John Petrie’s LifeBlag

I’m disappointed in the World Series result last night, with the Yankees winning their 27th World Series, but not as disappointed as I would have been if my team had been the one to lose to them. Not nearly as much as in 1996.

On SportsCenter this morning, their daily internet poll was “How do you feel about the Yankees, Love ‘em, Hate ‘em, or Indifferent?” and the result was funny. See for yourself (this is several hours later, after I submitted my “Hate” answer and screen-grabbed this image for blagging purposes…so the time and sample size are both large):

When I heard that Pedro Martinez would start game 2 of the World Series for the Phillies at Yankee Stadium, I was excited to watch it, preferably with my other baseball-following friends. You can read a nice summary of Pedro’s relationship with the Yankees here and see the famous September 2004 press conference sound bite where he called the Yankees his daddies here:

After that press conference, the Red Sox ended up facing the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series. That series is one of the most famous postseason baseball series because the Red Sox came back from a deficit of 3 games to none to win the series, 4-3. That’s the only time in MLB history that a team has won a series after being down 3-0. I never thought I’d see it happen. (It happened twice in the NHL and still hasn’t happened in the NBA). It was also famous for the two appearances Pedro made in Yankee Stadium, in which the Yankees’ organ player and 50,000 fans combined to rouse Pedro with their famous “Who’s Your Daddy?” chant. It started in game 2 when Pedro started and lost, and it continued in game 7, also at Yankee Stadium, when Pedro came in for two innings of relief with his Red Sox up 8-1. He didn’t pitch very well in that outing, either, giving up two runs before settling down and keeping his team up by a comfortable margin.

I tried as hard as I could to find a video of one of those two outings so you could hear the chant resonating through Yankee Stadium, but thanks to the idiots at Fox, it is surely unavailable to the human race forever. But if you’re not familiar with it, imagine what a chant of “Let’s go, Yankees!” would sound like, with the organ going, “Dun dun da-da-dun,” in between the chants, going up an octave each time, but the fans were shouting, “Who’s your daddy!” instead. It sounds just like the “OVER-RATED” chant.

I did manage to find a fan’s video of the “Who’s your daddy!” chant at Yankee Stadium this past Thursday when Pedro pitched for the Phillies in game 2 of the 2009 World Series. I’m sure this video doesn’t do it justice. It must have been louder than that, coming from every corner of the stadium. I couldn’t hear an organ, either, which gave it a nice, old-fashioned baseball touch in 2004.

I didn’t hear the chant on TV myself because I went downtown to watch the game at Bar Louie with five of my friends. It was a lot of fun watching it with them and all of us cheering for the Phillies. Pedro pitched well in Yankee Stadium for the first time since at least 2004, but he still lost because A.J. Burnett pitched better.

I wore my new red Detroit Red Wings hat because I wanted to wear a reddish hat that was close to the dark red of the Phillies to show my support for them that night. That sounds kind of lame because they aren’t even close to the same team, and Philadelphia fans, in fact, hate the Red Wings, but it’s the gesture that counts. (My red Georgia hat feels too tall and awkward on me, so I don’t wear it anymore, and it’s a brighter red than the flimsy, pre-faded, worn-out-looking Red Wings hat that I bought anyway.) However, my Red Wings hat came in handy in a very unexpected way. Near the end of our night there, after we had finished our meals and most people had finished their drinks, the waitress came over and said the bartender wanted to give us a free round of shots because I was wearing a Red Wings hat! Ha! We obviously laughed in disbelief about that. But not in front of the waitress. I’m not even a good Red Wings fan. I’ve never been to a game, I only watch them occasionally, and I only know their famous players. I jumped on their bandwagon and bought a hat so I could wear it to softball next year and because I couldn’t find a new copy of my flimsy, worn-out-looking Braves hat (which is smelly and dirty from wearing during softball). The shots were the bartender’s own creation, the first time he’d ever made it. I forgot what he called it, but I think it had triple sec and some kind of blueberry syrup in the bottom. We all agreed it was good.

An 8th-grader named Aaron Shutway made a cool basketball shot from the other end of the court. Read about it here and then see the video, which made SportsCenter:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

I can’t stand the NBA and especially not its playoffs. It drags on forever and I don’t understand why anybody gives a crap. I know there’s a lot more to it than this, but do you know what I see when I watch a basketball game? Dribble down the court, pass it around, shoot it, dribble it back down to the other end of the court, pass it around, shoot it, dribble it back down to the other end, pass it around, shoot it… It is the lamest sport there is. I would rather watch a scoreless soccer game than an NBA game. At least someone would be passionate about the soccer game. I don’t mind college basketball so much, not because the game is any different but because the atmosphere is different and school pride is on the line. The NCAA tournament is really the only time I pay attention to any basketball because there’s so much drama, so much passion, so much school spirit.

