You've noticed this, no doubt, but there really are many, many things we talk and write about in sports that have nothing whatsoever to do with reality. Think about how much talk there was this off-season about Cliff Lee pitching for the New York Yankees. There was discussion about it, and concern about it, and excitement about it. The Cliff Lee talk filled up countless talk radio hours, used up a whole lot of newsprint in newspapers across the country, overloaded web servers from coast to coast. The talk was so pervasive, in fact, that it transcended the basic "How good will the Yankees be with Cliff Lee?" conversation and moved on to how unfair the game is that the Yankees, needing starting pitching, can just go out and sign the guy.
Well, of course, Cliff Lee did not sign with the Yankees. And all that talk, all those words, all that computer memory, all them just disappeared into the ether. It wasn't just that the talk was meaningless ... it became entirely empty, like it had never even happened. We live in the era of the Story Mirage. Once Lee signed with the Phillies, all those stories became less than worthless. They became invisible.
And, it seems that invisible talk has become the norm in sports talk. Maybe it was always like this. Sports, thankfully, are so unpredictable that almost everything that is said in advance of a game or an event or a decision are likely to be wrong. The other day, ESPN ran a little segment on Auburn quarterback Cam Newton, and they had probably 10 different NFL GMs talking about him.
And the two things that struck me about what these men were saying was:
1. How utterly meaningless their words sounded. I realize that GMs don't want to reveal their hand, but in this case there's nothing to reveal. Everyone knows that Cam Newton is the No. 1 pick in the draft. And still, these men who have spent their whole lives playing football, studying football, living football, they were saying things like: "He has a great arm," and "He's a terrific athlete." I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that if you got 10 moderate football fans -- and I mean moderate, the sort who watch like three games a year -- they would have said EXACTLY the same things as these NFL GMs were saying, word for word.
2. How they really have no idea how good an NFL quarterback Cam Newton will be.
If NFL general managers who study the game 18 to 20 hours every day don't know, really know, how good the Heisman Trophy winner will be, then how do any of us know anything about anything? And the truth is, we don't know anything about anything. This is obvious in a million ways, but the most obvious of the ways is the "Keys to the Game" the color commentators offer on TV before each game. These keys usually have a goofy title that ties in with the name of the announcer like "Phil-osophy" or "Millen's Mistakes" or something. But, like the NFL GMs on Newton, the keys are almost always either (1) Inane* or (2) Completely wrong.
*Win the turnover battle. ... Get off to a fast start ... Don't settle for field goals ... Run the football ... Stop the run ... Blocking and tackling ... Convert on third down ... Win the battle of field position ... Play with fire ...
Of all the many ways that we talk nonsense about sports, I would say the "How will this team/player react after a tough loss?" question is probably the most nonsensical. Michael Schur and I talked a bit about this on the Poscast -- we talked about how fans and players have very different approaches to the games -- but this struck me again the other day. I heard Charles Barkley talk at length about how he was really curious, REALLY CURIOUS, to see how the Dallas Mavericks would react after blowing a huge lead against Portland in Game 4 of their series.
I thoroughly enjoy Charles Barkley on TV. He makes me laugh, he makes strong points that others seem unwilling to make, he is one of those rare announcers who turns a game on TV into an event. That said: I was stunned to hear him say that bit about how the Mavericks would react. I was stunned to hear it because it was SO MUCH like the studio cliche and SO LITTLE like how Charles Barkley really talks.
Barkley was one of the greatest players in NBA history. He is one of the all-time lancers of pointless pregame cliches. The man announced he wasn't a role model, for crying out loud. And yet, he was curious how the Mavericks would react? Really? Did he actually think that the Dallas Mavericks, who have averaged more than 55 wins a season for a decade, a team of ancient stars like Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Kidd and Shawn Marion and Jason Terry would somehow BE AFFECTED by blowing an NBA lead? There is absolutely no way he could have thought that.
But he said it. And he said it again. And he talked more about it. Apparently something happens to us when we start talking sports. We can't help but create stories in our minds, stories that have nothing to do with reality. Kenny Smith was so taken aback by Barkley's line of thinking that he reminded Barkley how his Rockets twice blew huge playoff leads to Barkley's Suns and still won the series. "What you really think is, 'Wow, it's really easy to get a big lead on them," Smith said, which was a great bit of insight, I think, into the mind of a high-level athlete.
