Unwise words

In the NFL it is the players on the field who take, in the course of sixteen or more games per season plus practices, a huge number of physical blows, some of them (quite a lot in some cases) inflicting roughly the same force as a car wreck on their bodies.

So why, at the risk of a "too soon" joke, are the owners increasingly the ones acting as if they've been hit in the head too many times?

First it was Jerry Jones, noted loudmouth, who had to walk back some ill-advised comments calling "absurd" the very idea that getting repeatedly hit in the head over so many years could possibly have anything to do with brain trauma. While John Mara of the New York Giants tried to strike a sane tone in comments suggesting that the NFL really needed to deal with the issue, the balance shifted back this week with leaden words from Jim Irsay of the Baltimore Indianapolis Colts. Irsay, attempting the subtle and difficult craft of analogy, ended up suggesting to a radio audience that playing football somehow carried about the same kind of health risk as ... taking aspirin.

Clank.

Fortunately, there are people capable of calling foolishness foolishness, even at jock-factory ESPN. Actually, this may be a case where the pervasive ex-jock culture of that network is an advantage; people who remember what it was like had no trouble coming up with an appropriate measure of outrage at the cloddish hatefulness of such remarks -- not to mention family members of people who ended up with long-term damage from all that aspirin head-to-head contact. (It really is worth working your way through several of the videos in that sequence.) Louis Riddick and Jerome Bettis have some choice words for NFL ownership, in which Bettis acknowledges some modification of his playing style might have happened if he'd known then what he knows now. Mike Golic of the ESPN "Mike and Mike" radio show practically blows a gasket at Irsay's dumb remarks. Former Colts center Jeff Saturday was more measured in his comments, evidently trying not to throw his former owner under the bus, but also admitting that he had recently undergone an examination to find ... well, whatever can be found at this point and enlisting his wife to monitor his behavior and condition for, presumably, the rest of his life.

Given such sentiments, it's no surprise that current Lions player DeAndre Levy also jumped on Irsay's comments, questioning where Irsay might have gotten such expertise. Others have also noted Irsay's own checkered past, including being caught driving drunk in the past.

For this blog, what such sentiments expressed so carelessly demonstrate is a point I've made often, and one perhaps that needs to be made more. I have expressed the concern that for a sports fan, one's "participation" in chosen sports is not without a kind of ethical liability. It isn't really possible to flip on the game on Sunday, or buy that jersey or spring for tickets, without in effect being party to whatever harms are visited on the physical participants in the game. In that light being ignorant about such harms is an irresponsible and untenable ethical position.

I went to two spring training games in Bradenton, Florida earlier this week. The Pittsburgh Pirates hosted first the Baltimore Orioles and then the Minnesota Twins Sunday and Monday. Thankfully, I didn't see any notable injuries in either game. It could have happened; even in spring training guys can get hurt and hurt badly. Generally, though, players recover from such injuries. Severe arm injuries can put a pitcher out for a year or more, after surgery; nonetheless, it usually doesn't end a career the way it used to do.

Even so, that bum arm generally doesn't irreparably destroy that player's future quality of life.

It's getting harder and harder to say that about football-related brain trauma, where studies keep suggesting that about a third of people who play football (pro or not) are going to come away with some form of debilitating neurotrauma.

But that point has been made, by me and others.

What is becoming clear is that, at least in the case of the NFL (and do you really think the NCAA is doing any better?), the people who profit from this level of physical damage have very little interest in mitigating that damage at all. Irsay's comments, also including the assertion that players know what they're getting into if they play football, have more or less the effect of Pilate washing his hands of what happens to that two-bit Galilean rabbi -- nice dramatic gesture, but the crucifixion still happened on Pilate's watch and with his name on it.

These guys don't give a s--t. And they, even more than the players, are the ones enriched by your ticket purchases and souvenir buys and cable or extra packages. To participate in the enrichment of the NFL power structure is to keep company with some of the sleasiest people in the USA.