And look at the name of the NBA’s championship: the NBA Finals. Every single other sport has an actual name for its championship. The World Series. The Stanley Cup. The Super Bowl. But basketball is so retarded that the best name they could come up with was Finals.

Have you ever heard any statistics about the number of fouls called on home teams vs. away teams in a basketball game? In college and professional basketball, home teams average a lot more free throws per game than visiting teams. I have heard more conspiracy theories about NBA basketball than every other sport combined in my entire life, at any and all levels. This isn’t because there is necessarily a conspiracy to favor certain teams or certain superstars; it’s because the sport sucks and its “fans” can’t hold on to anything else interesting about it, so they are left to invent and ponder idiotic conspiracy theories that might be tainting a sport no one in their right mind cares about.

Basketball is far too high-scoring. No sport that could end in a 120-110 score could possibly be worth watching. Like monetary inflation, the more points there are, the less the points matter. I don’t particularly prefer watching extremely low-scoring games like soccer, but, again, anything is better than basketball. A sport that has a stronger defensive component is worth more to me. A basketball fan might say, “Of course defense is incredibly important in basketball; as in any sport, offense sells tickets but defense wins championships.” Oh, yeah? Then why are there regularly over 200 points scored in NBA games? Your position is disproved by simply looking at the scores. The point is that too much scoring is an objectively bad thing, and basketball has too much scoring. A game with a low but tolerable score like baseball or hockey is much more interesting.

I think these and other problems with basketball aren’t NBA-specific—they don’t (necessarily) originate in the commissioner’s office—but stem from the fact that basketball is an inherently inferior sport.

When you just think about the nature of basketball compared to most other sports, it’s obvious. Basketball sucks. Admit it. The NBA is the worst North American sport there is, nobody should care about the outcome of its championship, and in fact it’s quite offensive to me that I even care enough about its suckiness to write an entire post about it.

Last Sunday I ran in the largest road race in Michigan, the Dexter-Ann Arbor Run. All together, its three races (5k, 10k, half-marathon) have more participants than any other race in Michigan each year. I did okay, but I was about 4 minutes off my target time I set this winter/spring and a minute and a half slower than my 2008 time. So, I took 51 weeks to deprove by only a minute and a half! Great… Considering that I’m a year closer to being over the hill, that should count as like a one-minute improvement, right? No, I don’t feel too bad about it, but it is frustrating. I ran it in 52:44, compared to 51:07 last year. I seem to have reached a plateau of around 52 minutes.

I don’t know why I can’t run 10 kilometers any faster than that. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t get in that good of shape before reaching my mid-20′s, and so my fitness peak of the last year or so is the best I can ever do, whereas if I had gotten down to 48 minutes at age 22 it would have been easier (hell, possible) to maintain that fitness level, rather than try to achieve it here in my late 20′s. People always say, “It’s easier to stay in shape as you get older than it is to get in shape,” but that struck me as being more psychological and free-time-dependent than biological. Maybe it is biological, though.

My friend who read Born To Run by Christopher McDougall after I forwarded her an excerpt from the book (which I blagged about here) said part of the book is about how almost everyone has the capacity to be a great distance runner, and that 27 is typically the age at which we plateau in our physical fitness—but the key is that it’s a plateau, not a peak, so we can maintain our age-27 conditioning for 20 or 30 years.

Thinking about my long-distance running endeavors both before and after she told me that (I haven’t bothered to read the book myself; seems like I only read things online anymore), I still thought I ought to be able to improve my times considerably here in my 28th year. Maybe I reached my plateau at age 26, though. I’m not quite ready to believe that, so I’m going to train really hard this summer, not for any road race but just for my own satisfaction. I’m considering running longer regularly—say, 10 miles instead of 10k on the weekends. That might help. I have two 5k’s in the summer and fall that I want to rock, as well.

Even people who already are, or used to be, athletes who take up distance running as a semi-competitive endeavor, like me, can only appreciate how psychological of a sport running is after they’ve struggled through it for a couple months. It takes a lot of will to push yourself to keep going when you don’t feel like it and could very easily say, “Screw it, I’m walking.” You’re just out running on your own, right, so it’s incredibly easy to simply stop. It’s very difficult to increase your mileage each week, to tough it out when it’s hot and humid, or to stick to your plans even when it’s cold and rainy or you’re tired or stressed or busy or hungover.

