Sports
How I started running
Dear Robert,
I hear you’re embarking on a running career tomorrow. And I hear you’re a skeptic. I thought it might be useful to write this up. (Edit: Whoa! It’s longer than I thought it’d be!)
I was also pretty skeptical when I started running. I was no athlete. In high school, I thought the days we had to run a mile in gym class equated to corporal punishment.
At the time I started running, I was living in Fresno. I had nothing resembling an “exercise routine.” I would on occasion find myself in the tiny “gym” in my apartment complex, pushing some machine back and forth for half-an-hour until I felt I’d filled a quota. And I was perfectly satisfied with this.
What I wasn’t satisfied with was my iPod. Poynter had given it to me as a parting gift when I left the Institute for Fresno the previous summer. And as delighted as I was with the thing, I hadn’t found any good time to use it. My ride to work was too short; I needed my ears free for the workday; and I usually ate lunch with friends from the paper.
One beautiful fall afternoon, I happened to arrive home early from work to find my iPod staring at me, guilting me out over not enjoying the gorgeous weather. I decided to create an iTunes playlist including some of my favorite weather-appropriate songs, and load the playlist onto the iPod. I figured I’d go outside and walk, but the blocks immediately surrounding my North Fresno apartment complex weren’t the most soul-stirring things. A sudden impulse presented itself: why not jog for a spell? Moving faster, I’d see a bit more of the neighborhood, and possibly discover some previously unseen scenery. No obvious counterarguments presented themselves, so I strapped on the closest running-shoe equivalents I could find in my closet, booted up the iPod, and stepped out.
I made a few key promises to myself as I walked out of the gates of the complex. I recommend these to you:
1) Go slower than you think you should. I had no interest in setting speed records, and I wasn’t really even all that concerned about elevating my heart rate.
2) Turn back when you know you’ve got more than half your energy left. I figured I’d probably jog about 10–15 minutes, and that I could always walk if I overestimated my stamina.
So I started my trot. Nothing magical happened, but the music paired with the scenery was pretty nice. And when I got back home, I wasn’t all that tired. It was pleasant, in its way.
So I went back out, the morning after next — a tiny bit farther, a tiny bit faster. The early morning adrenaline was a treat, and I found myself starting to love the way the pace let you appreciate the scenery — more varied than a walk, more unhurried than a bike ride. And my music mix was the *best.* So I went out again.
Before I realized what was happening, I *loved* running. I craved it. I couldn’t do enough of it. There was always one gorgeous instant when I’d pass over railroad tracks and a grove of walnut trees, typically shrouded in an early-morning fog. (This was where the grove used to be; it’s since given way to development.)
By the time I got to Minneapolis — a runner’s paradise — there was little more miraculous to me than an early morning run around a beautiful lake. Soon, I was going on 6-mile runs, three times a week. I didn’t even need the music anymore. It’s impossible to describe how peaceful it is to run around a frozen lake before dawn, warmed by your own breath inside a balaclava, all the sound in the air absorbed by the snow around you, the white ground glowing beneath a dark sky.
How I stopped running
Inventing a game
Last night, I caught “Silly Little Game,” the ESPN “30 for 30″ documentary about the origin of Rotisserie League baseball / the fantasy sports industry. I’ve also been reading Bill James’s Historical Baseball Abstract on the Kindle and watching Ken Burns’s Baseball documentary on Netflix — which happens to feature (among many other notables) Daniel Okrent, who invented Rotisserie Baseball along with his other media-writer baseball junkie friends in New York.
So, okay, big deal: it’s April, and I’m geeking out about baseball. What else is new? Really, though, what all this baseball bingeing is making me do is think about GAMES — how we play them, all the levels at which we interact with them, and especially how they’re invented and go on to take a life of their own.
Some of the best parts of James’s book and Burns’s documentary are about the very early years of baseball. You might think we don’t know very much about baseball at all in the nineteenth century, but we actually know a ton. We’re even able to reconstruct individual players’ statistics going back practically to the Civil War.
And every difference between early baseball and the game today which you might point to that seems huge — fielders didn’t use gloves? Batters got to tell pitchers where they wanted a pitch? Baserunners would run into the outfield and across the middle of the infield to avoid tags? — doesn’t change that baseball 150 years ago looked almost exactly like the game you probably played in a yard or park or the middle of a street with your friends and brothers and sisters. The differences seem weird only because baseball is so unchanged.
Once the game is there — in its basic shape, its speciation — it’s there.
Another paradox: once the game is good enough that it can’t be killed, that means it’s too good to be controlled either.
This is what happened with rotisserie baseball — Okrent et al came up with the basic idea of the thing at their meetings at the Rotisserie Française restaurant pretty much as it exists now, but then it metastasized into dozens and hundreds of leagues, each offering slightly different rules, and then into football. Any control the original inventors tried to exert over the thing just led to people ditching the name “rotisserie” and calling it “fantasy.” And now these totally virtual, second-order games do billions of dollars of business every year.
