Land of opportunity?

If you like baseball, it's hard not to like Andrew McCutcheon.

McCutcheon (or "Cutch") was the National League Most Valuable Player in 2013. His performance last year was perfectly worthy of another MVP award, but Clayton Kershaw had an insane season for the Dodgers and won both MVP and Cy Young awards.

It's hard not to like McCutcheon because, unlike some players, he does everything. Dude can hit, field, throw, and do all of them really well. To top that off, by all accounts he seems like a thoroughly decent human being. He's the type who, earlier this year, let his trademark dreadlocks be shorn off for charity. He's the face of one of the good stories of major league baseball the last couple of seasons, a Pittsburgh Pirates team that hadn't won diddly since 1992 (the infamous Sid Bream slide, for those with such memories) before breaking into the playoffs year before last (in other words, the Kansas City Royals of 2013) and followed it up with a return trip last season. He is a thoughtful and articulate man, not given to the shoot-from-the-lip blather of so many athletes. His mom is a pretty proficient singer who belts a mean national anthem, for pete's sake. How do you not like?

So when Andrew McCutcheon threw up some red flags about the Chicago Little League team that got stripped of its titles after their much-publicized run, I guess I was a little more inclined to listen than if the words had come from a more average, hotheaded type. McCutcheon poses these questions not by charging bias, but by pointing to his own story.

It's sad and scary to think that one of the most successful, accessible, and popular players in baseball right now (and one of its most marketable players, if MLB could ever get its act together) would have been playing football if he hadn't torn his ACL in high school. But you have to wonder if his story is all that unique, except that those potential stars do end up lost to the game.

McCutcheon recognizes the tremendous hand-ups he got in being picked up and largely funded through the system of "travel teams" that increasingly rule the roost as far as those kids with baseball talent who get drafted or make it on to prime college teams. For McCutcheon, as he notes, college baseball was really not an option; with even the best baseball scholarships only covering 70% of tuition and costs, and McCutcheon not coming from a family that could even pay 30%, it was pro ball or bust.

A similar story with a different track belongs to Giancarlo Stanton, the man-mountain power hitter of the Florida Marlins. While McCutcheon got lucky coming from a poor part of a small town in Florida, Stanton flew under the radar in another baseball hotbed, southern California, where he was overlooked by the travel teams abounding in that region. (You need to get fairly deep into the story to get to Stanton's high-school experience.) Old-fashioned high-school success, and one scout who saw what nobody else saw, were his ticket to pro ball, and even he allowed that if he weren't well on his way by his third year he might well have turned around and tried for college football.

As it happens, both Stanton and McCutcheon are black. And, to be honest, most of the kids whose parents can afford to pony up the costs of those exclusive travel teams are white. On one level, this looks a bit like yet another example of the unspoken, systematic exclusion of blacks from equal opportunity, in this case opportunity in the chosen sport of Jackie Robinson, of all things.

There are, though, other cases that cut against this particular grain. McCutcheon's teammate, shortstop Jordy Mercer, came out of a rural Oklahoma background, one in which if you played sports, you played all of them; his high school no longer fields a baseball team.

I'm not a parent. I can't claim to understand the motivations of parents who direct their children towards whatever sport as an extracurricular activity. (I was a band geek myself.) One presumes that part of the encouragement has to do with physical activity, with learning to play with others well, teamwork and camaraderie and all that. One also suspects, though I can't know this, that if you play a sport or sports (much like playing an instrument or painting or acting or other such endeavors), if you apply yourself and develop your talent, you can go as far as that talent and desire takes you. Basically, this sounds like what we tell our children about what endeavor they choose, be it high school activities or choice of major in college.

To the degree that sports turns out to be another venue for disappointment in that respect, I guess it simply starts to reflect the larger society in which it is situated. To the degree that a sport like baseball increasingly draws its players from a pool determined even in part by who can afford it as opposed to who is good enough; and to the degree that a sport more generally accessible -- like, say, football -- comes with the caveat that it might well destroy your brain; what, then, are these games teaching the young people that play them?

In this regard I'm extremely curious to see how this proposal plays out.  Sporting Kansas City, one of the more successful franchises in Major League Soccer, is seeking to develop what's called an "academy team" in the far west Kansas town of Garden City, as a part of its ever-expanding academy system.

Unlike other sports franchises, soccer clubs tend to develop extensive youth programs, including affiliated academy teams as well as youth teams more directly connected to the team. (Several of SKC's direct youth teams were big winners in one of the more recent tournaments for the different age brackets.) These teams and affiliated academies are very nakedly all about developing players for the major-league franchise; any other benefits are decidedly secondary. Still, it might lead to a college scholarship here or there, and even if your team eventually doesn't put you on its pro roster you're in a decent spot to catch on elsewhere. (SKC has several such "homegrown" players on its current roster, including Erik Palmer-Brown, who skipped his high-school graduation to play on the US under-20 World Cup team.)

