Three Quick Questions
haven't done this in a while...
There’s a lot going on in the sports world at the moment, so let’s try to do another quick roundup of some socialist themes…
Is Major League Baseball Going To Do Something About the Rockies?
Last year, the Chicago White Sox set the record for the worst record in baseball history, losing more games than the hapless 1962 Mets, who set a standard for baseball disasters that many thought could never be topped. But now, not even a year later, the Colorado Rockies are on pace to shatter that record. As of this morning, the Rockies have lost 53 541 games, and we’re barely 40% of the way through the season.
If you can’t do that math, that means Colorado is on pace to lose 133 games this season, or 12 MORE than the dreadful, record-setting White Sox lost last year.2 But as I wrote last year, this is just how baseball works now. Every full season going back to 2018, at least three teams have lost 100 or more games — a distinction that used to be the standard for futility, and would generally only happen once every couple years — while one threatens to set the all-time record.
We usually call this “tanking” or “rebuilding” but I feel like that gives these teams more credit for foresight than they really deserve. It’s hard to see any grand strategy behind what the Rockies or the White Sox are doing. But prior tanking projects by teams like the Astros and Cubs have normalized this kind of ongoing putridity, and now fans have just come to accept historically awful seasons as par for the course.
And this just cannot be good for the long-term health of the game. How many fans in Denver or the South Side of Chicago have been permanently turned off of baseball because their team doesn’t even bother to field a competitive team? And yet, thanks to revenue sharing and local media market monopolies, the owners have a locked-in revenue stream for the short-term. It’s yet another illustration of how the profit incentive for owners is diametrically opposed to the larger interests of society…
Are Individual Athletes Allowed to be Honest?
The French Open concluded over the weekend, and both the Men’s and Women’s Finals had thrilling come from behind victories. But while the Alcaraz/Sinner match was characterized by crisp, thrilling play, the Gauff/Sabalenka was characterized by a lot of uncharacteristic mistakes, and Aryna Sabalenka said as much afterwards:
“...I think I was over emotional. Today I didn’t handle myself quite well mentally. Basically that’s it. I was just making unforced errors. I don’t know. I have to check the statistics. I think she won the match not because she played incredible. Just because I made all of those mistakes, if you look from the outside, from kind of easy balls.”
To be clear, this was definitely true. Sabalenka made 70 unforced errors in the match, and landed less than 50% of her first serves. She looked out of sorts and frustrated for most of the match. And yet Sabalenka was pilloried for these comments, accused of being a sore loser and taking unfair shots at Coco Gauff, to the point that she had to issue a clarifying statement on Instagram the next day.
Initially I wondered if the criticism had something to do with Sabalenka’s gender or nationality, but I honestly think the real issue is something slightly different: Sabalenka works alone. Since tennis is an individual sport, she has no teammates or coaches (at least, no coaches she doesn’t hire herself) or team presidents; she doesn’t really have a boss.
In a team sport, when a player says something “controversial,” it is usually qualified by someone they work with. A coach or a manager or a teammate comes out and says, “Oh, Aryna’s a really emotional player. She has all the respect in the world for Coco, but she was just frustrated with how she played.” If what she said had been really bad, the team might even force her to apologize. But Sabalenka doesn’t have anyone around her like that, so fans got inordinately mad at some rather benign comments.
It’s honestly a clarifying reminder of how offensive an autonomous worker is to a lot of people. In the absence of a real boss, people jump on social media to perform that disciplinary role. The idea of someone who can’t be punished for what they say at work just bothers people THAT MUCH.
Who Should Coach the New York Knicks Now?
The New York Knicks just finished their most successful season of the last 25 years, and promptly fired their head coach, Tom Thibodeau. Thibs had been with the Knicks for five seasons, which is a long time in the lifespan of NBA coaches, but I still have to admit being surprised. He seemed to be well-liked by the players, and I don’t think many fans expected this team to make it past the Easter Conference Finals when the season started. It’s also not clear to me who the Knicks can hire who is any better.3
But there’s an idea that Thibodeau is a “raise the floor” coach who you hire if you’re a team coming off a rough stretch (like, say, a 21-win season and seven straight years of missing the playoffs, as the Knicks were when Thibs was hired in 2020), but that what the Knicks need now is a “raise the ceiling” coach who you hire when you’re one tweak away from winning a title. I’m not sure I agree with that — the Knicks overall talent level seems lower than other elite NBA teams — but the distinction is interesting to me. As I’ve written before, I’m skeptical of how we measure the skills of coaches and managers.
Nevertheless, I don’t think coaching quality is nonexistent. And so what I like about this “raise the floor”/“raise the ceiling” distinction is that it recognizes that coaching quality can be both REAL and CONTINGENT. That is, a coach who is good for one team may not be good for another. More than that, it recognizes that sometimes a coach can be fired through no fault of his own, but just because he stops being the right guy for that team. Which is a nice reminder that losing your job is not some moral failing, and therefore should not be subject to the penalties capitalist society imposes on that situation.
The Rockies went into the ninth inning with a three-run lead last night and still managed to lose…
For the record, Chicago is on pace to lose 110 games AGAIN, which in most years would be historically awful but would be an improvement of 11 wins from last year and ~20 more than this year’s Rockies.
Their reported interest in Jason Kidd is NOT encouraging…