Welcome to the Terrordome

Dave Zirin, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007) Pp. 258.

In short, if you are not an extreme leftist socialist looking to read a polemic work that reinforces your already tightly held beliefs – rather than one that provides new perspective – then don’t bother with this book.

What is billed as a book about sports and society written by a man “angry at all the right things” is in fact a 258 page missive that explains how George W. Bush and the Iraq War have and are ruining both sports and the world.[1] Throughout the book, in fact, Zirin makes only two new and insightful points relevant to sports and society. The first is that Barry Bonds has become a pariah for steroids when his possible PED use is not even remotely the worst thing that has happened to baseball. The second is the interesting story of the dull thud that greeted Sheryl Swoopes when she revealed that she was a lesbian.

The insanity of publicly funded stadiums and the social double standard of gays and lesbians are two significant problems in American culture, but for whatever reason are dulled as Zirin lumps them in with unoriginal discussion of the duality of the NBA’s hip-hop culture; a fence-sitting discussion of how the Olympics are both the root of all racist and sexist evil as well as a liberal wet dream; a view of international soccer and baseball that reveals a phenomenal lack of perspective; and a rather specious reconstruction of Pittsburgh Pirates great Roberto Clemente.

Because the book was published in 2007 it is hard to expect Zirin’s discussions to be exceedingly topical, but his arguments were bland and tired even then. Much as neoconservatives wield a specific tone and approach when hammering home their nearsighted points (coughGlenBeckcough) Zirin bludgeons his readers with the pompous, arrogant pseudo-intelligence that seems to drip from all über-left tracts. The promotional quotes that litter the book are provided by what I’m sure is a who’s who of counterculture minds and independent coffee drinkers, but I have heard of barely three of them. One reviewer goes so far as to refer to “Zirin’s…rapier wit”. If taking uncreative potshots at the establishment is rapier wit then I’m fucking Mark Twain. Also typical of hyperleft epistles is the flurry of platitudes from a “who’s that?” cast of progressive ‘stars’ and 18^th century Europeans.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t disagree with many of Zirin’s points, nor do I agree with all of them. The problem is that in the world of New Media we might have to start shooting the messengers since there’re more of them than ever but the message never changes, no matter what side you’re on. I hate to rain on everyone’s parade, but anger and a media outlet don’t make your right or intelligent, they just make you angry and visible.

---

[1] Notably absent, of course, is any mention of the campaign in Afghanistan.

What the Dog Saw

Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw, and Other Adventures New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. Pp. xv, 410.

Gladwell’s fourth book, What the Dog Saw, is an interesting collection of stories that highlight a number of ideas Gladwell has touched upon or expanded in his previous books. Broken down into themes, Gladwell explores various subtleties and seemingly contradictory truths hidden in advertising, finance, intelligence, the way the world evaluates humans, and stereotypes.

The chapters that focus on the way perception and stereotype are used, abused, and evaluated may be the strongest in the book. Chief among them is “Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy”. In looking at the services FBI profilers provide for local law enforcement, Gladwell argues that the historical memory of the profilers contributions is vastly different than their actual value. In analyzing criminal profilers the way he does Gladwell succeeds in not only promoting an alternative line of thought about the subject, but in evaluating the usefulness of its traditional interpretation.

Alternatively, a piece like “Blowing Up: How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy” shows how non-traditional thinking about a system, in this case the financial market, can reinforce the existence of the system entirely.

It seems obvious from Gladwell’s earlier books that he finds the former result more intriguing and more important. (This is especially obvious in Outliers, where he expands on ideas presented here in their original article form. The best example would be “The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated?”) And while Gladwell’s work regularly challenges established norms his reliance on sociological and psychological research will vex those who find the accepted truth of the conclusions problematic.

Regardless of each reader’s acceptance of Gladwell’s arguments it’s impossible to finish the book without reconsidering what you ‘know’ about the topics he presents. And in the long run that is Gladwell’s ultimate goal, which he achieves brilliantly. Unlike The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, What the Dog Saw presents Gladwell’s ideas in their original, shorter formats as New Yorker pieces. The result is an absence of the loose connections and not quite believable hypothetical leaps that are riddled throughout his earlier works. Overall, What the Dog Saw is a rousing, readable success. It’s up to your brain to take it further.

The Extra 2 Percent

Jonah Keri, The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First. New York: Ballantine Books/ESPN Books, 2011. Pp. vii-ix, 253 pp.

