Monday, June 30, 2014

Ann Coulter may be on to something

Before I even start let's be clear: Ann Coulter is a troll.  She is humanity, allegedly, at its most venal and corrupt.  It is important for you to understand this to be my opinion of that person.
It is important for you to know that because that is exactly why I believe Coulter might be on to something when she somehow associates the rising popularity of soccer with increasing "moral decay" in the Good Ol' US of A.  (And you should know by now I will not link to that kind of garbage; I'm assuming you've probably heard of it already.)
Here's the deal: soccer actually does, in a way, buck several trends that have usually been associated with the more typical sporting passions that claim popularity in this country.  My evidence is purely experiential and anecdotal; I completely acknowledge this and make no claims for any kind of scientific veracity.  But I see what I see, and that is all I can do.
Around three years ago I went to the first MLS match at Sporting Park in Kansas City, Kansas (it still had the "Livestrong" name attached to it at that point; this was before Lance Armstrong's full and total flameout).  It was SRO.  The franchise had been playing nothing but road matches at that point for weeks (electing not to return to the minor-league baseball park that had previously been their home), and finally getting to cut the ribbon on their new grounds was both relief and windfall for the club.  The match, with the Chicago Fire, ended scoreless, despite several strong runs and crazy long passes and shots that juuuuuust missed.
I spent most of the match walking around, enjoying views not obstructed except for my lack of height (as well as a pretty decent barbecue spot) and generally being surprised by everything.  That experience also formed my first "well...huh" observation about soccer in these here United States:
1) It was the most diverse crowd I had ever seen at a major-league level sporting event, live or televised.
This is not to say that MLB or NFL crowds are lily-white; it is to say that the Sporting crowd defied that particular duality in its diversity.  I did not see any identifiably Native American folk in the crowd, but that's about all that was missing.  Remember, we're talking about Kansas City here, smack-in-the-middle Kansas City.  Where were these crowds at Royals games or Chiefs games?  Also important here is a secondary point:
1a) This diversity of people came to the match together, or at least met at Sporting Park and hung out together at the game.  Baseball games can be diverse, but mostly on a black-white axis and in a more segregated fashion, though not always so and certainly not by compulsion.  I am not smart enough to know whether this is mostly because more of the crowd at baseball games is comprised of family units or if something else is afoot, but such division is usually pretty easy to spot at MLB games, and never more so to me than when at an Atlanta Braves game at Turner Field a couple of months ago.
Possibly a related point:
2) The Sporting Park crowd was young.  I refer to young adults, not children with their parents.  (This was a late start, so I did not expect to see the latter, frankly.)  How much 1, 1a, and 2 relate to and intersect with each other I do not know, but there's something there.
(Note: I haven't been to any MLS matches since moving here, but I have caught a few matches of the local USLPro side Richmond Kickers, and the above points seem to hold at least somewhat in this case as well, allowing for the different demographics of the two cities.)
Stepping away from that Sporting Park eye-opener to another point of a more general nature:
3) This fan base does not particularly care whether the USA has the best national team in the world.

Waiting for the US-Germany match at Power & Light District in KC

Check that: they do want to have the best team in the world, but they know it's not there yet and are hanging on anyway.
Here's where a lot of people get a bit mystified.  We are virtually the only country in the world where American football (you know, the one with the pads and CTE) is played.  Baseball might just be more popular in the Caribbean, Korea, or Japan than it is in the US by now, and it's making surprising headway in Europe, but despite somehow failing to win the World Baseball Classic so far, most would agree that the gravitational center of the sport is still here.  Basketball is about as "American" as a sport can get, in that we actually can point to a place and date and person for its invention in this country; that said, the moment US teams started getting beat at the Olympics we suddenly found it convenient to release NBA stars to play there, insuring that we won't lose another Olympics for quite a while.
We're not winning the World Cup any time soon.  Even the coach gets this.  The US team is certainly better than it's been in a long time and seems to be improving tremendously in recent years, but put us in a regular rotation with Brazil, Argentina, Germany, etc. at their best and we're going to take our beatings.  This does not bother soccer fans in the US, many of whom (traitorous pigs that they are) openly root for other countries, and others of whom get that the US has a long ways to go and are in for the long haul (I place myself here, for what it's worth).
This kind of thing infuriates some people.  They are baffled and angered when thousands of people gather in large public spaces in Chicago or Kansas City or other oh-so-American cities and live and die with each cross or header or save.  That's not American.  What's wrong with them?  
I could (and may yet) write a huge number of posts about the ethical failings of the World Cup and its overseer organization FIFA (an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel, to be sure): the feckless waste of resources on stadiums that will go unused after the Cup is gone; the deplorable state of Brazilian infrastructure ignored in the quest to put up said stadiums; the complicity of ESPN and like media in steadfastly pretending these things are not true and that many Brazilians have not protested these things, just to name a few.  Still, there is something stunning about the way that the sport and its banner event have managed to wear down American resistance and carve out a pretty substantial swath of allegiance and impact not just within my lifetime, but within my adult lifetime.  It's a different demographic, with different ideas about how the world works and a decided lack of interest in perpetuating old stereotypes and rules.
Of course this is going to tick some people off.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Help wanted: understanding "professional" youth baseball