But I’m almost convinced that, entirely aside from the conscious, psychological component to running, there is a neurological component that is completely out of our control. By that I mean it’s largely genetic, though it could probably be affected by our training during youth. Irrespective of your will to push yourself, to improve your times, to finish strong, to embody the mantra “no pain, no gain,” if your brain doesn’t tell your muscles to keep going a certain speed for a certain time, they won’t. Just like height, bone density, and propensity for muscle mass, the sympathetic tone to our muscles and our capacity for running endurance are mostly genetic. Sympathetic tone has nothing to do with an emotional understanding of someone else’s feelings; it means the level of neural activity that’s being sent to your muscles at a constant, basal, and involuntary level. Everyone has a different basal level of it and a different range through which it can be modified by training.

I think my sympathetic tone and my genetic predisposition to aerobic fitness are pretty good, but not great. It’s surprising because I’m pretty skinny despite my best efforts. (Hmm, well, not my best efforts, but I do have a hard time gaining muscle mass.) So I would have thought my high metabolism, low body-mass index, decent athleticism, and good sprinting abilities would make me a very good distance runner. I think when it comes down to it, when I’m out on the road or on a trail exhausting myself during a 10-kilometer run, regardless of how I push myself or how much adrenaline race day has given me, my brain just doesn’t feel like making my muscles perform faster or longer. I have three friends who are good baseball players, two of whom played football in high school and at small colleges, who got fantastic times in half-marathons recently. Two of them are pretty tall and strong, not skinny or lanky, and the third is thick and stocky, a real powerful guy. You would never peg them as great distance runners, and maybe one of them looks like a fast sprinter (and is). But with much less training than myself or my hardcore running friends, they got half-marathon times of about 1 hour and 55 minutes or 1 hour and 45 minutes. That annoyed the hell out of all of us. Just as they were born to be taller and/or more muscular than me, they were probably born to have a higher sympathetic tone (or something else) that allows their nervous systems, heart, lungs, and, especially, leg muscles to keep going faster and longer than us normal people. It is something separate from psychology and training.

I first saw college softball on TV five or six years ago when I was in college, and I’ve loved watching it ever since. I wish I had gone to some Georgia softball games when I was there, but I didn’t go to a single one. (I didn’t even go to nearly as many Georgia baseball games as I should have.) I figure there are three main reasons I like watching women’s softball: it’s similar to baseball, so it’s a great sport for that reason; its differences with baseball make it interesting and novel enough to intrigue me; and softball players in general are extremely hot.

The main difference between the games of softball and baseball is the pitching. Yes, there are differences in substitution rules, the infield dimensions, the size of the ball, and the (in)ability of runners to lead off from bases. But pitching, being the most important part of both baseball and softball, constitutes the biggest difference, at least to someone watching the game. There is no pitching mound, which is the cause and/or result of the underhand windmill delivery that softball pitchers must use. The pitch comes in at a different angle, and in fact the best softball pitchers are experts at a pitch that doesn’t exist in baseball, the “rise ball.” Women are able to pitch faster than they would on a baseball field because the lack of a downward-sloping mound allows them to use that underhand motion, which is very hard to do from a mound. (If you’re good at it, the underhand-windmill motion allows you to throw faster than pitching overhand because swinging underhand is the natural motion of the shoulder, whereas throwing overhand goes against the grain of the shoulder and brings your arm a little bit closer to injury with each pitch. I heard that the fastest pitch ever thrown with a baseball was 114 mph, by the tragically under-appreciated Eddie Feigner, who pitched underhand. In case you’re wondering, the reason baseball pitchers throw overhand is that it allows them to throw the ball with a downward trajectory and to throw sinking pitches better, which provide a tremendous advantage over extra velocity.)

I love watching college softball pitchers pitch. It is poetry in motion, to me. It is a beautiful fusion of power and grace that has the rare quality of making these often gorgeous ladies even more attractive. Additionally, the all-too-rare hitting and fielding skills possessed by softball-playing girls only provides extra fuel for my infatuation with them.

