Snippets and snarks

* Newly-finished: a soundtrack for the Sudden Yurt Commune.  I'll be working on the insert over the next couple of days.  Any of you Yurters want a copy, please email me - nightflymail AT gmail DOT com - with a mailing address.

* Hey, one of the SYC-OST songs is playing on the iPod right now.  Sweet.

* It is currently 92°, with 85% humidity, about to storm.  This is an improvement over last week, when it was 103°, with 174% humidity, and always five minutes away from a huge rainstorm that never came.

* I've played tournaments outdoors, in the bright strong sun; on painted concrete surfaces that baked like parking lots, where you could see heat waves at the far end of the rink; I've played as many as four hour-long games in a night; I've reffed for nine straight hours each day of a weekend tournament... but I have never been as beat as at the end of my one game last week, indoors no less, during the absolute depths of the hideous oppressive weather.  The heat from under my gear felt like an open oven door.  I could feel my pulse in my neck and ears.  It was brutal.  If there had been an overtime I don't think I could have finished it.  I felt like a crayon melting in a closed car.

* I am holding an hour-long press-conference/ego-stroke/circus/charity fundraiser on ESPN tonight at 9 pm Eastern, to announce my decision about what to do with this blog.

* Speaking of which, the Miami Heat announced a free-agent deal with LeBron's former Cleveland teammate, Zydrunas Ilgauskas.  I thought he left Cleveland because they surrounded him with bad teammates?

* Today someone at work brought in donuts for everyone.  This happens about once a month or so, for no particular reason, on no set schedule, just because.  My coworkers are pretty darned cool.

* I have too good a life to be so pissy lately.

* A few months ago I was walking the Official Dog, and an orange tabby decided to trot over, tail high, to make friends.

Since then Catfriend pops around every week or so and he hangs out with the pupperkins.  She wags, he purrs.  Pupperkins must think he's the strangest-smelling dog ever, but they're buddies - unlike the day last week when a lady on a horse walked through the neighborhood.  (We have a sizable park near the house and folks will sometimes ride there.)  The Official Dog was freaked about that a little.  I kept her close to me, across the street, so she wouldn't spook the horse.

* If Ladybug wasn't allergic, I'd consider getting the pupperkins a catfriend of her very own at home.  I have always been a cat lover.  She'll have to make do with her eleven dozen toys, various snacks and treats, mild Internet fame, and the single attention of her two owners.

* There's a four-lane divided highway about a mile from our house; people enjoy making illegal lefts onto and occasionally off of said highway, despite no fewer than five signs forbidding the practice.  You'd think that you couldn't miss such instructions, nor all the helpful people honking incessantly at you, or the friendly pointing to the signs with one finger.  You'd be in error.  It's amazing that there aren't more wrecks at that intersection.

* Last night was baseball's All-Star Game, out in Anaheim.  Both leagues trotted out an assortment of pitchers who threw 95+ mph: Justin Verlander, Josh Johnson, Matt Thornton, Jose Valverde, Brian Wilson, Jonathon Broxton.  Not surprisingly, there was a dearth of scoring.  The AL's only run came off a walk, error, and sac fly.  Dodger pitcher Hong-Chih Kuo (who was dealing in the high-90's himself) helped this immensely by fielding a dibbler in front of the mound, throwing off his back foot, and airmailing it 20 feet above his first baseman's head.  Every New York Giants fan watching immediately said, "Hey - Eli Manning's in the game!"

* The NL won on a late bases-loaded double by Braves catcher Paul McCann.  They wasted a great early opportunity when Verlander struck out Ryan Braun on a pitch down the middle of the opposing batter's box.  This thing would have been wide of a soccer net.  Every New York Mets fan watching immediately said, "Hey, I thought Jeff Francoeur didn't make the All-Star Game this year!"

* Brian Wilson and Corey Hart were NL teammates.  Now THAT would be a weird musical collaboration.

* Paperwork.  Always with the paperwork.  I close my eyes and see these forms floating around, demanding to be properly catalogued and compiled.  My subconscious has turned into a flash drive.

* Mmmmmmmm...... coffee.......

*In three weeks I will have been married three years.  Wild.

* I love fonts.  Thus, I love Blambot.

* The Mother of Unfinishable Stories goes slowly in any font.  I've been writing others.  As they begin to bog down, I think that switching back to the MOUS may help get everything moving again.  I hope so, because I am enjoying the adventures of the characters in the series and would like not to have that stall permanently.

