Showing posts with label Soccer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soccer. Show all posts
2016-08-05
2015-06-30
Watching Women Want
This is very good. I do think that women's team sports bring this out more than women's solo sports, particularly those that require the subjective approval of judges (I'm looking at you, figure skating and gymnastics).
2008-08-21
2005-09-06
Aren't They Cute?
2004-04-06
The Real Enemy
Foolish Spaniards;
they gave in to Al Qaeda when they should have been appeasing Prince
Albert.
2004-02-10
Jesus Loves Touchdowns
Colby Cosh wonders why we
don’t see more sporting rivalries grounded in religion. Why
not? After all, whenever I’m watching a European socccer match
and have no other reason to prefer one team over the other, I consult
which side each team’s city was on during the Thirty Years’
War.
2003-07-16
SABR Dance
I don’t like baseball, I’m afraid. My relation to all sports is somewhat checkered, however, so it might be helpful to specify which of baseball’s attributes particularly put me off. I don’t find it terribly athletic. I dislike the asymmetrical role played by pitchers, particularly when the pitching rotation makes it difficult to compare a team’s performances against common opponents. And, of course, it’s as boring as watching crows crap.
What raises this dislike from the level of petulant indifference to caustic denunciation—other than having to publicly fund a for-profit baseball stadium, that is—is the thuggish conflation of baseball mysticism with nostrums of national identity that deters one from applying too much analytical rigor to the history of baseball (and America) while at the same time makes one feel accursed for having missed its halcyon days.
It was therefore with grim delight that I discovered the field of sabermetrics, which purports to challenge traditional measures of skill in baseball. My discovery was occasioned by the recent publication of Moneyball, which studies the application of sabermetrics by the management of the Oakland Athletics. After reading about it in a critical discussion of Moneyball on Slate, sabermetrics struck me as nothing so much as how a min-maxing gamer would approach baseball. Indeed, a New Yorker profile of Bill James hails him as sabermetrics’ "founding nerd."
Detractors of sabermetrics lament that its widespread application would make baseball more technical and (somehow) less exciting. Walks are boring, stolen bases are fun, goes the argument. Perhaps. But if the geeks are right and empiricism comes to crowd out hoary notions of "the fundamentals," baseball fans who prefer their arguments untainted by scientific rigor are invited to follow a sport where no meaningful objective standard for comparing player performance exists and where discussions of player merit remain squarely in the realm of visceral froth.
What raises this dislike from the level of petulant indifference to caustic denunciation—other than having to publicly fund a for-profit baseball stadium, that is—is the thuggish conflation of baseball mysticism with nostrums of national identity that deters one from applying too much analytical rigor to the history of baseball (and America) while at the same time makes one feel accursed for having missed its halcyon days.
It was therefore with grim delight that I discovered the field of sabermetrics, which purports to challenge traditional measures of skill in baseball. My discovery was occasioned by the recent publication of Moneyball, which studies the application of sabermetrics by the management of the Oakland Athletics. After reading about it in a critical discussion of Moneyball on Slate, sabermetrics struck me as nothing so much as how a min-maxing gamer would approach baseball. Indeed, a New Yorker profile of Bill James hails him as sabermetrics’ "founding nerd."
Detractors of sabermetrics lament that its widespread application would make baseball more technical and (somehow) less exciting. Walks are boring, stolen bases are fun, goes the argument. Perhaps. But if the geeks are right and empiricism comes to crowd out hoary notions of "the fundamentals," baseball fans who prefer their arguments untainted by scientific rigor are invited to follow a sport where no meaningful objective standard for comparing player performance exists and where discussions of player merit remain squarely in the realm of visceral froth.
2003-07-02
Waiting For Herakles
Congratulations and condolences to Seattle’s neighbor, rival, and parallel-universe-twin Vancouver, British Columbia, on the occasion of being awarded the 2010 Winter Olympics. For me, the chief benefit from this decision will be to further inoculate Seattle against ever succeeding in assuaging it’s endemic rubophobia by winning an Olympic bid for itself.
