Bryan Joiner

March 2, 2013

How I talked myself into B.J. Upton’s breakout season

I play in a keeper fantasy baseball league that uses an auction system, and is a points system based on linear weights, so your runs and RBI can suck it. This morning, I made the decision to bring B.J. Upton back for one year at $10. Upton represents everything that this league doesn’t reward — fielding, speed, raw home run numbers — so I have spent the last three hours trying to talk myself into this being a bad idea, but I think it’s actually a good one. The statistics are one thing, and they are the main thing; they predict a year much like his last three, which would make him slightly less valuable than $10, in our system. My pause is this: Every anecdotal factor — every single one — is in his favor, as far as I see it. It’s a predictor’s no man’s land. It’s the rare time that the sides are equally weighted, as far as I can see.

Upton was once the top prospect in the game, and he has turned in a slightly above-average career through six full seasons and two partial ones. He had one great year, in 2007, at the age of 22. Since then, he has consistently hit around .270/.320/.430, albeit with a heap of plate appearances. He’s been success as a quantity, though not necessarily at the quality the Rays expected. The Braves signed him for 5 years, $75 million a deal that reflects his durability and the twinkle in the eye most free agents are for most teams. They see good things, and a lot of them. They see a very good baseball player, and teams need very good baseball players.

So why pull this for a guy who’s been good-at-best in the aggregate for the last six seasons? I think it works because Upton is a low-risk, high-reward proposition for the Braves. As a fantasy owner, he’s somewhat riskier, because I’m betting he’ll be good this year, instead of at some point in the next three years. But I think if he’s ever going to put it together beyond the perfectly respectable level he’s achieved, it would happen now, for several reasons.

The first reason he might be better this season is the new contract, which pays him almost twice annually the $7 million he earned last season in Tampa, itself almost twice as much as his previous high of $4.8+ million. Like the Patriots, the Rays are always playing the angles, locking up talent below market rates. Like the Patriots, I can’t expect this to endear itself to players in the long run. I think that a large contract has as much potential to calm an athlete as it does to throw him into complacency, a trope that rarely plays itself out — players who don’t fulfill the terms of huge contracts, like modern-day Alex Rodriguez — shouldn’t have been offered the contracts in the first place. For a player of Upton’s self-assuredness, I’m guessing that he’s more likely to fold comfortably into self-assurance, instead of being the player who “vexed his adherents, because he’s clearly a gifted five-tool player who can carry a team when it matters.” Unrelated to the contract, I think Alex Gordon is a good precedent for Upton’s career arc, albeit one without the wonderful age-22 season. Scouts can be right or wrong, but in the aggregate, they are quite good at identifying baseball talent, and Gordon was every bit the prospect as Upton, though more or less a complete disaster until two seasons ago. Upton’s talent has never been an issue, nor was Gordon’s aptitude for the game, but both have had trouble harnessing it. Gordon has become an above-average player, quite possibly a good one. It took him five years, and he broke out at age 27. Upton is 27 right now, and will be until August. If the dam is going to break, this would be a natural time for it to happen. To be clear, I’m not talking about a Jacoby Ellsbury-like breakout, but one like Adam Jones’s last season, which, at .287/.334/.505 would be a great landing spot for Upton.

The second reason I think it could happen is that he’s playing with his brother. Jeff Sullivan crunched the numbers at FanGraphs to see if siblings improved if they were on the same team, and the answer was: Not really! “It turns out baseball is a complicated game the outcomes of which can’t be determined by one’s emotional state,” he writes. “Play with a brother in April and, chances are, come July or August, it just feels like regular baseball.” Being wicked smaht, however, he throws in this caveat:

Of course, what applies generally doesn’t have to apply specifically, and the Upton brothers are unique, like all sets of brothers. Both are known for their incredible raw skillsets, and both are known for not consistently reaching their ceilings. Maybe each will be motivated in Atlanta by the presence of the other. Or maybe B.J. will just be happy to be away from Tampa, and Justin will just be happy to be away from Arizona. Maybe they don’t improve. Maybe they stay the same, or even get worse. At the end of the day, they’re just two teammates in major-league baseball who know each other pretty well.

