"For The Love Of God, Montresor!"

F#%$&!!!







Yesterday I was out for a walk, and my meanderings took me past a local sports bar. Outside the door, on one of those folding, sandwich-board deals restaurants often use to advertise the day's specials, events, etc. On said board was written, proudly in big letters (paraphrasing):

"WE HAVE NBA LEAGUE PASS!!! JOIN US FOR ALL THE 2011-2012 BASKETBALL ACTION!!! YOUR HOME FOR HOOPS!!!"

Um ... two questions.

1. Are they being intentionally mean to hoops fans? Is this some kind of sick joke?

2. How in the hell does anyone get made Manager of a sports bar if you have no idea that one such sport is currently locked out and in all likelihood will not commence play until January at the earliest and then, in blithe ignorance, advertise your establishment as a venue in which to enjoy that selfsame, currently-nonexistent, sport?

Sigh. Grumble. Grumbly sigh. Of Doom.

Cy Jung: (Hopefully) Changing the Pyschology and Logistics Behind Baseball's Awards

Three weeks can be a lifetime in the stretch drive. Before the Braves and Red Sox started their simultaneous, precipitous spirals and made things interesting (or terrifying, depending on your perspective) again, the only thing baseball folks had to talk about was whether or not Justin Verlander ought to win the AL MVP. And talk they did. A lot. Now that the sporting media's gaze has shifted, like the Eye Of Sauron, to the Wild Card excitement/disaster zone, everyone is debating, pontificating, and making a big ol' fuss over the Sawx disintegration and, you know, occasionally mentioning that Atlanta is also choking. (That's definitely enough Beantown-centricity out of you, ESPN. I'd like to thank Drew Magary for handing you your butts already and saving me the trouble.)

East Coast bias notwithstanding, as a lifelong Braves fan who also has many dear friends in Boston, allow me to speak on behalf of both our fair cities: We miss the Verlander-saturated days of yore. God, do we miss them.

And because life was so much more joyful back then, and thinking about the present state of Wild Card affairs makes me want to cry like a small child who just dropped a brand-new ice cream cone on the sidewalk before licking it even once, I'm going to rant about Justin Verlander and the MVP some more.

The crux of the debate surrounding Verlander's candidacy for the award is essentially this: an awful lot of the people who vote on these things are predisposed somewhere between reluctance and obstinate refusal when it comes to handing a pitcher the MVP. Which is silly. I'm not going to rehash the same tired statistics that have been trotted out to make Verlander's case. Nor will I sit here and discuss the relative merits of his 2011 impact as compared to Jose Bautista, Curtis Granderson, Dustin Pedroia, and the rest of the guys in contention. You know the numbers, and you know what he's meant to the Tigers this year. The semantics of how "valuable" should be defined are interesting to debate, but it's plausible, at the very least, to say that Verlander has been at least as valuable to his team as anyone else has to theirs. And I don't think anybody who has a vote would especially disagree with anything in this paragraph. The problem here is that a little thing called the Cy Young Award also exists.

The pervading ethos seems to be that the Cy Young, which Verlander will almost certainly win in the AL, should be sufficient for a pitcher, and that concurrently winning the MVP is overkill, not to mention depriving some worthy position player of the honor. Apparently, Roger Clemens winning both awards in '86 was some sort of sin against the spirit of the MVP. Or something. Never mind that there is absolutely no hard policy, anywhere, that precludes a pitcher from winning the MVP. In fact, after Pedro Martinez was left entirely off of two voters' ballots in 1999, thus depriving him of the award that year, MLB changed the instructional language to specifically include pitchers for consideration. Which hasn't done much of anything to alter the anti-pitching prejudice of the voters, but still, the point was made. In an ESPN interview on the topic, Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins summed up the mindset of position players and voters alike:

" ... the MVP for the pitcher is the Cy Young Award. That's why they came up with it. That's their award. But the MVP -- that's for the most valuable player. And is he one of the most valuable players in the league? Yes -- for 35 games." (courtesy of ESPN.com)

It's unclear whether Rollins intended "they" to mean MLB in general, or the pitchers themselves, or the writers who vote, or what. In any case, it's the wrong pronoun. In 1956, following the death of Red Sox pitcher Cy Young the preceding year, then-MLB Commissioner Ford Frick created the award in his honor, to be given to the best pitcher in baseball as voted upon by Baseball Writers Association Of America. So historically, it was not invented as a pitchers-only substitute for the MVP.

Rollins does raise one valid point: Verlander (or any other starting pitcher) only playing 35 games a year yet being considered for a year-long honor decidedly merits a pause, and apparently the BBWAA takes it seriously. (This is pure personal opinion, but that argument falls apart when a pitcher has been as transcendent and critical to team success as Verlander has this season.) Interestingly, in Cy Young voting, it's apparently the paucity of innings, not games, pitched that seems detrimental to candidates. In the past 20 years, only two relievers have won the award; Dennis Eckersley in 1992, and Eric Gagne in 2003. How in the hell has Mo' Rivera never won a Cy Young? Or an MVP, for that matter?

Pardon that digression. At any rate, as I said, "the MVP for the pitcher", as Rollins put it, is not "why they came up with" the Cy Young Award. It was intended as a tribute to a legendary player who had passed away, not to relegate an entire position out of consideration for the MVP by giving out a separate award. You can see why it might feel that way to a position player, though, and Rollins is merely giving voice to that feeling. It's not as if the BBWAA might award him the National League Cal Ripken Jr. this year for being the best NL shortstop in 2011. Pitchers are alone in their special-award-getting status. In that light, the Cy Young does seem to have an unfair cast to it, and everyday players' resentment over pitchers possibly also winning the MVP is understandable. To them, it accentuates the age-old Hatfields/McCoys scenario between the guys on the mound and everyone else on the diamond.

But those sentiments shouldn't be echoed by the writers voting on these awards. Per MLB, they are supposed to consider every relevant player, and doing otherwise, which they clearly are in the case of pitchers, is disingenuous.