The story has been told over and over and over again in sports. Albert Pujols nuked that homer off Brad Lidge, as crushing a home run as any of the last 50 years ... the Astros won the next game.
Carlton Fisk beat the Reds on one of the most famous home runs in baseball history off the foul pole ... the Reds won the next game.
Jerry West made his legendary 60-foot shot ... the Knicks won in overtime.
The Broncos beat the Browns on the drive ... they lost 39-20 in the Super Bowl.
The Broncos beat the Browns on the fumble ... they lost 42-10 in the Super Bowl.
The 1985 Lakers lost to Boston by 34 in Game 1 of the NBA Finals ... they won the series in six games.
The 1951 New York Giants won the pennant, won the pennant, won the pennant in the most dramatic fashion imaginable and won two of the first three games of the World Series. They promptly lost three in a row.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
Momentum, like experience, like chemistry, like the ability to deliver in the clutch, like so many other vague sports traits we talk about all the time -- hey, I'm not saying that these things do not exist or do not play any role in our games. I'm saying that we talk these things up, again and again, not because of their importance (we don't really know their importance) or because of their significance (they are almost NEVER significant). We talk about them because they make for good talk.
Inevitably, the talk rarely adds up to anything. The Mavericks easily beat the Blazers on Monday night. Nowitzki went for 25, Terry for 20, Kidd handed out 15 assists, Tyson Chandler grabbed 20 rebounds. Not surprisingly, they did not seem shell-shocked or even slightly bothered in the least by what had happened in Game 4. And if you think even a little bit about it, well, of course they weren't.
Circle me, 1991 Chicago Bulls.
ReplyDeleteThis is perhaps tangential to your point that teams maintain their consistent approach regardless of the emotional ups and downs of a season. But it is not hard to build a case that Brad Lidge was never the same after giving up that home run to Albert Pujols.
ReplyDeletei think the main reason barkley said that was because the mavs have a history of faltering: the 2006 NBA Finals, 2007 first-round against the warriors, and they blew a 30-point lead to the lakers in 2004. i think his point was that it would not be out of character if the mavs packed it in and lost the next two games.
ReplyDeleteMomentum is only as good as tomorrow's starting pitcher. - Tom Kelly
ReplyDelete2 thoughts:
ReplyDelete- I've always been amazed at how much of football specifically is exactly what you're talking about - just lots and lots of talk and hot air. I think it's part of the nature of the game: there are only 16 games and they are 7 days apart and then there is 7 months of off-season to fill. As a result, there is a LOT of dead space there that ends up getting filled with a lot of mindless chatter because football is so popular.
- re: NFL GMs not knowing whether a QB will be any good - Malcolm Gladwell did a whole piece on this. Good stuff if you get a chance to read it
Tangential as it may be, Brad Lidge went a perfect 41 for 41 in save opportunities in 2008 as the Phillies won the World Series.
ReplyDeleteAsk Eric Hinske if Lidge was ever the same.
In most of these cases, we are talking about psychology, not ability. And even Sigmund Freud himself once pointed out that psychology is not predictive. In other words, while Freud could take a neurotic adult and trace his issues back to a childhood trauma, he couldn't take a child and predict how (or even if) a childhood trauma would affect him. But we have an entire industry devoted to making predictions (mostly for gambling purposes, whether we are explicit about it or not). Journalist's predictions are like politician's promises in this way. They have to be forgotten, or the system wouldn't work. Staying focused on what might happen means that no one can ever be blamed for what did happen.
ReplyDeleteRemember how great the 1991 WS was? Puckett hits the game winning homer in game 6 followed by Morris' game 7 gem.
ReplyDeleteI think this is about two things: meaning and chance.
ReplyDeleteMeaning--People want sports to mean something. They want it to be about dedication, or about drive, or about a team overcoming obstacles. It's usually just about the player or the team that executes or gets lucky on a given day. But when there is a good guy and a bad guy, a redemption, a comeback--something--there is a story with meaning. People like to have meaning. Sports provides meaning and stories provide meaning. So people like for there to be stories in their sports (and sports in their stories).
