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?

Marshall McLuhan Is Killing Us

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/opinions.html

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community." --Oscar Wilde

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/opinions.html

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/opinions.html

If you were to watch sports television or listen to sports talk radio, you could be forgiven for thinking that LeBron James is driving the Cleveland Cavaliers bus off a cliff, that Mike Krzyzewski's legacy is now tainted by one bald-faced white lie, or that other  inconsequential moments in sports have taken on the gravitas of nuclear annihilation.

That's because these media have stopped the presses to devote interminable hours of blather dissecting both LeBron James's recent words and actions and Coach K's refusal to acknowledge a well-documented conversation.

"Nontroversies"
King James has, during the course of this ceaseless and meaningless regular season, demonstrated boredom, frustration and perhaps even regret about his team's dynamics. It appears he may have chosen teammates who don't share his singular focus, his devotion to his craft and his obsessive desire to win a championship for Cleveland.

Coach K lied to reporters about his words of admonition to an opposing player during the post-game handshake following Thursday's loss to Oregon in the NCAA playoffs. Cameras clearly caught him telling Dillon Brooks "you're too good of a player to do that," after Brooks fired up a three-pointer and celebrated its success with six seconds left and an 11-point lead. 

The Medium Is the Message
But this is not about James or Krzyzewski. It's about why these mini "nontroversies" flower into hours of discussion. it's about the medium, not the message.

You see, the existence of 24-hour sports talk and 24-hour sports news are far more responsible than LeBron James and Mike Krzyzewski are for the ubiquity of scandal in sports today. The plethora of national sports conversation outlets amounts to a gaping yaw that must be filled, minute after minute after minute -- at least those minutes not sequestered away for commercials, sponsorships, promos and the like. So let's say 50% of those minutes.

Paradox: More Conversation = Fewer Topics

With (the remaining half of) 24 hours to fill, you might think that many topics would get covered in the course of each day. Au contraire, Pierre. Because of the fierce competition, no network wants to be caught discussing any topic not of immediate and urgent concern to a majority of listeners at any given moment. That listener is liable to hit the radio or remote button and find another national sports network discussing the sport of their choice. So ironically, the existence of multiple options has reduced the sports talk universe to football and some seasonal filler. More choices has meant less hockey, tennis, car racing, track and field, soccer, boxing, baseball off-season or anything else.

This time of year, the NBA and the NCAA basketball playoffs join the NFL as topics that sports talk will cover. Consequently, that's all the sports talk consumer is interested in. And the cycle repeats itself.

More to the point, the hosts have to find fodder for their shows. And that means elevating the mundane to critical and expanding every anthill into a mountain.  It means parsing every word spoken by people who are not professional communicators and analyzing them into oblivion. And it means spouting opinions irrespective of the availability of the facts.

What They Won't Discuss
Because they are starved for content, the sports yakkers can never acknowledge the underlying business dynamic or that their subjects are drivel. For example, though they know that the NBA regular season is utterly, completely, without exception or doubt, irrelevant, they must still act as if every contest is a matter of life or death. In fact, the Cavs have clinched the playoffs and probably couldn't fall below the second seed even if they stopped trying. But acknowledging that would undermine the foundation of all the inconsequential prattle about LeBron James and the fate of the Cavs.

The result is disputations over LeBron's enigmatic tweets and Coach K's private conversations. They saddle us with the Johnny Manziel industrial complex and two years of deflated footballs, a discussion that is full of hot air about a subject that is not.  They bequeath us shibboleths like student athletes, division champions, unwritten rules and non-apologies.

I guess it diverts the listener from the alarming worldwide tangle with terrorism, the dispiriting presidential contests and the near-certainty of massive and disruptive global climate change. But anyone listening to it should recognize that sports talk is a highly distorted view of reality -- even of sports reality.

Dissecting a Common Fallacy

In the practice of rhetoric, deductive logic makes two demands:

1. Deductive validity. 
2. Truthful premises. 

That is, an if/then arrangement requires that the "if" statements be true and that the "then" statement flow naturally and inevitably from the combination of "if" statements.

For example: 

Mike Trout is the best player in the American League this year.

Mike Trout is a rookie.

Therefore Mike Trout is the Rookie of the Year.

It's valid and true. Although true, this isn't deductively valid:

Mike Trout is a rookie.

Mike Trout has the highest batting average in the league.

Therefore Mike Trout is the Rookie of the Year.

Many sports radio talk show hosts are inadequately schooled in logic.  Consider this segment paraphrased from a recent ESPN radio broadcast:

"Who are the managers of the year in the AL and NL? How about Davey Johnson? The Washington Nationals have the best record in baseball, three great starters and a different hitting star everyday. Even if they shut down Strasburg, they're looking good."

"The Reds have won five in a row even without their star Joey Votto. Dusty Baker is a veteran manager with a World Series on his resume. How about Clint Hurdle? He has the Pirates primed for their first winning season in 20 years."

"Bruce Bochy has kept the Giants atop the West. Maybe he's the guy."

"In the American League, the Yankees will win the East despite a rash of injuries, but before you crown Joe Girardi, Ron Washington has the Rangers ahead in the West."

This segment was based on several unstated fallacies:

1. The manager of the year is the skipper of the most surprisingly good team.

2. The manager is responsible for his players' performances.
3. You can measure how good a manager is by how often his team wins.

4. That the manager has guided a team to a pennant in the past has some bearing on his performance this year.

5. No actual data, anecdotes, research, knowledge or information is necessary to determine a manager's value.

Baseball writers have singularly relied on the first fallacy to elect their Manager of the Year each season, but there isn't a shred of evidence that there's any connection. Indeed, in every other sport we measure managers/head coaches by the sustained success of their teams, not by their episodic improvement from poor performances. Bill Belichick, Bobby Bowden, Mike Krzyzewski, Phil Jackson, Scotty Bowman and their ilk are admired not because their teams have outperformed expectations but because they set the expectations high each year and met them.

Beyond that, notice that the radio host, by failing to recite a single observation to support her arguments, unintentionally acknowledged that she toils in total ignorance of the actual work these men do. For all the host knows, one or more of them is reviled or disrespected by his players. 

The unfortunate fact for those attempting to parse managing performance is that the vast majority of a manager's role eludes the public lens: managing personalities, inspiring greatness, promoting teamwork, keeping a steady hand on the till from the first buds of spring through the changing of the leaves. Team performance on the field is a woeful proxy for that.

A small function of a manager's job is the In-game tactics. What little we can see suggests neither Baker nor Washington is even adequate. (After 50 years in the business, Dusty still thinks the quintessential leadoff hitter swipes 30 bases and makes outs 70% of the time.)

It got worse. Behold this matrix of convolution:

"But how about thinking outside the box? Sure, the Angels have Albert Pujols, but they're getting production from guys you don't expect, like Mike Trout and Mark Trumbo. Mike Scioscia deserves some attention."

The cupboard is so bare of rational thought here as to boggle the mind. Primarily, the talk show host decided to abandon the core fallacy -- absolving the manager for taking  a team of loaded dice and rolling craps -- and instead credit him for coaxing performance out of unexpected places (but failing to do so out of the big stars.) That particular pretzel logic is the perfect coda on an argument that captures, in one four-minute segment, why sports talk radio is a barren desert, and why Manager of the Year votes are completely, utterly, hopelessly irrelevant.