The local minor-league team, the Richmond Flying Squirrels, is an affiliate of the San Francisco Giants.  A few weeks ago, the local fishwrap ran a feature on the Giants' policies concerning the protection of the young pitching arms they hope to have ready to step in if Madison Bumgarner or Matt Cain can no longer carry the load someday.
It is an interesting read from a pure baseball-geek point of view.  For example, the question of pitch counts for young arms isn't a new one.  Most organizations mandate a fairly strict monitoring of the number of pitches a young guy can throw in a game.  This was, however, the first time I'd seen a policy about the number of pitches a pitcher can throw in an inning.  It's not unfounded; there has been a decent bit of research suggesting that pitches thrown under greater stress -- in a tight situation in a game, for example -- take more out of an arm than those thrown in less stressful situations.  An inning where the pitch count has gotten as high as 30 is almost by definition going to include some high-stress pitches.  So all in all that part of the article seems pretty sound.
What got me stressing comes later in the piece.  Bert Bradley, the Giants' minor-league pitching coordinator quoted much in the article, reveals in some of his comments a bit of what's going on among some young ballplayer wannabes and presumably their parents, something that makes me break format for this blog and look not at the fan relationship to sports through faith filters, but to ask questions about those who are more directly participants in the whole enterprise.
For those not following baseball much this year, what's wrong with you?  Aside from that, one of the larger stories in the sport this year is the number of extremely good young pitchers (including the closest thing I have to a man-crush in professional sports) missing in action due to the necessity for Tommy John surgery, a procedure in which a tendon from another part of the body is moved to the arm in order to replace a torn or otherwise damaged ligament there.  It's been enough of a concern to draw a statement from the American Sports Medicine Institute offering a potentially scandalous suggestion to pitchers: don't throw so hard, at least not all the time.

*Sob* *Sniff*

Bradley, in the Richmond article, wonders about two different problems; young players throwing curveballs too young (his response to parents asking about their kids learning such a pitch at age 11 -- "not from me he won't" -- is priceless, and his his advice for a young pitcher not to throw curves until they can shave is pretty cool too) and players playing too much baseball, and specifically pitching too much baseball.
I'm not sure which angle about this phenomenon bothers me most.  Is it the determination that the only thing that matters about your 11-year-old son is that he be groomed for professional baseball?  Or is it doing so in a way that makes the kid less likely to get there?  Or is it the idea of "professionalizing" youth sports?  Having kids pitch so much as ten-, eleven-, or twelve-year-olds that their arms don't ever get to rest?  Somehow this seems to miss the points of kids playing games, you know, playing games.

How long is this arm going to last?

Here's where I have to ask help.  I'm not a parent and won't be one.  Somebody explain to me the appeal of this -- the somewhat "professionalized" baseball travel teams, playing through what used to be called an "offseason," kids throwing so much they end up needing Tommy John surgery before they get out of high school.  What's the appeal?
I was no athlete at any point of my life (everyone who has seen me try is allowed to nod knowingly at this point), but I did put out an effort.  I never much played football, but I did at least try to play basketball or softball in their appropriate seasons (soccer hadn't hit at that point, and hockey had no hold that far south), and moving from one to another was, well, part of the progress of time -- "basketball season" was followed by "baseball season" (or softball for me; I really wasn't good).
So I need the help of you parents.  What is exactly the point of such endeavors?  I'm not being facetious; I really want help understanding the motivation for the perpetual baseball thing.
Is it the kid's choice, or the parents'?
What kind of expenditure is involved, and what is the expected return?  What is the child supposed to get out of it?  What is the benefit to their development as a human being?
And why in the hell would you have your child throwing curveballs at age eleven?  That's been a no-no since I was a kid.
What is the ethic behind this?  What is the developmental thing that can only be gained this way?  What is the gain versus loss versus playing a different sport, or actually getting homework done (or, heck, I don't know, going to church on Sunday? Had to get that one in there, seminary graduate that I now am) or reading a freaking book or who knows what?
So I need comments.  What is the point of making your child's baseball something a lot more like a professional endeavor?  Or is that what it is -- is this really what the child's idea of fun looks like now?