Chance--people hate chance. They find it revolting and hard to comprehend. People like to eliminate the chance element in sports, even though it's so dominant. Why did Tiger miss that put? Probably a chance event--he misses lots of puts and this was one of them. People don't like to think that, so they create a story (popping up again) that explains the event in a way not depended upon chance, a way that has meaning. Who will win this upcoming game? Well, it's likely that chance will play a huge roll in it. (As an aside, that's why European soccer fans don't like playoffs--the team with the best record after 38 games is the best teams, playoffs are too often decided by change. That's also why the MLB regular season is so good--it a big enough sample to eliminate the chance element. If you'd in first after 162 games, you're the best team). But we don't like having change play such a big role, so we come up with narrative-centric keys to the game (stay committed to the run; be tougher on the line of scrimmage). People also, because they don't like change, confuse execution with results. Sometimes you can make a good decision--even a great decision--and still have the result go against you. That's why we fire coaches too often.
When people talk about sports, they don't want to talk about chance. They want to talk about stories. So we create stories to talk about.
So Barkley mails it in sometimes (did as a player too). He still gets $$, fame, and front-tow seats - and that's enough for him. Thankfully for us he can be entertaining most of the time.
ReplyDeleteI'd heard, thought saw few comment on, the reason Cliff Lee went back to the Phillies was for his son to continue to receive treatment at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia.
ReplyDeleteIf more people knew that, you would think there's be less criticism in some circles about his decision.
The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.
ReplyDelete—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
Momentum happens DURING a game, not after it. People want to think they can predict the outcome.
ReplyDeleteYou started off talking about so many sports stories are about what could happen or what people think will happen. I blame ESPN for this. (The Every Speculation and Prediction Network) It seems that most of their time is devoted to questions and speculations as they talk about what could happen and tease you about when they will tell you more, like a weatherman. Even the "Coors light cold hard facts" are actually speculative questions.
Show me more of what did happen. Talk about that. I found out about where Cliff Lee went when he signed. I did not need 3 months of Rachel Nichols standing outside Brett Favre's home for 3 consecutive off seasons. I don't like hearing "sources" say that a trade is complete on Monday, That the player will not be traded on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then have him traded to a different team on Thursday.
I still love me some Baseball Tonight, but I can't watch most of the other speculations and scoop oriented drivel.
I think momentum is big for Lidge actually. His hot starts snowball into success. It's fascinating to watch. But I agree with the overall sentiment.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as a Philadelphian I'd like to add 4th and 26 to things that meant nothing.
My wife harasses me whenever I get off the phone with my father because we mostly talk about the Red Sox. She'll say, "So, have you recently been hired by the Red Sox and I don't know about it?"
ReplyDeleteOr, "Hey coach, who are you having pitch tonight?"
She thinks we're essentially talking about nothing. And, I guess we are.
Pre-game shows during football season are a joke. Most of the time is spent predicting how the games will go. The game is coming on next, let's just watch it and enjoy it, you know? I guess some of this has to do with betting, but for people who don't bet the whole thing is a drag.
ReplyDeleteChance is just a mirage. If you know all the data, and you know how to interpret the data, then you can predict the outcome.
ReplyDeleteOur minds are finite, so we attempt to predict what is coming next. And we're usually pretty good at it. We anticipate every step we take (literally, the step). And we get surprised when we stumble.
But do these "intangibles" really affect the outcome of the game. Of course they do. Anybody who has played any sport knows that if you don't give some effort, you cannot win. In the NBA playoffs, you can be pretty sure that both teams are giving near maximum effort. In other words, at that level; these intangibles are a given.
Every sporting event has relevant story threads behind them that effect the outcome. Every sporting event has major elements that allow one to predict the outcome more accurately. Do not expect people to appear on television and to divulge these things to the public for free. These things are worth money. So, what we get instead, is the illusion that we are told relevant facts and stories. Despite that we've seen failure after failure watching free advice, we continue to believe that the next presentation will contain something valuable.
ReplyDeleteI think the best example of the "invisible sports talk" is the mock draft. How many words are written every year before the NFL draft (and I suppose NBA and NHL and MLB drafts) every year? And immediately after the first few picks and all the mock drafts have gone up in smoke (like my NCAA bracket), all those words become invisible. Of course, the next day all the writers have to give letter grades for how well each team did in the draft, which is almost as pointless.