As the saying goes, bad company ruins good morals. Or, as it used to be put back where I grew up, if you lay down with the dogs you're gonna get up with fleas.

Getting itchy yet?

He'll spend the rest of his life watching for telltale signs and being monitored.

I'm guessing he won't be the only one.

Everybody knows now

Apparently this has a chance to be a thoroughly contentious off-season for the NFL in ways that go beyond the quarterback carousel.

In the wake of last week's seemingly inadvertent admission of a football-CTE link by an NFL official, and with research suggesting brain trauma was far more widespread among non-NFL veterans than previously believed, folks connected to the NFL are not keeping their thoughts to themselves.

Exhibit 1: John Mara, owner of the New York Giants, not only acknowledged the admission of the previously denied football-CTE link (although somehow claiming that the admission wasn't new), but declared that link to be teh most important issue the NFL faces, adding "and I don't think anything else comes close." Mara acknowledged the research indicating CTE in 32% of a sample of non-NFL football players in making his statement.

Exhibit 2: Kevin Turner, a former University of Alabama and NFL player who had been particularly active in supporting the settlement reached between the NFL and a large body of former players suffering from brain trauma-related maladies, died today after his six-year struggle with ALS.

Exhibit 3: Bruce Arians, coach of the Arizona Cardinals, has apparently had enough and decided it is time to end this whole foolishness once and for all. You're one of those parents who doesn't want your child playing football? You're a fool. Mr. Arians (and that is more respect than you deserve), there are worse things than being a fool. There is, for example, being a damned fool. And you, sir, are a damned fool. And yes, I am using that word theologically. This after Dallas Cowboys owner and noted intellect Jerry Jones declared "absurd" any notion that football could possibly have anything to do with concussions or CTE or any harm to his lil' ol' players, later attempting to walk his remarks back to the now-discredited position that "more research is needed."

Exhibit 4: Of course, Arians's employers had their credibility taken down several more notches today by the New York Times. You might remember the careers of, say, Steve Young and Troy Aikman, two of the top quarterbacks of the 1990s. You might also remember that both of them suffered a series of rather frightening concussions, career-ending in Young's case. Somehow those rather famous and highly-documented concussions never made it into the much ballyhooed report the NFL issued in 2003, declaring that (much like Jones above) football and brain trauma were unrelated. As a side note, the Times also documented that during that period of the NFL's history, quite a few of their owners and executives decided that it was a good idea to get advice from the same people who made Big Tobacco the moral exemplar of American goodness and decency that they are today. More than a few people have compared the NFL's moral compass in the brain-trauma era to to that of Big Tobacco or, more recently, the fossil fuel industry. Well, that might have been more true than anyone realized. Wonder if we'll find out that they've also consulted with attorneys for Exxon-Mobil as well.

Exhibit 5: Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly apparent to NFL players that nobody else -- not the NFL, not the NCAA at an earlier stage, and certainly not football fans -- is going to look out for their interests, so they'd damned well better start looking out for themselves. The latest to start speaking out is DeAndre Levy, a linebacker for the Detroit Lions. Whie in injury rehab last season, Levy started to look around and do that dangerous thing called "thinking."  Then he started asking questions. Really good questions. Questions about why the NFL continues to emply some of the most discredited and frankly reprehensible representatives of the hardcore denialist era of the NFL. This isn't Levy's first time speaking up on the issue of brain trauma, nor is he necessarily the first to question the continuing presence of those hardcore denialists in the NFL (and as a side note, it turns out that some current NFL players actually did go see the movie Concussion.) This is the only thing that is going to get any movement at this point. Owners, despite Mara's protestations, are still going to put their interests first, and fans clearly aren't going to do a damned thing. Players are going to have to look out for themselves. Some, like Chris Borland, will decide it's not worth the risk; some, like Levy, will choose to stick around, at least for a few years. But nobody else is going to give a damn for the current guys on the gridiron, so it is absolutely right and good for the players to start demanding a seat at the table, along with the suffering former players, survivors of deceased former NFL players, and the parents of those kids who die playing football.

