is alarming, considering that his are real)? Or how about a few years earlier, when he jumped through hoops to declare his love for Jeff Kent, aka The Man Bonds Wants To Swallow a Grenade.

This year, the scene involved new San Francisco ace Barry Zito, who on Wednesday posed for pictures alongside Bonds as both men laughed and smiled and wore T-shirts reading "DON'T ASK ME ... ASK BARRY!"

Oh, boy.

It is, of course, a ploy; an attempt by His Big Headedness to temporarily con us into thinking that, gosh darnit, Barry Bonds really is one heckuva guy.

We know what Bonds is, and it's not "one heckuva guy." But Pearlman says there was once another transcendant superstar who acted sweet for the cameras but treated everyone else like dirt:

Once, when Reds slugger Ken Griffey Jr. was a 20-something wunderkind patrolling center field for the Seattle Mariners, reporters and fans flocked from across the map to watch him in spring training. Griffey was "The Kid" -- a seemingly happy-go-lucky, backward-hat-wearing puppy dog who could hit, field and run with the gusto of a Willie Mays and the pop of a Mickey Mantle. He was the future of the game, and along with Bonds, one of its two best players.

He also happened to be a major pain in the ass.

Back then, Griffey had an attitude. He would offer snide answers to relatively intelligent questions. He would complain about a lack of respect, and -- if the mood struck -- insult anyone within striking distance. People would tiptoe past his locker, eager to avoid any sort of exchange. It was what one would expect from a pampered brat at the height of his profession, and it grated the masses.

In other words, he was Barry Bonds.

But then something happened. Read the whole thing to find out what it was.

(Thanks to Evan Pfannenstiel for the link.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:40 AM | Comments (1)

February 15, 2007

The Lawyer Did It

What a month it's been for journalists.

We've had a procession of superstar reporters (including five Pulitzer Prize winners) take the stand in the Scooter Libby trial. If we've learned anything, it's that the news-gathering business is often the opposite of its sharp-elbowed image. Rather than kicking ass and taking names, reporters revealed that, much of the time, what they're really doing is kissing ass and concealing names.

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, two guys who upheld the finest traditions of investigative reporting -- and I say that without sarcasm or irony -- can finally sleep a little easier tonight, knowing they won't be going to jail.

Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle exposed the steroid use of a number of prominent athletes, including Barry Bonds, in articles and in the book Game of Shadows. But, because their reporting was based in large part on grand-jury testimony, they faced jail time if they didn't give up their source for the transcripts.

Yesterday their source finally let them off the hook:

A lawyer admitted in court documents Wednesday that he provided a Chronicle reporter with transcripts of confidential grand jury testimony by Barry Bonds and other athletes about steroid use, and federal authorities said they would drop their effort to send the reporter and a colleague to prison for 18 months for refusing to disclose their source.

The lawyer, Troy Ellerman, 44, who once represented the founder and another executive of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, agreed in court documents to plead guilty to four charges of disclosing the transcripts in violation of a judge's order. The plea agreement calls for a sentence of up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

No surprise that it was a lawyer who did it, and if I'd been following the case more closely I probably could've guessed that it was this particular lawyer. Still, it's easy to see why the guy let the reporters sweat for so long -- two years in jail and a quarter-million-dollar fine is a stiff price to pay for breaking a law that ultimately provided a public service.

And, while it's good news that the reporters now know they aren't going to be bunking with real criminals anytime soon, there's still a chilling message being sent by this case:

While the reporters deserve applause for not revealing their source, "someone who may be thinking about leaking information to the press may think twice if he knows he's going to go to jail,'' said Mark Feldstein, a journalism historian and associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. That could keep important information from coming to light, he said.

There is actually one journalist who remains behind bars for not revealing sources:

In San Francisco, blogger Josh Wolf has spent nearly six months in prison -- the longest incarceration of a journalist in U.S. history -- for refusing to surrender a videotape of a July 2005 anarchist protest to federal authorities.

There may have been a breakthrough this week in Wolf's case, with the government suddenly interested in reaching some kind of solution. But the entire case is beyond strange:

Wolf has been in prison nearly six months for refusing a federal grand jury subpoena to turn over raw video he shot of an anarchist protest against corporate globalization held in San Francisco's Mission District in July 2005, though government lawyers had already obtained Wolf's edited video that he sold to a local independent television station that aired it on the day of the protest.

The journalist broke no laws. He videotaped a public protest. He sold parts of the video to a TV station.

Here's why the feds have been holding him:

The case was brought against Wolf in federal court on the claim that demonstrators at the protest attempted to burn a police car, a federal crime according to government lawyers because the San Francisco Police Department receives funds from Homeland Security. Wolf and his lawyers accused the government of manipulating the case to side-step California's shield law, which allows journalists to withhold unpublished material and confidential sources from prosecutors. There is no federal shield law to afford the same protection in federal court.

Wolf elaborates in this interview. The gist is that the feds are trying to determine if a crime was committed at the anti-globalization protest Wolf was covering. Here's how Wolf describes it:

At some point in time ... a lone squad car that was just patrolling the neighborhood proceeded to accelerate into the crowd. This is what set off the issues that have since become so explosive, because shortly after the car rammed into the crowd, [the two policemen in the car] took off and tackled two individuals.

I happened to be witnessing and filming one, who was being choked, and you could see it on my videotape. The other individual, the other cop that took off, I don't really know what happened, because I was following the one. The cop that I wasn't filming was apparently struck in the head during some sort of an altercation, and at some point, allegedly by the U.S. Attorney, someone threw some sort of a firework four days after the Fourth of July in the vicinity of the cop car, although when I walked past the cop car I certainly didn't see any flames protruding, and the damage report shows that there wasn't really any damage to the cop car beyond a broken tail light.

If you watch 24, the federal agents are doing "whatever it takes" to chase down bad guys who're on the verge of doing horrible things like detonating nuclear warheads in U.S. cities. The reality is that the feds are holding a blogger in jail for six months because of a broken tail light on a police car.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2007

False Equivalencies

Rannoch Donald sent me this outstanding article on the past and future of illegal performance enhancement in sports, which was published in Observer Sports Monthly this weekend.