So here's a crazy thought: if the Cy Young is being interpreted as a separate, special MVP for pitchers, and that interpretation is largely responsible for elite pitchers being denied proper consideration for the actual MVP, why don't we just change the meaning and/or context of the awards in question?

I know, I know. Baseball people hate and fear change. No game clings more fiercely (and ofttimes irrationally) to its history and traditions, and the mere suggestion of altering something ingrained in baseball's fabric like the Cy Young can earn a body the torches-and-pitchforks treatment. Just bear with me.

There are three ways in which pitcher-for-MVP parity could be achieved.

Door # 1: Vote on Everything. Voters choose the Offensive and Defensive Player(s) Of The Year in football; why can't baseball adopt a similar tack? The BBWAA already votes to award the Cy Young and the Gold Glove (basically subsets of the DPOY). Why not have them vote for the best offensive player as well? That way each category of performance (hitting, pitching, fielding) gets a unique, voted-on award, and the MVP vote can be reserved for the player who most fully and directly contributes overall to his team's success regardless of position. This could work, but if we get the writers voting on everything under the sun, the end-of-season awards are going to become as convoluted and debatable as the BCS system, and it's likely more quirks and biases would emerge in the voters' thinking than would be solved. Moving on ...

Door # 2: By The Numbers. Since the whole MVP/Cy Young problem resides with the BBWAA being crotchety grumblers about their voting in the first place, we could take this thing completely out of their hands and expunge all subjectivity from the awards process. Best batting average gets the Batting Title, best ERA gets the Cy Young, best UZR gets the Gold Glove, and best WAR gets the MVP. Quick, clean, easy ... and wrong. Not only would this be phenomenally soulless and boring, but the metrics crowd is going to pitch a fit about how ERA and batting average are quasi-meaningless stats and can't possibly be the criteria for major awards. Then they're going to want to turn it all into some kind of hyper-complex algorithm and it'll be 3 years before we settle on the efficacy of a "correct" equation. Drat. OK ...

Door # 3: Compromise. It's my belief that the MVP, by necessity, has to be voted on, so in our grand hypothetical awards shakeup, we're leaving its process of determination unaltered. In general, the voters are highly knowledgeable and observant people who try to take into account not only the relevant statistics but also the psychological impact that players can have on their teammates. As hackneyed and overused as these words can be in the wrong hands, "leadership", "guts", "heart", and their ilk pretty much have to be weighted properly if your intent is to accurately assess the "value" of an individual in the context of his team. Those words don't show up in box scores, so we need thoughtful human analysis to account for their importance. So much for the MVP; it's fine as is.

Now, let's address the Cy Young problem. Awarding it seems to bias the BBWAA pretty heavily against pitchers when it comes time for the MVP vote. The question is: does the Cy Young, in fact, need to be voted upon? I say no. Advanced metrics have been refined to the point that a thorough perusal of Baseball Prospectus can pretty much tell you who the dominant pitchers are in a given season. All we need is an equation to determine the most dominant guy from each league, preferably one that gives relievers equal consideration, and we're good to go. I'm no statistician, but surely some clever baseball junkie/MIT grad somewhere can come up with a crazy amalgam of WHIP, ERA+, K/BB, FIP, and whatever else they deem necessary to accurately determine the "best" NL and AL pitchers in a given year. If someone baseball- and math-savvy could get on this, please, I'd be ever so grateful. There would likely be a few stumbling blocks and more than a few misplaced awards early on if we implemented this. The working-out-the-kinks period would undoubtedly yield some flawed results. However, I believe that in the long run, it would result in MVP voters bringing less bias and skepticism to the table regarding pitchers.

Now, here come The Baseball Writers. "But, but ... we VOTE on this award! We've ALWAYS voted on this award!" To you I say the following:

First of all, the "We've always done it this way!" argument is quite possibly the dumbest, least sensible stance to take on anything. It's infuriating. As I noted earlier, baseball loves its traditions, but maintaining tradition at the expense of improvement is flat-out ridiculous.

And second of all: the reason you vote on this award has nothing to do with your being the "best way" to determine its recipient. You vote on this award because when Ford Frick implemented it, he was desperately trying to avoid a repeat of the Chalmers Award disaster, and having you do it instead seemed like a good idea at the time. It does not automatically endow you with the right to select the best pitcher from each league in perpetuity.

An objective, statistically-based Cy Young would, hopefully, disabuse the BBWAA of their MVP anti-pitching bias and force them to fairly evaluate pitchers as MVP candidates. If we render the Cy Young objective and the MVP subjective, that should at least recalibrate things in a positive direction, right? The voters wouldn't think twice about awarding the MVP to a position player who won the Batting Title, so if we can objectify the Cy Young with raw statistical data, it will hopefully be perceived in a similar fashion to that award, and cease to be a perpetual obstacle to the MVP.

Please understand, I'm not saying every 20-game winning pitcher should automatically receive MVP consideration. I think the "only plays every 5 days" mentality is fairly legit. But in a case like Verlander's (or Pedro's in '99) it seems ludicrous to ignore their contributions simply because they're not everyday players. If you have someone who makes you feel completely bulletproof every time they take the mound, whose mentality/invincibility/swagger is consistently off the charts, that absolutely has to be considered in a discussion of the Most Valuable Player. This is particularly relevant in Verlander's case, as he ended 16 separate Tigers losing streaks this season by pitching lights-out for a victory the following game. His very existence prevented several potentially season-ending skids. How is that not "value"?

Extended side note: why is the Batting Title still awarded to the highest batting average holder in each league? As long as we're vigorously reshuffling the Baseball Awards deck, we may as well amend this to be commensurate with modern times, starting with the name. It's inane to have something called "The Batting Title" while its counterparts are dubbed the "Cy Young" and (officially, although nobody calls it this) "The Kenesaw Mountain Landis Memorial Baseball Award." Also known as the MVP. To level the playing field, let's call it the "Rogers Hornsby Award." I went with Hornsby over everyone else for two reasons: 1. he won the Batting Title six consecutive times, along with two Triple Crowns, and 2. I liked the symmetry of having one award named for an AL player and one for and NL guy. (The only player with more Batting Titles? Ty Cobb, with either 11 or 12 titles and either 9 or 5 consecutive, depending on which sources you believe regarding the 1910 Cobb/Nap Lajoie dispute. From a purely baseball-oriented standpoint, his name would be the best choice, but I don't think this award should be fake-rechristened by a guy who was, by nearly all accounts, a total jerk, do you?)

