Are 77 Million Paying Customers Irrelevant?

I have a lot of opportunity to listen to sports talk radio -- not that I do, just that I have the opportunity. For one thing, there's no such thing as sports talk radio anymore; there's 24/7 NFL radio with an NBA side dish and some miscellaneous dessert. Around this time golf and Olympics comprise the postprandial offerings. 

In the process, baseball, hockey and all other sports have been relegated to sports talk Siberia. Someone should inform Mike, and also Mike, that Major League baseball games are actually being played during the summer, whereas there is absolutely nothing happening in pro football and basketball, save the verbal diarrhea that pours out across the airwaves about an irrelevant tweet, arrest or contract dispute.

Which brings me to the main point here: how utterly preposterous NBA talk is until the second round of the playoffs in May. Consider this:

• Today is August 6.
• The NBA finals take place in June, 2017, 10 months from now.
• We can agree with nearly 100% certainty that the Cleveland Cavaliers will play in the NBA finals in 2017 unless LeBron James gets hurt.
• We can agree with nearly 100% certainty that if the Cavs don't advance, the East representative will get shellacked in the finals.
• We can agree with nearly 100% certainty that the Golden State Warriors or San Antonio Spurs will represent the West in the NBA finals.
• No other team has any reasonable hope of vying for the title.

And yet, there have been several times more NBA talk on the radio than baseball talk the last two weeks -- even during the run-up to the trade deadline and while the pennant races are shaping up. Actually, that undersells the discrepancy because there was essentially no baseball talk despite the flurry of trade activity.

I understand that football and basketball are young fans' universe, though with supply-side pressure like that, how could they not be? But more than twice as many people attended MLB games last year than NBA and NFL games -- combined. 

So if 77 million people paid hard-earned American legal tender to enjoy ballgames, doesn't it stand to reason that a few of them, occasionally, would rather hear about baseball games actually being played than about some off-season hypotheticals in a league whose first meaningful contests are months away?

The Rookie of the Year Award Isn't About Jake Arrieta

The baseball world is making strides. Local broadcasts show players' OBP and OPS. Most Valuable Player discussions regularly invoke WAR. WHIP and fielding independent measures pepper Cy Young debates. These advanced metrics -- (if you can call them that: OBP and SLG are as old as Yogi Berra, though they didn't storm the shores of Normandy) -- aren't the final word, but they're superior to the old standard of BA-HR-RBI and W-L, ERA.)

It's been gratifying to see that most fans and reporters have begun to digest the argument that a player's value has little to do with his teammates' performance. Unless his world craters in the last 15 games, Bryce Harper will win the MVP award he deserves in a rout, despite the Nationals' 2015 face plant.

Some of the credit for this belongs to MLB itself, which has embraced the new analysis and all the fun tools like Statcast and PitchFX. Articles on MLB.com are replete with references to True Average, WAR, BABIP, FIP and myriad other helpful measuring tools.

Simultaneously though, we're backsliding on that notion in other bailiwicks. Much of the Heisman discussion over the past five years has centered on the best team's best player, rather than on simply college football's standout performer.

Along those lines, I commend to your attention this article from Sports On Earth, a generally excellent site with lots of good insight. In it, the writer suggests that candidacies for the Rookie of the Year award waxed and waned based on team fortunes. We've seen this illogic before.

There is utterly no justification to holding an individual baseball player responsible for the performance of his 24 teammates. Moreover, while some retrograde writers still cower behind the "valuable" nomenclature of the MVP award to denigrate the candidacies of great players on non-contenders, there is no such fig leaf in the Rookie of the Year award. It is simply a measure of the first-year player who has had the best season. Period.

Kris Bryant is almost surely the 2015 NL Rookie of the Year, not withstanding the final 15 games. He's posted a .317 True Average at the plate, defended third base reasonably well and contributed five wins to his team, the best of the freshman lot. That his team will make the playoffs is absolutely, completely and undoubtedly irrelevant.

Derek Jeter 174, Tony Gwynn 0

Fox issued 84 unnecessary mentions of Derek Jeter at the All-Star game and cut away to him unnecessarily 90 times, according to Baseball Prospectus. ("Unnecessary" in that he wasn't batting, baserunning or making a play.)

They never mentioned Tony Gwynn once. Not once.

Today MLB and Fox, under widespread withering criticism for a blatantly shameful misorder of priorities, issued a statement claiming that they ignored Gwynn because they didn't want to slight Jim Fregosi, who also died since the last All-Star Game.

Oh, never mind then.

When did Major League Baseball hire Ryan Braun for their PR department? 

So here's a fun game: 

Which notable attempt at spin has reached the highest level on the laugh meter?
1. We're emancipating the oppressed Germans of Poland and Belguim. -Adolf Hitler
2. It was a wardrobe malfunction. -Justin Timberlake
3. We have repelled the Americans. -Baghdad Bob
4. The Civil War wasn't about slavery. -Embarrassed Southerners
5. Well, Frank Cashen died too, ya know. -MLB and Fox

I used to think that Fox was the worst network for MLB because they obviously don't like baseball or know much about it. But now I realize, it's a perfect marriage.

R.I.P. Tony Gwynn. You were a great ballplayer and a good man who died way too young.

More and More and More Playoffs: Blecch

My newspaper tells me that tonight's NFL tilt between Atlanta and Detroit will help determine whether the Falcons clinch home field advantage on the road to the Super Bowl. The implication is that the contest is significant for this reason despite decades of experience.

In fact, tonight's clash is a near total irrelevance. The last two Super Bowl champs staggered to 9-7 records and slipped into the playoffs in the last week before eliminating all those 13-3 and 12-4 behemoths with home field advantage.

In fact, in American professional sports today simply making the playoffs is the entire goal. Period. After that, flip a coin.

Don't believe me? The football Giants weren't the only team last year to parlay a mediocre regular season into a crown. The L.A. Kings stumbled into the NHL playoffs with more losses than wins, qualified last and then swept through their conference with easy wins over the #1, #2 and #3 seeds before winning the cup in six games.

The 2011 World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals snuck into the post-season on the last day of the regular season with the worst record in the playoffs. (The 2012 World Series champs, the division-winning S.F. Giants, were a legitimate champion.)

During a thankfully truncated NBA season, the Miami Heat faced boobirds and derision because of a 9-8 start before capturing the #2 seed in the East and winning it all.

So when the NHL announces that half its season is lost, even hockey fans should applaud. Forty games seems about right if all they're going to do is eliminate a handful of awful teams. (On the other hand, the league and its players appear on the verge of another Armageddon. All involved have a bright future in Congress, once they earn their American citizenship.)

And we should all laugh when the sport's advocates promote a meaningless match-up like tonight's Falcon-Lion snoozer, as a playoff positioner. Anyone paying the least bit of attention anytime over the last three decades realizes there's no such thing.

A good rule of thumb for playoffs should be this: Qualifying should be sufficiently difficult that some good teams get left out. That ensures that playoff qualifying is an accomplishment and that a good team will win the title irrespective of who catches fire for a couple of weeks in the post-season. Major League baseball and the NFL are both straddling the line, which the NBA and NHL long ago breached.

The NFL is reportedly considering the addition of two more teams to its playoff lineup. It is difficult to overstate how awesomely awful this idea is. Adding two more palyoff slots guarantees that an 8-8 team will parlay a couple of fluke wins into a Super Bowl championship. Blecch.