There was one niggling little thing that bothered me about it, which I'll get to in a moment. First, check out this anecdote from the beginning of the article:

Lee Sweeney was relaxing in his office in the physiology department of the University of Pennsylvania when his phone rang. The call was from an athlete who had been reading about the geneticist's remarkable experiments in creating muscle-bound rodents -- Schwarzenegger mice, as the press called them.

Sweeney's experiments were simple but dramatic. He had isolated a gene responsible for manufacturing a protein called IGF-1. In mammals, IGF-1 boosts muscle growth and helps their repair. When we exercise vigorously, our bodies naturally churn out the stuff. But as we age, production drops off and our muscles weaken. Sweeney wanted to find a remedy so he could help the elderly and people with muscle-wasting diseases.

So he spliced his gene into a virus and infected mice with it. The engineered virus carried the gene into each mouse's cells, where it was incorporated into the animal's DNA. Then it began pumping out excess IGF-1 directly into its muscles. The results were spectacular. Sweeney's rodents developed mighty biceps and thighs 50 per cent stronger than normal mice. He had created a super-mouse with genetically modified, pumped-up muscles.

And that is what attracted Sweeney's caller. The sprinter simply wanted to know if Sweeney could do the same for him. No, said Sweeney. The techniques used to create his Schwarzenegger mice would not yet work on humans. Our complex immune systems would block his genetically engineered viruses and prevent them from getting into our cells with their IGF-1 cargo. Many more tests and trials would be needed.

"I thought I had explained it very carefully and made it clear how far away we were from carrying out gene therapy like this on people," Sweeney told me. "But the guy wasn't having any of it. After I had finished he said that was fine, but could I please use him as his first human guinea pig and start experimenting on him as soon as possible, please?" At that point, Sweeney hung up.

Later that day there was a similar call from another athlete and the next day brought several more. By the end of the week, Sweeney had received dozens.

The author, science writer Robin McKie, makes the very strong point that athletes will do anything, legal or illegal, to improve their performance if they even suspect their competitors are doing the same.

Which is all scary stuff, and certainly correlates with stories I've heard and read.

McKie also gets into the silliness of some of the anti-doping regulations:

Andreea Raducan was only 16 when she won the combined exercises at the 2000 Olympic Games. The Romanian gymnast was a short, elfin figure with an innocent, childlike demeanour. Hence the shock when she was stripped of her title for taking pseudo-ephedrine. The drug was part of a cold cure given to her by her team doctor. Tough luck, you might think, but rules are rules. The trouble is that the rules are constantly being changed. In 2003, Wada removed pseudo-ephedrine from its banned list. "Let's be reasonable," said Dick Pound, the agency's chairman, at the time. For Raducan, the decision was anything but reasonable. She lost a medal for taking a substance now used happily by athletes. "All I did was take a cold pill, which didn't help me at all during my competition," she complained at the time.

But here's the part I don't like, which comes up in a lot in the anti-anti-doping argument. (Yes, there is such a thing.) How come some performance enhancements are perfectly legal, but others aren't? Consider this one about laser eye surgery:

Why, for example, is it acceptable to permit laser surgery to improve an archer's eyesight while the boosting of an athlete's body mass by chemical means is forbidden?

I've had laser eye surgery. It certainly helped me play sports better -- I had peripheral vision for the first time in my life -- but I could've achieved the same effect with contact lenses.

If I were a world-class archer, I could've gotten perfect vision several different ways, and not one would give me an advantage over anyone else, because they'd all have perfect vision as well. What would give me an advantage is a drug that would slow down my pulse so I could shoot between heartbeats. Those drugs are illegal in competition, for good reason.

There's a world of difference between eye surgery and steroid-enhanced muscle mass. In a sport like baseball, there's a fence around the outfield, circumscribing the field of play. If a hitter takes a drug that allows him to hit the ball over that fence more often, then he has a clear advantage over the defense.

The pitcher can take drugs, too, but no matter how hard he throws the ball, the size of the zone in which he can throw it hasn't changed. And the drug-taking hitter has matched the juiced-up pitcher's enhanced fastball with his own improved hand-eye coordination and reaction time.

Thus, there's an absolute advantage that rests with the hitter who chooses to take steroids and who has the genetic propensity to take advantage of the drugs. I have no personal experience with this, but I've heard and read many times that individuals have broad and varied reactions to steroids. They work better for some people than for others, which is why baseball statisticians have had so much trouble detecting a true "steroid effect" by looking at broad trends, as opposed to individual records.

And that, I guess, is something that will never be "fair" about sports. Some individuals will always have a genetic advantage that can't be matched with training or coaching or individual will. Allen Iverson is just quicker than everyone else, and that's the way it is. Yao Ming is taller. Mickey Mantle had more natural power than just about anyone who's ever picked up a ball and bat.

But the individual differences are what make sports fun to watch in the first place. And the players who're truly transcendant are rarely the one with the freakishly outlying physical traits. Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, David Beckham -- they all have or had something that couldn't be simulated in a lab.

Hell, even Barry Bonds had that something before he turned himself into a cartoon character. I despise the man as deeply as I can despise anyone who's never been accused of mass murder, and I'll concede he was the best player in the National League in the early to mid-1990s, and it wasn't even close.

The key to the future of sports, it seems to me, is to avoid giving in to the cheaters. Someone's always going to cheat; as McKie points out, athletes have been pushing the envelope as long as we've had athletes (and probably before we had envelopes, for that matter). But wherever you find cheaters you also find snitches who'll rat them out.

So you can have a balance, if you want it. I just hope sports officials keep wanting it.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:13 AM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2007

The Hits Just Keep Coming

Nick Bromberg sent me this link from The Hardball Times about an underreported trend in baseball:

The incidence of hit batsmen in major league baseball has dramatically increased in the past couple of decades; a significant transformation has taken place in the very nature of the game. Yet this transformation has caught little notice, engaging neither broad contemplation nor comprehensive understanding. ...

Through the early decades of the 20th century, the incidence of batters being struck by pitched balls steadily declined, in both the American and National Leagues. As the sport developed from its rough-and-tumble origins to its slick and professional maturity, the pitchers' control improved, and the batters' tactic of semi-intentionally taking the HBP as a means of getting on base faded. By the 1930s, the typical team had a hit batsman little more than once every 10 games.

