Quarterback 1 is superior in every single meaningful category, including wins, so obviously I’m writing about this because Quarterback 2 was selected to the NFC Pro Bowl team and Quarterback 1 wasn’t. Who are they? Quarterback 1 is Matthew Stafford, and Quarterback 2 is Eli Manning.

What a bunch of bullshit. The Pro Bowl rosters are currently voted on by players, coaches, and fans, so it’s probably the idiot New York fans who voted Eli Manning in. As shown nearly every year by the baseball All-Star voting at some position or another, fans are idiots and shouldn’t be allowed to vote on anything because they make it a popularity contest instead of an accomplishment contest.

In the ESPN broadcast of the Fiesta Bowl on January 2, 2012, in which Oklahoma State beat Stanford in overtime, Sean McDonough expressed exactly those sentiments:

Some critics of this format don’t like the fact that you’re in field goal range, really, when it starts.

Amen to that. That’ll probably get fixed as soon as the inherent bias and traditional-power favoritism of rankings and bowl selections are eliminated…

The problem is that the United States deserved to win just as much as Japan did. They both scored two legitimate goals, so they should have remained tied until someone ended an overtime period with the lead or scored a “golden goal” (if that rule were in play).

Clearly penalty kicks are the absolute worst way to decide the winner of any sporting contest in the world. No baseball game has ever been decided by a home run derby, no football game has ever been decided by a field goal kicking contest, and at least no postseason NHL game (that I know of) has ever been decided by a penalty shootout.

The blame for this shortcoming of soccer’s does not fall on the policy of any league or governing body. The fault is not all FIFA’s. The ridiculous, outmoded, illegitimate, artificial method of deciding a champion by penalty kicks exists because soccer is an inherently inferior sport. If it weren’t inherently inferior, it wouldn’t need to resort to a penalty kick contest to decide the champion of the World Cup. It is appalling how often the final match of a World Cup, men’s or women’s, has been forced to end in penalty kicks. When I was studying abroad in Spain in 2002, I watched Spain get eliminated by South Korea in the quarterfinals on penalty kicks, and the Spaniards we were watching the game with were rightly disgusted at the fucking penaltis.

The great stories of the underdog Japanese women playing for the heart and soul of their disaster-stricken country and the heart-attack kids of the USA trying to regain their championship status have been tainted by a poorly devised sport’s inability to decide champions properly. I mean, what a great World Cup, from beginning to end, especially for the two finalists, ruined by fucking penalty kicks. After the overtime ended 2–2 and before the penalty kicks started, I changed my Facebook status to, “Wow, what a great World Cup ruined by an outmoded, unreasonable method of deciding a champion: penalty kicks.” The eventual outcome of the game was irrelevant; the presence or absence of my home country’s team was irrelevant; penalty kicks ruin any game, especially the championship match of the fucking World Cup.

I don’t care enough about soccer to know exactly how to fix it; I only care about soccer for about two weeks on two occasions every four years. Maybe scorers should be allowed to be more aggressive and physical against defenders; maybe the rules of set pieces need to be changed to favor the offense; maybe the fucking goal could be enlarged to allow some more near-misses to go in. The latter has long seemed a reasonable fix to the major drawback of soccer: the low scoring. I don’t wish soccer were higher-scoring because I like higher-scoring sports; my favorite sport is easily baseball, partly because it is low-scoring, as I have written before. I wish soccer were higher-scoring so that matches could be more often decided before they have to resort to goddamn penalty kicks.

Since the dimensions and rules of how the game is played are never going to change (understandable), the best solution in my opinion is to combine the two overtime formats that have been used: first play a half-hour of extra time, after which the leading team is declared the winner, if there is one; and after the extra time, go to sudden-death overtime, or, as they like to say across the pond, the “golden goal” rule. Play actual fucking soccer until there is a winner. If the players get too tired, then the increasing amount of substitution will mean that the team with the deepest roster will most likely win. If people will worry about games lasting unreasonably long, then remember that as fatigue builds, goals become more likely with each passing minute. Because of the building fatigue and the more lax defense that comes with it, most games would not go on interminably, and it would be a hell of a lot better than ruining an entire World Cup with fucking penalty kicks.

Of course, they could all just play a better sport that never even needed to resort to such an arbitrary, capricious, artificial game-deciding contest as a penalty shootout.