Anyway, someone can ameliorate this award too, and cook up an equation involving BA, BABIP, OPS+, etc. for "The Hornsby." I'm not nearly math-y enough to synthesize the correct formula out of the numbers, but someone is. The Hornsby/Batting Title could have actual statistical meaning in the future. Let's make this happen.

Extended side note part deux: As for the actual Triple Crowns, let's leave them be. Sure, some of their core stats have been proven to be quasi- irrelevant, but we can afford to let them alone. It's a nod to Venerable Old Baseball Tradition, which we certainly don't want to dismiss completely. The mythology and scarcity of Triple Crown winners is just ... well, cool. We can live with the statistical shortcomings. Also, if you actually win a Triple Crown, you are qualified for all time as "really effing good at baseball." To lead the league in batting average, homers, and RBIs (or) ERA, Wins, and K's simultaneously is insanely difficult. Yeah, yeah, BA, RBI, Wins, and ERA are dependent, to varying degrees, on factors that the player in question does not have direct control over. (Actually, so are homers, if you take Park Effect into account.) I don't care. The rarity of the event justifies its significance. It is very, very hard to garner a Triple Crown Award. So there.

After that extremely protracted diatribe, the rant ceases. I'm not saying Justin Verlander deserves the MVP, but if people aren't considering him because he happens to be a pitcher, that's a problem. You get the idea, and I'll shut up now. Go Braves. And, for my Boston brethren, go Sawx.

At least playoff spots aren't voted on.

Open Letter To Texas A&M From SEC Fandom

*A note to new readers perusing the archives: this post went up before Texas A&M had been officially accepted to the SEC.

Dear Texas A&M,
This really isn't a good idea. We know you think it is, and we think that's cute, but trust us, it's a phenomenally bad plan of action. Don't come to the SEC.

Allow me to exercise Southern Hospitality to the fullest and phrase it this way: your wonderful school has many fine attributes and traditions, but we postulate that y'all might not be real comf'table here, and bless yer little hearts, we'd just hate for y'all to feel ill at ease.

Or, to be less polite: We don't want you. More importantly, you don't want to be here.

We know you think you do. We know some of the power conferences are already unrecognizable from, say, fifteen years ago, and the entire paradigm of NCAA conference alignment may undergo some quasi- to hyper-dramatic shifts towards "super conferences" sometime soon. You don't want to get left without a chair when the music stops. You want to play the kind of teams that command national attention and respect, so that if you manage to go undefeated, you won't be kept out of the BCS Title Game on the "strength of schedule" argument. If Texas and Oklahoma vacate the Big 12 and you fail to get out in time, you're going to be stuck in a TCU-esque purgatory. And yes, it wouldn't hurt you (fiscally) to move to this conference, where we command truly staggering quantities of TV and marketing revenue, of which you would presumably get a share. You want a sort of preemptive contingency plan so that when your conference collapses, you're already in a safe harbor full of prestige and money. Fair enough.

But Nick Saban and Steve Spurrier are not the droids you're looking for. (We'll let you figure out which one is R2-D2.)

Let us break this down for you. Residents of your state are exceedingly fond of the phrase "Don't mess with Texas." It's a mantra, a battle cry, a protective incantation, and (in your minds) a factual declaration. Let us assure you now, if you come to the SEC, Texas, or at least College Station, is going to get messed with. You have no conception of the messing-with that will occur.* We don't mean to unduly disparage your program, but if you have to play a schedule loaded with 'Bama and LSU and SC and Ole' Miss and Auburn every season, you're going to get slaughtered. If you think this attitude is out of line or maybe overdosed with swagger, well, who won the last five National Titles?

*I'm talking primarily about football here, but even if you decide, for some crazy reason, to prioritize your school's athletics around basketball, let us cordially remind you: that would still entail facing a conference schedule with Kentucky, Florida, and Tennessee involved. Just saying.

But it's more than just the actual games, A&M. So much more. See, with all the hopscotching being done, there's the side effect of identity/misnomers to deal with. Geographical and numerical monikers for conferences are becoming increasingly erroneous. The Pac-12 only has it right because they had the good sense to change their name when they added teams. Nothing else makes any sense anymore. And really, all the chaos is OK. It's ... charmingly quirky that the Big 10 now has 12 teams and the Big 12 has 10. I suppose it's also an homage to the history of the conferences. Michigan and OSU have always been "Big Ten"; Texas and Oklahoma have always been "Big 12." Can't let a silly thing like basic math dissociate such storied programs from their respectively traditional "Big Whatevers." All the jumping around and mucking up the names and numbers is fine.

Unless you're talking about the SEC.

More than any other conference, we have a deeply vested cultural identity here that transcends scoreboards and recruiting and Heisman winners and draft picks and BCS bids. This is about what it means to be in the South Eastern Conference. We know, we know. We Southerners share many things with the Great State of Texas. Obviously, an obsessive love of college (and high school) football is right near the top of the list. There's also BBQ and Country Music, deep-fried-everything and moonshine, the Blues and guns whose names include hyphens followed by the word "gauge." On the surface, the rest of the country probably views us as culturally very similar, if not exactly the same. (Yes, the preceding paragraph was meant to be semi-satirical. Also kinda true, though.)

However, being a Southerner is more than just the stereotypical trappings. There's a geographical swatch of territory that runs (roughly) from the coast of the Atlantic Ocean to Louisiana's western border, and extends in latitude from the Mason-Dixon Line southwards to right around Ocala, Florida. Within that approximate region lies the SEC, and Sounthern-dom, for lack of a better term. It's a specific and powerful aura that permeates every facet of our cognitive and emotional existence. Trying to define it is a fool's errand. Like a good bourbon, you know it when you see, smell, taste, and experience it. It simply is.