In subsequent decades, the rate waxed and waned, but never in either league reached the levels of the 1900s and 1910s. Until the 1990s, that is, when, in both leagues, the occurrence of batters being pelted with pitches suddenly returned to the dead-ball era norm. But not for long; swiftly the rate soared past that, and in the past few seasons we've witnessed pitched balls smacking flesh at a frequency not known in more than 100 years.

The author, Steve Treder, offers a variety of explanations for this trend. The main one is the counterintuitive idea that, as baseball has tried harder to reduce hit batsmen, and as the quality of helmets and other protective gear has improved, hitters have gotten bolder, and started crowding the plate more.

In past decades, pitchers like Bob Gibson or Don Drysdale wouldn't allow that kind of confidence. If they saw a batter digging in with his cleats in the batter's box, they'd send a fastball sailing under his chin to discourage him from getting comfortable.

It's also worth noting that, for most of baseball history, pitchers tended to be bigger than hitters. Walter Johnson, for example, was 6-1, 200 pounds. In his best season, 1913, he was 36-7, with 243 and a 1.14 ERA. The hitters he was facing were, generally, much smaller.

Ty Cobb, for example, was the same height, but 25 pounds lighter. Eddie Collins was 5-9, 175. Frank "Home Run" Baker was 5-11, 173. (Baker, by the way, never hit more than 12 homers in a season.) Ray Chapman, whose death by a pitch to the head in 1920 inspired the creation of batting helmets, was 5-10, 170. One of the reasons Babe Ruth was such a paradigm-changing slugger was the fact he was one of the first big guys who was allowed to become a full-time hitter. He was only 6-2, 215, but that still made him bigger than most professional ballplayers, including the pitchers he faced. (Lou Gehrig, another relatively big guy for his era, was just 6-0, 200 pounds.)

Now baseball is a game of big men at just about every position. Thanks to modern nutrition and conditioning, they're much stronger than their predecessors. Hitting batters is proportionally more dangerous, given how hard today's pitchers throw. And umpires, as Treder notes, are quick to warn pitchers who throw inside to hitters:

Since the 1980s, umpires, presumably discreetly directed by MLB to do so, seem to have torn from the rule book the page that describes how close to the plate the batter may legally assume his stance. Coupled with hitters' unprecedented knowledge that any pitch more than a shade inside will generate a warning from the ump that the next inside delivery will send the pitcher to the showers, the result is a hegemony that earlier hitters could only dream about.

"Crowd" the plate? Many modern batters, with or without an elbow guard, set up permanent residence on the inner half.

Thus the modern pitcher, though more skilled than ever before, and despite facing far stronger sanction than ever before against attempting to brush hitters back, finds himself unable to avoid hitting batters at a rate not seen since the sport's primitive antiquity.

This is nothing more than a guess, but I wonder if some pitchers today just skip the traditional "purpose" pitch -- what they used to call "chin music" -- and go ahead and hit the batter if they want to send him a message.

There's really no consequence, aside from giving a free base to a runner. The umpire generally won't throw a pitcher out for a first offense. Even if there's a bench-clearing brawl, nobody actually gets hurt. What the umpire will do is warn both benches, but all that means is that the other team's pitcher will get penalized for retaliating. The pitcher who actually hit a guy on purpose gives up nothing but a baserunner.

So why wouldn't a pitcher just plunk a guy, if he thinks the situation calls for a message to be sent? It makes a lot more sense to hit a guy without warning than to go through the archaic ritual of throwing inside to intimidate guys who are probably too big and confident to be intimidated in the first place.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2007

Monday Link Dump

Kevin Drum asks if Roger Federer is the greatest tennis player in the universe.

I have a humbler suggestion: Tiger Woods is the best athlete in America right now.

It seems odd to talk about tennis and golf during Super Bowl Week, but really, does anyone dominate any sport the way these two dominate theirs?

The tooth is out there

Straight teeth don't make you any happier, according to this:

A 20-year study found that orthodontic treatment had little positive impact on future psychological health.

But what about future earnings? You can't tell me that having messed-up teeth won't affect your career path. Just try getting on TV without perfectly straight and glow-in-the-dark-white teeth.

Acceptance

I've never once seen an episode of House, but now, thanks to the vagaries of channel-surfing, I've seen Hugh Laurie accept two major awards -- the Golden Globe and one from the Screen Actors Guild.

Speaking of acting awards:

Forest Whitaker is considered the frontrunner for the Best Actor Oscar. As it happens, over the weekend, I saw much of Platoon on cable. He only had a minor role, but you always notice him when he's on screen.

By contrast, he shared several scenes in Platoon with Johnny Depp. But if you didn't know it was Depp, you'd never pay any attention to that character. He's just a guy in the background. Whitaker had a different kind of presence, even then. Even when he's in the background, you notice him.

I can't quantify this is any way -- writing about movies is pretty far from my paying gig -- but I think I can remember more minor roles by Whitaker than by just about any other actor.

The bit he did in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as the force-of-nature football player, was just a cartoon, like a purely physical version of Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli (interesting that neither actor ever played similar characters again), but in The Color of Money and The Crying Game, I remembered his scenes more clearly than I did just about anything else in the movie.

And who says there aren't any good roles for overweight black men with weird eyes?

The big picture

In this massive essay in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, argues that nutrition science misses the forest for the trees.

I can't argue with his point that eating real food is better than eating anything "enriched" or "fortified." I made the case for "clean eating" in New Rules of Lifting, although I suspect I'm more enthusiastic about protein supplements than Pollan is.

Right on cue, I found a news report this morning that bolsters Pollan's argument that we spend far too much time looking at the bits and pieces of nutrition, instead of the big picture:

Children who eat too little fat can end up overweight, a new study has found. Researchers in Sweden discovered that eating the right sort of fat kept the weight of children down.

Those who were significantly overweight consumed low amounts of unsaturated fat, the type found in fish, olive oil and vegetables.

Another point that could be made is that these bitsy-piecey studies do all tend to point to the same place -- eat more fruits, vegetables, and other whole foods, and skip anything that comes in a box.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:22 AM | Comments (2)

January 11, 2007

Like Busting Al Capone for Tax Evasion

The news about Barry Bonds this morning reminds me of an old joke:

Guy's working at a construction site. Every day, after he clocks out, he leaves the site pushing a wheelbarrow full of dirt. The foreman suspects he's up to something, so he starts inspecting the wheelbarrow as the guy's leaving. But it's never anything more than what it appears -- a wheelbarrow full of dirt.