Exhibit 6: The Onion is still on the case.

This could be an active off-season indeed.

Steve Young in 1999 (one among many); and...

Troy Aikman...several times. 

But not if you read that 2003 NFL report on how football doesn't cause concussions.

They played baseball today

They played baseball in Havana today.

That's not really that unusual. They play a lot of baseball in Havana and other parts of Cuba, and have for a very long time.

The unusual part is who the "they" in question was: the Tampa Bay Rays.

Yep, the Rays, who probably don't even qualify as the Greater Tampa Bay Area's Team (that would probably be the stinking New York Yankees) represented Major League Baseball in an exhibition game against the Cuban National Team in Havana's Estadio Latinoamericano. For the record, the Rays won 4-1 (and yes, the game was preceded by a minute of silence for the victims of the terrorist attacks in Brussels earlier in the day).

While I expressed a few weeks ago a general aversion to the blending of politics and sports (whether it be politicians pronouncing football "soft" or racists baiting high school athletes with the name of said politician, or much larger cases such as the Olympics being hosted by a country that turned around and invaded its neighbor a week or two later), and I hold to that opinion. Things get different, however, in the realm of diplomacy and sports.

It's been around for quite a while. If you've ever paid attention to the quadrennial World Baseball Classic and wondered how some of those European countries have any kind of baseball tradition at all, you can thank the quasi-diplomatic efforts of the US after World War II. Japan was introduced to the game even before that war. In my lifetime one of the first examples of US-China exchange in the 1970s, paving the way for Nixon to go to China, was a visit to China by the US's international table-tennis team, an event immortalized by the term "ping-pong diplomacy." In 1988 the NBA's Atlanta Hawks made a trip to the Soviet Union (as it still was at the time), at a time in which tensions between countries were running fairly high (before the Iron Curtain started to fall).

And of course there was a previous baseball excursion to Cuba. In 1999 the Baltimore Orioles traveled to Havana for a game against the Cuban National Team, an event reciprocated by a rematch in Baltimore later that summer. That was a rather different affair, much more a private effort of Orioles owner Peter Angelos than any kind of concerted diplomatic affair.

Not this time. Baseball and diplomacy were deployed hand-in-hand, or perhaps hand-in-glove.

Both President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry were at the game, along with a retinue of other diplomats, following up on recent moves towards the normalization of relations between the two countries. (They were able to stay at an American embassy in Havana, something that didn't exist in 1999.) Cuban President Castro was also there, apparently caught on camera in a half-hearted attempt at "the wave" during the game. Major League Baseball also brought along plenty of its own heavy hitters (so to speak), including commissioner Rob Manfred, former Yankees manager Joe Torre and shortstop Derek Jeter, and Cuban-born longtime Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant, who threw out one of the ceremonial first pitches along with a long-time Cuban star.

The Rays were chosen late last year for the trip from among a number of MLB teams who expressed interest, reportedly including the Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox (both of whom have Cuban defectors on their rosters, the infamous Yasiel Puig for the Dodgers and Rusney Castillo for the Red Sox). This followed a visit to the island by several MLB players including Puig and Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw last fall.

The diplomats and MLB each had their own aims for this trip. While the US leadership was seeking both to advance relations and push Cuba away from the general repressiveness of the regime, MLB was interested in loosening the strictures that cause Cuban baseball players to undergo dangerous and unsanctioned journeys out of Cuba in order to play in MLB.

One such player, Dayron Varona, was with the Rays for this trip. Varona is an interesting case. Unlike more famous players such as Puig or Yoennis Cespedes of the New York Mets, Varona hasn't exactly hit it big in MLB. He's in the Rays' camp this spring as a non-roster invitee, and hasn't played above Class AA ball in the US. He's not very likely to make the Rays' roster this year, although he could gain a mid-season promotion if he does well in the minors.