Keri’s book chronicles the way the former cellar-dwelling Tampa Bay Devil Rays changed not only their name, but their entire organizational structure on a quest of rebuilding that took them from last to first in the span of a year.

Baseball’s history in the greater Tampa/St. Pete area is fraught with bad luck and bad timing. The general story arc of The Extra 2% is the fact that baseball nearly came to Tampa/St. Pete when in 1988 the White Sox made the first relocation power play that resulted in public financing of a stadium. The tragic irony of the Rays’ situation is that now, encumbered with the need for a new stadium, the history of bad debt and empty promises that has become commonplace when discussing public funding of stadiums ­– along with a crippling fifteen more years on their lease at Tropicana Field – are preventing the Rays from the commodity they can’t survive without: growing revenue streams.

As much as The Extra 2% is a story of hope it is also one of a failure so inherent that it seems predetermined. For all the success found in the new approach applied by Stuart Sternberg, Andrew Freidman, and even Joe Maddon, there are the stories of passing on Albert Pujols in the draft and paying not-so-smart monies in a smart money era to the likes of Pat Burrell and Troy Percival.

The leap from worst to first is a story that is more monumental in baseball than almost any other sport. The problem is no longer (and probably never was) a flash of success. The real problem facing the Rays, a situation Keri blames Major League Baseball for, is the limitation on Tampa’s ability to maintain success. Moreover, Keri’s argument that arbitrage (the simultaneous buying and selling of assets, in this case players) was the main road for Tampa’s success is semantic at best. I am not an educated Wall Street mind, but if you show me a team that doesn’t attempt to gain some type of value with each trade you’re probably showing me the Pittsburgh Pirates. Keri is so intent on establishing arbitrage as the focal point of Tampa’s success that he at times relegates the importance of the conceptual revolutions Tampa’s front office is responsible for. Again ironically, these concepts were picked up quickly by the powerhouse teams like the Yankees and Red Sox, nullifying much of the strategic advantage that the Rays appeared to have.

The book is without even a small index, which would be helpful, but whether that is on the author or ESPN Books is unclear. Keri’s tone is at times vitriolic and polemic, bearing an all too common resemblance to biographers that become apologists for their subject, but his prose is crisp and enjoyably readable. As a whole, the book is a cogent reminder to baseball and its fans that tradition and progress are not mutually exclusive. Nor should they be.

Blink

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell (New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2005) 254 pp.

In a world obsessed with the idea of the ‘sophomore slump’, Malcolm Gladwell’s sophomore effort does exactly what he continually pushes his readers to do: defy convention and tradition by challenging accepted ‘fact’. Blink is all about the decisions we make that seem to be instinctual, especially when they go against our acquired knowledge.

Gladwell argues that there are different aspects to the phenomenon – known as thin slicing – that are important to understand because it will aid us in our ability to constantly improve our thin sliced decisions. The most essential is understanding that your Blink abilities are innate only in proportion to your knowledge. An astrophysicist will never develop the thin slicing abilities in regards to automobiles that a mechanic has, and vice versa. The difficulty arises when – like tennis coach Vic Braden, who can almost flawlessly predict a tennis player’s double fault mid-serve – our brains make the connection for us, but we are unsure of how the connection was made.

This gap between introspective evaluation and the knowledge our brain has acquired and retained is, as Gladwell shows, able to be primed without conscious acceptance or allowance. Whether it is a random word association test or Bronx policemen shooting down a suspect who pulled out his wallet (not the gun they ‘saw’) this action is in fact a type of profiling. As sentient beings with moral compasses we are often taught only the pejorative definition of profiling. Gladwell asks us to consider the benefits of profiling as well.[1]

Finally, cognizant of our abilities, limitations, and biases as thin slicers Gladwell illustrates the value of spontaneity in assessing various ‘standard operating procedures’ as used by various institutions. His most colorful and insightful example is the story of how Marine Paul Van Riper crushed the US government’s wartime strategies in one of its most famous war games, Millenium Challenge ’02. Van Riper’s overwhelming strategy was simple, overall guidance would be provided by top commanders, but specific guidance was never passed down, just intent. The controlled spontaneity that Van Riper used to win the quarter billion dollar game was the product of years of honing his thin slicing abilities, understanding his limitations, and controlling his biases as best as possible.

Unlike The Tipping Point before it and Outliers after it, Blink is a solid front-to-back piece that is eminently useful in literally any walk of life. Gladwell’s prose is readable, and the intertwined stories are illuminating and fun.

