Entertainment & Sports: October 2003 Archives

I just saw "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and it was pretty good. Quite predictable, in general, and the lighting was way too dark. It's easy to make anything look scary when it's pitch black.

Jessica Biel is gorgeous, and she did a pretty good job carrying the film. Horror movies are almost the only genre that commonly stars a woman in the lead role, and Ms. Biel performed as well as could be desired.

What more is there to say? The chainsaw scenes weren't as disturbing as the drug-deal-gone-bad near the beginning of "Scarface", but they were still pretty gruesome. Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't really enjoy watching people getting chopped up like I think I used to. Or maybe movies are just more graphic now, and I don't like it.

Anyway, don't forget to set your clock either forward or backward, as appropriate. Good night!

As I am on vacation in a place with no television, I have been unable to watch the last two games of the world series. But I have seen that the Yankees have lost both games, by a total of three runs, and in neither game have they pitched their best reliever, Mariano Rivera - arguably, the greatest reliever in the history of baseball.

Rob Neyer, who writes one of my favorite columns over at espn.com, talks about it here. I'm not going to get into the specifics of the situation, as Neyer does an excellent job, but I do want to talk about the use of closers in general in baseball.

Ever since the institution of the save rule in baseball, managers seem to be obsessed with not using their "closer" unless it is a save situation. To earn a save in baseball, the pitcher has to come into the game with a lead of 3 runs or less, and not give it up, while finishing the game. They have to pitch at least one inning. A pitcher can also earn a save by pitching 3+ innings to end a game. Typically, this means they pitch the 9th inning with a lead, and will not start the 9th unless the team has a 3 run or smaller lead.

The practice of managers saving their best pitchers for some of these situations is ridiculous. While I will not do the math here, it seems obvious that you do not need your best pitcher to protect a 3 run lead for one inning. It also seems obvious that, in a tie game, you may want to use your best pitcher anyway to prevent your opponent from scoring, and you may want to use him even if you are losing if it's the world series and he has all winter to rest. Managers, however, seem hamstrung by the save rule itself, as if it was designed to tell them how to use their closers. Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, very often uses Mariano Rivera for more than one inning to get the save, which is a rarity today, but I can't remember seeing him in a game-tied situation, and I've often seen him pitch with a large lead when he was unneeded. While I am unfortunately not a big-league manager, even if you feel the need to follow tradition in the regular season for closers, you have to treat the world series differently. Torre does it, but he does not go far enough, and in this case his reluctance may have cost the Yankees the title.

I'm playing in a few fantasy basketball leagues, and it's got me thinking about fantasy sports in general. We have had an argument in one of the leagues(which hasn't started yet due to lack of players; if you're interested e-mail me); the argument in the end boiled down to "should fantasy sports, by the categories used, actually reflect the skills of the players". To me, the argument seemed ridiculous; In any sport other than baseball, ALL of your players statistics are heavily influenced by who is on their team, so trying to balance a category to reflect skill is meaningless. Plenty of Denver Nuggets and Utah Jazz get drafted highly, not because they are among the best players but because, hey, someone has to play. Fantasy Baseball obviously follows the same rules, as leagues normally count RBIs or runs scored, but it could at least theoretically be entirely team-neutral performance (and, of course, super-boring).

Since fantasy sports don't always reflect real life skill, putting together a fantasy team has a lot more to it than just knowing who is good, and is mostly about understanding the players relationship to the rules of the league. In most fantasy football leagues, you aren't worried about individual categories, as scoring is done by "points": six for a touchdown run, four for a TD pass, 1 for every 10 yards receiving, etc. I don't like this as much because you have no need to balance your team, just find the guy at each position who scores the most points. It also suffers (to me) from a lack of control and predictability, since touchdowns are rare and hard to predict, but compose a large percentage of the scoring.

Fantasy Baseball and Basketball on the other hand are based entirely on categories - you have to try to put together a team that will not only score the most points, but will score them in the right places. I prefer basketball to baseball, for a few reasons. One, a common baseball category (stolen bases) is dominated by very few players, only a couple of whom are useful in other categories as well - in the last couple years the person who picked first or second was able to win the league do to this imbalance. Second is the fact that, since to me baseball is a science, using meaningless categories like RBIs and runs and batting average (ugh) drives me nuts, and forces me to learn a bunch of information I don't really care about.