The interesting thing about the Garden City potential academy is its very deliberate targeting of a demographic that would not fit into the profile of privilege suggested above. Garden City, and other nearby towns like Liberal and Dodge City have very large Hispanic populations, attracted in previous decades by opportunities in the meat-packing industry. SKC coach Peter Vermes alludes obliquely to the same kind of privilege tending to dominate soccer in the US in a way that perhaps it did not in his native Hungary, while directly wanting to work against that with the Garden City academy.

Let's be clear here; SKC is looking for players for SKC. Their principal hope is that some streetwise soccer kid from Garden City or Liberal will make SKC better in five or ten years. And yet, if this project comes off, that naked ploy to grab better players might just take some kid places he might never have dreamed of going. I have no idea what kind of life that becomes, or if there's even a sliver of education that is even possible in such a context.

What we ask of sports for our young people, or of our young people for our sports, is deeply due for examination. As a pastor you might be expecting me to complain about traveling teams taking kids away from Sunday morning worship services, but frankly my interests and concerns go a lot deeper than that. It's a huge topic, and one that could be a blog all to itself. But nothing is beyond questioning here, so questions will get asked when the need arises. Hopefully I'm not the only one asking.

The NFL's tobacco morality

So the news on the NFL-and-brain-trauma front has been a little slow of late, at least since Chris Borland decided he didn't need an NFL career more than he needed a functional brain for the rest of his life. In the last couple of days a story has come out, though, that -- while disturbing itself -- contains one quote that is in itself extremely revealing and disturbing, at least about how the NFL still doesn't get it even as it digs a spare billion out of its seat cushions to buy off bad publicity.

Awards in the long-awaited settlement of the "concussion lawsuit" against the NFL will be delayed until some time this fall. About ninety former players have lodged appeals against the settlement, and awards will not happen until most or all of those appeals have been heard and settled. In the meantime, a number of former players now showing signs of dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or Lou Gehrig's disease will have to wait a bit longer for cash awards to be disbursed.

Sad enough, although the appeals process needs to be heard out fully. But what gets particularly disturbing is the pretzel logic that seems to have governed one key omission from this settlement.

You'll notice, if you've followed this story or if you've read League of Denial, something missing from the list of conditions former players are suffering while awaiting this legal action. There is no mention of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the condition uncovered in a legion of deceased former players (many of whom committed suicide) not only with NFL experience, but also a number of former players whose football experience did not extend beyond college or even high school in some cases.

This is where the NFL starts sounding more and more like its predecessor in crime, the tobacco industry. The first sign of "tobacco logic," an anonymous quote attributed only to "negotiators," claim that "the science on CTE is still evolving." (Actually here the NFL actually sounds like the climate denial industry, to be honest.) Unless the NFL is going to claim that these numerous players had boxing careers on the side, it's going to be a serious stretch to claim that the relationship between football and CTE will somehow "evolve" to be nonexistent. That the judge in the case seems to have fallen for this shady bit of sub-logic is disturbing enough.

The real bizarrerie, though, comes a shade later in the article. Those same "negotiators" go on to claim, concerning CTE, that "many of the behavioral and mood conditions claimed to be associated with CTE are prevalent with the general public."

Say what?

Because people who didn't play football have memory lapses, claims about CTE are invalid? Seriously, if someone really said this, their name and address need to be published purely for harassment purposes. The sheer immorality of this statement is mind-blowing. It is as if the tobacco industry, back in the day, had suggested that because some people who didn't smoke got cancer, tobacco can't possibly be blamed for any cancer in anyone.

The logical leap behind this claim becomes even stranger when one remembers that the conditions covered in the settlement -- Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's, Parkinson's, dementia and the like -- are also experienced by many people who never set foot on a gridiron in their lives. Why, then, is the NFL so willing to fork over the dough to cover diseases that need not have any relation to football?

Because this is nothing more than a public relations dodge. And shame on Judge Anita Brody for going along with it.

Why are they so adamant about excluding CTE? My surmise: to "give in" on CTE, more than any of these other diseases, exposes football, as it currently stands, as a fundamentally unsafe sport. Remember that CTE is not expressly about the effects of concussions on players (although concussions certainly don't help); rather, CTE -- chronic traumatic encephalopathy -- is traced to the regular, almost routine sub-concussive hits a player experiences. The kind of hits a player, particularly a lineman or linebacker or defensive back, might experience on any routine play. Even I wouldn't claim that the NFL thinks concussions are a good thing (they'd dislike them if only because of the player-hours lost because of them). But the looming possibility that the basic nature of the game itself has such devastating and traumatic effects on players' brains would potentially be an existential threat to the game. Therefore, no matter how base or amoral the league looks, it is never going to give on the CTE issue until it is forced to do so.

In the end this is hush money. And because these players suffering the above maladies are in many cases desperate for the financial assistance, they have little option but to take it.

Please don't try to impress me with the amount of the settlement, around one billion dollars. The NFL takes in about nine billion dollars a year. The above line about squeezing out change from the sofa cushions isn't as much of a stretch as it should be. And as the NFL has stated as its goal annual revenue of $25 billion, a disbursement of one billion over many years just doesn't have the same impact.