Fantasy sports shows that all games, too — and maybe especially baseball — can be read closely or distantly. Close-reading a game like baseball — watching players play, or playing yourself — gives you the experiential feel of the game, its textures, its nuances, the color of the grass, the smell of the chalk. Everything that doesn’t translate into a rule book or a box score.
Even with a game as structured as chess, there’s still that reality of sitting at a table, competing against another player who’s sitting across from you — your mind and will against theirs, where the state of the pieces on the board is just a momentary expression of that fact.
On the other hand, distant reading offers you a completely different perspective on a game. You can deconstruct it, formalize it, break it into pieces and recombine it. That’s Moneyball. That’s text-mining. It’s the telescope, not the magnifying glass.
Can any game be looked at this way? I kind of think it can.
Last idea. I would love to be able to invent a game. Something as conceptually simple and detailed and fun as baseball, or rotisserie baseball, or Diplomacy, or even the weird balloon volleyball game my sister made up when we were kids.
I don’t know how I would do it. But if I could, I know I’d want to do it with the people in this room.
Rooting for the home team
It’s a classic paradox of American democracy: citizens love America, hate Congress, but generally like their own district’s Congressman. (Until they don’t, and then they vote for someone else, who they usually like).
Josh Huder (via Ezra Klein) takes on the apparent paradox, armed with some good data and historical analysis.
Huder points out something even more paradoxical: Congressional approval takes a hit not just when there’s a scandal, or when there’s partisan gridlock in the face of a crisis, but even when Congress works together to pass major legislation:
By simply doing its job Congress can alienate large parts of its constituency. So while people like their legislators, they dislike when they get together with fellow members and legislate.
From this, Huder concludes that “disapproval is built into the institution’s DNA.” But let me come at this from a different angle: professional and/or sports.
There’s almost an exact isomorphism here. Fans/constituents like/love their home teams (unless their performance suffers for an extended period of time, when they switch to “throw the bums out” mode), and LOVE the game itself. But nobody really likes the league. Who would say, “I love the MLB” or “I love the NCAA” — meaning the actual organizations themselves?
Never! The decisions of the league are always suspect. They’re aggregate, bureaucratic, necessary, and not the least bit fun. Even when leagues make the right decision, we discount it; they’re just “doing their job.” The only time they can really capture our attention is when they do something awful. And most of the time, they’re just tedious drags on our attention, easily taken for granted.
If it’s a structure, it doesn’t seem to be limited to politics. It’s a weird blend of local/pastime attachment, combined with contempt/misunderstanding for the actual structures that work. Because we don’t *want* to notice them at work at all, really.
The invisible down
This Sports Illustrated article on NFL punters is well-worth reading. Two things that the article alludes to but doesn’t make a big deal about:
- Punters, in addition to booting the ball away and trying to pin down the other team’s defense on fourth down, also often hold for the placekicker on extra points and field goals. Not only can a dropped or bad hold lose games (more high-pressure stakes for already high-pressure players) but an athletic punter gives you a lot more options for fake kicks. (Another reason why a lot of punters were high-school or college quarterbacks.)
- For NFL players, punters have amazing longevity. I was amazed that Ray Guy, a legendary punter I remember watching in the mid-80s, when I first started watching football as a kid, is now 60 years old, and that Giants punter Jeff Feagles is still one of the best in the league at 43.
This last point, though, made me think about this point Malcolm Gladwell made in his exchange with Bill Simmons, about concussions, other head impacts, and the reduction in life expectancy for most other NFL players:
Early in the 20th century, there was a big movement to ban college football because of a rash of deaths on the field, and one of the innovations that saved the game was the legalization of the forward pass. What people realized was the more you open the game up, and make the principal point of physical contact the one-on-one tackle in the open field, the safer the game becomes. Keep in mind, the forward pass at the time was a radical step. Lots of diehard types stood up at the time to say that passing would ruin football. But it happened anyway. So there’s a precedent for dramatic reforms in football, even those that change the spirit of the game. I think football has to have that same kind of radical conversation again. What if we made all tackles eligible receivers? What if we allowed all offensive players to move prior to the snap? What if we banned punt and kickoff returns, where a disproportionate number of head impacts happen? [emphasis mine]
In SI, Feagles talks about how punting has changed over his career:
Just 10 years ago there were probably only a handful of returners who could take a punt and run it back; the athletes covering the kicks were much better than the returners. But the tide has turned. Nowadays the returners are much better than the guys covering. What does that do to the punter? It puts more pressure on him to directional kick and to keep the ball out of the returners’ hands.
So the “golden age of punting” coincides with the golden age of concussions; punters and returners have both gotten better, which puts more pressure on coverage guys on both sides of the ball; and those are the guys getting dinged, injuries that contribute to disproportionately shorter lives and careers for non-punters — for a part of the game that even fans and sportswriters don’t fully appreciate. (As the SI article explains, no pure punter has ever been voted into the Hall of Fame).