Years later, the foreman sees the guy in a bar, and asks him what he was really up to. "You were stealing something, right?"

The guy nods.

"Okay, I give up. What were you stealing?"

The guy smiles. "Wheelbarrows."

It's not exactly analogous to Barry Bonds failing a drug test for amphetamines, but it's in the ballpark:

Barry Bonds, already under investigation for lying under oath about his steroid use, failed a test under Major League Baseball's amphetamine policy last season and then initially blamed it on a teammate, the Daily News has learned.

Under the policy, which went into effect only last season, players are not publicly identified for a first positive test.

But according to several sources, when first informed by the MLB Players Association of the positive test, Bonds attributed it to a substance he had taken from the locker of teammate Mark Sweeney. Sources did not identify the drug in question but characterized it as a serious stimulant.

When asked last night whether Bonds had an explanation for why he failed the test or if he wanted to issue a denial, Bonds' agent, Jeff Borris, said, "I have no comment on that."

I guess if the joke had the guy with the wheelbarrows blaming a coworker, the link would make more sense.

Of course the big irony is baseball's most notorious steroid user testing dirty for a garden-variety stimulant -- hence my headline about Al Capone. What's the fun in that?

(Thanks to Mike Navin for the heads-up.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2007

A Dick for All Seasons

I was enjoying the New York Times Magazine profile of Dick Pound, the anti-drug crusader for the the International Olympic Committee, when I came across this passage:

Pound’s biggest role in sport, before joining WADA, is one that can be seen as having helped create the very thing he is now fighting. Pound was the I.O.C. money man. He recognized that Olympic organizers were undervaluing their product and, as chairman of the I.O.C.’s television and marketing committee from 1983 to 2001, he dragged the games into the big-money era by negotiating richer deals with multinationals like Visa, McDonald’s, Kodak and Coca-Cola. In 1980, the I.O.C. got about $100 million for its TV rights; for the Beijing Games in 2008, the total will be nearly $2 billion. ...

Andrew Jennings, a British investigative journalist who has written three books on the International Olympic Committee, told me he believes Pound so valued his place within the I.O.C.’s inner circle that he abided the group’s questionable ways of doing business until Samaranch cast him in the role of reformer. ...

Jennings says Pound “did very well at giving sports away to commercial interests” and, by making the games vastly bigger and the money available to athletes more plentiful, thereby increased temptation and cheating. “The sponsor money brought the doping,” he claims, adding that it also financed the lavish travels and perks of I.O.C. members. Craig Masback, C.E.O. of USA Track and Field and a frequent target of Pound’s, says that “it seems logical that with more money, there is more temptation to make the tragic decision to cheat.” But he adds that it may be too pat to equate the money and drugs. “There was plenty of doping before there was a big financial incentive,” Masback says.

There was no money in Olympic weightlifting in the early 1960s, when the Americans started doping to keep up with the Soviets, who were so open about their use of synthetic testosterone that they left their hypodermic needles on the locker-room floor after meets. How much money is there in powerlifting or Strongman competitions today, and how many of the top competitors would pass a drug test?

To put it in even better perspective, friends who've played Division III football have told me about teammates who used steroids to get an edge.

That quibble aside, it's a terrific story, written by Michael Sokolove, an outrageously talented journalist. I love this paragraph near the beginning of the story, in which Pound is talking about Floyd Landis:

Pound took something like a schoolboy’s delight in talking about Landis’s lab result, which supposedly showed his testosterone level to be grotesquely above what is typical for most men. Landis has denied taking a prohibited substance and is fighting what could be a two-year ban from cycling. “I mean, it was 11 to 1!” Pound said, referring to Landis’s reported testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio, a measure used to identify doping. “You’d think he’d be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?”

The Megaphysical Club

Speaking of doping, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a feature this morning on baseball's 500-home-run club, a group that's growing and diminishing at the same time:

This coming season, Frank Thomas, Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez are within 40 home runs of reaching 500, with Thomas needing 13. As two is the highest number of players to hit their 500th in the same season, it could be an unprecedented membership drive for the club. From Babe Ruth in 1929 to Ernie Banks in 1970, nine players hit 500. Six players joined in a seven-year span from 1965-71.

If Gary Sheffield, who is 45 short, reaches 500 by 2008, nine more players will have joined the club since Barry Bonds did it in 2001.

"I think it does have the same (importance)," said David Vincent, a home run specialist for the Society of American Baseball Research who has a book on the history of the homer coming out this spring. "When you consider there have been 16,000-plus players all time and you're still talking about just 20 people, that's significant."

Others have a different view.

Wrote Bill James, author of The Bill James Handbook and a pioneer in baseball statistics, in an e-mail: "If (500) hasn't lost some of its luster already, that would be a miracle. I wouldn't want to speak ill of Mark McGwire, who was a fantastic player for a few years, or (Rafael) Palmeiro, who was an unusually good player for a long time, but ... they're not Mickey Mantle or Jimmie Foxx, either. It seems a matter of time until somebody who nobody would describe as a great player reaches that level."

Note the faint praise from Bill James. You can add a couple words to each quote and perhaps figure out what he thinks about each player: McGwire "was a fantastic player for a few years while he was taking steroids." Palmeiro was "an unusually good player for a long time, once he started doping."

But here's the most interesting passage in the story, which mainly focuses on whether Jose Canseco, who appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first (and probably last) time this winter, would've been a sure-fire HOFer had he reached 500 home runs instead of topping out at 462. The guy quoted is Doug Ames, his agent:

Canseco is at work on a second book, Vindicated, which could hit shelves as early as the All-Star break, Ames said. It was his first book, Juiced, that didn't spark but spurred discussion on steroids -- spurred it all the way to Congress. Ames said Canseco wrote himself out of the Hall with that book. That prompts this question: If he had reached 500, would he have put out his tell-all book? Would all that followed its publication have happened? ...

"He said he would still have written the book," Ames relayed, "but only after he was in the Hall of Fame."

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:47 AM | Comments (2)

January 04, 2007

Say It Ain't So ... Whoever You Are Who Puts the Rubber Thingie Inside Baseballs

I've been strenuously avoiding writing about baseball, steroids, and steroids in baseball, even though another major scandal may be ready to break. I haven't written about the subject in more than a month, which must be a record for me.