And you don't feel that Southern thing, Texas A&M. You know how we know that? For one thing, by no stretch of any cartographer's imagination would your school be considered as within the Southeastern United States. But more importantly, as Texans, you've told us you don't feel "Southern." Your state is vehemently insistent that it is an entity unto itself. You don't want to be associated with us. You're too good for us, aren't you? "Everything is bigger (and by implication better) in Texas." That's another one of your mottoes, right? Well, one of our favorites goes like this: "American by birth, Southern by the Grace of God." We admire your state pride. It just doesn't jibe with us, because we're Southerners first. Not Georgians or Virginians or Floridians.

Southerners.

Now you're thinking, "but this is about a football conference. We're not invading or trying to impose Texan-y things on you or anything, we just want a respectable place to play."

Well, consider our position to hinge upon a philosophy very similar to the old square/rectangle axiom: being Southern isn't entirely about the SEC, but the SEC is entirely about being Southern. The games and their attendant hoopla are just how we express that through an understandable cultural meme. (While we're kicking your ass, of course.)

So Texas A&M, if you value your Texas-ism, and your not-a-doormat-in-your-own-conference status, rethink this one. Between your Texan ego and our Southern pride, it could only have ended badly between us. We hope you find a great conference, and wish you all the success in the world, so that one of us can beat you in the National Championship game six years from now.

Sincerely,
-The SEC Fans.

Brief Reprieve On The Field Of Battle

It's been a tremendously disappointing eight months if you've been following the state of NCAA football. Not actually surprising, mind you, but disappointing. Oregon has a recruiting scandal on its hands. Miami is living an extended encore of everything that made The U infamous the first time we went through this nonsense, only they upped the debauchery quotient in Round 2. A lot. Ohio State is a mess because Jim Tressel found it convenient to ignore several of his players strutting around with ill-gotten folding money and shiny new ink. In an incident that, if true, trumps everything above, LSU starting Jordan Jefferson QB allegedly kicked a United States Marine in the face during a bar fight. Call me crazy, but that's a tad more concerning than kids hawking tiny gold pants for cash and free tats. And of course, hanging over everything, we're still locked in a fairness and efficacy debate over the current BCS system, how it awards championships, and how it perhaps ought to (fiscally) award the athletes who make it profitable.

Overall, not a strong showing for NCAA gridiron-related activities of late.

With all the overarching negatives drifting about, I don't want to attach any undue attributes or superlatives to last nights' Baylor/TCU game. On-field exploits, no matter how spectacular, can't hide or alter the fact that the BCS is a broken system, and the NCAA needs to figure out how to prevent, or at least reduce, the kind of behavior that has some people clamoring for the Death Penalty in regards to The U. Unfortunately, the games, the only things that still function like they ought to in college football, are not magic elixirs for the sport as a whole.

Nonetheless, it was extremely gratifying to sit down last night, crack open a cold one, and forget all the junk for a little while. We had to wait all of a day for our first back-and-forth, shoot-out, upset of the 2011 season. Baylor. TCU. Barn. Burner.

In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't have much of a conception of Baylor's squad heading into this season. Because, well, they're un-ranked and hadn't notched a victory over a ranked opponent since beating Texas A&M in 2004. As they were facing the TCU Horned Frogs and their 25-game regular-season win streak, I just assumed that they would be steamrolled by the defending Rose Bowl champs.

Whoops.

Baylor QB Robert Griffin III, or "RG3" as the hip kids are calling him these days, ripped through TCU's secondary for 359 yards and 5 TDs on a 21-of-27 performance. The Frogs' secondary simply couldn't keep up with Bears receiver Kendall Wright, and they didn't have any first-half luck containing RB Terrance Ganaway either, as he racked up 100+ rushing yards before the half.

After the 45-10 drubbing the Bears received at TCU's hands last season, Baylor coach Art Briles wasted no time putting his foot on the gas. Dialing up a trick play just 2 minutes into the game, Griffin flipped it to Wright, who played QB in high school, and watched him complete a 40-yard touchdown strike to Terrance Williams. Both teams were firing on all offensive cylinders through the opening quarter, but Baylor clamped down on defense and took a commanding 47-23 lead on four straight TDs that bookended halftime.

As the clock began to run on the fourth quarter, it looked like a certifiable rout, but TCU was not about to go gentle into the humid, 100-degree Waco, TX night. Starting the final period on the Baylor 1-yard line, Frogs QB Casey Pachall went to work. He completed a touchdown pass to Logan Brock and ran in the 2-point conversion. 3 minutes later, he laced another scoring throw to Josh Boyce, then hit Boyce again for another two points. He rifled a 19-yard TD to David Porter. 22 unanswered points in just 7:12 of game clock, and TCU was back within two points.

They almost tied it up. The 2-point attempt found Boyce more-or-less wide open near the sideline of the end zone. Pachall's pass wasn't quite on the numbers, but it was a pretty catchable ball. Unfortunately for the Horned Frogs, "catchable" does not always mean "caught." As the pigskin hit the turf, you got the sense Baylor's offense, thus far stymied the final quarter, got a boost from that dropped ball. They were starting the next drive on their own 25, with a chance to salt the game away by eating the clock and putting some points on the board. Anyway, I got the sense they were ready to do that. Turns out that sense was either wrong, or the emotional boost of that missed 2 was too much adrenalin for Griffin, who promptly coughed up a fumble on the Bears' first play from scrimmage.

On the ensuing possession, Pachall drove TCU down to within field goal range, and Ross Evans booted through a 27 yarder to give the Frogs a one-point lead. The furious rally they'd staged to regain control of the game seemed indicative of the fact that this team had been in the National Championship discussion for the past two seasons, and after an inglorious start, they were hellbent on reminding everyone of that fact.