Fantasy Basketball, on the other hand, is great (maybe I like it because I tend to win). There are a ton of meaningful (or at least useful in-game) statistics; leagues tend to have 8 or 9 different stats, none of which are routinely dominated by one player. Building a team takes a lot of different considerations, as drafting only the best player available can leave your team imbalanced, to get crushed in multiple categories regularly, or short certian key positions (point guard and center being the hardest to fill adequately). And unlike football, there are enough games that you can use past games as a predictor to try to find players worth adding from the free agent pool.

There seems to be quite a disparity in the ideal age to be successful at different sports. Tennis players seem, often, to thrive before they leave their teens, especially in the womens ranks; They're almost all done by 30. Good golfers barely get started by the age of 30. Baseball players may become "professionals" out of high school, but they rarely reach the major leagues before the age of 23 and statistically, most reach their peak at 27. Basketball players may start in the NBA at 18, but the cream of the crop is always over 21, and often much older. The NFL has draft rules keeping younger players out of the league, but 23 is a pretty good base age for beginning success in the league.

It seems the main difference is in the skills and development needed to play the different sports. Of the ones I listed, tennis and golf seem to be the outliers - tennis relies on speed, agility, and endurance, and does not require fully developed adult strength (especially for the women) - golf requires, more than anything else, accuracy. Football, Baseball, Basketball, seem to fit in the same group, as they all require more strength; Baseball again requires precision and accuracy that can only be developed over time; In the NFL, quarterbacks age more like baseball players than the other skill positions or defensive players.

These are only the sports I know the most about; I wonder what other sports age patterns are like. Soccer seems like it could have younger players succede, rugby probably not. Gymnastics and figure skating seem at the surface to be similar to tennis, but I think that is largely due to their amateur-olympics popularity.

Peoples bodies change throughout their lives, and people are better suited for different sports at different ages, though they normally need to have developed their skills over time (no jumping sports). I'd be interesting in seeing how much this is applicable to employment in non-physical professions.

Not surprisingly, I watched basically every minute of every game in both the NLCS and ALCS this year. Today I saw a pretty exciting game 7 between the BoSox and Yanks, and I saw a few good things and a few bad:

Good: Joe Torre leaving Mariano Rivera in for three innings, and putting him in in a tie game. The whole concept of a one inning closer drives me nuts. And anytime I see a manager put in his top closer with a three run lead, I want to beat him with a stick. A lot of times a manager won't put his closer in in a tie game (oh no, he might not get a save!), but this is the playoffs, so smart decisions happen. Unless you're Grady Liddle.

Good: the best thing about playoff baseball, as I stated before, is pitcher use. While this is not something you'll ever see in the regular season, this game featured five starting pitchers - Clemens, Mussina and Wells for the Yanks, and Martinez and Wakefield for Boston. You have to let it all hang out in game 7's, and for the most part both Managers did this. And Mussina, I have to say, was awesome in his first relief appearance ever, especially when he first came in with runners on first and third and 1 out. He gave up 0 runs.

Good: Mike Timlin. He pitched something like 10 innings in the ALCS, and gave up 0 runs. Even Mariano Rivera gave up a run in the postseason. Pitchers typically have an advantage in the postseason - you get to start your best pitchers more often, and you have a lot better advance scouting for a playoff opponent. Sorianos struggles at the plate are a good example of advance scouting taking a player out of the game. But even with those advantages, Timlin was awesome.

Bad: Grady Liddle leaving Pedro in. I know that he asked Pedro how he felt, and let him make the decision, but making that decision is the Managers job. All anyone talked about that game (and that series) was how Pedro felt, what was his velocity, etc etc, and while he had pitched a great game to that point it seemed obvious he was in trouble with a capital T. And while the Redsox had had bullpen problems during the year, they had everyone on their roster available since it was game 7. Either way, it didn't work out, so it's easy to second guess. All I know is when he left him in, I immediately called my brother to see if he was watching the Yankees inevitable comeback.

Bad: Joe Torre: Again I'm second guessing a manager, but I still don't get his moving Jason Giambi to 7th in the batting order. While I don't believe that batting order significantly matters, I still don't see why you would do that in a friggan game 7. Seems like a move that could easily backfire.