My experience playing slow-pitch softball in intramural and city leagues—which, I won’t lie, has included more than a little bit of frustration at the paucity of women with softball skillz—has only augmented my attraction to those rare and special girls who have them. I have some vague memories of a scene from a movie or TV show where one lawyer gets incredibly turned on by his opponent’s sound legal argument and passionate (even arrogant) defense of her position, because someone who knows their stuff and can argue with the best of them is a turn-on to most lawyers. Same with a world-class pianist or a magnificent surgeon or a woman who can fix your car in a cinch. A pretty girl who plays softball with smooth confidence, speed, strength, and grace is like a dancer performing a beautiful ballet or a figure skater executing a gold-medal routine. For this baseball player, this applies more to softball players than to any other athletes, but I know millions of men share a similar feeling. I think about this quite frequently when I’m playing softball in my co-ed leagues with and against women who are really good.

These thoughts were prompted by the Women’s College World Series, which ended last night. Washington beat Florida in the championship round, two games to none. I recall Stacy Nuveman, former UCLA pitcher and current ESPN softball analyst (who probably has a job at ESPN for two weeks of the year), predicting before the tournament started that Washington would win it. I had just caught Georgia vs. Ohio State on ESPN purely by chance two Saturdays ago, and after Georgia defeated Ohio State to win a spot in the World Series tournament, ESPN cut back to the studio for highlights and analysis, and Nuveman picked Washington. She said she wasn’t as confident about that prediction as she had been about previous ones, but Washington’s pitching and their attitude and determination made them her favorite. Me, I’m just happy Florida lost.

By “Washington’s pitching” she meant Danielle Lawrie, NCAA softball player of the year. The main problem with college softball is that one team can ride one pitcher for almost every game of the postseason. Their ace will pitch both games of a doubleheader, start games two days in a row, or more. They are able to do this because the underhand motion of softball pitching doesn’t really hurt the arm. This is absolutely unheard of and would be horribly unethical in baseball at any level because of the permanent damage it would do to the arm.

I heard a little about the University of Washington’s ace last week before I saw her pitch, against Georgia in the WCWS semifinals. (Apparently her name is pronounced like “lorry” since she’s Canadian, eh.) The second-best pitcher in the nation was Stacey Nelson, Florida’s ace. If I weren’t constitutionally incapable of being attracted to a Florida Gator, I would note that she is even hotter than Lawrie, and most of the other girls in the tournament, for that matter. Girls who are great at softball and are pretty to boot are almost too much for me to handle.

Naturally, Nelson and Lawrie squared off in both games of the best-of-3 series. It must suck to be the second-best pitcher on a softball team because your chances to pitch in the postseason will be few and far between! You might only be a very good pitcher, but if you’re behind someone who’s great, you’re riding the pine. I guess it’s better to win a championship from the bench than lose while playing a lot, but I don’t know… Danielle Lawrie’s teammates aren’t complaining, I know that.

The first time I saw her pitch, my thought process was: 1. Wow, that’s fast. 2. Wow, that’s hot. She throws faster than most pitchers, with a fastball of 66-68 mph. While I was throwing that fast at the age of 14, it is extremely fast for college softball, where the distance from pitching rubber to home plate is a mere 43 feet. That gives hitters the equivalent reaction time of a 92-95 mph pitch in baseball. (As a comparison, when I played for my traveling teams at age 13 and 14, our pitching distance was 54 feet most of the time, except in AAU tournaments, which use the Major League distance of 60 feet and 6 inches.) You can see Lawrie in this short highlight video of Washington’s victory over Florida in the final round. She has a wicked change-up that is made even nastier by her scorching fastball. I couldn’t hit that—back when I was playing baseball.

She and all those other cute girls who play college softball just exude sexiness from every pore. Gorgeous, athletic, experts at the second-best sport there is…

I’ll be in my bunk.

I saw a really neat vignette on SportsCenter a couple Sundays ago about some baseball players’ curious and unique batting stances over the years. It features interviews and demos with some retired baseball players, like Will Clark, Cal Ripken, Julio Franco, and Eric Davis, in addition to some active ones. It also features this guy who calls himself the Batting Stance Guy, who has a web page and a YouTube channel highlighting what he calls “the least marketable skill in America.” He’s pretty funny and pretty cool.

I like batting stances. I like paying attention to, recognizing, and imitating them. At least, I did when I was younger. Same with pitching deliveries. I guess the Batting Stance Guy never grew out of it, and I apparently haven’t completely grown out of it, based on my enjoyment of this SportsCenter segment. The difference is, he has turned it into a hobby that’s at least gotten him on ESPN a couple times. When I pitched for my baseball teams, I intentionally and unintentionally imitated many pitchers over the years: Tom Glavine, Jack Morris, David Cone, Pete Harnisch, Greg Maddux, Curt Schilling, and a couple of my teammates. I never imitated any batters that I know of, though. (Update: I should have said: I never imitated batters in real baseball games. I imitated many in the back yard or in the cul de sac, but not when I was hitting a real pitcher on a real baseball field or batting cage.)