* Love you all.

I love it when someone else writes my posts

Bill Simmons, this time, on ESPN.com talking about the statistical revolution in sports, and specifically in basketball.

If I wrote that, there would be two major differences:

1. It would be about hockey, not basketball.
2. 7,335,204 fewer people would read it.

I don't begrudge the man his audience of course, but I feel a kinship with the premise, which is that certain sports (baseball, football) are much easier to break down statistically. I think the reason is that they are much less fluid than basketball and hockey. Baseball is easiest because it is the most static - there are innings, and further there are at-bats and individual pitches. Go to the Baseball Analysts and you can find posts describing the various run-creation formulae... and even insanity such as charting certain pitches placed in certain parts of the strike zone with various permutations of outs and baserunners, and how many runs tend to be scored off those pitches.

(Note - not all that insanity is bad, actually; and lest Bill Conlin and Murray Chass start pounding their 1915 manual typewriters in frustration over all this newfangledry, there are also posts breaking down pitchers' mechanics and old-school "I know good baseball when I see it, consarnit" scouting reports.)

Football is an interesting case. It breaks down similarly by play, but there is a wrinkle that baseball lacks: there are people in football whose sole job is to make it possible for other people do their jobs: primarily the offensive lineman and the humble blocking fullback, who are thus tough to quantify. The venerable Paul Zimmerman, SI's Dr. Z, keeps charts to help him rate the overall performance of such players, but it involves watching truly staggering amounts of game film every week, and thus it's very difficult to duplicate and make generally accessible. (Aaron Schatz and the Football Outsiders folks have taken Dr. Z's work to the next level.)

This wrinkle sometimes hurts cold objective analysis. Why are some defensive units extremely effective with few or even no Pro-Bowlers, while a unit with four can be inferior? Or to use Simmons' basketball example - Carmelo Anthony is clearly superior to Bruce Bowen, but the Spurs played better with Bowen than they ever would have with Anthony. They wouldn't have been able to use a guy like Carmelo in Bowen's role as top-flight defender and grit/hustle player. And basketball runs into far more of those difficulties than football - it is much more free-form. However, it is also high-scoring and has a shot clock; it breaks down into possessions of a sort, resulting either in points or a stop, and that gives the nascent statistician an edge.

What then of hockey, the most fluid of the four major sports?

Well, it's so unstructured that play can conceivably continue without a whistle for an entire 20-minute period, so long as nobody takes a penalty or knocks the puck out of play. Baseball is so structured that players can only play on offense one at a time, have rigidly-defined jobs on defense, and cannot return when substituted. Hockey is so loose that both offense and defense require complete team efforts, in which anyone may find themselves crashing a crease or working in the corner, and in which players make substitutions during the play.

The most structured position is that of goaltender. Not surprisingly, the goalie has the most complete set of statistics: percentage of shots saved, goals per game, wins, losses, and shutouts. This doesn't account for the quality of the shots but over the course of a full season such things tend to even out, or are partly reflected in other numbers. Then there's offense. Hockey features the lowest scoring of the four majors, so again, that's a relatively simple matter of who scored and who set up the goal. (Sometimes not even that. The NHL didn't officially record assists for a while.)

But as a low-scoring game, it's the defense that suffers. The plus/minus is a start, but the stat has a lot of "noise" to it. It sounds simple: plus/minus measures the difference between goals a team scores and those it permits while a particular player is on the ice. If my +/- is +5 it means that, while I've played, my team has scored five more goals than it has allowed at even strength. If yours is -10, well, that means the team is fifteen goals "worse" with you out there than it is with me. Right?

Well, not really. A poor player on a good team can float on the results of stronger teammates. A great player on a bad team will tend to have bad numbers. Some players play almost 30 minutes per game while others play only 7 or 8. A team's best defenseman and checking forwards are expected to shut down the opponents' most dangerous scorers while a third-pair defender benefits from playing against lower-skilled foes. You could be expected to handle future Hall-of-Famers for half of every game while I can only be trusted against scrubs for ten minutes here and there.

And it gets more complicated - if I wasn't around for those ten minutes, would you do worse at your job because you wouldn't be as rested during the game? If I sink to even or minus, should I be benched? What if that sinks your rating to -20? What if your rating is so low because you play with checking forwards who aren't expected to score? What if it's because we have a terrible goalie, so you are more likely to be on the ice when he flubs an easy shot?

