Bread and Circuses

I normally don't swim in these waters anymore. But at times the atmosphere gets to me just the same.

I don't like playoffs. They're one of the reasons, and perhaps the main reason, which turn me off from sports. If you'll excuse the admittedly vague pun of a dad joke, I don't like being played by playoffs. And that's what playoffs do. They try to manufacture excitement solely for the sake of cash and prestige. And that, I will argue, diminishes sports and wastes time.

Take Indiana's win over Ohio State yesterday. A great win? Not in this day and age. Sure, they beat OSU for the first time in 31 games. It's Indiana's first Big Ten Championship since 1967, when even I was but a child. And what's their reward for it? Basically, a pat on the head followed by, 'win two more games to prove yourself'.

If they don't win a national championship the conference title is no more than a footnote. If they should meet Ohio State again and lose, it will be thought of as a fluke. Indiana will have effectively won the wrong game.

Yes, it may not happen that way. Maybe the Hoosiers will win a Natty. That still accomplishes the same purpose: a meaningless and forgotten win over the Buckeyes on a cold December Saturday. Win it all or you're in the dustbin. Losers rarely get more than apologetic afterthoughts.

The championship is all that matters. And that has to be made even more difficult by adding more hoops to leap through, all so that more money can be made. There's talk of expanding college football playoffs to 16 for no other purpose than that. Don't try to argue integrity. All adding four more teams to a playoff field means are four more teams without a realistic chance to win. 

Now, if watching and rooting are your hobby, by all means enjoy. We aren't talking about any evil. At least, I don't think so anyway. But I am open to the question, quite frankly. Bread and circuses don't strike me as the best expressions of humanity or human effort.

I feel jobbed by playoffs

The Major League Baseball Playoffs begin soon, and indeed it almost feels like they have already, and I don't feel that interested. Lest you think this is Marty backing away from his ardent support of America's Pastime, I will let you know that I haven't watched the last two Super Bowls (and little of the NFL Playoffs leading up to them) nor very much of the last three or four Stanley Cups. The older I get the more I can't help but feel that we, the fans, are getting jobbed by sports playoffs in all their forms.

With the exception of American Football, which is by its own tacit admission too brutal for such tests of endurance, we find long seasons which are supposed to be so important leading into a relative handful of games which actually determine champions. They're just something silly about that, if not downright ridiculous. Play all these games, and if you win a lot of them, well, you have to play just a few more to prove you're really that good. It's simply dumb, the more I think about it.

Make teams do it to show how they perform under pressure? All right, there's something to that. Maybe. But maybe also all it does is allow overall weaker teams to shorten their benches and appear stronger by what is little more than slight of hand. But that hardly strikes me as fair to the better overall teams. And if sports are supposed to be about the best man/woman/team winning, I think playoffs may in fact lead to situations less than ideal for such outcomes. Were the New York Giants really the better team than the New England Patriots the year the Pats went into the Super Bowl 17-0? Nope. Yet they were the NFL Champs.

I realize that without the allure of playoffs many teams and their fans might quit on the seasons without the promise of something more. And I get that, so far as it goes. But I also get that if you can't survive the trial you shouldn't earn a mulligan for it either. Further, a good team ought to be put on the field first if it wants support. It's really no different a concept than expecting a business to put out a good product or service before it merits patronage.

As we all know, it really just comes down to the money. Extended playoffs mean more cash for the games and the industries which surround them. I'll admit up front that there's nothing wrong with that per se. But I also think that an honest assessment of the situation should conclude that it is less than ideal for the integrity of our sports and games as sports and games. It teaches, whether it means to or not, that excitement is more important than the best team winning. Excitement on its own isn't wrong either of course. Yet I just can't help but feel that excitement when it comes more naturally is deeper and more thrilling than when it is manufactured by groups and persons who don't care about my allegiance so much as they do my money. That more than anything else is when I feel jobbed. I think sports fans in general should feel the same way.

To be sure, I'll watch some of the upcoming baseball games as the next few weeks pass. I admit as well that I will watch more ardently if and as the Detroit Tigers are involved. But my attention will only be half present as I do. Sparky Anderson said it best: the best team in baseball in a given year is the team with the best regular season record, not the World Series winner. He's spot on with that assessment, and I wish more sports fans would think so too.

Sports Playoffs and Society

Before we go any further we want to say something to those readers who might not accept this column as political enough. If George Will, perhaps the current dean of conservative commentators, can write about sports in general and baseball in particular in his missives, then so can we. There: our street cred is established.

Sports Illustrated has predicted that the Cleveland Indians will win the 2015 World Series. Billy Beane, the remarkably successful general manager of the Oakland Athletics, has famously said that the playoffs are a crapshoot. How do these tidbits work together? Well, as SI points out and Beane's remark essentially confirms, the best teams in the regular season don't necessarily win the World Series (or by extension, the Super Bowl or Stanley Cup and so on). Just getting into the postseason is all a team needs in order to have the chance at finishing on top of the heap. SI notes that both World Series participants, the Giants and the Royals, were wild cards in the 2014 playoffs.

This means simply that playoffs aren't fair to the better teams. At the highest levels of play anyone can beat anyone else in a short series, especially as overall weaker teams can shorten their benches. It isn't unusual in baseball for example to see a fifth starter relegated to the bullpen to strengthen it for a short run. But over the course of a full season a team can't do that. It must play its whole team. This is what allows the cream to rise: weaknesses of whole teams tend to get exposed over time. These weaknesses can be hidden in short term events such as playoffs.

On another front, the effect of mere hot streaks, momentum, are generally ameliorated during the regular season. One might win several games in a row, even 10 or 12, but that by itself won't power a team into the playoffs. Such a run in the postseason, even a lesser run such as 11-3 (which would win a baseball World Series) can win championships. By rights, then, they ought to be dismissed as merely lucky when scored against superior opponents.