If you hadn’t guessed by now, I think the combination of B.J. being away from Tampa, and taking on an elder-ish statesman role on a high profile team alongside his struggling younger brother, will be good for him. I’m not sure this works out for Justin, anecdotally, but he’s already owned for $31. Obviously, BJ at $10 is a better bet than Justin, but the question is whether it’s a good one. I think BJ is good for Justin. It’s possible that being an oldest brother with the initials “B.J.” is clouding my judgment. It’s likely, even, but it doesn’t make me wrong. At the very least, I don’t see how it would hurt B.J. This is obviously a major judgment call, but it’s on these margins that desktop scouting happens. There’s an argument that it’s a hobby from which to stay away, like picking stocks unless you’re really good at it, but forget it, Marge: It’s fantasy baseball.

Finally, I think the Braves provide a better environment for Upton than Tampa’s wonderful free-for-all. Part of growing is accepting that you need to change, and if Atlanta’s slightly more strict ways can have a positive effect on Upton, and get him to wait on juuuuust a few more pitches, the benefits will expand disproportionately to the costs of instilling them. This is always true, but this is why change can be important — even if Upton is nothing I say he might be, and does in fact use his contract as an excuse to dog it, the barriers to getting messages across in a new environment are necessarily easier to cross than they are in a static situation. If the Braves can get him to stop swinging even a little bit, they’ll make out well. I think they’ll do it, and I’m betting my fake money that it’ll be this year. I feel just good enough about it, but these are the margins at which I have to work.

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March 1, 2013

The NBA’s Space Race

Yakkin’ about how the NBA salary cap destroys parity over at The Classical.

February 21, 2013

Goats yelling like humans, ranked

1. Goat 1 (0:00-0:21): Just amazing yelling and poise. Totally not flustered, and legitimately seems to need some help. For what? Who knows? But we’re all ears.

2. Goat 3 (0:27-0:42): The authenticity of the scream is just fantastic, even if it’s weak. Let’s face it: Weakness can be funny. You know it, I know it, and the American people know it.

3. Goat 9 (1:42-1:59): A nice angry retort to some regular ol’ bleating. Shit doesn’t always need to be gussied up.

4. Goat 4 (0:54-1:02): Very much of the same school as Goat 1, but without the smooth finish. Underrated (in society as a whole, not on this list).

5. Goat 10 (1:45-1:49): Is higher on other lists. Also very much in the same vein as Goat 1, but in the same way Jerry Stackhouse was in the same vein as Michael Jordan. Good? Yes. More than that? No.

6. Goat 8 (1:36-1:45): So Italian. Major problem: Doesn’t sound like a human. But serious attitude points.

7. Goat 6 (1:02-1:12): Cuter than it is effective. Props the cameraman for acknowledging the absurdity, tho.

8: Goat 4: (0:42:-0:54): Solid bleating, but this is an A/V competition, and you’re on some 8-bit shit.

9: “Goat” 11 (1:59-end): A lamb. And fake. Still better than…

10. Goat 2/7 (0:21-27, 1:12-1:22): Kill yourself. You’re the worst. Never bleat again. Ever.

February 20, 2013

Nate Silver was wrong about one thing: The ocean

I’ve known Nate Silver for a long time, and spend 10 minutes in my presence and I’ll be sure to remind you of that. I finished his book last night, and it’s amazing. I wasn’t surprised at the depth of his knowledge, because no one with an Internet connection would be, but the breadth of it knocked me off my feet. We often talk about baseball and poker and politics, but he doesn’t go quoting Julius Caesar here and there. The book is a masterpiece, and like all great masterpieces, it has a flaw. I wasn’t looking for it: most of the time, I was shocked that I’ve spent time with this human, whose brain could be running America (and as of last month, is qualified to do so!). But Nate grew up in the spartan hills of central Michigan, and I grew up on an island, and got to spend my early life near the ocean at all times. That’s the other thing I’ll tell you in the first 10 minutes you’ll spend around me, without fail. Martha’s Vineyard. Nantucket sucks.