Had it been up to the Rays' leadership Varona might not have made the trip. The choice to bring Varona along (and to have him in the starting lineup) was apparently instigated by Rays players, according to their manager Kevin Cash. Even the usual starting right fielder, Steven Souza Jr., was apparently o.k. with the move.

The Rays, I think, turned out to be an interesting and inspired choice for the trip. They are one of the youngest teams in MLB, both chronologically (they only began play in 1998, a year before the Orioles' Cuba trip) and in terms of roster and even leadership, both on the field (Cash is the youngest manager in MLB) and front office, where owner Stu Sternberg isn't that old himself. It's hard not to wonder how much that influcenced the Rays' apparent eager embrace of the trip, well beyond the usual public-relations work of holding a baseball clinic for kids in Havana.  Maybe a team of older players with longer memories of US-Cuba conflict might have been less eager to get into the trip. If reports are at all accurate it seems MLB might have hit the jackpot when the Rays got selected from that random drawing.

Of course, the game is over now, and the Rays back to Port Charlotte for the rest of spring training. What happens from here? Who knows? Presumably diplomatic initiatives will continue, whether in such public fashion or more quietly. People who oppose any contact with Cuba will continue to make those noises, without any explanation of why doing the same thing that hasn't dislodged the Castro regime for fifty years is suddenly going to work now (or for that matter why China should not be similarly ostracized), simply expecting the world to remain hostage to their grievances. Probably some players will continue to defect from Cuba in the meantime, as long as the economic embargo remains in place (since the Cuban league is an arm of the state and all players are under contract to it, an MLB team can't sign a Cuban player without some cut of the pay going to the Cuban government, thus violating the embargo).

Meanwhile, MLB may continue to work towards more involvement in youth baseball in Cuba, and I'd be very surprised if another team doesn't make the trip to Havana during next year's spring training. There may well be another goodwill trip with more MLB players, possibly including other Cuban defectors, this next off-season.

For myself, in this case, maybe a baseball game was a means toward a hopeful end. If it might help two nations get to the point where they hate each other a little less, I'd say that's a good thing. I have a feeling some people disagree. I don't want those people in my life. If some enmity in the world can be reduced, that seems like a Christlike thing to do.

And if a ballgame can help towards that end, so much the better.

And frankly, given the other events of the day, a hopeful baseball game sounds even better.

Dayron Varona of the Rays is embraced by family members upon his return to Cuba.

32%

Most people have heard of the Mayo Clinic. Between its locations in Minneapolis and Jacksonville it has acquired a reputation for being one of the premier hospitals in the nation.

As many such premier hospitals do, Mayo Clinic has an active research arm, with research ongoing in many areas of medicine and health.

It turns out that includes CTE. And people are not going to be happy about the results of this one.

In their study of 1,721 brains in their own brain bank, 66 turned out to belong to young men who had reported playing contact sports in their youth or young adult years -- i.e. through high school, maybe some college, but no pro sports. No former NFL players here.

The Mayo researchers were operating with a pretty broad definition of "contact sports" -- football, of course, but also boxing, wrestling, rugby, baseball (!), basketball (!!) and others played while in high school.

Two surprises: No mention of soccer, although that might be included among the "others," and no mention of hockey. It might also be among the "others," or it might be that the fact that the study was conducted at Mayo's Jacksonville campus might have steered fewer high school hockey players to the brain bank. 

Of those 66 young men (apparently no young women were found; again, wondering about the absence of soccer, but you would have thought basketball might have showed up), 21 were found to have the telltale tau deposits that mark CTE. That represents about 32% of the brains attached to a record of contact sports during youth.

As a control group, 198 brains (three times the number of brains from the contact-sports group) were selected, age-matched to brains from the contact-sports group, but with no participation in youth contact sports indicated. (This group included both men and women). Of this group, however, 33 (half the size of the contact-sports group) did record incidents of single-incident traumatic brain injury (TBI), with falls, assaults, domestic violence, and car accidents. Of this sample of 198 brains, including the 33 TBI cases, the total number of brains showing CTE was zero.