Oh, and in regards to my last baseball post no one read: I'm a waffle. I can't root for the Yanks. Go Marlins!

In this year's baseball playoffs, there are four teams remaining: The Cubs, Yankees, Redsox and Marlins.

I've decided I hate all four teams and none deserve to win. At work, Frank and I have been actively rooting for a game 7 of the world series meteor or something. Or maybe Don Zimmer will go crazy again and actually succede in taking not only Pedro Martinez, but every other player on all four teams completely out of action, by maybe killing them or something. Hey, it could happen.

None of these teams deserve a title. The Marlins won in like, 1997, when they bought a championship and then prompty dismantled their team. Slimy owner Wayne Huzienga (I'm not even going to try to spell that right) then complained that no one came to see the newly dismantled Marlins, and he eventually sold the team.

But it gets better! The Marlins are now owned by someone even Slimier, Jeffrey Loria. Mr. Loria, until last season, owned the Montreal Expos, who are now referred to as the Anywhere-But-Montreal Globetrotters. This is a team that actually played "home" games in both Montreal and Puerto Rico. Just in case your geography is lacking, those places are not close. Though they are all millionaires, so maybe they do have homes in both places.

When Loria sold the Expos to MLB (they have no actual owner now) part of the deal was he got to have the Marlins. The Expos were in such a sorry state the league is working hard to move them somewhere else, due to all sorts of complaints like "canadian taxes are too high", "there are no fans" and "We don't speak canadian". But their main problem, no fans, seems to have been largely caused by Mr. Loria. There aren't even English broadcasts of Expos games IN MONTREAL. How do you have fans who can't even watch you? But my favorite part of all this is when Mr. Loria took over the Marlins, he totally stripped the Expos. He took everyone associated with the team other than the players (though he tried to do that too). He took the equiptment from the training rooms. I'm pretty sure the toilet in his house came from Olympic Stadium. So he, and his team, are flat out. Can't root for them.

The Redsox may be worth rooting for - they haven't won in a long time (since 1918!), and they have had a lot of really heartbreaking moments over the years. Heck, they've lost 4 game 7's of the world series since their last win. Thats tough. But they have two things going against them. First, they have the Curse. Sure, it's a myth, yadda yadda, but regardless they sold the greatest baseball player of all time (maybe second greatest at this point - more later). Not only did they sell him, but they sold him to finance a Musical. Not only did they sell him to finance a Musical, but they sold him after he had won TWO GAMES of the world series, the last they won, as a PITCHER. Babe Ruth, best hitter ever. The second reason is their ridiculous Cowboy up slogan they've taken on this year. It makes me want to retch evey time I hear anything about it. And they don't Cowboy up anyway, they're a bunch of pansies. Manny Ramirez going towards Roger Clemens, with his bat? After a pitch that wasn't even inside! Pedro Martinez trying to bean someone. I hate them. So they're out.

The Cubs. I don't really have much to say about the cubs, other than their best player was shown to be a cheater but got away with it with his goofy smile and broken english. This team just doesn't seem ready to me, so rooting for them seems destined for heartbreak anyway (I've had enough of that, I root for the A's and the Tigers). And Big Sluggers in MLB today drive me nuts. Body armor, prancing around, cry if a pitch is vaguely inside. Cubs have the biggest one of those left in the playoffs. They're out. Mark Priors awesomeness isn't enough to make up for Sammy. Oh, and Dusty Baker, argh. Don't get me started.

Finally, the Yankees. Uh, I shouldn't even need to explain this one. They're evil. But in the end, I think if anyone has to win of this group, it should be them. I mean, they've won 26 times, whats a 27th? Changes nothing. New Yorkers won't be any more insufferable. Derek Jeter won't be any more overrated. But the best part is that I read that if they win it this year, George Steinbrenner will turn over more control to his kids. Less George = a win for everyone! Go Yanks!

In one of my favorite weekly sports columns, Tuesday Morning Quarterback Gregg Easterbrook mentions (invents?) a very interesting concept for Football: The Maroon Zone.

Everyone knows what the Red Zone is - the area between your opponents 20 and the end zone where you NEED to score, or you suck. The Maroon Zone is the are between your opponents 40 and 30 where drives go to die. If you do not get a first down and get out of that area, you're stuck. It's a little too far for a field goal; A turnover on downs gives your opponent good field position; A punt is pathetic.

