Three Brief Items

1. Here's an interesting article about the frequency of upsets in the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament. In a nutshell, it suggests that the downward trend in upsets (till this year's aberration) was caused because the NCAA tweaked its formulas for seeding. Adjusting the RPI, plus allowing for some other factors, resulted in better seeding and, consequently, fewer upsets.

Proving, once again, that stats are ruining sports.

2. Jeff Pearlman, ever the nice guy, wrote an article called: Lessons of Washington, Gonzalez sagas: nice guys finish first. The article suggests that Ron Washington was forgiven an egregious transgression because he's a nice guy, and Bobby Gonzalez was fired because he isn't a nice guy.

Therefore, the lesson to be learned is that nice guys finish first.

I'm pretty sure that there are a few counterexamples out there. Readers?

God bless Jeff Pearlman. I enjoy some of his stuff, but man that guy likes flowers, Cinderellas, hopeful stories, hardworking people, honesty, and general morality. He's like Rick Reilly except he is a better writer.

3. Front-page news at ESPN.com on March 21: Vikings coach Brad Childress has officially stated that he's willing to tolerantly and patiently wait out Brett Favre until Brett Favre has taken "all the time he needs". This article is particularly wonderful because it contains the following quotation from Mr. Childress:

As a coach, you're a mother hen, you'd like him to be there for all of it. But I'm enough of a realist to know that's probably not going to be the case.

Rarely do you hear a 100% red-blooded American football coach refer to himself as a mother hen.

Actual Firings Might Happen Because of This

In the spirit of a blog whose title purports to encourage the removal of incompetent persons from their occupations, I bring you this post. In the aftermath of Vancouver, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has decided he's had enough.

Those in charge of preparing Russian athletes for the Vancouver games "should take the brave decision and submit their resignations," he said.

I wish I knew an actual Russian person who could help me unlock the Russian Presidential code that. I lost my Putin decoder ring. So, is this code for:

"The men and women in charge might consider graciously and bravely stepping down from their positions to allow others the chance to help the athletes prepare for the next Olympics"

or

"They better get the fuck out before we disappear their asses to Yakutsk"?

"If they cannot do it, we will help them," Mr Medvedev added.

Looks like the latter.

Russia - traditionally a winter sports powerhouse - ended 11th in the medals table, with just three golds.

It's worth noting that they did finish sixth in the overall medal count, but 11th in gold medals. Still, it's hard to hang your hat on anything when you're managed fewer gold medals than the Netherlands, which has a tenth of your population. [Side note: I just learned that Nigeria is more populous than Russia. No kidding. And they didn't medal at all!] But seriously: Russia still has the advantage of having the most cold weather in the entire world, a HUGE advantage in the per-capita cold weather rankings... and they still didn't win much.

"Fuck Yakutsk!" said Mr. Medvedev under his breath. "We're sending them to Irkutsk!"

"For a long time we have benefited from Soviet achievements, at some point they ran out," President Medvedev said at a meeting of the governing United Russia party on Monday.

I don't know anything about Russian politics. But this still seems a bit silly to me - to publicly call out your atheletes' coaches. But I also imagine this has to do with wanting to save face because his own country is slated to host the next winter Olympics.

If they don't do well in 2014, those coaches better start learning the local lingo in northern Kamchatka.

For The Last Time, America: Baseball Still Isn't Dead

For those of you scoring at home, this is my record-tying third straight post about the same goddamn issue. Sports media just cannot stop themselves from writing more and more whiny claptrap about how bad this World Series was and how baseball is dying and about how cold those players looked. Gregg Doyel chimes in on the "OMG WORLD SERIES IMPLOSIONS" issue. Even more amusingly, Gregg drew an air of intelligence by citing this mind-blowingly idiotic article by a "Bill Livingston" living in "Cleveland".

Since I already hate Sportsline and Doyel has been a target here before, I'll stick to his crap. Warning: idiot typing and stale ideas ahead. The whole article is basically a rewrite of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s claim that "Baseball is dead, nobody plays it, it's too boring". It's just found a new place to spawn. And it's still the same old tripe. Let's look at some of the worst claims.

The truth of the matter is ... baseball just isn't that important anymore.