If sports are supposed to be about fairness and the best team winning, if they are supposed to instruct both participants and the broader society in good sportsmanship and in recognizing and accepting that competition means separating the wheat from the chaff and that there should be no jealousy among us in accepting that, then they need to reassess the idea of playoffs. As Sparky Anderson said, the best team in baseball is the team with the best regular season record and not necessarily the World Series winner.

Playoffs hinder rather than build character and mettle. It's the long haul which creates those virtues in a person. If sports wish to teach society that, they need to instill them within their systems of play. Anything less, and less is what we've got now, is nothing more than bilking people out of their cash with an artificial excitement. Such bread and circuses will only make a nation soft. Both our athletics and ourselves will be weakened.

Playoffs are a Joke

The Philadelphia Flyers pulled out an amazing comeback against the Boston Bruins in the NHL playoffs, becoming only the third team to rally from a three games to none deficit to win a hockey playoff series. Do you know what that means?

It is yet another demonstration that playoffs are a joke. They are intended as nothing more than money grabs by the powers that be in the sports world.

We now are faced with the unreasonable spectacle of the seventh and eighth seeded teams, in the Eastern Conference of the NHL alone, playing for a shot at the Stanley Cup. That once supreme symbol of team dominance in sport is tarnished by this sort of competitive tragedy.

Not only are the Montreal Canadiens and the aforementioned Flyers the weakest teams in their conference, neither would have even made the playoffs had they played in the West. There were three Western Conference squads with better records, and one with an equal record. How fair can anyone claim playoffs to be when at least three better teams didn't even have a chance to show their stuff?

This is not to take anything away from Montreal, who ended the seasons of the first and third best teams in their conference, or Philadelphia per se. They won their games legitimately enough. But they never should have been there to participate. There were better squads on the outside looking in.

True, in the the West the number one and two seeds are playing. Yet that has happened for only the sixth time in the NHL since 1994. In short, generally speaking, after a grueling regular season the higher ranked teams regularly do not get the opportunity to play for a Cup. An opportunity that their dominance in the regular season should have earned them.

At the highest levels of play in any sport, any team can win a short series. When lesser teams even at that strata do, however, it lessens the importance of the long run. It moves competition from overall mettle into a leap at short term gains. That does not improve the aura of a championship. It diminishes it.

What the NHL has is a Stanley Cup Tournament, not an NHL Championship. They should at least have the decency to call it that. It would be better to simply seed all 32 teams and let each one have a crack at the Cup than to waste all the time they do on a meaningless regular season.

Playoffs: unfair and unsportsmanlike

We are well into the college football season yet only a week or two into the annual BCS, Bowl Championship Series, rankings of the highest caliber teams in the top division of the sport. Their purpose is to establish a 'true' national champion within the college football world. Sadly it is, like most systems of playoffs for top honors, much ado about nothing.

To begin with, playoffs really don't prove who is the better team. At the highest levels of play anybody can beat anybody else on any given day, particularly in a short series let alone one game at a time. BCS schemes only make matters worse, by factoring in noncompetitive aspects of the game. If games are to mean anything at all then all we should do is see what happens on the field or in the arena. Strength of schedule, and such as that, are ultimately subjective. They are useless in determining who ought to play who when.

But more than that. Playoffs are inherently unfair to any participant. If the better team wins, so what? They should have won. If the worse team wins, again, so what? On one day and one day only they outplayed a superior rival. It happens; yet when it does, the lesser squad is still the lesser squad, and they gain acclaim beyond their actual ability.

The bottom line is, paraphrasing former Detroit Tigers and Cincinnati Reds manager Sparky Anderson: the best team isn't necessarily the team which wins the World Series. It's the team with the best record after the regular season. This applies to all sports; it is the long haul rather than one series or one game which really lets us see who's the best in their field. Short series only offer false excitement. They do not truly measure the mettle and grit of a team.

Cabrera Should Sit Out this One

Detroit Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera has purchased himself a bit of bad publicity recently. During the wee hours of Saturday morning October 3rd, he sat around sharing a few drinks with members of the Chicago White Sox, whom the Tigers were playing that weekend. Upon arriving home a few hours later there was an altercation with his wife which led to the police being called to their home. The slugger was taken in, team President Dave Dombrowski was called to pick up Cabrera from the police station as he was too inebriated then to drive himself somewhere, and that seems to be that as no charges are being filed against anyone.

In the meantime the Tigers ended their regular season schedule tied with the Minnesota Twins and are forced to play a one game playoff this afternoon in Minneapolis. It is a game which Cabrera ought not play.

Surely, though, that will not happen. After all, this is a big time sports event, which somehow makes it more important than issues of world peace, health care, and social security, to name a few questions one would like to believe more critical to our well being than a simple sporting match. And nothing wrong with hoisting a few with your buddies, after all. Further, Cabrera has not been charged with anything, so there should be no repercussions based on that either.

Well, maybe. Still, hanging out with the opposition during the course of a late season critical series can be argued as detrimental to your team. Friendship might ease any sense of having to perform your best against the visitors. Then, too, there's still the instance of a domestic altercation of some sort. While it may not lead to legal troubles it nevertheless happened, and some kind of message ought to be sent that such behavior reflects on the team whether you care to admit it or not.

Ryan Raburn should play first today and Cabrera should sit it out. It would signal that certain behaviors are at least frowned upon by the Tigers while rewarding a bench player like Raburn for his good production this past season. It may even teach Cabrera something about his duty to his family and, to an admittedly lesser extent, his teammates.

But, again, that won't happen. Sports are judged in a separate court from the rest of the world. We see that kangaroo in action every day.