In his conclusion, Nate writes:

Staring at the ocean and waiting for a flash of insight is how ideas are generated in the movies. In the real world, they rarely come to you when you are standing in place. Nor do the “big” ideas necessarily start out that way. It’s more often with small, incremental, and sometimes even accidental steps that we make progress.

I agree that small, incremental steps are how we form ideas, but they will hit you on the beach. What Nate doesn’t account for is that they have to hit you sometime, and his conclusion implies that these times are random, but the “getting inspired by staring at the ocean” isn’t contrived: It’s a real thing that happens.

Look at it this way: If you are building toward an idea, a “Eureka!” moment will come, at some point. For the same reason cloistered thinkers are encourage to take a walk in order to give their brains a chance to start putting together some puzzle pieces behind-the-scenes, looking at the ocean is one of the best ways to help you come to your magic moments. The staring-at-the-ocean “meme,” may I call it that, came from a place where staring out at the biggest feature on our planet affords us insight by bringing our own ideas down to size. And here’s the thing, the one thing I can speak for from experience: It never gets old. I can’t remember a time, growing up, when taking time at the ocean didn’t help me reorganize my thoughts in a constructive way. It may have happened, but if it did, it was rare. That was part of the magic of growing up on an island, a magic I still think and write about to an outsized degree, more than a decade later. It’s less “Lost” magic than pure practicality: When faced with the infinite on all sides, it’s hard not to be awed by life, however contained. It’s no accident Hollywood is mere miles from the ocean. As Nate might say, it’s the single greatest tool we have to separate the signal from the noise.

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February 19, 2013

The Horror and the Noise

I wrote more about Reeva Steenkamp and Oscar Pistorius over at The Classical. Previous post here.

4 Comments

February 15, 2013

When a man kills a woman: The ethics of the Oscar Pistorius coverage

At some point in the future, another famous athlete will kill another beautiful woman. This is inevitable. That’s why I was so disheartened with Katie J.M. Baker’s teardown of the Reeva Steenkamp/Oscar Pistorius coverage at Jezebel today. Baker said, basically, that the media was irresponsible for running pictures of Steenkamp from her work as a swimsuit model on their front pages, and that the AP and the New York Times had glazed over the severity of the crime and the totality of Steenkamp’s life to focus on Pistorius in their articles. She found fault with one NYT paragraph in particular, and I agree totally with her criticism of it, which reads:

His arrest is a stark reminder that violence is an everyday face of life in South Africa, where fear of armed robberies and carjacking prompt the wealthy to take refuge in heavily guarded gated compounds and arm themselves with handguns.

It is, of course, not a reminder of this, or not one worth mentioning. But the real problem, echoed by Deadspin later in the day, was boobs. I do not believe that the ethics of publishing swimsuit photographs of someone who was a swimsuit model, among other professions, aren’t as cut-and-dried as Baker and Barry Petchesky make them sound, and not leastwise because those outlets ran the newspaper covers themselves. Their defense might be along the lines of Jon Stewart’s, when he’s invariably asked if The Daily Show is a news program, and he invariably responds that it is not. I think you could make an argument either way with Stewart, and I think you could make an argument for or against Jezebel and Deadspin as being hypocritical by publishing photos they condemn, but I’m not interested in that argument or, frankly, what they did. I’m interested in what should be done the next time this happens. Because it will.

Baker didn’t propose a solution, which was the most disappointing part. My question is whether it is ethical to post posthumous photos of a professional swimsuit model. Steenkamp was a law school graduate in addition to being a model, and one commenter expressed her objections like this:

[S]he was also a qualified lawyer and modeled cosmetics, and that the photo on the cover wasn’t chosen as a direct representation of her career (again, she modeled more than just swimsuits) but to be titillating.