Football statistics don't normally interest me much - with a 16 game season the sample sizes tend to be small, and teams don't all play each other so lots of the statistics seem skewed by who your competition was. Regardless this seems like a great concept, and something I'll be sure to look for next time I watch football. Greggs column in general has really improved my grasp of the game, and changed what I find interesting. Look for his sections like "stop me before I blitz again" or "High school play of the week", they're great, even though I don't always agree with his statistical analysis.

Baseball is probably the greatest sport in the world for statisticians, math fanatics or just people who love to over analyze things. Not only does it have a ton of statistics, but unlike most other sports the statistics can often be used as a predictor of future performance for individual players, regardless of changes to the team as a whole. This is because each player, while on a team, has to perform certian tasks (pitching and hitting) on their own. So while Karl Malone, now playing with Shaq and Kobe on the Lakers, cannot be expected to do as well statistically, moving Barry Bonds to another team in baseball should have no effect on his statistics, outside of park effects, which are also measurable.

Baseball also has an advantage over other sports in this regard because of sample sizes. A regular starter could have 650 plate apperances a year, a pitcher could pitch well over 200 innings. Teams play all of the other teams (at least the ones in their league) and while not every influential factor is controlled for it is much closer to perfect than any other major sport.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're an elitist as well as a math freak) the most common, popular, whatever baseball statistics, such as RBIs, Runs, Batting average, and Strikeouts, are also the least meaningful. While there is a cottage industry for meaningful statistics, a quick-and dirty look at baseball can show you that on base percentage and slugging percentage are the most meaningful offensive statistics. A pretty good estimation of a players offensive value can be derived from the sum of these numbers (referred to as OPS). The product of these numbers is slightly better, but not nearly as easy to calculate by a quick glance, so OPS is normally used.

OPS is useful because it is teammate-neutral, and because it looks at all the possible results of every plate appearance. Your RBI or Runs total is partly a factor of who hit behind or before you; Your batting average does not take into account extra base hits or walks. My favorite example of the problems with batting average is the obsession with the .300 hitter. Trust me, a guy who bats .300, almost never walks, and almost never gets anything other than a single is hurting your team. And there are a lot of these guys in Baseball. Which leads me to the last thing I love about baseball statistics; The fact that baseball experts, columnists, and the such have such a problem with the statistical analysis. They slowly adopt sabermetric ideas (I see OPS mentioned all the time now in articles), but constantly rail against it due to the lack of subjectivity involved. Sometimes they are right; For example, there aren't very good methods yet for measuring defensive performance, so offense is very much emphasized by sabermetricians as being more important.

Finally, one of my favorite managers, Earl Weaver, has been somewhat vindicated by sabermetrics. There is a famous incident where Earl blew up in a radio interview:

Announcer: (A fan) from Frederick, Md., wants to know why you don't go out and get some more team speed.

Weaver: Team speed, for Chrissake, you get (expletive) little fleas on the bases getting picked off trying to steal, getting thrown out, taking runs away from you. You get them big (expletives) who can hit the (expletive) ball out of the (expletive) ballpark and you can't make any (expletive) mistakes.

Announcer: Well, certainly this show's going to go down in history, Earl. Terry Elliott of Washington, D.C., wants to know why you don't use Terry Crowley as a designated hitter all the time.

Weaver: Terry Crowley is lucky he's in (expletive) baseball, for Chrissake. He was released by the Cincinnati Reds, he was released by the (expletive) Atlanta Braves. We saw that Terry Crowley could sit on his (expletive) ass for eight innings and enjoy watching a baseball game just like any other fan, and has the ability to get up there and break one open in the (expletive) ninth. So if this (expletive) would mind his own business and let me manage the (expletive) team we'd be a lot better off.

Announcer: Well , certainly you've made your opinions known on the fans' questions about baseball, Earl, but let's get to something else. Alice Sweet from Norfolk wants to know the best time to put in a tomato plant.

Anyway, I love baseball.

Although the methodology looks questionable to me, Harris Interactive conducted an "online" survey of teens and asked them what they thought about file sharing.