Looking back, I wish I had been a person who didn’t wear batting gloves. It seems so much more tough and hard-core, like the baseball players who don’t change their hat throughout the year or rub all that pine tar and dirt on their helmet or always seem to get their uniform dirty. They play hard and tough and don’t care about any dirtiness or discomfort. I’m going to raise my kids not to wear batting gloves, even (especially) in the cold weather when we’re practicing for the new season.

Ted Williams was one person who didn’t care about discomfort but rather welcomed it, embraced it, and inflicted it upon himself with ardor. He famously took soft toss every day in spring training until his hands bled. He could only feel assured that he had practiced enough if he swung to the point that his hands bled. And he came back and did it every day after that, until his hands were so calloused that they probably couldn’t bleed anymore.

Interestingly, Ted Williams is one of the people who is thought to have maybe been the first Major Leaguer to wear batting gloves. That would have been in spring training, but Hawk Harrelson is well known to have been the first Major Leaguer to wear a batting glove (actually these early ones were all golf gloves) in a regular-season game.

Entirely apart from the blisters and pain, there are good reasons to wear batting gloves with a wooden bat. There is no leather or other-material grip, as there is on metal bats, so you have to put pine tar, rosin, dirt, and/or other substances on the handle to make it less smooth and slippery. Therefore, I don’t consider Major Leaguers less tough or manly because they use batting gloves. I still admire those who don’t wear them, though. The two main ones I’ve noticed in my lifetime are Moises Alou and Vladimir Guerrero. That Wikipedia article informed me of a few others who don’t wear them, either. Here are my favorites:

I didn’t include Jorge Posada in that list because I can’t stand him, and even his gloveless batting doesn’t rescue my opinion of him. I think he is so overrated (even though isn’t rated all that highly, possibly (hopefully) not even a Hall of Famer) and don’t think he deserves whatever high praise he has received. He is only good because he has been lucky enough to be on the Yankees his whole career, surrounded by other, actually great players, and his defensive skills never improved over his entire Major League career.

Here’s Calvin Johnson’s touchdown reception:

Here’s the NFL rule under which the replay officials nullified an obvious reception and behind which everyone associated with the NFL is hiding because they are small, weak men:

Rule 8, Section 1, Article 3, Item 1: Going to the ground. If a player goes to the ground in the act of catching a pass (with or without contact by an opponent), he must maintain control of the ball after he touches the ground, whether in the field of play or the end zone. If he loses control of the ball, and the ball touches the ground before he regains control, the pass is incomplete. If he regains control prior to the ball touching the ground, the pass is complete.

To briefly review what happened in the video above, Calvin Johnson caught the ball, got two feet down, fell onto his left hip, his left hand slid out of bounds, he touched the ball to the ground while maintaining a secure grip on it with his right hand, started supporting/propping himself up with his right hand with the ball underneath it, and then he let go of it (or, possibly, lost control of it; it doesn’t matter). It wasn’t one motion, and he didn’t lose control of the ball in the process of making a catch or going to the ground. There is simply no debating it. It is obvious Johnson completes at least one if not two full processes before he starts propping himself up with his ball-holding hand, during/after which he lets go of it: the first is falling to the ground and landing on his left hip, and the second is rolling over while his left hand is out of bounds and the ball, gripped by his right hand, reaches the ground while he still maintains control of it. Then he lets go of it.

The rule says “he must maintain control of the ball after he touches the ground”. He did. He fell to the ground and then rolled over, and he didn’t lose possession yet; he still maintained possession. The rule says, “If he loses control of the ball, and the ball touches the ground before he regains control, the pass is incomplete.” He didn’t lose control before the ball touched the ground. I’ll say it again: when his right hand touches the ball to the ground, he still has control of it. Right after that, he loses his grip on the ball, either voluntarily or involuntarily. It touched the ground under his possession, and admittedly very soon after that, it squirts out of his hand. Any reasonable person would deem him to have possession when the ball touches the ground, but not immediately after that. He didn’t “lose control of the ball” before the ball touched the ground, and the ball did not “touch the ground before he regained control”.