Of course, if a newspaper is going to put one photo on a cover at a time, it would be impossible to have a “direct representation of her career” if she modeled more than one thing. That the newspapers chose swimsuits is hardly suprising, but that doesn’t make it right. It also doesn’t make it wrong, and part of it has to do with your take on the modeling profession. Steenkamp chose to be a model. If you are a successful model, modeling is not easy. It looks easy, and that’s the hard part: Anyone can look good for a few minutes at a time with months of practice, but even then, it has to look easy. Like anything, it’s hard work — extremely hard, if you have to stay at a certain weight. She chose to do it, and she did it well. If one is going to attack the newspaper for publishing the photos because of the outsized effect exposed skin has on the human brain, one could see that as an indictment of Steenkamp’s chosen profession, and that she, herself, had exploited this outsized effect in her own way. One could say the newspaper was respecting her by showing off her work.

I don’t necessarily believe this. BlackSportsOnline, a site I respect for its breadth of coverage but cringe at which I cringe for its butchered grammar and constant barrage of pinup photos, ran a series of Steenkamp photos with their article, and it rubbed me the wrong way. For me, that was sexualizing her too much; my line was more than one photo. When I saw the covers of the Post and Daily News this morning, I wasn’t surprised, nor was I horrified. If we know about Pistorius because of his athletic accomplishments and now about Steenkamp’s looks because of her death, these are part of the same system that circumvents the logical parts of our brain. On the whole, we like stupid stories about athletes and we like pictures of scantily clad humans, and even if it was 55 percent for and 45 against, that’s a ton of people against. But this type of coverage isn’t immoral just because you personally don’t fall prey to these traps. It may be immoral, but it just means you don’t like it.

Maybe that’s not what Baker was saying, but she didn’t say much about why newspapers shouldn’t do this, except that this “is not [Pistorius’s] obituary.” Was it Steenkamp’s? Better question: If it was Steenkamp’s obituary, would it be right to run a photo? She chose to do this, after all: Saying that running a photo of her in swimwear implies that she didn’t take pride in her work, and that it’s less representative of her life than, say, a candid photo of her at home, is disrespectful to the work, whether that sounds insane or not. We don’t think twice about running photos of actors in their roles or chemists at the lab. Running the photo wouldn’t be disrespectful to her. But here’s the problem, and here’s why Baker is right. These things are not for Steenkamp — she’s dead. They’re for us. And running a photo of a dead woman in swimwear exploits our brains into not thinking about what to do when this happens again, and the next dead model’s boobs are up in our faces again, and the cycle of rage repeats itself, and we’re no closer to a solution. These are real people, not toys for Rupert Murdoch to play with, or for Katie J.M. Baker to channel outrage without having to say, in detail, why this is wrong and what to do about it, in face of all the temptations to do it the same way all over again. The forces of sex and violence are powerful. If we’re going to beat them, we’re going to have to try twice as hard. This wasn’t it.

2 Comments

February 6, 2013

Dunk of Ages

The moment.

I debated whether to write about Kobe’s dunk, and I just saw Emma Carmichael’s writeup on Deadspin, so I’ll try to be brief. Kobe killed it last night. I don’t typically like him, but last night he was Full Kobe.

The entire arena was behind him, every time he hit or missed a shot. Brooklyn “fans” are just happy to have basketball, and basketball with Kobe is better than basketball without it. There were a lot of Lakers fans. They chanted “M-V-P!” all game. This must happen in every arena Kobe goes to, in some form.

Midway through the third quarter, Kobe crossed over Gerald Wallace, for whom I am told he harbors a long-standing distaste, and hit a jumper, and I jumped out of my seat with thousands of others.

From that point on, every time he got the ball, he was trying to further humiliate Wallace. He took Jordanesque fallaway 25-footers and just missed most of them and blew by Crash, as I am told he is known, at least twice. The game stayed close, and with three minutes left, Kobe pulled Wallace out to half court and I said, out loud, “This isn’t good for Gerald Wallace.” It wasn’t. The Nets expected a pass, not, as Carmichael wrote, young Kobe and a violent dunk. That’s what we got.