Problem: Baylor still had 4:27 of clock to work with. TCU's defense put the shackles on the Bears and forced them into a game-altering 3rd and 10 on their own 20 when Coach Briles decided that some more trickery was in order. Griffin took the snap, once again flipped it to Wright, and took off down-field on a shallow crossing route. He made the catch, got the 1st down, and promptly received a bell ringing to rival the biggest, baddest cathedral tower in the world. Rattled but unwilling to show it, RG3 led his squad down the field, finally pausing to let Terrance Ganaway to eke out a few last yards on the ground to set up a field goal attempt. Kicker Aaron Jones drilled a 37 yard shot through the uprights, and all of a sudden that missed TCU 2-point conversion moments earlier took on sinister implications. Baylor 50, TCU 48.

But Casey Pachall and the Frogs weren't done quite yet. Pachall rifled a ball down the right sideline to Michale Tucker, who made a spectacular catch over the back of a defender for 30 yards. With 17 seconds on the clock, TCU needed roughly 15 more yards to get within comfortable field goal range and a chance for the win. It was at this critical juncture that Pachall finally made a mistake. The QB (along with numerous other TCU players) had been suffering from leg cramps for much of the night. With trainers working on him every moment he wasn't on the field, it was obvious he wasn't 100% by this point. To be perfectly blunt, he was gassed. But Pachall has a tattoo on his right arm that reads "Sacrifice." By all accounts, he takes that word seriously, especially as it applies to his teammates, and he wasn't about to let a little fatigue and cramping remove him from the contest. Unfortunately, his pass attempt to Antione Hicks simply did not have enough juice on it coming off those weakened legs. The pass did find Hicks ... but it was Baylor's Mike Hicks. He scrambled around to kill time before taking a seat with 0:02 left. One knee later, the Baylor faithful were charging the field, eager to celebrate the school's most significant victory since the aforementioned A&M win in '04.

Wire to wire, this game was an adrenalin rush. Nine lead changes, just shy of 100 total points, and roughly 28 highlight-worthy plays, it had everything a fan could have wanted. (Except, you know, defense.) It was an incredible upset for Baylor, and a hyper-fast ending to TCU's title hopes. As I said up top, no game on the field can really conceal or ameliorate the myriad problems facing the BCS system as it is currently constructed. But this game, on this field, at least allowed me to forget that for a little while.

Now if only we could enjoy epics like last night without wondering who's on the take, and whether Casey Pachall's tattoo was paid for on the level.

Greatness Begets Greatness. (Or: Why I'm Kinda-Sorta Glad Dan Uggla's Hit Streak Ended Last Night.)

Dan Uggla's hit streak came to an end last night at 33, in a losing effort against the Chicago Cubs. While Uggla still managed to be productive, courtesy of an RBI, he was prevented from extending the hit streak when a flare to shallow right was snagged by Cubs' 2B Darwin Barney on a frantic diving catch. (The irony should not be lost that a guy named "Darwin" derailed the streak's continued evolution. Rimshot, please.)

The hitting streak was possibly the most improbable in recent history, since Uggla was batting an anemic .173 at its inception on July 5. Even 33 games and impressive power numbers over that stretch have only managed to elevate Uggla's season average to a deeply substandard .231. Nonetheless, his remarkable performance over that duration played a key role in keeping the Braves offense afloat sans Chipper Jones and Brian McCann. This was the kind of production Atlanta was hoping for when they acquired Uggla in the off-season, and rarely has the old adage "better late than never" been more apt. So ended the longest Big League hitting streak since 2006. In its wake, I find myself ruminating on the hypothetical significance of what might have been had Uggla kept the train rolling long enough to eclipse Joe DiMaggio's 56-game milestone.

That 56 represents one of the few truly fascinating numbers left in all of sports. To put things in perspective: Uggla still would have needed 23 more consecutive games with a hit to tie Joltin' Joe. In other words, he was still 41% shy of the required total. The best streak in the majors in five years still only got him 60% of the way there. The unassailable nature of DiMaggio's achievement tends to render these brief flashes towards it somewhat quaint. Hitting streaks, of course, are always fun, but more in a "museum gift shop curiosity" way than an actual "wow, this might happen" sense. And we like it that way. At least when someone like Dan Uggla is making a run at history.

The simple fact is that great feats generally require inherent greatness. That sounds redundant to the point of banality, but it's also true. Across the record books of sporting history, all the "significant" top slots are held by instantly recognizable names; players who are already enshrined in or are undeniably on their way to their respective Halls of Fame. No pertinent records rest in the hands of lesser talents. A quick rundown:

NHL:

All-time Goals: Wayne Gretzky
All-time Assists: "" ""
All-time Saves: Martin Brodeur

NBA:

All-time Points: Kareem Abdul Jabbar
All-time Assists: John Stockton
All-time Rebounds: Wilt Chamberlain

NFL:

All-time Rushing Yards: Emmit Smith
All-time Passing Yards: Brett Favre
All-time TDs: Jerry Rice

MLB (Because I'm a persnickety grouch, I'm awarding the HR numbers to their "clean" holders.):

All-time Hits: Pete Rose
All-time Home Runs: Hank Aaron
All-time HR (Single Season): Roger Maris
All-time Strikeouts: Nolan Ryan
All-time Saves: Trevor Hoffman

And, of course, DiMaggio's aforementioned 56.

Baseball is the sport in which such numbers are more sacrosanct and revered than any other. It's why writers and fans were so up-in-arms over Bonds and Sosa and Big Mac "tainting" those long-ball records. (And why I wrote in the names I did above.) It's why we'll never see Roger Clemens' career through lenses that aren't colored with suspicion and ill will. We care about these things because they represent the height of accomplishment, a step beyond the grasp of mere mortals. Which is why it would have been highly disturbing to our sensibilities if Dan Uggla had somehow managed to equal or surpass that 56-game mark.