But now we get a report that shifts the emphasis from baseball's players to its balls:

"Examining the CT images of Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball one can clearly see the synthetic ring around the core -- or 'pill' -- of the baseball," UMS president David Zavagno said. "While Mark McGwire may or may not have used illegal steroids, the evidence shows his ball -- under the governing body of the league -- was juiced."

But Bob DuPuy, baseball's chief operating officer, said the core of the ball has been unchanged for decades. Rawlings has been the exclusive supplier of baseballs to the major leagues since 1977.

"All of our balls are subject to rigorous quality control standards and testing conducted by Rawlings," DuPuy said. "No changes have been made to the core of the ball through the entire time they have manufactured it."

UMS specifically examined the ball McGwire hit for No. 70 -- a record surpassed when Barry Bonds hit 73 homers in 2001. The company did not say how many 1998 baseballs it examined, and Zavagno did not return telephone and e-mail messages Wednesday. ...

"The synthetic rubber ring of the modern-day baseball, in this case that of Mark McGwire's prized 70th home run ball, acts as both a spring and a 'stop,"' Zavagno said. "Much like a sling shot pulled back 10 or 20 degrees farther than normal, the subsequent restitution or rebound allows an object to fly faster and farther."

I have no idea if the CT scans really found something new and nefarious. I've been reading stories about juiced baseballs for as long as I've been following baseball. In particular, I remember Whitey Herzog complaining about the baseballs in 1987, a year that saw a sudden uptick in power and run scoring.

However it works out, I can't see it disproving the idea that steroids were the main reason Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds managed to surpass 60 home runs six times between 1998 and 2001.

I expect we'll start hearing the same sort of things if Ryan Howard bops 60 in the next season or two: "See? This goes to show you don't have to take steroids to hit 60!" All it would prove is that Ryan Howard was able to do it without juicing.

Now, if David Eckstein hits 60, then I'll be willing to say the balls are more juiced than the players. Until then ...

(Thanks to Mike Navin for the heads-up.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:29 AM | Comments (1)

December 21, 2006

It's Not Just Me!

I may have mentioned, once or twice, that I truly suck at sports. This isn't false modesty; I have ample reasons to be genuinely, sincerely modest. When I play golf with friends, I always finish 10 to 20 strokes behind the others. Part of that is lack of practice -- when you play twice a year, you should finish 10 or 20 shots behind guys who play every weekend. But the biggest factor is that I suck.

I still like to play, and take some pride in the fact that I'm one of the few poor athletes who kept playing into middle age. I can't find statistics to back this up, but I'd guess that 99.9 percent of the guys from my generation gave up soon after realizing they were never going to progress beyond the obligatory two innings in right field at the end of the game. As soon as those innings were no longer obligatory, they knew they'd never get off the bench, and they made the rational decision to bail.

Me, I kept going, playing any sport where I could make the cut. I started enjoying sports more as I got older and stronger, and I really enjoyed playing after I got LASIK and had peripheral vision for the first time in my sporting life.

But the thing that's always mystified me about sports is my inability to master anything, no matter how hard I tried. How could my brain not figure out how to repeat seemingly simple movements after so many years of trying?

Now, thanks to this, I know it's not just me:

Stanford University research suggests we are not capable of repeating exactly the same movement over and over again. The Neuron study found monkeys trained to repeat simple movements produced slight variations every time.

The experts said training can improve the way the brain controls the muscles, but practice will never make perfect.

The lead researcher, Mark Churchland, explains why:

He speculated that the brain has evolved this way in order to respond better to new situations, which are more important than the ability to perform repetitive movements accurately.

He said: "The nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over again. The nervous system was designed to be flexible. You typically find yourself doing things you've never done before."

So the next time I miss a three-foot putt for par, I'll remember those monkeys ... every one of which could probably beat me by 10 strokes.

(Thanks to Rannoch Donald for the link.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:04 AM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2006

At Least They Didn't Use the NitroTech Defense

Rob Duffield sent me links to the following stories, suggesting that it may be time to replace the NitroTech Defense -- blaming "tainted supplements" when you flunk a steroid test -- with the Heineken Dodge.

First up, former sprinter Ben Johnson says his beer was spiked with a steroid while he was waiting to take a drug test at the 1988 Olympics:

Johnson has claimed he drank beer with a former U.S. football player in the drug test waiting room at Seoul, that the footballer was "a family friend" of Carl Lewis and that his beer had been tainted with stanozolol.

"I've been speaking to my lawyer and he wants to keep it as low (key) as possible until next June. We're trying to get some information, try to get that guy (the footballer) to speak," Johnson told the Herald Sun.

Lewis, in his book Inside Track, admitted knowing the footballer seen drinking with Johnson at Seoul but ridiculed any suggestion the player may have tampered with Johnson's beer.

I'll say this about Johnson: He's been consistent. Both he and his coach admit he used steroids, but that he hadn't been using stanozolol, the one for which he tested positive.

But as soon as "beer" and "positive steroid test" enter the same conversation, we have to talk about Floyd Landis:

This is the question posed (tongue-in-cheek) by cyclingnews.com, when Floyd Landis won stage 17. It had already been reported to the media that he had drank some beer the night before. After le Tour, when Landis' doping positive became public, cyclingnews.com used the same question as the headline for the article on the doping. At this point, it was possibly still tongue-in-cheek, although it had been determined that alcohol could affect T/E ratios.

Landis has mentioned this a few times in his defense, although he now says he never meant to claim that the alchohol he consumed (apparently both beer, and later on, Jack Daniels) was supposed to be an explanation, only something he mentioned because he didn't understand the result. At this point it seems they have distanced themselves somewhat any mention of the beer as an explanation.

That still leaves open the possibility that someone associated with Carl Lewis slipped something into Landis' beer the night before. You never know ...

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2006

The Beer Hunter

Here's a crime story you don't see every day:

A St. Louis man was shot to death Sunday night over a warm beer, police said.

St. Louis police say a woman shot her husband, who was about 70 years old, four to five times in the chest after he tried giving her a warm can of Stag beer.