---

[1] Ironically, the article “Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy”, included in Gladwell’s collection What The Dog Saw succeeds in showing how criminal profiling is not nearly as exact or successful as one might think, often garnering a false positive for the act of conscious profiling.

Scorecasting

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim (New York: Crown Archetype, 2011)

When I settled in to read Scorecasting I assumed – rightly so – that it would read quite a bit like another book about the truths of statistics in sports, Mathletics. Scorecasting, however, is much more about the broader aspects of the game and team performance and influence, and as such is a nice complement to the more player statistic-oriented Mathletics.

Scorecasting is a very easy read if you are willing to either glaze your eyes when pounded with statistics and just trust the authors or take the time and think about the numbers. I did a bit of both, honestly. Understand that this partly because the malleability of statistics is notorious; the argument is what you should be concerned with.

At various times throughout the book the authors address the issue of statistic manipulation (Damned Statistics) and the way it affects perceptions of performance, and thus real dollars (Rounding First). Yet they also commit this same inclusion bias when arguing about the true competitive nature of sports. Using the Pirates and Steelers as test cases, Moskowitz and Wertheim use market shares to explain why baseball is in fact the least competitive sport. In a league where there is no salary cap and the playoffs are decided by 5 or 7 games series, it is no surprise that the Yankees, with the potential to field the best team and in a sport whose playoffs inevitably favor the better team, have a gigantic 25 percent market share. But this vilification of the Yankees ignores the fact that the teams with the second and third largest market shares of championships (the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants) do not play in the second or third largest markets (LA and Chicago).[1]

On an individual statistics level, Scorecasting contributes little, rehashing tired arguments about blocked shots (The Value of the Blocked Shot) and players being ‘on fire’ (The Myth of the Hot Hand). The former’s inclusion is troubling because anyone who has ever watched a single quarter of basketball and possesses a functioning brain understands there is more value in blocking a shot to a teammate than swatting it off Jack Nicholson’s face out of bounds. The latter is more troubling for other reasons. Yes, it is true that ‘on fire’ is an unpredictable statistical anomaly. And yes, it is true that by the logic of “every basketball player I have ever talked to believes in the concept of ‘on fire’” we also have to believe the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Specific to this book, however, the argument of the Hot Hand is exceedingly problematic in its lack of sports psychology. Whereas in an earlier chapter (Tiger Woods is Human) Moskowitz and Wertheim explain how loss aversion impacts golfers such that “when a golfer on the PGA Tour tries to make a birdie, he is less successful than when he lines up the exact same putt for par.” (67). And while loss aversion is not the proper psychological trait to call upon when discussing a player ‘on fire’, the lack of psychological discussion of any nature is arrogantly selective.

For the handful of problems that are evident in Scorecasting the interesting and quality arguments outweigh them. One of the primary targets of their statistical ire are the long held general platitudes of winning. My favorite attack is the one aimed at the tiresome and untrue mantra of “Defense wins championships”. Aside from the fact that this is idiotically counterintuitive since the point of sports is scoring, the authors in their chapter Offense Wins Championships Too show that there is no statistical correlation between defensive performance and championship pedigree.

In fact, the authors argue that the saying was simply a way for Michael Jordan to motivate his teammates to perform well in the unglamorous job of playing tough defense. There’s No I In Team explains that for all the preaching of teamwork in the NBA, a team’s chances of heading home with the Larry O’Brien trophy in June are heavily influenced by the number of stars and superstars they have.[2] The final anti-sentiment that Scorecasting proposes is that ‘icing’ and athlete – be they kicker, free throw shooter, etc. – has absolutely no bearing on the result. Performance in either situation is identical. Additionally, the book attacks the theory that punting is the best 4^th down option. According to Moskowitz and Wetheim’s statistics, football teams are better of going for it. Every time.

Perhaps the most interesting arguments are those that analyze officiating and home field advantage. The simple summation of the authors’ findings is that officials do commit errors, but the errors are most often in favor of the home team (to placate their anxiety in front of the home crown) and/or in order to ensure that the game’s result is determined by the athletes, not the officials.

The authors argue that the book is an attempt to analyze sports with ‘hindsight bias’ removed. In layman’s terms, they want us to not ‘play the result’. This desire is both very fair and important to furthering our understanding of sports. However, in attempting to remove any trace of playing the result, Moskowitz and Wertheim also forget – often – about the people actually playing the game. The statistics they use are large samples, controlled and normalized to remove situational biases. Yet all the while they forget about the fact that every sport interaction is a biased situation. But to control for all of the important variables (who is guarding your best shooter, who is pitching, whether there’s a nickel back on the field) might be akin to insanity. Scorecasting is valuable in that it looks at large sample sizes and speaks to some of the broader ideas that are unsupportable when illuminated with statistics.