As a die-hard Braves fan, I was rooting for Uggla to succeed. Heck, I'd like our entire lineup to go on ludicrous hitting streaks. Frankly, our offense could use the help. But as a baseball fan, I didn't really want him to break that record. It would have been nice if he had extended the streak for another 2 weeks or so, ending it somewhere in the low-to-mid 40s. In a season where we can already see the vast majority of postseason teams ensconced in the playoffs, any little storyline that upped the amplitude on the "exciting" meter would have been a welcome boon. But really, we didn't want to see Uggla striding to the plate at 55 games, did we? Look at the names on that list again. Does he belong there? No offense to Dan Uggla, but the answer has to be a resounding "NO", right?

Of course, if he'd gone ahead and done it, we'd certainly have to say he earned it. Hit streaks aren't the kind of thing that can be engineered with PEDs or sign stealing or any other "untoward" methods. They're statistically improbable, fluky occurrences, fueled by a strange combination of luck, skill, and loosely ineffable terms like "groove." If it had happened, we'd have to give Uggla his due. But it didn't, and that's a good thing, because we didn't want to.

The dichotomy about records rests in the old saying "made to be broken." We hate the notion that the best possible outcome has already been relegated to the past, because it implies a larger inability to reach our own personal and societal apexes. We want to believe that there's always another plateau, that new heights of greatness are still attainable. Even in the case of something like Cy Young's 511 wins, which can't possibly be approached in the "modern era" of specialized pitching an comparatively expanded rotations, we can still find ways to say "yeah, but if ..." and put current and future pitchers in roughly the same ballpark. (No pun intended.) The caveat, of course, is that it matters a great deal who does the breaking.

If Albert Pujols, for instance, hits in 57 straight games next season, we'll rejoice. Headlines will stream and TV specials will air and media and fans will fall all over themselves to concoct the most sappy, lyrical way to express what a great and historic moment that 57th at-bat was. I can almost assure you that any such jubilant proclamations would have been mingled with no small amount of grumbling (and a huge sense of letdown) had Uggla done it this year. We would have felt as if we'd been deprived of something, like a small part of our national mythology had been irrevocably defiled. We enjoy assaults on history, but only if they're driven by appropriately iconic figures. Nobody, after all, wants Joe Schmoe pulling Excalibur from the stone.

So baseball collectively breathed a small sigh of relief last night, and Joltin' Joe's 56 remains safe for the nonce. With all due respect to Dan Uggla, I hope that next time it falls into potential jeopardy, the man wielding the bat is worthy of seeing it through.

Diversionary Tactics: Recreating Sports Movie Soundtracks To Take My Mind Off The 2011 Lockout Season

I'm just going to ignore the fact that as of 12:01 AM, the NBA has joined the NFL in a state of lockout. If I actually think about it, I'll get cranky, so I will simply keep my focus elsewhere. When I woke up this morning, "For Love Of The Game" was on TV. I won't lie, I freaking love this movie. As a matter of fact, I love all of Kevin Costner's sports vehicles. I wish he'd make more of those instead of churning out stuff like "Water World." Anyway, it's a great movie; not on the level of "The Natural" or "Hoosiers", but absolutely watchable and enjoyable at any time. The one serious problem I have with this flick is the banal, uninspired soundtrack. (I have this problem with a whole bunch of movies. When you're a total music nerd, you spend a lot of time thinking about what songs might have better suited various scenes in film and television than whatever the music director came up with.) That tendency led me to today's post. Time for a little mindless fun.

You may or may not have seen that meme making the rounds on Facebook a few years back wherein a storyline was hypothetically laid out for your life, and the game was to put your iTunes on shuffle and see what a randomized soundtrack for various touchstone moments in your fictional existence would sound like. It was actually kind of entertaining, and given the nature of my music-obsessed friends, we had a lot of fun rehashing the playlists and talking about what worked and what didn't, how certain songs were perfectly aligned with their fake moments, etc. Because we're dorks that way. Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to reverse engineer the concept in a sports context.

I decided on the following method: first 10 songs to pop up on my iTunes shuffle will be assigned a sports movie moment. (I like this because it ups the degree of difficulty. You're not just saying "you know what I always thought would be a great song for this scene ...?" You have to take what you're given and apply it effectively.) Rule: the movie moment can't be used if it already has a perfect soundtrack. For example, you can't utilize a song for Costner's drive to Boston in "Field Of Dreams", because the Allman Brothers' "Jessica" is already an exemplary choice. We're gunning for improvement here, not just a different, equally apt song selection. Is this a pointlessly silly exercise? Well, yes, yes it is. But it's also tremendously fun. And off we go ...

1. Look At Miss Ohio - Gillian Welch. When John Lovitz's scout character pulls up to Gina Davis and her sister's farm for the first time in "A League Of Their Own." I realize the movie's time period is well before the song's release, but it works beautifully. You could even fade down to undercurrent levels for the dialogue; it's got the right sort of spacious melancholy for Kit's yearning to follow with Dottie.

2. Feio - Miles Davis. The climactic final game between Denzel and Ray Allen in "He Got Game." This is as tense, funky, and haunting as it gets. As a matter of fact, instead of trying to get cutesy with all the Copeland, Spike Lee should have just used all of "Bitches Brew" as a soundtrack. It would have upped the whole vibe of the film by at least 10%.

3. Enemy Fire - Ryan Adams. When Mox drives out to the field, deeply concerned for Billy Bob in "Varsity Blues." This is an underrated sports movie, in my opinion, particularly this scene. The shotgun blast and shot of the truck absolutely make you think Billy Bob offed himself. The exchange he has with Vanderbeek really explains everything about sports' effect on kids when the pressure gets too big. You could take the dialogue from this scene and apply it to AAU hoops, gymnastics, any scenario that demands too much of young athletes. This track would underpin the scene really nicely.

4. Fine (live) - Edie Carey. After the romantic leads (Moira Kelly and I forget the lead actor's name right now) have the big fight before the finals in "The Cutting Edge." They're still trying to hold it together on the ice, but clearly both feeling hurt and betrayed. "As long as the neighbors think everything is fine ..." Indeed.