This blog attempts to approach sports from a Christian ethical viewpoint, if not in a terribly rigorous or scholarly way. Frankly, though, I'm really trying to think of any religious or moral ethical system that can look at the NFL at this point and find its ethical compass to be anything but grotesque. It is a horrible stretch to look at the NFL's record on the health concerns attached to the modern game, not just those around brain trauma (consider, as I must eventually, the NFL's track record on painkiller abuse); how is it at all reconcilable with a claim of a league that cares one whit for the welfare of its players?

Again, a thousand player suicides will not budge the NFL. Nor will a thousand lawsuits, a thousand player wives cold-cocked in elevators or shot to death by husbands who then shoot themselves, or a thousand confirmed cases of CTE. The NFL knows, having weathered what it has already, that it is too big and to strong to be bothered by any of those things.

The only thing that can ever have any hope of changing the NFL is the disappearance of those billions of dollars of revenue.

This would mean that advertisers are no longer falling all over themselves to be associated with the NFL.

This would mean that television outlets are no longer salivating to throw wildly exorbitant contracts at the NFL.

This would mean that fantasy-league operators aren't forking over dollars for permission to invoke the NFL and use player names and stats.

This would mean that merchandise with NFL logos and trademarks is no longer flying off shelves at a dizzying rate.

In other words, this would mean that people are no longer watching or spending money on the NFL.

And that's up to...well, people.

I reiterate that this book is worth your time to read. Beyond the stories of some of the earliest cases of CTE and the sometimes-byzantine work of tracing the condition, it puts to rest any notion that the NFL is at all concerned with anything other than what Roger Goodell has sometimes called "protecting the shield."

Can a sport dry up?

Apparently the US Open was this past weekend. The golf one, that is.

Being on "vacation" while my spouse was working a convention at a Central Florida resort with a golf course attached, you might think I would have been unable to avoid the event. Indeed, it seemed that every publicly available television in the resort was on the Open, but the crowds gathered around it at every such television dissuaded me from trying to look in on it.

As far as I can tell, there are two major takeaways from the event, one of which might just edge into this blog's territory: (1) the winner of the Masters also won the Open, which means there's still whatever slight chance of a golfing Grand Slam alive for this season; and (2) apparently a number of the event's participants were highly critical of the condition of the course.

At least two of the participants went off on the conditions of the course, in particular the greens, after the event was done. Others responded, when questioned, with negative assessments of the course and greens, comparing them to broccoli, or dirt, or simply calling them dead.

Now, I'm not much of a golfer; it's been years since I played at all. Neither is golf the first sport I look for when kicking back in front of the television for some mental down time in front of a game of some sort. I do pay enough attention to keep up with who's winning and who's sliding, and to know that Tiger Woods isn't doing much these days.

Still, I find it very, um, interesting that this is the big story coming out of the US Open, even more in some corners than Jordan Spieth's half-Slam. Now I get that golf is in fact a physically demanding game on the professional level, and difficult course conditions make a pro golfer's job harder. Still, it might be juuuuuust a little lame to be so, well, bitchy about the grass.

In case you've forgotten (or in case you thought it was just California), Washington state (the site of this year's Open) is experiencing a pretty stiff drought these days. Yes, California and its disappearing lakes and nonexistent snowpack gets all the ink, and before it was drowned Texas had the drought headlines pretty well locked up, but Washington is in the midst of conditions the state simply isn't accustomed to.

I do not know what strictures the USGA might have been facing in preparing the Chambers Bay course for the competition. But in a state with a missing snowpack and increasingly skimpy water supplies, and an exceptionally hot summer looming, carping about brown greens by a bunch of fairly privileged athletes doesn't look very sympathetic.

Where this provokes my curiosity most, however, is what such might mean for the future of this sport, so water-dependent as it is. Is it possible, in a world with a broken climate (and don't argue about the faith component of this topic; no less than the Pope has you nailed on this one), can a sport like golf survive?

You might be thinking of other sports that would seem more subject to trouble in a climate-change age -- auto racing, for example, with all that fuel being burned. True, that's going to be a tough sell, but with that sport there is at least the possibility of running those cars on a fuel that has less deleterious effects (and I'd be shocked if the major auto racing bodies aren't already looking into such possibilities). Onerous and nasty as it is to do, outdoor sports like baseball, football, or soccer can be played on artificial turf if absolutely necessary. What exactly does golf do if the water dries up?

This seems like an out-there question, but maybe it isn't. Does the sport become more limited when municipalities decide that water for drinking is more important than water for lush greens? Do we end up with courses only in "wet" places? Who decides these things? What kind of underhanded deals do golf courses make to keep their greens green and their fairways appealing? You get the idea, I hope.

I have no answers here. This is a lot more speculative than many posts here, but that doesn't mean that the question doesn't have at least the potential to become serious. Is it possible that, in the name of a faithful and ethical concern for creation, it might become necessary for golf to, well, dry up?

This might have been as much as a year before the Open.

Credit: pga.com

Baseball gets its own "Spygate"?

Well, this is just...creepy.

