This, That and the Other

Ken "Hawk" Harrelson's nine-year vagabond MLB career included a third-place MVP finish in 1968 and a fair amount of part-time, above-average offense. Hawk was an amusing blowhard when he played and he's maintained that record as the Chicago White Sox color analyst.

Harrelson is a card-carrying member of the Tantrum Club whose members stick their fingers in their ears and moan through rolled tongues whenever new analysis explodes their deeply-held mythology. In fact, Harrelson might even be president of this club.

Brian Kenny is a saber-wise host on the MLB network who has educated nearly as many people about baseball as Harrelson has stupefied. Kenny brought Harrelson on his show last week and allowed him an opportunity to explain his ideas, which is another way of saying he provided Hawk enough rope to hang himself. 

Harrelson eschews illuminating statistics based on actual research in favor of his own unquantifiable measure -- the will to win. During his rant, he made a long series of provably false claims and if you need to have the evidence provided, you've probably stumbled on the wrong site. Thanks anyway for visiting.

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The truncated NHL season has come to a merciful end and now half the teams start all over with three more months of playoffs. Last season, the L.A. Kings, the last team into the playoffs with more losses than wins, swept through their higher-seeded opponents en route to the Stanley Cup.

When it comes to winning the championship, the regular season is so utterly irrelevant that every contender ought to be installed in Las Vegas as a 15-1 shot. 

There are three teams in this year's tournament that have lost as many games as they've won -- Detroit, Ottawa and the Islanders, but you'd never know it from the standings. In an effort to obfuscate how weak the lower-tier playoff contenders are, the NHL calls overtime losses "ties" but overtime victories "wins." As a result, the standings suggest that the Red Wings are 24-16-8 when in fact they won 24 (probably some of them in overtime) and lost 24.

When you have to resort to trickery to validate your product, perhaps you need a new product. Hockey is a spectacular product; the NHL is a disaster.

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Now that the Lakers have proved to be pretenders not just in the regular season but in the playoffs as well, sports talk radio has swiveled its collective head to the other coast. "Next," (after more ads than the Super Bowl) "can the Knicks beat the Heat?"

No.

Now what do we talk about?

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The extraordinarily entertaining and intriguing NFL draft features a handful of encyclopedic minds offering instant critiques like old testament pronouncements about each pick. They never mention the one item that would be particularly illuminating: their own track record.

You heard a lot of analysis of Geno Smith, E.J. Manuel and the other QBs, including definitive statements about how they were taken too high or low. Some of the comparisons invoked the names Russell Wilson and Colin Kaepernick. 

How many of these football sachems were calling for teams to draft Wilson and Kaepernick? How many of them even thought Wilson and Kaepernick would start a game in their first two years, much less lead their teams into the playoffs?

Yeah, I thought so.

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Here's another NFL draft head scratcher: teams have been criticized for choosing a player in the right round, but not with the right pick. For example, the team with the ninth pick selects the best player at a position they need who is rated the 20th best player. "He's not a #9 pick," they say.

But the team isn't picking 20th; they're picking ninth. And presumably no one with the next 10 selections will trade with them. So they take the guy they want with the pick they have. If selecting that player will make the team better, isn't that the right choice? It seems like a silly criticism to me.

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The first 25 games of a season are too small a sample to draw conclusions from scratch. For example, the Rockies are 15-9, but we don't know whether they're that good, they're just on a hot streak or some gust of luck has blown their way. (Actually we do know that good scheduling has been at least partly responsible for Colorado's success. They're 1-5 against the Braves and Giants and 6-0 against the sad-sack Padres. Plus, they swept a three-game set against the Mets -- at home in the snow.)

On the other hand, we can learn a lot about things we already thought we knew. Here are four last place teams, with a combined record of 29-65: Houston, Miami, the Cubs and San Diego. It's not too early to draw conclusions about these collections. We thought they would stink and they have delivered in spades.