5. (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons - Sam Cooke. Annie Savoy could've easily put this on the turntable for any of the dancing scenes with Crash Davis in "Bull Durham." If she dug the gloriously soulful earnestness of Edith Piaf, clearly she'd be into Sam Cooke. However, personally, I'd have had Crash listening to this tune while he's ironing his shirts and drinking scotch as she bursts into his apartment so they can have the "William Blake!" exchange. It's his type of tune, and the lyrical content would have underscored the romantic tension.

6. Pedestal - Portishead. Tough one, here. Portishead: not a band you'd generally stick in a sports flick. I have to go with "Any Given Sunday." This would work for Al Pacino's frustrated/soul-searching moment when he's failed to bring Steamin' Willy Beaman to heel in terms of play calling, and he's unsure what course of action will help the team. His face in that moment is perfect. He knows the game, has his philosophy about how it ought to be played, but he doesn't want to undermine his QB if they're winning. This track is dark enough to pull of the conflict, a good sort of forlorn creepiness resonating. It's not totally ideal, but it works fairly well.

7. The Exhibition - Kaki King. It's like iTunes was trying to make it up to me for the previous track. Instrumental solo-acoustic guitar tracks are incredibly malleable as sonic backgrounds. Gotta go with this, played super low as an augmentation to the "I didn't choose this town, I chose you" scene between Mary McCormick and Russell Crowe in "Mystery Alaska." The right kind of poignancy is in play, and the understated-ness of the piece makes it perfect for a subtle, delicate texture within a touching scene like this one.

8. Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes. Shane "Footsteps" Falco sitting dejectedly on his boat after a tough loss in "The Replacements." Good indie faux-moping track, as droning as the character and the movie itself. 'Nuff said.

9. Mama, You Been On My Mind (live) - Bob Dylan (w/Joan Baez). Any time you get a Dylan/Baez duet like this, it's always going to be good for something. This rattling, bouncy version from the Rolling Thunder Revue tour is particularly choice. For when Dennis Quaid's family shows up for his eventual Major League debut in "The Rookie." Perfect for the hug-and-kiss-the-wife moment, and nestles in well with the film's twangy soundtrack. It would have been a great little snippet of song to slip in there, just a flash of something to cook the moment up right, like adding a touch of hot sauce to a dish.

10. Lucky Day - Morphine. For the opening credits of "Fever Pitch." (Awful, awful movie, I know.) Why? Because it's a song about feeling lucky and eventually screwing it up, (something any pre-2004 Sox fan knows about), it's by a band from Boston, and you don't blow the gritty, anthemic celebration that is "Dirty Water" on the opening sequence. Cliche, rookie move there. Which isn't surprising given how terrible the film is, but still, you gotta save your show stopper for when it counts. Why they don't have any Morphine (or Aerosmith!!!) on the soundtrack baffles me. Anyway, this is what I would have gone with.

Feel free to play at home and post your own results in the comments. Happy 4th of July weekend, kids!!!!

Comparisons: "Next Bob Dylans" And Our Worst Knee-Jerk Impulse.

As a society, we seem obsessed with the art of the comparison. Nowhere is this preoccupation more evident than in the media. From highly-paid journalists to casual bloggers, you can't turn around without running headlong into someone likening things to other similar things. You've never heard of Band X? Well, they sound like a cross between Band Y and Band Z. Oh, did you like this book or movie? You should read/see this other thing, it resembles the first thing closely. This used to drive my buddy Ian nuts. He did some part-time writing for an Indy music blog, and was always hyper-fastidious about only describing what he was hearing, never how it related to other music. Since I'm not as pent-up and type A as he is, it took a little longer for the comparison bug to get around to my last nerve, but it's damn sure there now. The sports world has exploded with two separate incidents of unnecessary comparison recently. I blame Rory McIlroy. I blame Scottie Pippen.

Actually, I don't really blame Rory; it's not his fault he's here. Someone has to be the PGA's new alpha dog, and right now he seems to be the logical "next annointed one." But the fervor and hyperbole that sparked off after his win at Congressional was, for whatever reason, the last straw for me. "The Next Tiger Woods," they said. First of all, that's a backhanded compliment at best these days. Would any sane, well-comported, extremely talented young athlete (and McIlroy certainly is all of those things) want to be compared to sports' ultimate Icarus? Not likely.

The thing about comparisons in sports (or anything else) is that they're insanely unfair to both parties. McIlroy surely must feel somewhat flattered at the notion of being compared to Tiger, but at the same time that comparison thrusts heavy and unwarranted expectations upon his burgeoning career while simultaneously depriving him of an individualistic identity. I can understand PGA people themselves wanting to saddle the kid with the "Tiger" mantle. The sport experienced a pretty heavy tailspin following Woods' fall from grace and subsequent dismal performance on the course. They need a new face of the game, and a handsome, charming young guy like McIlroy is just what the doctor ordered. But the media's overblown reactions were grating and foolish.

Please understand, I enjoy comparison and ranking people in a historical context as much as anyone. In 50 years, I'll be glad to sit around and talk about how Woods' and McIlroy's legacies stack up against each other. But trying to jam the young phenom into Tiger's spikes at this juncture is just plain silly. Rory McIlroy is a very promising young golfer who is hopefully cranking up for a long and beautiful career. Why can't we just say that about him? Why does the arc of his PGA experience have to be hardwired into someone else's to be meaningful? His intrinsic properties as a golfer and a person ought to be sufficient to be getting on with.

And then there's the other side of the coin. Publicly, of course, Tiger was very complimentary of McIlroy, but he really can't afford to be elsewise given his current tenuous status in the public eye. Regardless of how you feel about him as a person, you have to think all this hype rankles him pretty badly. "For over a decade I absolutely owned EVERYONE on the tour. I won a tournament on one freaking knee!!! I can hit farther with a 4 iron that some dudes can with a driver!!! This kid wins one paltry major and now he's the new me? Are you joking?" And, seriously, are we? I hope so.