ReplyDeleteThis is fascinating, Joe! It reminds me of what you talked about a couple of weeks ago in your Duane Kuiper story, calling yourself a "prisoner of narrative." I think that perhaps these narratives, or talk, are the result of our driving need to express, somehow, the human experience, both individual and collective. (Or give meaning to it, as Hartzdog said.) Sports seem like both an element and a microcosm of this human experience, and so provide great fodder for discussions of this sort. Of course, some of these narratives are more interesting or more trite than others; but perhaps they all come from the same source? I'm not sure, but I do think it's interesting. Thanks for inspiring some thought and procrastination on my part. Hopefully I haven't twisted your or Hartzdog's words.
ReplyDeleteJR
I think Poz is trying to say that the talent and the professionalism of the athlete is going to trump the emotional in the case of a catastrophic loss.
ReplyDeleteAnd that seems like a very reasonable statement to make. I'm an Astros fan, after all, and knew that Game 6 of the '05 NLCS was in the bag because Oswalt was starting.
Personally, I think it might not be unreasonable to talk about the mental state of a player in a solitary sport like golf or tennis. But given, again, the professionalism and the talent, it seems almost impossible that *all* the individuals on any given team would simultaneously lose their edge.
Yet it's not hard to think of a counterexample at all. Think the '88 Athletics and a certain home run hit off their ballyhooed closer by a certain injured Dodger.
Same problem with early presidential preference polls. These polls have almost never correctly predicted the eventual winner, but they get oodles of attention from the newsies. Blah.
ReplyDeleteIsn't your Browns-Broncos example disproving what you're saying? The Browns lost a heart-breaking game on The Drive, and the next year fumbled away the game on The Fumble. Then the Broncos crushed the Browns in the playoffs in 1989, too. I'm not saying there's any correlation whatever because I don't believe in game-to-game momentum either, but I could easily see some blowhard using the Browns' futility against the Broncos *after* The Drive to prove that The Drive destroyed the psyche of the Browns players.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything you wrote, but it just seemed like a curious example, especially since the examples are cherry-picked to begin with.
In defense of all this talk about nothing, what the heck else am I going to pay attention to? Dancing with the Stars?
ReplyDeleteJeff Capel made his half-court runner... they lost to UNC in double overtime.
ReplyDeleteThis is honestly why I don't watch ESPN or pregame shows on other networks or whatever. You get maybe, MAYBE one relevant fact about matchups or instance of useful statistical analysis. The rest is just examining meaningless junk. I read smart blogs that actually try to analyze data or those that don't take things too seriously. The rest are playing to audiences other than me, the people who want to fire off even more ignorant opinions than are in the ignorant commentary.
ReplyDeleteAs betting has been mentioned a couple of times in the comments . . . I'd reckon the people LEAST likely to listen to the pre-game punditry would be those making a serious wager.
ReplyDelete— Graphite
I just that rings true for the Canucks who blew a 3-0 series lead heading into tonight's game
ReplyDeleteInteresting you mention momentum, because just after the Sabres lost Game 6 to the Flyers, someone asked Ryan Miller about momentum between period. And he had to take a moment to correct the reporter to say that momentum is a physics term, that it doesn't exist in sports. He said confidence is the right word.
ReplyDeleteIt was amusing for a few reasons, mostly because Miller went out of his way to make that clarification (after a tough loss, to boot).
n - Brad Lidge did have a fantastic 2008, but followed that with a 7.21 ERA and 11 blown saves in 2009. I would hardly same that makes him back. He had a 5.28 ERA in 2006, the year after the shot. I would say that he hasn't been the same since the shot and that 2008 was an anomaly.
ReplyDeleteHey Joe! Who do you have the Chiefs taking in the third round of the draft?
ReplyDeleteNice one, Adrian. I like it.
ReplyDeleteJoe, I think you have one of the most intelligent and thoughtful followings on the internet. I look forward to your posts not only to read your writing, but to enjoy the comments from my fellow readers. This is the kind of thing the internet is suppose to be for, I think. :D
ReplyDeleteAlso: PLEASE give your thoughts on Tressel for the next post. As an undergrad at Ohio State, I am few and far between in my belief that Tressel should be fired immediately.
ReplyDelete