I'm really not quite sure what to make of the reports that emerged today, informing the world that the FBI (??) was investigating the St. Louis Cardinals (???) for having apparently hacked into the (possibly proprietary?) computer databases and (possibly?) obtained information about players, policies, scouting reports, and, well, I'm not really sure what of the Houston Astros (????). In all seriousness, this report left me in a state of repeatedly saying "wait, what?" over and over again, with increasingly long intervals between the "wait" and the "what?"

Now I don't want to give the impression that I don't understand anything about the story.

The previous post on this blog alluded to the increased use of statistical analysis in baseball in the past few decades. Since the success of the Oakland Athletics in using such analysis to compete with far more moneyed teams, more and more teams have taken up such analysis, either hiring some of the pioneers of analysis (e.g. Bill James to the Red Sox) or developing their own systems and analysts. At this point very few teams don't partake of "moneyball" any more, which makes the business of statistical analysis extremely competitive.

A possible example of this kind of competitiveness occurred a few years ago when the Astros, and aging and run-down team, hired Jeff Luhnow as general manager, prying him away from a front office position with...the Cardinals, of course. Part of Luhnow's appeal was his perceived understanding of and comfort with statistical analysis, or sabermetrics.  After one of the worst three-year stretches in major league history, in which players with even marginal value were strip-mined and sold off or traded for potential, the Astros are emerging this year (at least a year early, by most estimations) with a much better record than expected and (even at this early point in the season) a better-than-average chance of making the playoffs in what was supposed to be a tough American League West division.

So obviously there's some connection between the two franchises, and that has led to some speculation that the hack was somehow meant to "get back" at Luhnow for leaving the Cardinals. This is nuts. Front office personnel, particularly when their opportunity for promotion is blocked (as was Luhnow's in St. Louis), change jobs pretty regularly (not unlike in other businesses--more on that point later).  That the Cardinals organization would somehow hold it against Luhnow for grabbing a chance to be a general manager would make the Cardinals one of the pettiest organizations in professional sports.  Now I'll admit that the Cardinals can come off a bit smug at times with that whole "best fans in baseball" schtick, but they don't seem that petty.

And it's not as Luhnow could actually take away the Cardinals' system and database when he left. Luhnow may have been gone but the Cardinals still had their own program. What exactly were they supposed to be gaining? And aside from the Luhnow connection, why the Astros, a team not even in the Cardinals' league (literally in this case, as the Cardinals are in the NL and the Astros in the AL). In the most basic sense, the two teams aren't really competing with one another. The New York Times report on the story suggests that Luhnow made a rookie mistake in carrying over some of the passwords used in the Cardinals' program to the new network he built with the Astros. That makes Luhnow spectacularly careless, and the Cardinals (if they really hacked to try to guard against Luhnow somehow carrying over actual information) paranoid on a New England Patriots scale.

"Jeff, did you ever change those passwords?"

A side point on this story is that for all the fuss of the moment, the whole story may not amount to much legally. The FBI may be investigating, but it's entirely possible that the whole business may not rise to the level of a chargeable crime. I find that pretty depressing, if the same high bar applies to the hackers who keep trying to get into personal computers. At the same time even if no criminal charges are filed, MLB may well choose to carry out some kind of punishment against individuals involved. At the minimum MLB (and other professional leagues) may be compelled to develop a policy on this kind of thing. Most stories of such hacking seem to fall into the realm of international espionage, accusations or charges that China or North Korea breached databases or systems in the US government or of US corporations. One sports team hacking another is in the strictest sense unprecedented.

More broadly, though, the business of one team cutting ethical corners to get a leg up on another is quite an old story; it usually played out on the field or in the stands, most notably in the business of stealing signs. Teams might station someone in the center-field stands or some other advantageous location to spy on the signs the catcher flashes to the pitcher, calling the next pitch, or maybe signs being flashed from the dugout to the catcher. In theory, that information would be relayed to the hitter, giving him the advantage of knowing what pitch was coming. The famous home run hit by Bobby Thomson in a 1951 playoff between the then-New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers turns out to have been hit against a backdrop of sign-stealing by the Giants during that season.

Frankly, this leads to about the only point that can really be made here; baseball has a pretty long history of ethically dubious behavior. I'm not even getting into the allegations of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the 90s or other kinds of drugs in the 70s and 80s. Go back further and you find pitchers spitting on or sanding down or otherwise defacing a baseball in order to cause it to break differently and fool hitters. (This stuff still happens on occasion.)

You can also look back even further to a time when the Cardinals, who as noted above can come off as a little smug and maybe even a tad self-righteous, would have been thought of as the dirtiest team in baseball. The 1934 team known as the "Gashouse Gang" somehow managed to stand out in what was still a very rough league at the time, one in which deliberately trying to injure an opponent with your spikes or by some other means was pretty common.

As for front offices, their malfeasance tended to be directed against players. Whether in unjust withholding of salary or bonuses owed to the player, or simply stashing a player in the minor leagues without hope of promotion, no matter how well he played. Back then rules didn't give a player any leeway at all in terms of moving from one team to another; fans gripe about it now, but some level of freedom of movement for players, only won with great difficulty across the 60s and 70s, is BFD precisely because of such abuses from the earliest days of baseball.

