Tuesday 4/2/24
I'm looking at the stats for the Oakland Athletics, and I see that they're at a -27 run differential after five games--which is fairly impressive on the futility front--but it's this error total that is astounding me: 13 errors in five games! That has to be a record, right? Has to be the record for first five games of the season, and it might be a record for any five games. That's Bad News Bears bad. (Or Charlie Brown's "All-Stars.")
I may write something about Larry Luchino, who died today, at seventy-eight. Kind of young. I hadn't realized he was sick. I think he's a very important, and overlooked, person in Boston sports history.
It's not a real record--call it an anecdotal-type of record--but Sidney Crosby clinched his nineteenth season in which he averaged at least a point a game. Now, you can play twenty games and have 21 points and keep this kind of thing going--like I said, it's not an actual stat--but it's pretty damn impressive either way. Crosby matches Gretzky's run, albeit with a lot less points. I think Crosby is one of the dozen best players ever, but he's going to suffer at the hands of McDavid, who will only keep rising and will go down as the most memorable player of a thirty or forty year stretch. Well, allowing that he wins some Cups.
I'll tell you what to me is an even more impressive hockey non-stat stat: Ray Bourque averaged a point a game as a defenseman over thirteen straight years.
Tip: Don't draft a quarterback in the first round of the NFL draft this year. None of these guys will take you where you want to go.
Regarding last night's woman's basketball game between Iowa and LSU: It's the zenith for the sport, but it's also a false-positive zenith. I'm hearing all of this talk about the game growing, and what I believe people mean by that is in terms of fan interest. I don't think that's true. I think you may have more girls getting involved in the sport. Which is good. Playing sports is good for you. Publishing people hate sports, which we'll get into more later, because sports require you to be good at the thing, and you are not handed things you don't earn, and people beat you, and that's how it works, and you are deemed not good enough to keep going. It's a meritocracy that requires ability and effort. That is why publishing people really detest sports. They hate the concept of having to actually be good and compete and prevail that way.
I don't believe there's going to be any increase in terms of fan support with women's basketball. The ratings for this game will come out and I'm sure they'll be the highest ever. They'll be high for as long as Iowa keeps playing this year. But Caitlin Clark will go into the WNBA, and that will kind of be it for her in the sense that she won't be where she is now visibility-wise. People are not going to follow her there.
I heard someone say today that that game last night had such high ratings because games in which there's this animus thing happening--be they women's or men's games--make for the highest ratings. Yeah...that's not true. It's true with women's games, because many people need drama in order to make even a temporary change--like for a night--in their viewing paradigm. High school sort of drama. I'm not saying that's what was going on here with the actual players, but it got presented that way. The point being, the play alone wouldn't bring in those numbers, and that's what this person was saying about men's sports, too, which is dead wrong. People will watch two great men's teams play each other. Two all-timer teams. It's getting late in the NFL season and two teams are both 12-0 and they meet--people are going to watch that, even if there's no personal drama.
It's a bit like women's hockey, but with greater star power (in part due to the nature of the sport). Many of these stories are manufactured stories by newspapers and magazines that are dying, and websites desperate for the almighty click. They all have terrible writers, so no one is going to be interested for what anyone at those venues writes or thinks. There's no talent to be found. So when there's no talent, no insight, no one saying anything smart and new, you have to repeat whatever anyone else is repeating and trying to force these angles with daft high school shit and pom-poms and agenda and manipulation and snake oil and insincerity and being one of the good ones and so forth. We had that big push about the women's pro hockey league, how it was going to be regular viewing for people, etc., and that was just false. What do you hear about it now, weeks later? Nothing, right?
If you're counting on non-game things to sell the game--by which I mean, Black and white (which is wrong, but those who bleat the most about these things are doing the most to make them a thing), "hated" rivals going at it again, Twitter "beefs"--it's not going to work because it won't be sustained. You'll have to invent it and storyline it--which is what wrestling is.
I'll watch people compete at anything when they're committed to it, but that's me, a guy who watches random women's college basketball games on NESN on a January Sunday afternoon or stands with twenty other people at a women's hockey game or, even, stops in at the local hockey rink on the way to the Monument for stair-running to watch a bit of a boys squirt game. The purity of competition. With writing, I'd compete against God if he picked a place and told me what time to be be there, and I don't even care if he brought along Moses and Zeus and the devil to help him out. I'll fucking take them all on. (I'm getting myself excited. Give me a second.) Anyway, I just think that's a very faulty premise, that you need the personal stuff as a rule to get the biggest draws. This Caitlin Clark situation was lightning in a bottle. There were abetting, once-off conditions. I think it's great if some kid sees her play and asks her mom or dad about basketball and joins a league and has a coach and plays and plays hard and has some success and some failures and learns some lessons that will serve her in life. Which is the very best thing that sports can offer.