With most statistics, outliers are a problem - they skew the overall results and aren't reliable. With a stat like +/-, it almost forces the reverse, where an outlier is not an anomaly but a true measure. That indicates something badly gone wrong with the original stat. Sure, the only player with a positive rating on a bad team full of high minuses is probably that team's best defender, but if takes that kind of a result, the stat is not all that useful. We could tell such a disparity without any stat at all; but if a guy is +8 and another is +10 over the course of 82 games, is that a statistical flub or a true indication that one has had a marginally better season on defense?

Attempts to improve hockey statistics are also underway, but much less known, and one big reason is that they're rather like Dr. Z's Pro-Bowl charts - they aren't that accessible and they do some very strange things with the little raw data available. Measuring strength of opponent, for example - sticking with you and I, the two defenseman - you face better opponents, measured in part by their goal and assist totals, in part by their minutes played (thus reflecting what their coaches think of their skill)... But are not my opponents' lower scoring totals due in part to their own lesser playing time? In part, isn't it also because I am knocking them down with a stick? In spreadsheet terms, it's something of a circular formula: the results of the calcuation are part of the calculation itself.

The only way to be really sure of our relative value would be to play me half the game against All-Stars and you ten minutes against shlubs, and see if I can duplicate my +5 while you remain at -10. Good luck finding the team that is willing to do that merely in the name of statistical analysis. Much the reverse - they would want to see some cold facts to back up the idea that I am suited for a tougher role. In fact, that's why the Montreal Canadiens developed +/- in the first place, back in the '50s (the league at large didn't adopt it until 1967, I believe). Absent that they must go with their eyes and their gut. Well and good for the team, but harder for the hockey fan who wants to argue that their favorite guy deserves a larger role, and who wants to appeal to something more than "I really like that guy." (I am your favorite guy, of course... What? My hit counter proves that I'm a bench jockey? Whyioughta...)

The worst thing would be to drag into hockey the ridiculous conflict between stat geeks and harrumphy "because I say so" sorts. Both call themselves the clear-eyed lovers of fact, and the other side is regarded rather as the emissaries of the Devil - either wanting to empty the sport of its soul, or of its brains. I'd rather not be either a vampire or a zombie, thanks all the same. I don't object to good stats, nor to personal observation. They're both simply means to describe and measure performance, and when they are at odds, something is up. What I object to are bad stats and prejudiced observations, which confuse and mislead. We get this a lot with Martin Brodeur, who recently became the winningest regular-season goalie in NHL history. Some people think he's too brilliant for words, others insist that he's only decent and not excellent, both based on their lyin' eyes. Others point only to the numbers to say he's the greatest, while others point to entirely different numbers to insist that he's adequate at best. (Really, I've heard it.) It's almost like he's the Derek Jeter of goalies...

...except, of course, that Jeter is clearly overrated (though still darn good), while Brodeur is in fact a superb keeper. So say my own lyin' eyes, at least until the stats catch up.

PS - speaking of lyin' eyes, your eyes are correct about the different look to the blog. I swapped templates and tinkered with some of the colors during a dull moment.

Good times at the ball game

If you're a sports fan, this spring is in the midst of rocking out.

In baseball, you've got the first month of the year: everyone is still in it, and some teams that have suffered long have the glimmer of hope - the Royals and Orioles have started well, and the Cubs (of all teams) have as good a shot as anyone of winning the National League.

Basketball is coming off an incredible NCAA final game, with Kansas rallying from eight down in the final minute, and one of the best regular-seasons in recent NBA history, especially in the Western Conference - nine teams won 48 games or more (sadly, that means Golden State is home while the mediocre Atlanta Hawks stink in up in the east against Boston in the opening round). There are four legit MVP candidates (Bill Simmons gives you a two-part breakdown).

Football? Well, even that's fun, with the schedule getting released and official crazy person Chad Johnson demanding a trade before draft day.

Then, of course, there's the Lord's Own Hockey. With the exception of Ottawa getting pantsed by Pittsburgh, the playoffs have been very good so far. We've had breakout goaltending from Carey Price in Montreal, huge comebacks in the Calgary-San Jose series, and if you're into idiocy, both Sean Avery and Mike Milbury have delivered.