ROCHESTER, N.Y., Oct. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Results of a new Harris Interactive® survey show that two-thirds (66%) of American teenagers (13-18 years old) oppose fining individuals who offer copyrighted music online for other people to download while about one in ten teens (13%) believe that people who offer copyrighted music on their computers for others to download should be fined. Half of teens (52%) strongly oppose such fines and two in ten teens (21%) neither support nor oppose the fines. ...

In addition, the poll found that most teens believe that sharing and downloading of copyrighted music should be legal. Three quarters (78%) of them feel that sharing (letting other people download music from them) should be legal. Additionally, 74% of teens said that downloading copyrighted music files from the Internet without paying for it should be legal.

Why am I skeptical of the results? Well, online surveys tend to be bogus, since the respondents are self-selected (only people who are interested tend to answer polls they come across online), but near the end of the article it says:

This Harris Interactive survey was conducted online within the United States between September 17 and 22, 2003 among a nationwide cross section of 642 respondents aged 13-18 years old. Figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, urbanicity and region were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population.

I don't know what this means; if the sample isn't self-selected, and the survey just happened to be done online with an actual random sampling of teenagers, then maybe the results are ok. It's not clear, however.

But, if the results are meaningful, then the modern concept of copyright is doomed, because these kids will be making policy in 20 years. I'm not saying this is good or bad, but it seems inevitable to me.

(Thanks MD.)

Famed talk show host Wally George has passed away in the hospital. He had just completed the 20th year of his show, "Hot Seat", which ran on KDOC in Los Angeles.

Picture taken from the LA Times.

Most of you are probably not familiar with George's show, but his style of "combat TV" (as he called it) really set the stage for confrontational talk shows of the present day.

At the height of its popularity in 1984, "Hot Seat" was a must-see for college students, who waited six months for tickets and hours for a choice spot among the 80 audience seats, where they waved U.S. flags and chanted, "Wah-lee!" on cue. George engaged guests whom he called "liberal lunatics" and "fascist fanatics," including 1960s drug guru Timothy Leary and Tom Metzger, a white supremacist leader.

George called his delivery "combat TV," a phrase he used in an autobiography published in 1999. Johnny Carson, referring to the show's choreographed hysteria, once called George the William F. Buckley of the cockfighting set.

"Hot Seat" hit its stride in late 1983 when avowed pacifist Blasé Bonpane, there to oppose the U.S. invasion of Grenada, erupted in anger over George's taunts, flipping over the host's desk before storming off the show. A clip of the altercation aired on national news programs.

It's a great, hilarious, entertaining show, and reruns are still showing on channel 56 (KDOC) in Los Angeles at 12:30am, Tuesday through Saturday (that is, Monday through Friday nights).

I saw "School of Rock" Friday night, and it was a blast. It's not a typical Jack Black vehicle -- it's rated PG-13, and most of the characters aren't even that old -- but he still brings quite a bit of humor to an otherwise run-of-the-mill kids comedy.

The plot isn't particularly deep, and you've seen it 100 times before, but what makes the movie really shine are the performances of the kids, who are almost all outstanding. Hard core rock gives the movie a lot of energy, and Jack Black harnesses his own obvious passion and makes you really believe he's pouring it into a class-full of elementary-age kids.

Despite the overall theme of "sticking it to the man", the movie is funny without being bitter or terribly angry. Black's character rails against authority a few times, but at a very mild level that young kids can appreciate; in the end everything turns out warm and fuzzy, including the parents and the school principal.

Even though you'll see the ending coming a mile away, "School of Rock" will leave you smiling. I couldn't turn my eyes and ears away from the closing credits, and when I left the theater I was grinning and playing air guitar.

I've been thinking a little more about the to-do over Rush's comments on ESPN -- it's not that I really want to, but I can't escape it. The one thing that stands out to me is that these comments weren't spontaneous, they were scripted out days in advance in collaboration with the other panelists and the producers. The on-air conversations are planned ahead of time; each member comes up with their own lines, and the group then tries to work them together into a cohesive whole.

ESPN had a chance to prevent Rush from saying what he said, and they had a chance to allow him to say it and to then rebut his position. There were, in fact, two black fellows on the show with Rush at the time. (Sorry, I don't know any of their names.) But obviously no one had a problem with Rush's comments during pre-production.

ESPN should have stood by Rush, since they were complicit in his actions. The producers thought his words were acceptable at the time, and they should explain their reasons to the public.