Not the percentage, 0.1% or anything like that. No brains from that group showed CTE. None. Zeeeee-ro.

Of the contact-sports group, some of those brains were attached to diagnoses of Alzheimer's disease or similar disorders, but none of these brains had been identified with any claim or suggestion of CTE. Not all of that group had reported any symptoms of any such disease before death. We're not talking about persons for whom any CTE-based red flags had been raised, in other words.

Another note: maybe the most useful part of the Mayo Clinic's own report of this research is possibly the inclusion of an illustration that shows how the tau deposits associated with CTE differ from such deposits associated with Alzheimer's disease. There is a difference, and it is identifiable. Doctors have not been confusing the two when analyzing all these football-player brains posthumously.

This is new research in this area, based on brain bank-archived tissue rather than self-reported or self-selected cases, more typical of the research program at Boston University that seems to drop a new former NFL player with CTE on us every few months. What is perhaps startling is that the percentage of CTE-affected cases -- 32% -- is pretty strikingly similar to the percentage of cases of brain trauma the NFL expects to be found among players after their careers (this was before Monday's admission of a link between football and CTE by the league's chief safety officer, so only diseases like Alzheimer's or ALS are counted there).

It's hard to imagine this will be the last such study. This is of course is an ethical problem of sorts, in that it relies on continuing brain trauma in order to make such studies possible or viable. But scientists need verification and duplication of research results in order to make any confident claims about their results.

Question: do we non-scientists have to adhere to the same standard?

This study was published and reported this past fall. It got a bit of new notoriety this week in the wake of the roundtable in which the NFL's safety guy let slip an admission I don't really think he meant to make. The NFL, in the days since, has gone back and forth over whether that claim was going to be accepted for real or not. But perhaps the most striking part of that event, other than the NFL's loose lips, was in remarks from another source.

Dr. Walter Koroshetz is the director of the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke. In the wake of the Mayo Clinic research and other such reports, Koroshetz expressed concern for what seemed like a greater incidence of CTE in non-professional athletes than had previously been expected.

"That's what keeps me up at night," Dr. Koroshetz said in an interview, expressing concern about research seeming to indicate a greater prevalence of CTE among the amateur athletes of the country. Acknowledging that this expanded research is still at an early stage (one wonders why it took so long?), he noted that to see such results at such an early stage was cause for concern, and makes it all the more urgent to get answers on how the disease develops and why it develops in some and not others.

Dr. Koroshetz is a highly placed individual in the world of neuroscience, perhaps the most high-ranking such official to weigh in on the subject. For every Koroshetz, though, there is still some (willfully?) misinformed individual (such as the VCU chair quoted in this article, who gets refuted by Koroshetz) who somehow wants to claim that we must force kids to play football or else they'll all get obese (yes, I'm exaggerating, but my statement has about as much relevance to and coherence with the current state of the research as his does) -- seriously, has he never heard of running or swimming or tennis? When actual physicians are consistently being so inaccurate in their public statements (people who actually do the research are well beyond the idea that CTE is the result strictly of concussions, and even simpletons like myself can grasp this one) it's little wonder that fewer people grasp the potential trouble indicated by these new rounds of research.

And that's why I'll have to keep shouting into the void. The ethical grotesqueries cannot be limited to the NFL for long, folks. Being caught unawares is no excuse.

Image credit: Mayo Clinic. At left, tau deposits (brown) in a brain with CTE. Right: tau in an Alzheimer's brain. The deposits seem more widespread in the Alzheimer's brain, but are located more deeply in the CTE brain and affect the "white matter" of the brain as opposed to only the "gray matter" in the Alzheimer's brain.

Loose lips

"Loose lips sink ships."

It is unlikely that the unexpected admission, by an NFL official, of a link between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) will actually "sink" the NFL. It might, however, sink the career of the person who uttered two seemingly simple words.

"Certainly, yes."

These words from Jeff Miller, the NFL's senior vice president for health and safety, are pretty thunderous for a league that has not only steadfastly refused to acknowledge even the possibility of such a link but has worked very hard to control research on the subject and the funding for it.