This is just one sport, like all others or even non-sporting organizations populated by humans, and bad apples are going to appear. It is perhaps a little disturbing how often church folk, or at least some strains of church folk, tend to resort to sports as some kind of shaper or guarantor of moral and ethical character when baseball (and every other sport) is littered with examples that would seem to suggest the exact opposite. Any endeavor that includes competition is inevitably rife with some level of corruption, once you look at its history. (Seriously, can you name me one human endeavor with competition involved -- sporting or not -- that doesn't end up in some kind of scandal or corruption? I'd really like to know) Why, then, do we seem so willing to lionize sport and its participants as some kind of ethical lodestar?

I really have no idea where this Cardinals-Astros business will end up. I suppose that the only surprise is that the story, or something like it, took this long to come to the fore. Maybe one day we'll quit thinking of sports as character-building and realize that it, like pretty much everything else we do, is another venue for the demonstration of the fallenness of humanity.

"Moneyball," Moneyball, and the Church?

So last week, my Twitter feed produced a link to a column by a pretty well-known blogger in progressive-evangelical circles, putting forward the notion that the church needed to embrace the principles laid out in Michael Lewis's best-selling book Moneyball. Being a guy who occasionally traffics in the intersection of sporting culture and faith issues, this naturally caught my eye, but a few "wild pitches" found in the blog column (in terms of its description of Moneyball in its baseball context strictly) put my suspicion antennae on high alert. I made the mistake of acknowledging this on Twitter, which led to my being questioned about the hackles-raising points, which obligated me to respond (albeit tardily), which is resulting in this blog post.

Image: baseballphd.net

For the uninformed, Moneyball is Lewis's account of the 2002 Oakland Athletics under the leadership of general manager Billy Beane (and also the title of the Brad Pitt movie based on the book). This leads to the first "wild pitch" in the column: Beane is general manger of the Athletics in the book, not manager, as the blog post states. This may seem trivial but is desperately important; it is the general manager in most organizations who bears principal responsibility for acquiring players for the team, whether via draft or trade or free agent signing. As a manager, Beane would have had little opportunity to put his ideas into action; even as general manager Beane faced stiff opposition from many parties in the A's organization -- principally the team's scouting staff, steeped in traditional, non-statistical player evaluation beliefs, and the team's actual manager at the time, Art Howe.

Another "wild pitch": I'm not quite sure to what the author is referring when he speaks of "a company called Saber Metrics." I've never heard of it, and I like to think I'm enough of a sports fan that I would have. What I do know of is sabermetrics, not so much a company as a practice of empirical analysis of baseball. (Sabermetrics, or advanced statistical analysis in general, has started to expand to other sports as well, with basketball perhaps being most notable.) The term "sabermetrics" is derived from SABR, the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research, an organization founded in 1971 and espousing baseball research of all kinds (historical research has long been a strong suit of the group), not just statistical analysis. However, a number of SABR members (most famous of whom are probably Bill James, statistical analytics guru who published occasional editions of the Bill James Baseball Abstract for diehard stat geeks and is now with the Boston Red Sox, and Rob Neyer, sabermetrician and author long affiliated with ESPN.com and now with FOXSports.com) did engage in the use of advanced statistical methods to engage with baseball and its results, including developing new statistics intended to gauge baseball performance more accurately. Beane himself was/is not necessarily a sabermetrician himself, but made the decision to make use of these advanced analytical tools in his role with the Athletics. (More on this later.)

Another "wild pitch" (or at least curveball in the dirt): it's a stretch to say that Beane's teams were or are "playoff contenders ... year after year." While there have been a number of highly successful teams during Beane's tenure, there have been rough years as well (this year's team looks like one of the latter so far). A look a the franchise's history shows that, since Beane took over as GM in 1997 (after first working for the club as a scout), after a slow start, the team peaked around 2001-2002 (the period covered in Lewis's book), declined over time to a pretty rough stretch from 2007-2011, and rebounded with three straight playoff appearances 2012-2014. One could argue that the Tampa Bay Rays (full disclosure; the closest thing I have to a "local" team right now) have had a somewhat more consistent run of success since their playoff breakthrough in 2008, while being run under similar principles (and with maybe even less money).

Another factor to be considered is that for all the success across regular seasons, the team has yet to win a playoff series under Beane's tenure. Beane himself famously acknowledged this with the earthy declaration "my s*** doesn't work in the playoffs," attributing playoff success or failure in general to luck. (He's probably not completely wrong about this, but that's another column, the theological implications of which I'm not sure about.) This isn't a reason to dismiss the success of Beane's work, but should not be forgotten in seeking to apply the concepts elsewhere, including the church.

Now, as far as the actual application of "Moneyball" principles in the church realm, there are definitely possibilities there. But it matters what we understand those principles to be, and even those in baseball tend to get them wrong. For a number of years folks tended to leap to the conclusion that Beane's tactics were about acquiring a specific type of player (for example, one who was particularly skilled at getting on base) at the expense of another (e.g., one who hit a lot of home runs). Beane would have been plenty happy to load his lineup with power hitters, but because other teams with larger budgets could and did pay more for power hitters, Beane needed to find a way to acquire players who could contribute enough to the team without spending sums of money the team's ownership wouldn't approve. Thus, as teams such as the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox loaded up on power hitters, Beane went in search of players skilled at getting on base.