As I previously cited in this post last February, MLB's revenues indicate that quite a lot of people still care. For example, for 2007 (figures not available yet this year) MLB's revenues approach the oh-my-god-best-professional-league-ever NFL's. Besides money? I don't see appreciable decline in other metrics which might measure the lack of baseball importance. Yes - before you comment - the lousy ratings for this year's World Series are hardly a useful metric.

In 2008, MLB had its second highest attendance ever: "The total of 78,614,880 fell short of 2007's record of 79,503,175" (source).

Baseball purists and constipated gripers -- same thing, if you ask me --

Sportsline.com journalists and uninformed self-aggrandizing windsocks - same thing, if you ask me --

want to blame the 2008 World Series' tepid television ratings on the schedule and the network and the weather,

Or the one small-market team?

all of which they sum up with the words "Bud Selig." And they're complaining that next year it will get worse, what with the World Series starting in late October and ending in early November and WHIP and VORP and the world coming to an end. Not to mention on-base plus slugging.

Yes! Now we get to the real problems! WHIP and VORP and OPS! That's why baseball is too irrelevant: it has a small core of actually intelligent fans! Again with the eschatological overtones: clearly baseball stats are bringing recorded time to a standstill!

Thesis: baseball's core of intelligent fans distinguishes it from every other sport, which is comprised almost exclusively of hordes of morons. Discuss.

But the truth is, baseball just isn't that important anymore in this country,

Six billion dollars suggest otherwise. Lotta tax dollars going to lotta communities. At a fairly-conservative 5% sales tax, that's 300 million tax dollars... and that's not even counting the income tax, which probably runs about 9 million a year for Alex Rodriguez alone. *shrug*

and there's no going back. I'm not sure how many people, other than the purists and the owners and (maybe) the players, even want to go back.

Actually, as a card-carrying purist, I kind of like the present. I really do. Except for the fact that the Reds haven't had a winning season since 1999, a record or two is steroid-tainted and the American League still has the DH, I'm just about fine with the present. And I don't mean that with any sarcasm whatsoever.

We like baseball where it is, behind football and ahead of soccer and log-jammed in there with basketball, golf, auto racing and combat sports.

That must be the royal "we" of smarmy assholes who write for Sportsline and like to think baseball is doomed when it isn't. Seriously: combat sports? COMBAT SPORTS?

What an idiot.

... regarding the (obviously idiotic) idea of a neutral-site Series:

Only in football are tens of thousands of fans willing to spend a small fortune to traipse across the country to watch one winner-take-all game.

I am not sure of an exact stat here, but I once read somewhere that some huge percentage of SB tickets go to corporate sponsors and interests, with another percentage available to the public of the host city. Readers?

Oh, right, like people who "traipse" (traipse?) across the country to go to the Super Bowl go there to watch the game.

Football is passionate. Football is fun.

Apparently eighty million turnstiles clicked this past summer to go to events that were not fun. I think this is a sign of national depression. Why the hell did people go to baseball games eighty million times in order to not have fun? Put America on suicide watch.

Later:
With baseball, that means wrapping up the 162nd game and then looking back and studying the statistics, seeing which players got better or worse (or, like Adam Dunn, both).

Besides being a blatant and pointless baseball homer, you're uninformed to boot! As far as writers go, this year you got worse!

I think this is a joke? Like maybe Adam Dunn somehow got better or worse? Even though he had exactly as many homers as he's had for each of the previous three seasons, or that his OPS+ was exactly his career OPS+?

Gregg doesn't know his head from his ass. I wish Dunn would start hitting Gregg Doyel instead of 40 home runs a season or his wife after games in Chicago.

[Note: this is an inside joke between me and two other bloggers. I am not actually suggesting that Adam Dunn commits domestic violence.]

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Baseball isn't dead. Baseball isn't dying. The World Series isn't dead. The World Series isn't dying. Can we all just get over the ONE RAINOUT in the ONE HUNDRED YEARS of World Series baseball and go back to debating about something useful, like how many DHs can dance on the head of a pin?

Seriously, people have been whining about how baseball is dead for the last thirty years. I once read a Charlie Brown comic strip from like 1974 or some shit where Linus declared baseball to be dead. It's not true, it hasn't been true, and no useful metric suggests that it's going to be true.