The best chapter in the book by far is entitled Are the Chicago Cubs Cursed? in which the outstanding futility of the Cubs is analyzed from a statistical perspective. One of the conclusions reached is that unlike other teams where performance and ticket prices have a significant effect on attendance, Cubs fans use a different indicator: beer prices. God Bless America.

---

[1] In fairness, 4 of the Giants’ 5 championships came when they still played in New York. However at that time there were still three New York franchises, dividing the market share of revenue more evenly. The Yankees should in fact be an unpredictable aberration on account of their success not a justification of imparity. The Yankees and the Lakers are the only two teams to constantly surmount a forced market share. The Mets, Dodgers, Angels, White Sox, Cubs, Giants, Jets, Los Angeles Rams and Raiders, Clippers, Knicks, Nets, Islanders Rangers and Devils all seem to suffer from sharing revenue in America’s three biggest markets.

As you can see, a deeper and less general market share argument would be not just warranted but far more interesting.

[2] This chapter includes one of my favorite quotes ever, from a conversation between Chicago assistant coach Tex Winter and Michael Jordan.
Tex: “Michael, there’s no I in team.”
MJ: “There’s an I in ‘win’. So which way do you want it?”

Inverting The Pyramid

Inverting The Pyramid Jonathan Wilson (London: Orion Books, 2008). 374 pages (w/bibliography and index).

I came into the world of soccer through a conflux of my gambling habit and living with a friend who is a rabid soccer fan during the summer of the 2010 World Cup. I had thrown the common epithets at the sport, decried it whenever I got the chance, and never thought twice about the fact that I defended baseball as if it were my firstborn child. Then the name ‘Didier Drogba’ in all its awesomeness happened. (Nevermind the Ivory Coast’s poor showing at the World Cup.) Then Wesley Sneijder and 20-yard goals happened. Suddenly I was scrambling out of bed to catch matches that started at 6 AM local time, fascinated by these teams and this game that could be quite fun and quite beautiful when played well. Regardless of the fact that we couldn’t win a bet to save our lives I was hooked. I had to have more. When the World Cup was over I spent as much time as I could watching Didier at Chelsea or Wesley with Inter. I began to get a feel for what I was seeing, but like I said, I’m a baseball guy. I needed numbers, quantifiable things; statistics or diagrams or charts that would help me explain what my eyes were enjoying. So I turned to books.

I picked up Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid on the recommendation of my aunt, a genuine soccer fan. I devoured it, delighting especially in the later portions of the book’s chronological explication of soccer tactics mostly because there were names that I recognized (Wayne Rooney, Zenidine Zadane, Drogba, etc.). For the neophyte soccer fan like myself, the book is a bit beyond comprehension in some of the details of tactics. This is especially true when Wilson discusses how repositioning players changed the way an offense or a defense acts or reacts. Because soccer is never shown full-field, it’s difficult to grasp the importance of off-ball positioning that emerges a third of the way through the book. Additionally, if you are as ignorant of international soccer history as I (and if you’re American, let’s face it you probably are) then many of Wilson’s offhand comments about the career paths of many of the players will fly on by without registering.

For all of its English bias, shoddy editing, and intermediate soccer knowledge requirements the book is a success. It is a success because some of the points Wilson makes transcend soccer alone. Granted, soccer is arguably the world’s most global sport, but, for example, is not exceptional in the way coaching trees develop along with the philosophies they employ. What does make soccer unique is that its development of styles was much more a product of the culture and political realities of a particular geographic region than a reaction to the types of players it acquired. These distinctions were obvious in the styles of play. The soccer developed by the coffeehouse intellectuals of Vienna was drastically different than that made up of players from Brazilian favelas. And they were all different than the pragmatic English. As Wilson writes, “every nation came fairly quickly to recognize its strengths, and…no nations seems quite to trust them” (6).

The great paradox of athletics’ place within society is probably best represented in the history of soccer. Throughout Wilson’s history, there is a constant tension between aesthetics and athletics. Is it better to win ugly or to lose (or draw) in beautiful fashion? In a more American parlance, would you rather watch the championship Detroit Pistons or San Antonio Spurs of the early/mid 2000s or Steve Nash’s title-less Phoenix Suns teams? Wilson also addresses themes ubiquitous in the discussions of today’s sports media: how much does coaching matter? Do systems and styles of play have an expiration date? Is sport reactionary or revolutionary?