Perhaps the most famous example of this in Moneyball was Scott Hatteberg, a lifetime backup catcher until being signed by Beane for the 2002 season to replace power-hitting Jason Giambi, who was siphoned off as a free agent by the big-bucks Yankees. If you know baseball, you know Giambi was a first baseman, not a catcher, but this didn't faze Beane, who signed Hatteberg anyway and put his coaches in charge of teaching him to play a new position. Hatteberg indeed went on to have a reasonably successful season for the A's in 2002.

At any rate the biggest takeaway from Moneyball in this respect is to "zig where others zag," using one's limited resources most efficiently by prioritizing players with skills less valued by other teams. Of course the problem is accentuated when other teams, particularly teams with bigger budgets than yours, start to appropriate your methods. The Red Sox in particular began to invest more in advanced analytics, to which they could then apply their much larger player-salary budgets. Their run of success from 2004 (their first World Series win in 86 years, as we heard about ad nauseam that year) through 2013 was largely fueled by this combination of analytics and budget, or "Moneyball with money" as some have called it.

Here, I think, is a potential pitfall for applying Moneyball principles in the church. In responding to other teams' appropriation of statistical analysis, Beane has quite notorious for ruthlessly trading "assets" before they reach their free-agent years, in order to guarantee getting some return on the investment the team has made in them. (At this point Beane's methods seem most about the collection of young -- and therefore affordable -- talent, while occasionally taking chances on risky players such as those recovering from injury.) As this year's team struggles, observers expect a "fire sale" of talent to kick in soon, as Beane seeks to retool and reload the young talent in the A's organization rather than pouring resources into a lost season.

If this sounds rather impersonal, well, it is. Players who think they've found a home in Oakland are suddenly shipped across the country without so much as a thank-you card. (Third baseman Josh Donaldson, now with the Toronto Blue Jays, would be a prime example from this past offseason.) Even if one is applying these Moneyball principles to the activities or programs of the church, one had better remember that there are people attached to those activities or programs, people who can't be traded or released. A church simply can't proceed as if personalities are not involved in its activities.  A church may seek efficiency, but it probably shouldn't be "ruthlessly efficient." There is at least some risk of getting caught in a different form of what many outsiders like to charge against megachurches or heavily evangelical churches; treating people as numbers.

Another general principle of Moneyball tactics, not necessarily restricted to Beane and the A's, can be loosely summarized as "don't tie up too much in one player." Even if the A's had chosen to pay the money required to keep Jason Giambi before the 2002 season, they would have blown too much of their budget in doing so, and been unable to sign enough players to field a workable team around Giambi. (The aforementioned Rays pursue this principle almost religiously, while a team like the Red Sox will still splurge on big-ticket players on occasion.) Here is a pretty workable principle for the church. Sinking too much of the church's assets into any one facet of its ministry (too much salary for the pastor, for example, or a budget gobbled up by the music ministry or the preschool or whatever) becomes quickly paralyzed and unable to respond to other ministry needs. Star pastors seeking $65M jets need not apply.

A final thought on Moneyball: the book actually carries a subtitle, "The Art of Winning an Unfair Game." (The "unfair game," of course, is competing against big-dollar teams such as the Yankees or Red Sox.) I don't think anyone seriously wants to suggest that the church is a "game" of any sort, but this might be helpful to consider in thinking of "moneyball" in application to the church. If our objective is not to "win an unfair game," then what is it we're hoping to accomplish in a "moneyball church"? If this becomes a prod to reconsider the mission of the church more generally perhaps it's a helpful thing; if it simply becomes yet another quick-fix for the ailing church then it is probably going to be more destructive than helpful.

Or perhaps the question becomes "with who (or what) are we in competition?" That opens up a whole minefield of questions beyond the scope of this blog, but those questions might actually be useful or needful for churches to consider.

This has gone well beyond the initial scope of the query that prompted this blog, to be sure. Hopefully, though, there are some useful points here for those who might wonder at the unlikely mating of Moneyball and church. Let the discussion continue.


*Note: I do have other reactions to the blog that initiated this whole discussion, ranging from curiosity to abject horror. As they lie (as far as I can see) outside the scope of the Moneyball Church idea I am not addressing them here, and as they lie outside the scope of the sports/faith focus of this blog, they are very unlikely to be addressed here. 