I hate to say it, but maybe that Canadian is right.
Undercapitalized
Here’s an idea Malcolm Gladwell throws out in a long back-and-forth with ESPN’s Bill Simmons that’s mostly about the NBA. Simmons argues that career longevity, European imports, and overachieving young players have helped make the current NBA particularly well-stocked not just with talent, but with well-used talent. Gladwell makes one of his trademark Gladwellian connections:
What we’re talking about is what are called capitalization rates, which refers to how efficiently any group makes use of its talent. So, for example, sub-Saharan Africa is radically undercapitalized when it comes to, say, physics: There are a large number of people who live there who have the ability to be physicists but never get the chance to develop that talent. Canada, by contrast, is highly capitalized when it comes to hockey players: If you can play hockey in Canada, trust me, we will find you. One of my favorite psychologists, James Flynn, has looked at capitalization rates in the U.S. for various occupations: For example, what percentage of American men who are intellectually capable of holding the top tier of managerial/professional jobs actually end up getting a job like that. The number is surprisingly low, like 60 percent or so. That suggests we have a lot of room for improvement.
What you’re saying with the NBA is that over the past decade, it has become more and more highly capitalized: There isn’t more talent than before, but there is — for a variety of reasons — a more efficient use of talent. But I suspect that in sports, as in the rest of society, there’s still an awful lot of room for improvement.
Noam Scheiber, writing in The New Republic this week, says basically the same thing (about management, not basketball):
A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them?
It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his failed predecessor, Rick Wagoner, both worked their way up from the company’s vaunted Treasurer’s office.) But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”
In effect, what we’ve been doing in American industry is overpaying flashy ball hogs who put up great statistics but don’t know how to build teams or win games. In a similar vein, Umair Haque says that the whole model of a “leader” needs to be rethought, and what we really need are builders:
Leadership was built for 20th century economics. It’s a myth that leadership is a set of timeless skills. Is it? Abraham Zaleznik famously defined leadership as “using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other people.” Influence is the key word. The textbook skills of the “leader” — persuasion, delegation, coalition — aren’t universally applicable. Rather, they fit a very specific context best: the giant, evil, industrial-era organization.
Leaders don’t lead. How did this particular skillset emerge? Influence counts because the vast, Kafkaesque bureaucracies that managed 20th century prosperity, created, in turn, the need for “leaders”: people who could navigate the endlessly twisting politics at the heart of such organizations, and so ensure their survival. But leaders don’t create great organizations — the organization creates the leader. 20th century economics created a canonical model of organization — and “leadership” was built to fit it.
Haque actually doesn’t do a great job at articulating what a “builder” does differently, other than throwing out a few examples. (Yes, Obama isn’t as accomplished a builder as Gandhi — but saying that Gandhi “built” nonviolent resistance only scratches the surface.)
But if you use Haque’s new-economy and Scheiber’s old-economy critiques of current practices, you get something very powerful. The pre-managerial, heroic-age-of-capitalism industrialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries didn’t always build things that were good, from our perspective — but coalsmoke aside, they BUILT things, creating real capital and value along the way. It’s this fifty-year-blip of late uncreative capitalism, milking old property for its dregs, reshuffling money to create something from nothing, that has culturally really screwed us up.
“The Problem With Cable Is Television”
But, it turns out, the problem with television is sports:
The broadband business is doing fine, as costs are coming down. Cable executives do worry that if costs rise as they expect because of surging online video use, they will need to find some way to get prices going up the way they are used to in their video business.
The bigger question is what happens to the video business. By all accounts, Web video is not currently having any effect on the businesses of the cable companies. Market share is moving among cable, satellite and telephone companies, but the overall number of people subscribing to some sort of pay TV service is rising. (The government’s switch to digital over-the-air broadcasts is providing a small stimulus to cable companies.) However, if you remember, it took several years before music labels started to feel any pain from downloads…
The wedge that breaks all this may well be sports. ESPN alone already accounts for nearly $3 of every monthly cable bill, industry executives say. With all these new sports networks pushing up cable rates, at some point people who aren’t sports fans might start turning in volume to Internet services like Netflix. We’re not there yet, but looking at the industry in the last quarter, you can see the pressures building.
Fascinating (and quick!) look at cable companies’ businesses. [Everything in bold is my emphasis.]
So Much News With No Paper To Report It
Auugghh. Gavin at Wordwright links to more bittersweet news about my (and Robin’s) hometown:
Maybe once a year, a city has a news day as heavy as the one that just hit Detroit: The White House forced out the chairman of General Motors, word leaked that the administration wanted Chrysler to hitch its fortunes to Fiat, and Michigan State University
Paging Nate Silver
Paul Krugman on “the magazine cover effect”:
[W]hen you see a corporate chieftain on the cover of a glossy magazine, short the stock. Or as I once put it (I