The purpose of this rule is to prevent plays from being called receptions when someone catches the ball with two feet barely in, falls down out of bounds (or, maybe occasionally, in bounds), and the impact of hitting the ground causes the ball to come loose. I think in football and, for instance, in baseball, maintaining control of the ball while taking two steps is, or was, generally considered necessary to define complete control. I’ve also heard a rule (or opinion) cited that requires two seconds of control in baseball if the player isn’t running when he makes the catch (for instance, sliding, diving, or leaning over a wall). It is perfectly understandable that the NFL would want to amend a rule or correct a preconception that as long as you have two feet in bounds while securely holding the ball, even for a millisecond, that those two feet give you the reception. It makes sense that catching the ball over the middle, taking two steps, and then losing the ball upon contact with the ground would count as a completion and a dead ball—you took two steps while controlling it, the ground can’t cause a fumble, so the ball is dead where it hits the ground. Similarly, it’s perfectly understandable that catching the ball over the middle, taking two steps, and losing the ball when you get hit would count as a reception and a fumble. However, according the NFL’s position and everyone’s opinion who watches football, including mine, it shouldn’t be considered a completion when you toe the sideline or the back of the endzone, catch the ball while leaning out of bounds and falling down, and then lose control from the impact of the ground. This makes sense because you weren’t taking steps, each of which could be considered a “process”, but were just toeing the line and falling down, so you should have to complete the process of the fall with control to be judged as having caught the ball and completed the reception.

According to what everyone is saying about how the rule actually defines Johnson’s catch as an incompletion (which it doesn’t), then if a receiver lands on his back with possession of the ball, holds the ball up for the official to see it, and a defensive player comes and swats it out of his hand, then that is also an incompletion. Because the process of getting two feet down, falling down, maintaining control of the ball, and holding the ball up wasn’t completed without losing possession. Sure…

With these considerations and the letter of the rule examined line by line, it is clear that falling to the ground, sliding your non–ball-holding hand out of bounds, rolling over, and touching the ball to the ground with it under your possession is neither one “process” nor an incompletion under the spirit of the rule when it was discussed, drafted, and implemented by the NFL. Yet the slimy, disingenuous suits in the NFL Competition Committee and the Commissioner’s Office are hiding behind the rule and saying it was interpreted correctly, but that they’ll look at it in the offseason.

Most people’s point in venting about this awful call is that it was clearly a touchdown by any common-sensical definition of a reception and that the rule should be eliminated so that the NFL can go back to calling touchdown receptions touchdown receptions. Most people also say, “Yeah, by the letter of the rule, they made the right call.” I think I’ve explained why the video evidence and the content of the rule ineluctably prove that it was a reception by any definition and any literal or common-sensical interpretation of the offending rule itself. But my main point is that regardless of whether the rule defines this catch as a reception or an incompletion, the travesty is that the NFL itself—not bad officiating or a mistake—caused this injustice and continues to hide behind a rule, claiming it was the right call, and that they might “look at it” in the offseason. As Michael Wilbon said on today’s Pardon the Interruption broadcast, “Change the rule TODAY.” If this happens again, it won’t be a good thing that the NFL was consistent. Consistently wrong, at least in this type of awful rule/interpretation, is worse than wrong one day and right the next. Be consistent by being right for the rest of the season/eternity, not by being wrong for a whole season and then right the next. The NFL deliberately caused this travesty, continues to hide behind the letter of the rule (which judges this a reception, not an incompletion, anyway), and refuses to apologize or do anything other than say “the call was right, but we’ll review the rule”. This disgusts me and makes me uninterested in watching another NFL game until they fix it.

This isn’t the first time this year an officiating disaster has befallen Detroit. A much worse call as far as the consequences it had for the individual player and for posterity was Jim Joyce’s missed call at first base on what would have been (was) the 27th out of Armando Galarraga’s 28-out perfect game. This was not caused by a bad rule or a bad interpretation, and no one hid behind anything or claimed it was remotely correct. Everyone recognized it was wrong. This highlights baseball’s colossal shortcoming in not having implemented instant replay except on potential home runs here in the second decade of the 21st century. They’re behind the times; that’s bad enough. But everyone knows and admits the call was blown. What the NFL continues to do is far worse. Everyone knows the rule is bad and the call was wrong; the NFL caused the problem and continues to deny that anything is wrong. That’s why the NFL and that small, testicle-less, slimy coward Roger Goodell should be boycotted. I never liked him, but that was just opinion; now the entire nation has solid proof that he’s an awful commissioner who ought to be ashamed of himself for focusing too much on the players’ image and not enough on the playing of the game, not to mention his own league’s and officials’ image.

Here are some related links:
HuffPo: Calvin Johnson Touchdown Catch Overturned on Controversial Call
New York Times: The N.F.L.’s Worst Rule: ‘Going to the Ground’
The Big Lead: Calvin Johnson and the Going-to-the Ground Rule

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):

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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.

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 system, heart, lungs, and, especially, leg muscles to keep going faster and longer than us normal people. It is something separate from psychology and training.