Inverting the Pyramid is a book I will read more than once. Most of that stems from failure to comprehend entire sections of the tactical discussion, a fault that is entirely mine. That it succeeds in spite of my ignorance is a testament to Wilson’s ability as a writer and the quality of the argument he is making. This is an excellent sports book, even for the casual fan.

The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown, and Company, 2000). 294 pages + index.

The world could use more thinkers like Malcolm Gladwell. Even in the case of The Tipping Point, where the theories and ideas strongly outweigh the quality of the argument, what Gladwell does in questioning “why?” and then looking for rather nontraditional answers is an underutilized exercise.

The premise of Gladwell’s first book is that there comes a point where some simple, seemingly insignificant influence or alteration pushes a product or idea over the edge. More importantly, there are three kinds of people required for this to happen: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

The most essential leap in understanding that one must make in order to accept the tipping point is that human behavior is actually epidemic in many ways (Gladwell uses syphilis as an example). Because of this condition, impact is often able to override logic in such a way that results in the trends of the modern world. Moreover, tipping points seem to be antithetical to typical human behavior, which is infinitely more gradualist, in the way they explode and evoke drastic, nearly instantaneous changes. This is where the work of the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen come in. Their presence allows for magnification of the influence of the few elements influencing the tip, the sustainability and resonance of the epidemic, and the development of the proper context in which to ensure generational success.

Gladwell’s theoretical construct is sound, but his approach to examples proving his theory turns out to be more erratic than one might expect. While the reasons that Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues stuck around are just as convincing as the reasons that New York City crime dropped drastically in the wake of Bernie Goetz, I remain wholly unconvinced that Peter Jennings’s personal preference for Ronald Reagan, manifested in a slight smile, influenced the vote of ABC’s viewers. This last is an example of the general problem with much of Gladwell’s approach. Because his evidence base is largely sociological scholarship (and he trained as a journalist) he wields sociological arguments as near-fact, never pausing to consider the problems they may present.

Sociology from the outset is difficult for a logical mind to accept, as human behavior is so reliant on an infinite and always changing number of variables. Gladwell even contradicts himself, writing, “The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment” (163). If this is true – and it is a point I find compelling – then there should be no place in human behavior where our world can be “tipped” by external influences; at least not in some of the ways that Gladwell is describing them. In fact, Gladwell likes to employ a tactic I have just now coined Improper Variable Weight. In the real world, where the human condition is so fluid, to ignore the need for constant context (a requirement Gladwell himself describes!) and fail to understand the spectrum of the systems of influence is self-defeating and disappointing.

Overall the book is fascinating, and Gladwell most definitely has opened my mind to ways of analyzing trends not only in human behavior but everywhere they are observable. I can also only assume that each person’s reaction to the book will be influenced in advance by your feelings about science, sociology, logic, and knowledge. And if there’s something for everyone, then the book is, by definition, a success.

Battle: Los Angeles (2011)

You’ve all seen this movie before. No, literally, even if you haven’t seen Battle: Los Angeles specifically, you have seen this movie before. Sometimes called Independence Day, sometimes War of the Worlds, either way, you get the point.

Battle: Los Angeles is little more than your average ‘aliens invade and we totally underestimate them’ action flick, although it makes itself unique by applying the Black Hawk Down ambush approach very early in the movie. The film opens with the retirement from the Marine Corps of Sgt. Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart) who, it is insinuated, had a difficult and infamous occurrence during his last tour of duty. Naturally, the imminent collision of a number of ‘asteroids’ turns out to be much more than that, and Nantz is forced back into active duty against the invading alien foe.

The rest of the movie is an action chronicle that is the embodiment of average. Stuff blows up, people shoot and are shot at, good guys die, bad guys die, the obligatory ‘combat situation eerily similar to the infamous one that haunts the protagonist’ pops up for Nantz, and there’s even enough time to drop hints at an emotional bond between Nantz and Michelle (Bridget Moynahan), a random civilian that the Marines are charged with protecting.

Considering that Christopher Bertolini wrote the movie, and that he also wrote The General’s Daughter, I find it fair to criticize the dull plot. The action scenes are decent, and there’s nothing wrong with hitting up Battle: Los Angeles on Netflix or Red Box, especially if you have a good sized TV and serviceable home theater equipment. If you want to be entertained for two hours, this movie delivers. Just don’t expect much more than that.

Rating: 4/10