Conventional wisdom, like student-athletes, tends to be one and not the other. Below are the 10 greatest and most persistent ideas in sports that have somehow eluded punchline status.
1. How valuable can he be when his team wasn't any good? Let's flip this. How valuable could Ichiro Suzuki have been in 2001 when the Mariners swept the AL West by 14 games, and finished 31 games clear of the Wild Card? Seattle could undeniably have earned a playoff berth without him. Yet the writers who use this question to justify skipping over a league's best player voted Ichiro the MVP by a wide margin.
2. The team controls its own destiny. No one owns a dictionary anymore, I get that. But dictionary.com is one click away. Google is still on computers, last I checked. Is there some vast, worldwide conspiracy to not understand what destiny is? (Hint: see fate, kismet.) Next: the world's physicists discuss in which direction the sun revolves around the earth.
3. His team lost, so he's no longer the leading Heisman candidate. Because his six touchdowns demonstrated a lack of leadership.
4. Championships are all that matter. So being a fan of the Minnesota Twins was just as rewarding in the 1990s as being a fan of the Atlanta Braves, because each team celebrated one World Championship during the decade. The Twins averaged 67 victories, and notched two winning seasons, one division title and one pennant in that span. The Braves averaged 95 victories, and notched nine winning seasons, eight division titles and five pennants. But none of that matters; only championships do.
5. Hitting wins games but pitching wins championships. (Football corollary: offense wins games but defense wins championships.) Brilliant! Think about what this revolutionary concept says: If you hold your opponent to fewer runs (or points) than you score, you will win the title. But if you score more runs (points) than you allow, you won't win the title. This changes everything! It disproves the widely held belief that offense and defense are inversely linked: every run (point) the offense scores, the defense allows.
6. This is a big regular-season game because they're battling for the top seed . . . Sure, because the top seed gets the home field/court/ice advantage against a clearly inferior opponent in the first round while on the other hand, the second seed gets the home field/court/ice advantage against a clearly inferior opponent in the first round. Plus, if these same two teams make it through the post-season gauntlet to meet for the conference championship, the one-seed gets home field/court/ice advantage, which has been proven over the last 30 years to be utterly irrelevant. So they'll be slugging it out in this critically important regular season contest in which both combatants long ago clinched a playoff spot and would never think to rest their best players and protect them from injury. (Now on the radio: George Strait's "Ocean Front Property.")
7. I'm against instant replay because I believe in the human element. You got that right! And while we're at it, let's put the human element back in team travel. No more of these fancy aeroplanes. The teams should just walk from St. Louis to Cincinnati. And no more of this tel-o-visioning either. People should either come to the game or wait for the newspaper to report two days later the information they get from the teletype. And no more of them arthroscopes and other fancy medical doo-dads for injured athletes. Back to surgeons with saws and ether. Because, you know, the human element. We like a system that upholds game-deciding mistakes, which the entire world except the umpires can see replayed. If it's good enough for the Providence Grays, the Boston Beaneaters and the Cleveland Spiders, it's good enough for us.
8. If the team wins a third championship in three years, the quarterback has to get consideration for "greatest college football player of all time." (This one has been suggested specifically of A.J. McCarron, the QB of Alabama.) Wait, I thought defense wins championships. (McCarron's never even earned first team SEC, but 14 of his teammates over the three years have.)
9. He's an RBI guy. Some guys are base stealers. Others are LOOGYs. None is so revered as the man who bats behind the best hitters on his team and exploits his opportunities to plate runs by grounding out, flying out, bouncing into a double-play, sacrificing or other cunning methods. He is the RBI Guy. We never hear about his counterpart, the RS Guy, who walks, steals second, advances to third on a ground out and makes it possible for RBI Guy to knock him in.
10. All that counts is: how many rings does he have? Back-up shortstop Luis Soto is thrilled to hear this. By this accounting, he is one of the great players of all time. He won five championships with the Yankees and Toronto. He accrued a .650 lifetime OPS and earned four wins against replacement over a 13-year career. Whereas Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb combined for one title -- they probably didn't even get rings back in 1924 -- and all they did was enter the Hall of Fame with the first class. Why? Because they had the misfortune to play on bad teams? Pfff! It was because they lacked the will to win! And that's why they can never be the greatest of all time. Johnson, who in every other sense was the most accomplished hurler in baseball history, earned four times as many wins against replacement as Soto -- with his bat.
Go back 50 years and you find an even more spectacular winner than Soto. Third-string Yankee catcher Ralph Houk slugged seven extra base hits, including zero home runs, in his eight year career. He garnered one-tenth of a win against replacement for his entire Major League life. But he had the will to win, as his six World Series rings attest.
In basketball, the same honor goes to Robert Horry. His seven trophies -- two with Houston, three with the Lakers and two with San Antonio -- attest to his transcendence. He may have received some slight assistance from Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler, Shaquille O'Neill, Kobe Bryant, David Robinson and Tim Duncan.
Those 10 assertions continue to delight, years after their debunking. Long live the myths! (Not!)
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