Police said the wife admitted shooting him about 5:40 p.m. in the kitchen of their home in the 5100 block of Terry Avenue. Police said the home had no electricity at the time.

My guess is that she shot him over the fact their house had no electricity. The warm beer was just incidental. And speaking of beer, this story involves Dominique Byrd, a rookie tight end with the St. Louis Rams:

Byrd is alleged to have grabbed a woman's buttocks. When a man standing nearby challenged Byrd, police said, the Rams player grabbed a beer bottle and struck the man in the head. The bottle broke, and the man was taken to a hospital and got stitches to close the wound, police said.

No telling if the beer in the bottle was warm, cold, or reaching an ambient temperature in someone's stomach.

But it doesn't matter. The real issue here is that my hometown seems to be developing a bit of a problem. Time for an intervention?

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:07 AM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2006

Him Again

Sometime this week, 575 current and former members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America will get their annual Hall of Fame ballots. If three-quarters of those who send in their ballots vote for a player, he's a Hall of Famer.

Two of the players appearing on the ballot for the first time -- Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn -- are considered no-brainer first-ballot Hall of Famers.

According to this Associated Press story, another first-timer on the ballot doesn't figure to get within a tape-measure shot of induction:

For one glorious summer, Mark McGwire was bigger than baseball itself. America stopped to watch each time he came to the plate, and cheered every time he sent a ball into orbit.

He could do no wrong, it seemed. Surely he would be a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame someday.

And then came that day on Capitol Hill. Over and over, the big slugger was asked about possible steroid use, and his reputation took hit after hit as he refused to answer, saying he wouldn't talk about his past.

Now, with Hall ballots in the mail, McGwire's path to baseball immortality may have hit a huge roadblock.

The Associated Press surveyed about 20 percent of eligible voters, and only one in four who gave an opinion plan to vote for McGwire this year. That's far short of the 75 percent necessary to gain induction.

Behind ESPN's Insider subscription wall, Buster Olney says that McGwire is being singled out for one reason:

[T]he only real difference between McGwire and many of his baseball superstar peers is that it was McGwire who got the subpoena for the March 17, 2005 congressional hearing, and they didn't. Imagine if Superstar X, or Superstar Y, or Superstar Z had gotten that subpoena, instead of McGwire. Those guys would have been hemming and hawing and giving the same non-answers that McGwire and Sosa did. So I'm supposed to withhold my vote on some guys I suspect of using steroids, but not all of them? How do I do that, in good conscience? Because I think I probably know who took steroids?

Olney suspects a bunch of players whose names haven't yet entered the rumorama also used steroids. He can't say who they are, because that automatically puts those names into play. Which leads him to this dilemma:

If I don't vote for McGwire or Bonds or the other guys who have been in the middle of the public discussion over steroid use, then what do I do about the candidacy of many other great stars from the era who I believe -- but can't prove -- also used steroids?

And I do believe most of the great stars of the era used steroids. I can't write their names here. I have no hard evidence that they took steroids, just as I have no hard proof that McGwire took steroids, or that Bonds did.

Olney has decided to vote for the great players of the steroid era, no matter whom he believes used steroids, figuring that there are only two good options: Vote for everyone who deserves entry, or vote for no one. So if you think McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds deserve to be Hall of Famers, you vote for them, along with players X, Y, and Z, whom you also suspect of anabolic assistance. Or you don't vote for anyone on the list.

Personally, if I had a vote, I'd handle it with a bit more nuance. I'd look at what they accomplished before they obviously and flagrantly used training drugs.(I've written about this a bunch of times -- here, for example.)

By that standard, Bonds is a Hall of Famer, but McGwire, Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro are not. According to this estimation, without steroids he'd still have hit more than 600 home runs, barring catastrophic injury. That's more than McGwire, Sosa, and Palmeiro hit with steroids.

Still, I can't get my mind around the idea of Bonds -- the most flagrant of all the drug cheats, a guy who would be in jail for perjury if not for the silence of his trainer, Greg Anderson -- getting into the Hall of Fame after sticking a 32-ounce maple shaft up baseball's ass since 1999. Yes, he's one of the greatest ballplayers of all time, but so was Pete Rose, and so was Shoeless Joe Jackson.

I say fuck 'em all.

(Thanks to Nick Bromberg for the heads-up.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:24 AM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2006

When All Else Is Equal, Vote for the Guy Who Smiles More

Each fall, when Major League Baseball hands out its hardware, there's at least one award that leaves you scratching your head. This year, it's the NL MVP. Just when you think you have it figured out, the voters find a way to make it mysterious again.

In any other season, Ryan Howard would be a perfectly fine choice, with his 58 home runs and 149 RBI. You wouldn't penalize the guy for being a butcher in the field, or for striking out 181 times, or for the fact his team didn't make the playoffs.

But to believe he deserved to be MVP this season over Albert Pujols -- whose team did make the playoffs (albeit with fewer wins than Howard's Phillies), who plays well in the field (he won a Gold Glove, although that was awarded long after the MVP votes were cast), and who struck out just 50 times while finishing slightly ahead of Howard in slugging and on-base percentage -- you have to forget that the voters came to the opposite conclusion last season.

In 2005, many thought Andruw Jones deserved the MVP. He led the league in homers and RBI, just as Howard did this season. His team made the playoffs. And he's long been known as one of the best defensive outfielders in the game, whereas Pujols wasn't yet Gold Glove material at first base, a less demanding position. And Jones' 112 strikeouts weren't outrageous for a power hitter.

And yet, voters gave the MVP to Pujols. As I recall, the arguments in favor of Pujols were that he was more valuable to his team than Jones was to his, that he was more "clutch," for lack of a better word. He also had much better on-base and slugging percentages, but if those had been the criteria, then Derrek Lee of the Cubs would've been the clear choice for MVP.

The Viva El Birdos blog has a good rundown of the MVP credentials of Howard and Pujols. Pujols wins in nine out of 12 statistical measures. On top of that, he wins the "clutch" derby with a .397 batting average with runners in scoring position, vs. .256 for Howard. Altogether, there were 509 men on base when Howard came to the plate this season, vs. 427 for Pujols. Howard had 12 more RBI than Pujols, in 16 more games and with 72 more opportunities. And I haven't even mentioned that the ballpark in Philly is much kinder to hitters than the new Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

It's not a travesty that Howard is MVP in 2006; the kid had a great season. But it is odd that the voters seem to have no more consistency from one year to the next than the geezers who vote for the Oscars.