We actually have to give credit to a member of Congress, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), for shaking loose the admission from Miller, though I doubt even Rep. Schakowsky expected such an admission. Now that it's out, the potential repercussions are already starting to unfold.

It took very little time at all for a representative for the NFL Players' Association to hustle into court to file a contention in the ongoing court settlement between the NFL and NFLPA over brain trauma. While the NFL had agreed to settle on such illnesses as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, it had steadfastly refused to include CTE in any settlement. With the NFL having now gone on public record acknowledging such a connection (and they have already gone on record not rebuffing the statement), it's going to be pretty hard (though not necessarily impossible) to sustain such a position in that lawsuit.

I'm also interested in some of the other, more obscure implications of this bit of revelation. It's been six years since the process of lawsuits over brain trauma began. This of course followed the revelation of CTE in a number of deceased former football players over many years, starting with the 2002 death of Mike Webster (with more such revelations even after the suits were well underway, as recently as Super Bowl week). The Players' Association has long been convinced that the NFL did not have the best interests of the players -- past, present, or future -- at heart, and this bit of admisstion will most likely confirm that suspicion.

The implications won't be limited to the NFL, either. Already college football representatives were at the event where Miller's comments came out, and the NCAA won't be able to deflect the connection very well in the wake of this acknowledgment.

Even further down, the lifting of the NFL's denial could have notable impact on youth football. Already participation rates for youth flag football are increasing at a rate well ahead of that for traditional tackle football (with the South being the one regional exception, which is probably a whole other story). Might the acknowledgment of the CTE connection persuade other parents to steer their kids towards flag football, at least until high school, as some advocates have already urged (Dr. Robert Cantu and Chris Nowinski among them)?

One thing the statement won't affect is future research. That will largely go on as it would before. And frankly, it's unlikely that the NFL will change its approach to what research (or which researchers) it will or won't support with its dollars.

The great unknown, of course, is one more critical but largely silent party of interest: fans.

One thing that can be deduced from the Players' Association and its pursuit of legal action against the NFL is largely unspoken but hard to avoid. The NFLPA has figured out, quite rightly it seems, that they are the only party that is going to look out for the interests of the players.

Certainly not the NFL, even if they acknowledge the link between the game and the trauma.

And certainly not football fans.

You don't have the players' backs, and they know it, and are proceeding accordingly.

Any chance that will change?

Don't ask me. That's up to you.

Jeff Miller. What he said, apparently.

Pay attention!

1.

Apparently Ricardo Lockette of the Seattle Seahawks came awfully close to becoming the first on-field casualty of the NFL in, well, ever.

Back in November Lockette's head was nearly removed on a hit by Jeff Heath of the Dallas Cowboys. That phrase is normally used as hyperbole, but it is apparently uncomfortably close to truthful in this case.

Scary moment, maybe more so than anyone realized at the time.

Lockette discussed this injury on a visit to the paramedics who responded to his injury, properly handling him so that his neck didn't fail completely.

This blog mostly concerns itself with the issue of brain trauma in football, though we're on a slight break at the moment. It's worth the occasional reminder that one doesn't have to suffer concussions or end up with a CTE-riddled brain for football to mess you up whether you hit each other in practice or not.

And on that subject, one has to wonder if the same kind of care always comes into play when head injuries and potential concussions are involved. Those usually don't draw paramedics onto the field.

2.

So a kid attending a spring training game at Disney World wasn't far from having his head removed either.

As the Pittsburgh Pirates were playing against the Atlanta Braves (who for now still have spring training at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex), Pirates batter Danny Ortiz lost his grip on his bat after a swing, with the bat spinning crazily towards the stands. In the stands, Shawn Cunningham barely had time to stick out his arm to deflect the bat away from the head of his eight-year-old son Landon.

Frighteningly close.

The money quote is at the bottom of the article, by a representative of a company that supplies netting to MLB teams to keep this kind of stuff from happening. 

