The Cascade: Scoular: Why America’s pastime trumps Canada’s bloodsport

Mission and hope,  Mission and hope…

To compare baseball to hockey is to risk that same mentality – that one is tougher, that the athletes of one sport aren’t even athletes. It’s a mixture of defensiveness from fans of a less popular sport and false bravado. But this relies on another television twisting – the knowledge of the sport through highlight reels. The emphasis of home runs and diving catches, although exciting, falls into that same trap of predictability and replay. Where baseball lives is in between, the so-called “boring” parts where “nothing’s happening.”

Baseball broadcasts aren’t groundbreaking, but they don’t have the problem of failing to show – everything is before and visible, the pitcher-catcher-batter relation clearly defined and observable. When runners reach base, the imperfect but still effective solution of splitting the screen, showing multiple perspectives, with base-running coaches in the background, cuts to managerial direction and the different plate positions all held on the screen until the last possible second, when the pitch is released, the early jump of a stealing runner or stop at the realization of a strikeout just registering at the corner of the frame.

A friend that helped re-introduce me to baseball offered one observation that also helped when it comes to season and game length: with a game every day, there is less dwelling on the past, an allowance for losses because every team will with such a packed schedule.

What it also means is just more to watch – there are those that try to see everything, but the overabundance means that there’s the routine of there always being a game on, to turn on for a few innings as inoffensive backdrop for an evening of trying-to-but-not doing homework.

Baseball extends through days, timeslots and pre-conceptions. Surely the greatest experience of watching hockey is playoff overtime when the game doesn’t end until a goal, with no commercials to interrupt. With baseball, there is the possibility for this with every game.

Every half-inning is defined this way; it could be over in regular 1-2-3 fashion, or take an hour, with nothing to break in and advertise. Sure, there’s always the signage in sight, and required broadcaster mention, but it’s a pleasant feature, and better yet an outcome of the eternal possibility in baseball – a sport unrestricted by time, where victory is always an open chance.

Tracy: Which sport is the most immune to Moneyball?

It ain’t baseball.  It’s probably soccer.

Each year, as ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz has noted, more and more people are coming to Sloan. That’s literally true, but could be said figuratively of sports analytics in general. The days are long gone when seemingly unremarkable players could be signed on the cheap by the few teams smart enough to understand the value of, say, a high on-base percentage. “You used to know how other teams operated,” complained stats-friendly Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban at the opening panel. “Now you have to reverse-engineer what they did to see how they do it.”

Or, as Nate Silver put it on the same panel, “There’s not the low-hanging fruit anymore of having some teams that are totally stupid.”

Over the course of the two-day conference, I asked many people which sport—out of the four major U.S. team sports (baseball, basketball, football, hockey) and soccer—is least amenable to an advanced analytical interpretation, where little is to be gained by looking at the game from a new, maverick angle. In short: Which sport can’t be Moneyball-ed?

Globe and Mail: Canadian baseball’s lefty leanings linked to national game

When Canada begins play in the World Baseball Classic on Friday, it will field a roster featuring 13 players who throw right-handed and bat left-handed.

That number compares with two Americans, one Mexican and three Italians who throw right and bat left – and among the last, pitcher John Mariotti grew up in Woodbridge, Ont.
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What gives?

The answer, experts believe, is that most quintessentially Canadian pastime – hockey.

“Most of the conversation revolves around the dominant hand and its position on the bat and/or hockey stick,” says Gord Ash, former general manager of the Blue Jays and now assistant GM with the Milwaukee Brewers.

OT: NHL is finally back thread

Now that the season has finally started it’s time to break from the NFL thread.