I'm reminded of 1998, when Mark McGwire set a record with 70 home runs and led all of baseball by a wide margin in on-base and slugging percentages. And yet, Sammy Sosa got the MVP. It was hard to make the case that he'd had a better season than McGwire. They'd essentially had the same season, with McGwire's being slightly better in some measures (such as home runs)and dramatically better in others. The only strong arguments in favor of Sosa were that he drove in more runs, and that his team won seven more games and made the playoffs, while McGwire's Cards didn't.

The real bottom line seemed to be that sportswriters liked Sosa more; just as, I suspect, they like Howard more than Pujols.

Nice to know a smile still matters.

I just hope Howard begins his post-award statement by saying, "I'd like to thank the Academy ..."

Posted by LouSchuler at 03:34 PM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2006

Introducing the Mighty IronWhoopee

Nick Bromberg and I were trying to figure out if the name selected for Allentown's AAA baseball team, IronPigs, is the worst team name in all of professional sports, especially since the NHL's Anaheim Ducks are no longer Mighty. (Imagine the indignity of being a pro athlete on a team being used as a marketing tool for Emilio Estevez movies. I guess we baseball fans are lucky we never got the Bad News Bears, although Mean Machine might've been interesting in the NFL -- an entire team of prison convicts. You'd pay to see that, right?)

Nick wasn't buying IronPigs as the worst team name:

It can't be worse than Macon Whoopee, can it?

I agree, except that the Whoopee are defunct, and the IronPigs are just getting started.

Sox make waves

How ironic is it that, on the day we learn that the Boston Red Sox have bid $51 million to get the rights to Japanese phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka, a tsunami hit Japan?

The $51 million goes to the Seibu Lions, the pitcher's current team. All the Red Sox get for their money is the exclusive right to negotiate with Matsuzaka's agent, the notorious Scott Boras. They still have to come up with an offer that Boras deems worthy of the top pitcher in this year's free-agent market.

Ken Rosenthal guesses the contract could pay Matsuzaka $12 million a year, although my guess is that it'll go even higher.

All for a 26-year-old guy who's already thrown a shitload of innings, none of them in the major leagues. Hardball Times has a great headline on its analysis of his potential: "When Will Daisuke Matsuzaka’s Arm Fall Off?"

Conclusion:

I'm not going to tell you when Matsuzaka is going to become ineffective or seriously injured. All I can tell you is that it will probably happen before he reaches 31 years of age.

So if the average Red Sox fan had to guess "sooner" or "later" for the inevitable arm injury, which would it be? I mean, has the Curse really been lifted?

Sigh Young

The NL Cy Young Award was announced yesterday, with Brandon Webb of the Diamondbacks winning following a season in which no NL pitcher put up the kind of numbers that end arguments.

To show how wide-open it was, Webb got 15 first-place votes ... but wasn't named at all on three of the 32 ballots. (The sportswriters who vote on the award list their first, second, and third-place choices.) San Diego closer Trevor Hoffman finished second, with 12 first-place votes, but he was only named on 23 of the 32 ballots.

The Cards' Chris Carpenter, who won last year, got 16 second-place votes, the most by far, but still finished third. Like Hoffman, he was named on 23 ballots, which means he wasn't named on nine.

Two guys probably have legit gripes about the balloting: Roy Oswalt of the Astros got three first-place votes (one more than Carpenter), but was only named on 13 ballots. And Bronson Arroyo of the Reds wasn't named on anyone's ballot, even though he was legitimately one of the top four starters in the NL. You'd think that would be worth at least a few third-place votes.

Could this explain why Leatherface is always so angry?

Rob Siders sent along this story, written by Tracy Ringolsby, about the vindication of the Colorado Rockies' once-controversial practice of keeping its baseballs in a humidor:

Five years ago, Tony Colwell was sitting in a duck blind, south of Kremmling, waiting for some birds to fly overhead and wondering why his leather boots had shrunk so much during the summer.
That's when the idea hit.

Colwell, who works in the Rockies' engineering department, wondered if the shrinkage and dryness of the leather could be because of the arid Denver climate. And if that were the case, he wondered, wouldn't the baseballs used at Coors Field be victims of the dryness, too?

"I always felt too much was made out of the altitude, that maybe it was a moisture factor, not air density," Colwell said. "Myself and another guy did some tests to see how the balls would react."

Then Colwell suggested to Rockies general manager Dan O'Dowd that a humidor might help normalize the games at Coors Field.

Though Rockies management welcomed the idea, it wasn't an instant hit in baseball. Suddenly, all the moaning and groaning about arena baseball gave way to complaints about a lack of offensive production and accusations the Rockies were doctoring baseballs.

Now, though, there is vindication for the Rockies.

During the general managers' meetings this week -- they began with a dinner Monday night -- Jimmie Lee Solomon, Major League Baseball's executive vice president of baseball operations, will recommend the 29 other teams follow the Rockies' lead.

"I think the Rockies are ahead of their time," Solomon said. "Baseballs are stored in all kinds of environments. They are subject to varying temperatures and levels of humidity. The Rockies took it upon themselves to replicate the climate that is suggested by the manufacturer. It's really the proper way."

How long before pitchers and catchers report for spring training?

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:19 AM | Comments (2)

November 09, 2006

Seat of Power

I wrote here about an acquaintance, the husband of a friend and former colleague, who was in a serious bicycle accident last last summer. He recently learned that his injuries were healing nicely, and he should be able to ride again. I didn't have any trouble understanding his desire to get back on the horse, but my wife was kind of shocked. She said all by one of the riders in his group -- we're talking about serious and accomplished cyclists -- had been involved in accidents that required hospitalization.

Since I don't ride, I don't have any opinions about people who do. It looks like fun and it's certainly great exercise. But, because I don't have much interest in it, I'd lost track of just how expensive it can be -- upwards of $10,000 for the highest-end titanium bikes. Check out this story by Steve Friedman in today's New York Times:

“You go to Central Park and there are all these expensive custom-made bikes, and they’re not just for the bike geeks anymore,” said Noah Budnick, a deputy director at Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit group that lobbies for bicycle-friendly laws in New York City. “You have these corporate guys now. I like to say that bicycling is the new golf.”