Those (hypothetical) sentiments were very likely reverberating in Michael Jordan's head after Scottie Pippen made that unfortunate "MJ was the best pure scorer, but LeBron might be a better basketball player" comment, then compounded his mistake by trying to say he was "taken out of context." I really do feel pretty bad for LeBron at this point. Certainly, I've been as guilty as anyone in over-scrutinizing every little failure, and putting every missed shot under a vitriolic microscope. When you're touted as a possibility to unseat Jordan's GOAT status before you can legally vote, naturally, that's going to cause some problems. As with the McIlroy/Woods scenario, neither LBJ or MJ can possibly be happy about our collectively, constantly assessing them vis-a-vis one another. For LeBron, anything less than flawless dominance is automatically perceived as failure, and Jordan must be in Charlotte smoking stogies and utterly confused as to why this kid was ever even in the discussion, especially given James' recent playoff miscues.

Of course, Jordan has the benefit of having been through this before. Kobe. Wade. Any time a hyper-talented two-way shooting guard appears, we automatically start wondering is this might be the guy to take MJ's crown. For Tiger, McIlroy is the only the first, but if Rory falters, you can bet the press will instantly find another talented young kid on the tour to hitch its wagon to. And this of course is ignoring whether Tiger will ever catch Jack, the previous generational "who's the next GOAT?" saga that's still in play.

You know who all this comparison-mongering this reminds me of? Bob Dylan.

Perhaps no legendary figure in the realm of music has been subjected to such a fierce search for their replacement or heir apparent or whatever as the man from Hibbing, MN. Think about it; we never hear about "The Next": Hendrix, Coltrane, Stones, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, Elvis, Aretha, Bill Monroe, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, James Brown, Muddy Waters, Beatles, P-Funk, Elton John, Cash, Beatles, Nina Simone, Madonna, Ramones, Satchmo, Beach Boys, Ella, Nirvana, Marley, Robert Johnson, Grateful Dead, Public Enemy, Gram Parsons, Sly Stone, Who, Velvet Underground, Marvin Gaye, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, Bird, John Lee Hooker, Tom Waits, Stevie Wonder ... you get the idea. Nobody ever looks at a new group or artist and talks about them usurping those places in music history. Oh, there might be a nod given or a brief allusion to influences of the old on the new, but never acknowledgement of "legit challenger" status. It would be unthinkable; a heinous transgression.

But in the curious case of Bob Dylan? For reasons that remain totally unclear, we're obsessed (or were for a great while) with finding an heir to his particular crown. He never got accorded the same "off-limits" status as so many of his peers. Seems like about once every five years or so for a really long time, we had a new "Next Dylan" on our hands. Tom Petty, Springsteen, Neil Young (post-CSNY), John Mellencamp, Jackson Browne. (I think Lou Reed may have gotten the "Next Dylan" nod at some point, too, but I could be wrong.) And in that list of media-generated ersatz Dylans lies the great lesson that we as sports fans and sports writers need to learn.

Think about those "Next Dylan" names for a second. Does Bob Dylan even come to mind? Of course not.

Tom Petty plays great American rock'n'roll. Just song after song of gorgeous, dirty brilliance. The guy is a hook machine. It's all he does. Slap on "Greatest Hits" sometime and think of the multitude of things you could be doing for which it would provide the perfect soundtrack while you sing along to every single word. It's a long list. It's a road-trip album, and lazy day album, a party album, an everything album. Because Tom Petty is never out of place or not fantastic.

The Boss ... what more can I say? You don't get a nickname that awesome without good cause. Not even the Beach Boys made American sports cars sound as cool as he did. The spokesman of small-town life and arbiter of marathon showmanship and unabashed joy on stage. Rock's ultimate everyman balladeer. Not to mention the sweeping grandeur of his compositions. Whether he's doing folky or screamin' swagger, he's an absolute original, and the single greatest export New Jersey ever produced.

Neil Young has done nothing more than crush, smash, and obliterate every boundary and convention he could get his hands on, all the while churning out enigmatic and iconic songs that stretch across generations. Also may hold the record for having been a member of the most different great projects ever, what with Buffalo Springfield and CSNY, plus solo. Listen to "Helpless" and tell me you don't get a little misty in the eyes. I'd call you a liar, and I'd be right.

John Mellencamp gets a (very slightly) unfair rep as a lesser light in the rock pantheon. Maybe it's understandable if you're stacking him up against the absolute elites, but "Jack And Diane", "Small Town", "Hurt So Good", "Scarecrow" ... come on! The guy had (and still has) a knack for turning the trivial into the anthemic in a rockin', accessible fashion. Say he's derivative, and on the surface you'd be right, but really, that would mean you're not paying enough attention.

Jackson Browne is among our more woefully underrated geniuses. "Oh yeah, he was pretty good!" is a response commonly heard, and completely wrong. It's not laudatory enough. He engineered a bizarre alchemy of folk, twang, soul, and what later became "soft rock" (in a good way in this case) in a totally unique fashion. The guy was dialed in to a specific frequency, and he let that resonance come out through a filter only he could have provided. Beautiful stuff.

My point is that these guys were never the "next" anything or anyone. They were the one and only versions of themselves. Instead of comparing them to Dylan, we would have been better served discussing them on their own merits, reveling in their individualism, not their convenience as analogies to someone else. Why would we want to pass that crown in the first place? Dylan himself has said he never wanted it. But we gave it to him, and considering everything he did (and continues to do) while wearing it, it's stupid to propose anyone could ever inherit the thing. Thinking anyone could be the "Next Dylan" not only diminishes what Dylan has accomplished, but puts ludicrous pressure on whoever gets stuck with that tag. When McIlroy and LeBron hang up their gear for the last time, we can talk endlessly about their places in sporting Valhalla. Until then, let's stop trying to compare them to Tiger and MJ. It's an easy out, a trite gimmick, and a faulty premise. We can do better than setting these kids up for failure and degrading the ostensible GOATS while were at it.

Remember kids, "gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through."