Don't take me out to the ballgame

Today we got an answer to an age-old philosophical question: if they play a baseball game and no one is there to see it, does it make a sound?
Answer: yes, but only if it's televised (or on radio, I suppose).
Because of the civil disturbances in Baltimore, the Orioles had the first two games of their series with the Chicago White Sox postponed. Presumably because of a desire not to lose too many games (that would likely require making up, considering that the Orioles and White Sox are both likely playoff contenders), today's game was moved up to 2:00 p.m. and played in a stadium with no spectators. This weekend's series against Tampa Bay, scheduled for Camden Yards (still one of the best stadiums in baseball), is being moved to Tropicana Field (not as bad as people make it out to be, but still one of the worst), although Baltimore will still function as the "home" team, batting last. (This I don't understand; these two teams are division rivals and had at least four more series to come; it seems like it should have been possible to swap out a future series at St. Pete rather than have the Orioles totally lose the home dates. But I'm no expert.)
It is not unprecedented for sports to be disrupted by civil unrest (the term used for events in Baltimore by Orioles announcer Gary Thorne, who did not use the term "riot"; his broadcast partner Jim Palmer floundered a bit, referring to "a riot or whatever"). Watts, the Rodney King unrest, the MLK assassination and other examples of civil unrest in the past have caused serious disruptions in baseball schedules. Baseball seems the most subject to these disruptions, possibly because more of these events seem to happen in the hot-weather months of baseball season, and maybe more because the everyday schedule of baseball is more susceptible to disruption (unless the unrest happens the morning of a football game, such a once-a-week event may be less likely to be affected and have more opportunity for the situation to be calmed by game day, for example). The NBA has known some disruptions in the past, however.
As for today's game, though there were no spectators admitted, the game was in fact televised. (I didn't watch it live, but I -- as an MLB.TV subscriber -- am able to watch it after the fact.) It was by all evidences a strange experience. The broadcasters were doing their usual professional work, but on occasion were clearly distracted by the circumstances. A Chris Davis home run in the first inning was met not by the cheers of a home crowd, but by the surprisingly noisy clattering of the home run ball in the right field seats. A clutch of spectators gathered to follow the game at one of the stadium's (closed and locked) gates, occasionally being shown on camera; exactly how much of the game they could actually see is questionable.
Nobody's idea of an ideal situation, to be sure.
But then, what would have been the better answer?
Adam Jones, the Orioles' center fielder and acknowledged "face of the franchise," spoke to the media before the game. Unlike a lot of athletes (or fans, for that matter) Jones seemed to get that a game in such a situation has only limited "healing" powers. "This game needs to be played," Jones said, "but [Baltimore] needs to heal first." Jones's background, growing up in a troubled part of San Diego, seems to have influenced his view of the events around him, even as he performed the publicly-mandated straddle of condemning the violence while understanding the conditions that provoked it; Jones knows those conditions better than most.
This is a place where baseball (believe it or not, given my sporting predilections) actually falls well short of its professional competitors. Football, for all its depredations (and I have chronicled them obsessively here), still has a reach among poor youth (an opportunity to get out of the ghetto/sticks/sugar cane fields and into college if nothing else). Basketball has an extremely prolific tradition of providing a way out for inner-city youth, even if that reputation may slightly exceed the reality. Baseball, on the other hand, has on the youth level increasingly become the province of pricey travel teams and programs that are a stretch for middle-class kids to afford, much less the poor of either urban or rural residence. Jones is an exception, increasingly, at least among US-born players (those who hail from Caribbean or South American countries are a quite different case).
Back to the game at hand; was it possible to play a game today (with the curfew in place, a game tonight was out of the question) and trust that it could be carried off safely with crowd in place?
I don't know. I have my doubts. The dynamics of a situation boiling with mistrust simply would not have given me any confidence about a game going forward without incident.
On the other hand, it's not hard to find a TV carrying the game. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were folks in the city starving for exactly that kind of distraction or relief for a few hours amidst the cleanup.
I have no answers. Nothing is ideal, nothing is going to turn out the way anybody would want.
For what it's worth, the Orioles won 8-2.

(p.s. one bit of humor; at one point the announcers decided to announce the very silent game in the manner of golf announcers, with the appropriate "golf whisper" voice.)

Chris Borland's research

Note: It's been a while.  In the interim I've accepted a call to a pastorate and moved to Florida (a town with a pretty well-known college football program at that), which has admittedly kept me occupied.  But as you might have heard, there was some news today in the ongoing football-brain trauma connection, and that got me to carve out some time to address it.

Followers of football, and maybe of sports more generally, were rudely reacquainted with a subject that seemed to have died down for a while with the news of the retirement of Chris Borland, a linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers.  The jolting part of the story was that Borland was no grizzled veteran; actually he had just finished his rookie season, which was a highly promising one by all accounts.  Also jolting was Borland's stated rationale for his early retirement.  Borland frankly acknowledged that he was getting out after a lot of consideration of the risks of playing football in light of the last several years of revelations about former and often deceased NFL players suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and other brain trauma-related diseases.

The combination of Borland's youth and his frankness about his motivation was enough to awaken the beasts of sports television (ESPN in particular, but others too) and sports-talk radio, not to mention the ever-virulent spheres of social media.  The subhuman trolls of Twitter were out in force, though perhaps not carrying as much of the day as might have been the case in the past.  For the most part, public figures refrained from bashing Borland (though there were certainly exceptions, but even those were relatively restrained in some cases).  The NFL, of course, had to release a statement that, while striking a respectful pose towards Borland, more or less called him a wuss by insisting the sport has never been safer.  (Increasingly the NFL is joining the ranks of the tobacco industry and Big Oil/climate denialism in its ability to forfeit credibility with every statement it issues. But I digress.)