Huff added that it is important for fans to be aware of what's happening on the field and avoid distractions such as cellphones. 

“Fans have to actively watch the game,” Huff said. “It is just like crossing the street — you need to look up from your phone to do so safely.”

Man, oh man, is that a great quote. "Fans have to actively watch the game." I may just make it the motto of this blog.

3.

Of course, what you see when you do so is sometimes downright ugly. At least the team being threatened won, to the degree that counts for anything.

That guy does have a history in sports, for what it's worth. He actually managed to destroy a league (almost) all by himself.

Now he seems set on destroying other things.

Sports fans are capable of enough ugliness, without intentionally divisive and race-baiting politics being thrown in. 

I'm trying to think of a time when the mixture of sports and politics has ever been good for sports.

Can't think of one. 

But pulling this crap on high school kids? Evil. Pure evil.

4. 

Wrapping back to a previous blog entry, and to bullet point #1, Calvin Johnson, a.k.a. Megatron, has confirmed he will retire from the NFL.

The rumors had been pretty well-established out there since the end of the regular season, and now it's done. Johnson retires after nine seasons. 

As noted in the earlier blog post, that used to seem like a short career. Not any more, perhaps.

Football doesn't have to screw up your brain to mess you up real good. 

You have to actively watch the game, even when you're not actually at the game. It is showing us ourselves, good and bad. Ignoring the bad is self-destructive. 

Pay attention! This stuff matters more than it should.

A little life

No ethical discussions today. Just some sports-fan joy.

This was me Friday:

Orioles vs. Blue Jays, 3/4/16, Dunedin, Florida

That's Florida Auto Exchange Stadium in Dunedin, Florida, where the Toronto Blue Jays hold spring training. On Friday the Baltimore Orioles made their way up from Sarasota to play a little ball. With Friday being my day off, the timing seemed opportune.

It was a pretty typical spring training game, won by Toronto 4-3. The highlight was a three-homer inning in which Toronto built the lead that Baltimore would never overcome. 

My seat was actually much closer to home plate; this just seemed to be a good spot to get a picture of a baseball crowd on a sunny (but not too hot) March afternoon.

As this was Toronto's spring training site, you might wonder about the national makeup of the crowd. I'm sure there were plenty of Floridians around, but I was surrounded by Canadians. As a result, in odd moments between action I learned more about Ontario than I had learned in any one occasion since the last time I was there (2011, I think, when I attended one of my last academic conferences that happened to be meeting in Ottawa). 

And thankfully, no political talk. Just as well, I can't say I know that much about Justin Trudeau.

Being in front of live professional baseball game was all sorts of good for my psyche and my soul and all those good things. On the other hand, getting into and out of Dunedin, and the Tampa/Clearwater/St. Petersburg area in general, mostly managed to evaporate all that psychological healing before I even got back to I-75. Still, some residual effects (good ones) do linger.

Not nearly on the same scale, but still a pleasure, the Major League Soccer season started today, and I got to see Sporting Kansas City get an ugly win against Seattle Sounders. It's still not on the same level as baseball, and it was televised instead of live, but hey, small pleasures count. 

And of course my #3 sport preference, college basketball, is approaching its peak season. (I dare not use that phrase -- you know, the M-alliterative one -- for fear of copyright infringement.) The Kansas Jayhawks head into their conference tournament as the top seed, with their twelfth consecutive Big XII title wrapped up. They won the national championship in 2008, during my first year teaching at that university, and have been breaking hearts ever since. Still, this is "hope springs eternal" time. 

On occasion it's good to remember the pleasures of "participating" in sports. So no heavy ethical contesting tonight, just some enjoyment of such pleasures as sports can bring, and enjoying the way they can bring a little life to the everyday.

Clint Dempsey, you shall not pass!

Waiting on science our savior, cont'd.; the Ivies take notice

Remember the Dartmouth MVP?