I’m 35, just a tick older than Kobe, and my friend Ravi, a lifelong Kobe fan taking in his first Kobe experience, is 34. As a journalist and writer, my career is still beginning. Kobe’s career is not yet in its twilight, but we know it’s coming. I never believed in him before, but he changed my impression in an instant. That dunk was more impressive than his older ones because he had no legs — it was pure practicality. It was 80-80, and it wasn’t just two points. It was: You’re NOT winning this game, and the Nets didn’t. It was a perfect expression of basketball genius, a moment, in the volume business of regular season sports, that changes everything you ever believed.

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January 24, 2013

What does a Boston sports fan look ahead to?

The Celtics are toast. Let’s acknowledge that straight off. It is not a question of whether they will go down, but whether or not they will go down fighting. These Celtics have always gone down fighting. When fans cite Rajon Rondo’s outsized statistics in nationally televised games — as of last April, the most recent time for which I could painfully easily find stats, 14 of his 18 career triple-doubles had come in the postseason — I take comfort in the fact all postseason games are nationally televised. That will not be enough this year.

The Bruins, we’ll see. Hockey is bred for one-season phenomena (not surprisingly, the opposite of how it should be bred), and they had their moment two years ago.

The Red Sox have their defining season, for this iteration. What they have going for them: Cherington is de facto a good general manager, they are totally unburdened from expectations, and they still have some great players… even if “some” is just two. What they have going against them: They’re not great, which has a way of wearing on people.

The next real big game for Boston sports fans is next year’s Patriots opener. We have floated back to Earth. The whiplash will catch some people, but whatever. We now have eight months to figure out if the Patriots can do it again — eight months to focus on the Patriots, and the amazing favor they’ve done us. Eight months to follow nonsense stories about Welker. (He will re-sign.) Eight months to wonder if Brady will still have it. (He will.) Eight months to wonder whether Rob Gronkowski is permanently off-and-on injured, and whether the how the dice-roll defense will acquit itself.

Here’s the problem: In the NFL, that’s a sad road, because eventually, you’re going to lose. If you’re a fan of all but about eight teams — that is, 75 percent of the league — it’s a daily reality. In college, it’s different. In college, Alabama can stay Alabama from year to year, mastering the churn. In the NFL, the Patriots can only do so much, and they have done so much that expecting them to do it again is both wholly selfish and altogether correct. Because fuck’em, right?

Right. But here we are and there ain’t no frontier. We’re getting to the mountains. When it stops rolling, who will still give a crap?

A better question, of course: Should you?

Should you care about what a bunch of people you’ve never met do inside a TV set? Should you pay criminally insane prices for licensed goods with your favorite team’s logo on it? Should you spend hours on the Internet, dousing the Web with your thoughts and feelings? Should you skip that Sunday appointment?

The answer to these questions is no, you shouldn’t, and it is self-evidently true that it is. But it’s the wrong question. The real question is: Knowing that it’s wrong, why do we do it anyway? What is it that makes sports irresistible? I don’t know the answer, but I haven’t given up looking for it, nor have I quit trying to figure out why I care. And if you’re tuning in tonight, or whenever, you probably feel the same way, though maybe not to the same degree. But I know this: In eight months, you’ll be glued to your TV set for the first game that mattered for awhile. You won’t stop to think why. You’ll just know that it does. When it’s game time, it’s all about the game.

There might not be too much to look forward to until September, but we’ll always have that, and in that, we’ll have a Rondo pass, a blown Rivera save that’ll make it all worth it. They’ll never get a trophy for it, but hey, you never got one at all.

3 Comments

January 23, 2013

The Patriots’ happy ending

The Patriots aren’t in the Super Bowl, and it will be at least 10 years since they won anything that mattered. Except, you know, all those games. Ask a Cleveland fan what they would have given for this season. Then think of Joe Flacco’s ugly face, and take it all back. Then take a giant hop over the Red Sox’ season and land at next year’s Patriots season opener, the next real game that matters.