(For the record, I'd have put Avery in the box at once for his antics in front of Marty Brodeur. I've actually had someone do that to me and he was hit up for unsportsmanlike conduct. No question. And Milbury hardly invented the "Washington Crapitals" insult - remember, he played when Washington was going 8-67-5 in their first season in the league. They had THREE head coaches. Yikes.)

SI's Mike Farber has a column about the Senators, BTW, that deserves some fisking. I'll probably get into it tomorrow.

The Women's Final Four in Tampa...

...has special fans.

Starting Friday, Tampa will become a national epicenter for gay women, thousands of whom are coming to town for the Final Four of the women's NCAA Tournament.

Most of the activities will center on Ybor City, where clubs are hosting all-girl bands and an event called Bounce, promoted as the largest women's party in the Tampa Bay area. The National Center for Lesbian Rights is holding a mega party at club Underground. Restaurants are offering free specials to attract gay patrons.

No one knows how many of the 21,655 fans expected to pack the St. Pete Times Forum on April 6 and 8 will be gay. Last year, national leaders in the lesbian community who attended the women's Final Four in Cleveland estimated at least half of the fans in attendance were lesbians.
Some consider that low.

Here's why I bring this up. If a religious or social conservative even hinted at a connection between lesbianism and women's sports, the good liberals at the St. Pete Times would be peeing themselves over such outrageous homophobia. But it gets better:

Karen Doering, senior counsel and Sports Project attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, counters that lesbians love the game for the same reason any fan does: It's exciting, with a greater emphasis on team play than men's basketball, particularly the star-driven NBA.

Right. And I buy Playboy for the articles.

This is too good

Killing a little time with the Sports Guy, and here's what I see as a banner ad above his column today:


This is inadvertently the funniest thing I've seen today. Not only does Simmons kill the Jerome James signing every time he brings up the Knicks, James himself is about the last reason to come out to see the Knicks play, unless you like watching the guys in three-piece suits on the end of the bench. T-Mobile couldn't even find a picture of him with his uniform and a basketball. They're expecting him to sell tickets and/or cel phone service? He could maybe sell mutual funds - he's making $5.8 million this season, and has played all of five minutes total. (Every remaining Knick fan just threw their mouse through their monitor.)

That this ad popped up over Simmons' column today? Let's just call it faaaaaaan-tastic.

Deputy Shaq

Imagine getting pulled over by this guy.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is excited that Shaq's coming to town.

Arpaio deputized Shaquille O'Neal, who became a Phoenix Sun on Wednesday, two years ago.

``Actually, I made him a colonel after he won the NBA championship (with the Miami Heat in 2006)," Arpaio said after learning of the trade.

``He's a great addition to the Valley. He's a good guy and likes law enforcement, and I hope he'll be good for the Phoenix Suns."

The sheriff added, ``I'm glad he's coming out to my turf. I'm hoping we'll recruit him for our posse. Maybe we'll go after illegal immigrants and other crime."
Arpaio has one concern.

``The only problem I have is he keeps saying he wants to run for sheriff in Florida or California. I hope he doesn't get any ideas here in Phoenix. However, I'd beat him anyway."

Arpaio said he'll have a uniform made for Shaq if he'll join the posse. It will be a big one. O'Neal stands 7-feet-1, weighs 325 pounds and wears a size 23 shoe.

Shaq is no stranger to police work; he has been a Miami Dade volunteer office for years.

It's worth the trip

That's the saying, and I would have to agree. Enjoy the fascinating in-depth article about the Northeast's fave java fix.

In my mind, I can see Ms. Sister's bi-weekly pilgrimage from Banga-cola to Jacksonville.

Wing-tip (believe it or not) to the Sports Guy, via his semi-regular links list. On the miracle chance he sees this, I can add to the admiration - thanks to bad Thai food, I was sick as hell Thursday and stumbled across Cleveland-Detroit, Game 5, with about 5 minutes left in the fourth and watched it through to the end of the game. I was officially freaking out by the time he buried the long two-pointer from the right wing late in OT1 - right with the one fan who just put his hands behind his head and stared. LeBron had just hucked a collective cup of warm beer right in the entire arena's lap, and when the Pistons somehow forced OT2, he just got better. If his arm had stretched out from midcourt to dunk like Space Jam I don't think I would have been surprised.

Normally, I'm a hockey bug, but jumpin' Gminski that was awesome. Thank you LeBron James.