The only other international sports event comparable to the Olympics is, of course, the World Cup. Though the (modern) Olympics are a few decades older than the World Cup, the host selection process for both events have long become so shot through with tediously sordid politics and corruption that it no one can honestly claim to be shocked by it anymore. Absent bribes and other tangible (if putatively illegal) criteria, the governing bodies must select hosts based on the often conflicting and certainly orthogonal principles of "infrastructure soundness" (who can afford to spring for the facilities) and "geographic equity" (who hasn’t hosted in a while). The principle of "athletic tradition" waxes and wanes as new markets are imagined and disproved. Unlike the World Cup Organizing Committee, which (for reasons having less to do with minimizing the aforementioned problems and more to do with stadium logistics) selects a host country in which several cities participate, the International Olympic Committee bestows its favor upon an individual city (or, in practice, a metropolitan region). This creates the well-known paradox of Olympic bids: those cities which are best suited to hosting the Olympics are precisely those which least need the publicity and other ancillary benefits promised by Olympic boosters.
Apart from the construction and hospitality industries, I cannot see that a community reaps any lasting economic benefit from hosting the Olympics. In order to improve their chances, bid cities incur enormous public financial commitments "on spec," and considerations of whether the infrastructure or tax base can support such commitments are glossed over with appeals to "civic pride." A city with real civic pride would be able to soberly weigh the costs of hosting the Games and, if finding them prohibitive, say "No." After being lofted by the rise of Microsoft, Nirvana, Starbucks, and Amazon, Seattle somehow mustered the restraint at the peak of the 90s bubble to refuse to sign onto the developers’ Olympic bandwagon (paying for the House That Griffey Bilked might have played a factor, as well).
Of course, some of those 2012 boosters are now claiming that Seattle will derive some secondary tourism increase in February 2010, as if anyone will want to drive three hours to the border and wait almost as long at Blaine before trying to find parking near the Biathlon range. I think a more certain windfall is going to the wealthy skiers who own condos at Whistler, but hey, a rising glacier lifts all bobsleds, right? At least Vancouver probably stands a better chance of getting its federal government to chip in than we would with ours. So, good on you, Vancouver, and better you than us.
The only other international sports event comparable to the Olympics is, of course, the World Cup. Though the (modern) Olympics are a few decades older than the World Cup, the host selection process for both events have long become so shot through with tediously sordid politics and corruption that it no one can honestly claim to be shocked by it anymore. Absent bribes and other tangible (if putatively illegal) criteria, the governing bodies must select hosts based on the often conflicting and certainly orthogonal principles of "infrastructure soundness" (who can afford to spring for the facilities) and "geographic equity" (who hasn’t hosted in a while). The principle of "athletic tradition" waxes and wanes as new markets are imagined and disproved. Unlike the World Cup Organizing Committee, which (for reasons having less to do with minimizing the aforementioned problems and more to do with stadium logistics) selects a host country in which several cities participate, the International Olympic Committee bestows its favor upon an individual city (or, in practice, a metropolitan region). This creates the well-known paradox of Olympic bids: those cities which are best suited to hosting the Olympics are precisely those which least need the publicity and other ancillary benefits promised by Olympic boosters.
Apart from the construction and hospitality industries, I cannot see that a community reaps any lasting economic benefit from hosting the Olympics. In order to improve their chances, bid cities incur enormous public financial commitments "on spec," and considerations of whether the infrastructure or tax base can support such commitments are glossed over with appeals to "civic pride." A city with real civic pride would be able to soberly weigh the costs of hosting the Games and, if finding them prohibitive, say "No." After being lofted by the rise of Microsoft, Nirvana, Starbucks, and Amazon, Seattle somehow mustered the restraint at the peak of the 90s bubble to refuse to sign onto the developers’ Olympic bandwagon (paying for the House That Griffey Bilked might have played a factor, as well).
Of course, some of those 2012 boosters are now claiming that Seattle will derive some secondary tourism increase in February 2010, as if anyone will want to drive three hours to the border and wait almost as long at Blaine before trying to find parking near the Biathlon range. I think a more certain windfall is going to the wealthy skiers who own condos at Whistler, but hey, a rising glacier lifts all bobsleds, right? At least Vancouver probably stands a better chance of getting its federal government to chip in than we would with ours. So, good on you, Vancouver, and better you than us.
2003-04-07
"It is far from Damascus."
The neocons have started floating their next target, and it’s one the French and Germans will have no problem supporting.
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