Dealing with decline is difficult, and the Patriots have largely spared us by refusing to decline. Bill Belichick runs a volume business, and he has given us volume. There is more yet to come; if there was going to be decline, it would have started by now. The end will be abrupt, unexpected, and suddenly being a Patriots fan will mean a whole new thing. Some people, invariably, will not like it.

It will never be better than this. Think about what will happen to San Antonio, post-Duncan and Popovich. Think about the sheer churn the Patriots have imposed on NFL history, and the team’s outsized share of the last 11 seasons among its competitors, for victories and airtime. The Patriots are the sixth-most valuable franchise in sports, fourth-most valuable in American sports, and third-most valuable in the NFL. When I was young and licensed NFL gear was harder to come by, you could almost never buy a Patriots jersey out-of-state. If Eastbay offered up just one, I’d be all over it.

That was why Drew Bledsoe was such a big deal. By 1998, he was easily the best skill-position Patriot who ever lived, which seems categorically insane now, but there we were. And that’s where the story ends, really. Tom Brady has been the Patriots’ choice to start and finish games every day since September 23, 2001, and you know his story. He belongs to the world, but we just get him for a little while. That little while is already longer than we had any right to ask for, and I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter if I think I’m greedy for asking for more, or trying to be content with what I have, they’re just going to keep on winning and winning and winning. And then they won’t, it’ll be over, and we’ll talk about it long past the point anyone cares. It’s a feel good story, and one that has a happy ending, no matter what happens from here on out. We won’t be able to resist.

(Go Niners.)

2 Comments

January 11, 2013

Kill all the sportswriters

They were writing about performance enhancing drugs 50 years ago. They’re writing about them more, now, because they believe that for sports to survive, there must by a mystery. For almost all members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, there’s simply not that much to do any more. The numbers have closed around them. More people can better evaluate players than ever before. The game of hero-making for a living is transparent; Jon Heyman doesn’t even bother hiding the game anymore, like playing the cup-and-ball version of three-card monte with an invisible glass, where you can see the ball go down his sleeve just before he looks you dead in the eye and tell you that were wrong, wrong, wrong.

If we needed sportswriters at any point, we certainly need them a lot less now. Games are covered from every angle, as they happen, on Twitter. The sportswriter must figure out how to make lemonade out of a fully squeezed husk; the difference between the sportswriter and the journalist is that the journalist does not pee in a pitcher and tell you his lemonade is the absolute best, because it has real lemon husks floating inside. The press box is a coddling mechanism, an incubator to keep the writers happy with the team’s CEO. In the specific case of the Hall of Fame dialogue, punishing the players for alleged PED use exonerates the owners. The “Hall of Fame” is a misnomer as it is; it’s one room at an otherwise amazing museum of baseball. Clear out the plaques, and you could put some cubicles in there, make some cold calls. It’s the least special part of a very special place. It’s the coat room at the Chartres Cathedral.

Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are arguably the two best baseball players ever. They do not seem to be nice people. They did really well at the end of their careers. They are famous beyond belief. They don’t need the Hall of Fame. Frankly, the Hall of Fame doesn’t need the Hall of Fame. It’s stupid and demeaning and insulting to the intelligence of anyone who bothers to pay attention. The “character clause” is institutionalized bigotry, not necessarily along racial lines, but along the lines of us vs. them. Ken Rosenthal compared attack-dog statheads to Tea Party activists, but he’s got it backward. His vote is his weapon, and he uses it irresponsibly simply because he can, for now, even as he feels he’s being marginalized to a zero point. It’s insanity, and the angry voices in the computer likely have nothing on those in his own head, telling him that what he’s doing is right. Barry Bonds played. Roger Clemens played. Baseball happened, and it’s properly represented everywhere on Earth except the one room built to do so.