The MVP, or Mobile Virtual Player, became the means by which Dartmouth football coach Buddy Teevens moved to eliminate tackling from practices during football season -- tackling of other players at least. The MVP is a robot programmed to move like a football player -- not just with speed, but making cuts and other elusive maneuvers. While the move had immediate benefits for team health, Teevens was concerned about his team lest its skills get rusty. When Dartmouth engineering students (including a former Dartmouth football player) came up with the device, Teevens jumped at it.

It turns out Dartmouth won a piece of the Ivy League championship this past season (after third- and second-place finishes in previous seasons), and the rest of the league took notice that they did so while only tackling that Mobile Virtual Player device instead of each other during in-season practices. Possibly as a result, the league has voted -- unanimously, at that -- to eliminate tackling drills during the season throughout the league.

There are things to be excited about here, and things not quite worth jumping up and down about. The latter first, so one blog entry can end on an upbeat note:

1. This is the Ivy League. There are a few players from the Ivies in the NFL; New York Jets quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick of Harvard might be the most prominent right now. The Ivy League schools have some of the longest and most storied histories in college football, but one can't deny that the Ivies fall rather far outside the current power structure in the NCAA. In short, this move by itself is unlikely to be the start of a trend in the NCAA.

2. This is the Ivy League. Only a very limited number of high school players are going to be able to make the cut academically to play in that league, and many of those players will not be interested in doing so because of point #1 above -- they don't represent a likely springboard to the NFL. The number of players who will be affected by this move is pretty small.

3. This is the Ivy League. For a large part of the culture surrounding college football or football generally, the league's adoption of these standards will merely be proof that they don't play "real football" in that league.

4. This is the Ivy League. Probably every school in the league can afford a squadron of MVPs if they so desire. And while no doubt the Ohio States and Alabamas of the world could corner the market on the devices were they to try, that's less true of the Division II and III schools in the world or even the Tulsas and San Diego States and Marshalls out there. Should such technologically aided practices start to sweep through the college game, the division between the haves and have-nots will only become more stark. Then make the leap down to high schools and youth football programs and the divisions become even deeper, even as restrictions on tackling in practices have had dramatically positive results in reducing head injury (keep reading, you'll get to it). Technology as a leveler of the field isn't typically that accessible.

5. We are still acting under the assumption that technology can fix everything and save football as the country knows it (football as the world knows it is what we call soccer, to be clear). The evidence of this just isn't all that persuasive. There's a real desperation about it sometimes as well. From the next great helmet to the MVP to sensors designed to warn coaches or trainers that a player might be on the verge of brain injury, the technological hits keep on coming. Only the real hits also keep on coming.

OK, let's be positive:

1. There are coaches out there who actually care about the health and well-being of their athletes (one can't always be sure about this). It's good to be reminded of this amidst the jaw-droppingly bad headlines these days, not just on head trauma.

2. At least some coaches can cut through the macho jargon and see not only a way to improve player health, but apparently also performance on the field. Whether Dartmouth's improvement really correlates to reducing hitting in practice or is simply a function of Teevens being a good recruiter, or goes to randomness somehow, at least this success might persuade a few coaches elsewhere to ease up on the full-contact drills during the week.

3. While the NFL still seems to see most of its brain injuries take place during games, at lower levels practice seems to be the more perilous time for players. If this move helps persuade youth football or high school programs to think about cutting back on contact and those injuries drop as well, so much the better.

I've made it clear in this blog that I can't stomach watching football any more. That doesn't mean I'm particularly eager to see more and more players suffering concussions at whatever level of the sport they play; I've also made it clear that I don't consider it my place to tell people they can't play football, although I won't shy from speaking my mind on the subject here in this blog and elsewhere, and I continue to believe that there are serious theological and/or ethical problems with participating in the economic system of football. Anything that might offer a small amount of hope for cutting back on concussions or subconcussive hits is a positive by me.

It doesn't mean I'll be watching again any time soon, though.

Dartmouth's MVP might really be Dartmouth's MVP after all...

p.s. for those who don't recognize the title phrase, it comes from this little musical ditty...