This vignette is actually pretty funny. My favorite impersonations by the Batting Stance Guy are Derek Jeter, Will Clark, and Dave Winfield. The Winfield one is the last one filmed in his back yard, when he throws the bat into the bushes. I about cracked up when I saw that. Final note: Will Clark is one of the most bad-ass athletes of all time. I love Will Clark. One of my favorite players ever.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

This is one of the more bizarre sports stories I’ve heard in a while. Listen to this Ron Artest interview after the Rockets–Lakers playoff game, where he’s talking about the altercation he got into with Kobe Bryant and the physical, confrontational nature of heated, competitive basketball games:

WWWHAT??! Listen to how calmly he says this, almost in passing:

I remember one time, it was um…one of my friends, you know, he was playing basketball, they was winning the game, they were so competitive, they threw a, um, they broke the…a piece of leg from a table and they threw it and it went right through his heart and he died.

Just another crazy story from this very…colorful character who’s been involved in, and in fact created, more than his share of controversy over the years. Right? It turns out he was totally telling the truth! From the April 15, 1991 edition of the New York Times:

A 19-year-old basketball player from Queens was fatally stabbed with a broken-off table leg today after a fight broke out during a basketball tournament, the police said.

The player, Lloyd Newton, was stabbed in the back with a leg from the scorer’s table at the championship game of a Y.M.C.A.-sponsored tournament at the Niagara Falls Boys and Girls Club, the police in Niagara Falls said.

“An argument ensued about the score,” Capt. Louis Curcione said, adding that one of the teams “thought they were getting gypped.”

“A fight broke out between the players and about 40 fans in the stands,” he said. “In the course of the fight, one person was stabbed in the back.”

Today’s headline that needs no re-phrasing to make it into a double entendre:

Hooker named Indoor Athlete of the Year

So claims one Christopher McDougall in a new book, Born To Run. The book was largely inspired by his discovrery of the Tarahumara indians of Mexico, a reclusive tribe populated by the greatest long-distance runners in the world. Read Random House’s description of the book, which should entice anyone interested in running or even physical fitness to at least consider buying it:

Full of incredible characters, amazing athletic achievements, cutting-edge science, and, most of all, pure inspiration, Born to Run is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world’s greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.

Isolated by the most savage terrain in North America, the reclusive Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s deadly Copper Canyons are custodians of a lost art. For centuries they have practiced techniques that allow them to run hundreds of miles without rest and chase down anything from a deer to an Olympic marathoner while enjoying every mile of it. Their superhuman talent is matched by uncanny health and serenity, leaving the Tarahumara immune to the diseases and strife that plague modern existence. With the help of Caballo Blanco, a mysterious loner who lives among the tribe, the author was able not only to uncover the secrets of the Tarahumara but also to find his own inner ultra-athlete, as he trained for the challenge of a lifetime: a fifty-mile race through the heart of Tarahumara country pitting the tribe against an odd band of Americans, including a star ultramarathoner, a beautiful young surfer, and a barefoot wonder.

With a sharp wit and wild exuberance, McDougall takes us from the high-tech science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultrarunners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to the climactic race in the Copper Canyons. Born to Run is that rare book that will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that the secret to happiness is right at your feet, and that you, indeed all of us, were born to run.

What I found even more fascinating was this excerpt from Born To Run, which appeared as an article in the UK’s Daily Mail. You might as well read it on the Daily Mail’s site, but I’ll paste it here for posterity in case gets taken offline in the future (not that I won’t have my own hard copy by then):
(continue reading…)

“I said I believed in drug testing a long time ago. All through the sixties I tested everything.”
—Bill “Spaceman” Lee, former Red Sox and Expos pitcher

The internet ruins radio trivia contests. Most radio trivia contests are sports-related, I guess, and most answers can be looked up with Google. You don’t know if the winner is the first caller who happened to know (or guess) the right answer or if they just looked it up on a computer. WRIF-Detroit has been running a couple trivia contests per day relating to the NCAA basketball tournament, with the winners getting tickets to the Final Four at Ford Field, and I can’t be sure the callers actually knew or guessed the answers and didn’t use Google or ESPN or some Michigan State basketball-related page to look up the answers. It’s kind of lame, but, what are you gonna do?