Nationwide, demand for specially made bikes is higher than ever. “Custom bike sales are on the rise, and we’re nowhere near the saturation point yet,” said Megan Tompkins, the editor of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, a trade magazine.

Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de France victories provide one explanation why the road bike has seized back ground it had lost to mountain bikes in the ’80s and ’90s.

Another reason: aging baby boomers with worn-out knees have embraced cycling as a low-impact, aerobically demanding alternative to cartilage-grinding sports like basketball and tennis. The explosive growth of triathlons, whose participants need bicycles that will perform at long distances, has created tens of thousands more buyers since 2000. Finally -- and not to be underestimated, especially in Manhattan -- rich people like to buy cool things.

Like everything else Steve writes (we were acquaintances in J-school back in the late '70s, and crossed paths occasionally since), it's a fun read.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:53 AM | Comments (2)

October 28, 2006

Karma Is Not Just a River in Egypt

On Friday morning I got an email from my friend Nick Bromberg, a sportswriter in Columbia, Missouri:

I'm a firm believer in karma, and I definitely think that last night was divine retribution for Denkinger's call in '85. There's no other explanation.

He was referring to the World Series game Thursday, in which the Tigers seemed determined to hand the game over to the Cardinals, whether the Cards deserved to win or not. Here's how Salon's King Kaufman described it:

On a slippery field on a misty night in a Game 4 the weather forecasters spent two days saying wouldn't be played Thursday night, the Tigers slid and skidded and threw away a 3-0 lead to the St. Louis Cardinals and their hitting star of the night, David Eckstein, who's 5-foot-7, soaking wet.

The Cardinals won 5-4, with all but one of their runs affected by fielding miscues, most of them water-related. St. Louis leads the World Series 3-1, with Game 5 scheduled for Friday night, again in St. Louis, again with a pessimistic forecast.

Eckstein had four hits, three of them doubles, two of those courtesy of misplays by Tigers outfielders, one of those caused by a slip on the wet grass. A fourth error by a Tigers pitcher in as many games helped Eckstein come home with the tying run. Left fielder Craig Monroe misplaying Eckstein's line drive in the eighth inning brought home the eventual winner.

You know that the Cardinals went on to win game five last night, and thus the World Series. It's the Cardinals' 10th World Series championship, dating back to 1926. And with the possible exception of the '44 series, in which they beat the St. Louis Browns with all six games played in the same stadium, it's the strangest.

Not only was it the unlikeliest championship -- the Cards officially go down in World Series history as the worst regular-season team ever to win it all in October -- but it may end up being noted as the sloppiest. Here's Murray Chass of the New York Times:

With a Detroit pitcher making an error in an unprecedented fifth consecutive game, the St. Louis Cardinals won the game, 4-2, and the World Series. The Cardinals, an unlikely winner after staggering into the postseason, may want to take a new vote on Series shares and include the Tigers’ pitchers.

Justin Verlander, Todd Jones, Joel Zumaya, Fernando Rodney and Verlander again made costly errors in each game of the World Series, leading to seven unearned runs. That includes 6 of the last 12 runs the Cardinals scored in the final three games, all of which they won.

No pitching staff had ever before made more than three errors in a World Series. The Tigers beat that mark before Game 4 was over. Pitching staffs on six teams had made three errors, the most recent being the 1997 Florida Marlins, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

The same Detroit team that steamrolled the Yankees and A's with seven straight postseason wins somehow forgot how to field and hit when they went up against the Cardinals. The Cardinals, who blew through the Padres and then outlasted the Mets, figured to be nothing more than a speed bump on the Tigers' victory-parade route. They played well but not exceptionally well. They made the plays you expect major-league ballplayers to make, for the most part. (The obvious exception was Iron Chef Chris Duncan, who brought a skillet to right field instead of a glove. He dropped two fly balls, only one of which was ruled an error, before he was mercifully replaced by someone who's been trained to catch baseballs, rather than merely deflect them.)

But mostly, they showed up. And for that they get a World Series trophy. If you've been a Cardinals fan, and suffered through the agony of World Series losses in 1968, 1985, and 1987, knowing your team was at least as good as the other, it's hard not to conclude that the baseball gods set out to balance the ledger in 2006.

Take a play that happened late in the game last night. The hitter for the Tigers, Placido Polanco, grounded one in the hole between first and second base. Albert Pujols, the Cards' first baseman, flopped to his right ("dove" would make it sound more graceful than it was), gloved the ball, rolled onto his back, and threw to pitcher Jeff Weaver, who caught the ball between strides but quickly stepped on first base. The umpire called the runner out, which was the right call. But the replays showed it was much closer than it at first appeared, with a fraction of a second's difference between Jeff Weaver stomping on the base and the Tiger runner hitting it. The Fox cameras froze the frame, and it appeared that the runner's spikes were less than an inch from the base when Weaver's foot touched down.

You won't often see a fan celebrating an umpire's correct assessment, but I think every fan who saw the consequences of the blown call in 1985 should do exactly that. It wasn't even a bang-bang play; the umpire's eyes and ears couldn't possibly have sensed two discreet events, and I have to think it would've been hard to blame the umpire if he'd missed so close a play. But he didn't, and that's why the Cardinals are World Series champions right now.

If it's not divine intervention, if it's not the karmic rebalancing my friend Nick described, then all baseball fans have to concede that there is no order to baseball's universe. A team that won just 83 regular-season games, playing in baseball's weakest division and thus facing baseball's weakest schedule, just won the World Series. I'm happy about it, but I'll be the first to admit it makes no sense at all.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:46 AM | Comments (5)

October 27, 2006

Poor Guy

I almost feel sorry for the sportswriters covering this World Series. Getting stuck inside hotel rooms and press boxes while waiting out the rain in St. Louis can't be fun. The games themselves are nail-biters, but given the weather in St. Louis, you just never know when you'll get to cover one.

The problem with the games, though, is that everyone gets the same story, and people who watch the games (excrutiating as that is on Fox, which sucks the grandeur out of the game with its endless close-ups and smash cuts from camera to camera, like they're editing an MTV video in real time) already know what happened by the time they open the next day's newspaper.

So media organizations have to look for the angles that no one else is covering. And a writer for E