Borland also acknowledged that last year during training camp he experienced what he thought might have been a concussion, but did not report the injury and continued to participate in drills in his concern for making the team.  He acknowledged questioning himself and his actions afterwards, leading to the research (including consulting with scientists researching CTE) that helped inform his decision (maybe including this bit of information).

Herewith, a few thoughts:

1. Borland was not the first person to retire from the NFL at a young age over health concerns.  In fact he wasn't the first member of his team to retire this month over health issues, but Patrick Willis's retirement was over very specific injuries he had already suffered, not over potential long-term harm. Two other NFL players, Jason Worilds of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Jake Locker of the Tennessee Titans, also left the game last week, and Locker's frequent injuries played a part in his decision.  But in none of those cases was brain trauma listed as a factor.  Despite the oddity of four young (30 or younger) players retiring in the space of about a week, Borland's case is still different and potentially the most challenging.
For that matter, Borland has a predecessor from almost three years ago.  Jacob Bell walked away in 2012, and the risks of brain trauma were among the factors he acknowledged in his decision.  Bell, though, was 31, and had had a respectable career already.  Rashard Mendenhall also made mention of injury risks in his discussion of his retirement at age 26, but it was not a primary factor in his choice. What Borland has done is unique and challenging enough that it will reverberate within the football industry for some time, even if the sports-media beast gets bored and lets the story drop.

2. Borland's opinion is not unchallenged among NFL players.  Even within the link above to the main Borland story, someone named Bobby Wagner is quoted via tweet as saying he'll play until he can't anymore because he loves the game too much.  Because this is a faith-oriented blog and because I'm a pastor now, I'm going to refrain from commenting on that, or on Chris Conte's stated belief that brain trauma and early death is totally worth getting to run around and hit people.  (Yes, he claims that his remarks were not specifically related to concussion issues, but considering he had just come off a second concussion and his lack of other clarification, I'm not buying it.)  OK, one bit of snark; I don't know if Conte is married or not, but I have trouble imagining why any woman would want to be married to him with this expressed lack of concern for his future health -- given what happens to women like Kasandra Perkins, Jovan Belcher's girlfriend.

3. Borland's concern did not necessarily need to be limited to long-term health concerns.  The aforementioned Jovan Belcher was only 25 when he murdered his girlfriend and committed suicide, and his brain showed signs of CTE in the posthumous analysis.  And Chris Henry, the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver who died in a strange automotive accident in 2009 while still an active player, already showed significant brain damage despite being only 26.  Paul Oliver was only 29 when he committed suicide, and his brain also showed advanced CTE.  Other former players who lived into their 40s or 50s report that the kinds of symptoms frequently associated with CTE -- memory loss, violent mood swings -- began to manifest themselves as early as their thirties.  If Borland was concerned about the health risks associated with football and brain trauma, it wouldn't have been impossible for such symptoms or impacts to have started manifesting themselves much sooner than even he might have thought.

4. Don't let's kid ourselves; this isn't going to bring down the NFL, not even close.  For every Chris Borland that chooses to walk away, there are a hundred or more ready to take his place.  Maurice Clarett, the former Ohio State running back, took to Twitter to offer a different take on Borland's decision, noting that Borland "probably had a backup plan" and that an awful lot of football players come through their college careers with no practical "backup plan" nor the ability or credentials to form one.  Football won't go away any time soon, but it does run the risk of going the route of boxing; a once-dominant sport that becomes a spectacle of the rich keeping their kids playing but happily watching the less fortunate (desperate for any out or up) bash their brains out on the field for their entertainment.

5. And therein lies the rub for the would-be Christ-follower who enjoys football.  Do you keep on watching?  Buying the merchandise?  Paying for the cable or dish packages?  Where does a sport that cannot shake this deadly connection no matter how much its main purveyor claims otherwise fit into a Christ-oriented ethic of living?  Just how close are we to recreating the days of the gladiatorial combats?  (Do you really think that the fact that death comes slowly, maybe years later, rather than immediately in the arena makes that much difference?)
And no, don't even try to make any claims about it being up to the players to guard their own health or take the risks (which Borland decided not to do, after all).  What is at stake here is how we, as sports fans who are trying to be Christ-followers, express that following even in this realm of our lives.  It is, I will insist, totally irrelevant that Chris Conte has decided that the risk is worth it.  Your own response to the risks associated with the game are not contingent on the players' own choices, for which they and only they can be accountable in the end.  The question ultimately can only be: can I, seeking to follow Christ, partake of such an injurious and potentially destructive spectacle in good conscience?  Even sports like auto racing, in which death is far more frequent, does not kill its participants so routinely -- a fatal crash very explicitly means that something went wrong.  The players, from Mike Webster to Junior Sean to Paul Oliver, were playing football exactly the way they were taught to play.
We cannot escape the ethical challenge here.  To the degree that we try to evade it we discredit ourselves and our professed faith.  The question must not and cannot be swept under the rug.  Time to start facing up to the challenge.

Credit: 49ers.com