On Coaching

It's been a bit amusing to watch the handwringing and indignation surrounding the Mike Rice story. In case you've missed the endless video replays, he's the Rutgers University basketball coach who was fired this week after video surfaced showing him engaged in a variety of manic and abusive behavior during practices.

The reaction of many brought back memories of Captain Renault in the film Casablanca: "I am shocked...shocked...to find that gambling is going on in here!" Was anyone paying any attention to Rice's sideline behavior during his tenure at Rutgers? If so, how could they not have been asking questions about what he was doing away from the live crowds and TV cameras?

Let's go deeper here and ask some hard questions about what it is to be a coach today. Full disclosure: I grew up as the son and grandson of coaches. Both my father and his father were credentialed teachers who also coached high school teams. Both coached a variety of sports. My grandfather's legacy as "The Coach" at Kingsburg High School south of Fresno was such that years after his retirement, I could walk into that town and invoke his name; people recalled him as a pillar of the community.

In fact, the honorific "Coach" is itself emblematic of the esteem in which coaches were held. I have vivid memories of a retired NFL star who had briefly played for my father in high school spotting my dad at a football game. As they shook hands in greeting, the quarterback didn't call him "Mr. Bunger" or "Jim". He called him "Coach". It's a sign of respect, both for the person and the position.

As I mentioned earlier, both Dad and Grandpa were teachers, both in the literal and figurative sense. To them, coaching was an extension of teaching: they saw themselves as molders of young minds. Of course they wanted to win when their teams competed, but that wasn't Job One. First and foremost, they were teachers--and they had the gradebooks and lesson plans to prove it.

Sounds quaint, doesn't it? Let's fast-forward to this week's poster child for Out-of-Control Coaching, Mike Rice. Nothing in his resume' suggests "teacher". He wrapped up his basketball playing career at Fordham and immediately became an assistant coach at his alma mater.  There followed a series of brief stays as he worked his way up the college hoops food chain, eventually becoming a head coach before he was 40. Nowhere is there evidence of him teaching anything beyond an inbounds play or a zone trap.

Make no mistake: Mike Rice was employed to win basketball games. Until his methods became an embarrassment to all, he remained employed.  Nobody spent much time worrying about whether he was helping build good citizens.

It goes a lot deeper. Stop by your local high school and ask how many of the coaches are also teachers. No matter what the answer, it'll be a smaller number than it was 10 or 20 years ago. The days of the math teacher/football coach or civics teacher/basketball coach are rapidly disappearing.  Heck, it's getting hard to find P.E. teachers who want to coach.

What's going on? Let me offer a few thoughts:

•  Money. The Oakland Unified School District just posted an opening for a head basketball coach at Oakland Tech High School. The pay? About $2800 a year. You do the math.
• Administrative and community support.  You'll find no shortage of stories about coaches beset by pushy parents and left dangling by spineless administrators. I will never forget the day I watched a father call his daughter over to the backstop during a high school softball game and direct her to ignore what the coach had just said. 
• A cultural shift. There was once general agreement that high school and college sports existed to impart valuable lessons about effort, teamwork, sportsmanship and the like. Now? College sports are a multi-billion dollar business and high school (or lower) teams seem to function as feeders to that system. 

In my unspectacular high school sports career, every single one of my coaches was a faculty member. Many of my teachers coached other teams. The school was a web of interlocking relationships between the classrooms and the playing field.  Teaching and coaching weren't separated; they were joined at the hip.

Perhaps my hazy memories are laughable to you. Or maybe you agree that something's awry. I don't know if the trend can be reversed; it would take general agreement that teaching matters and that coaching is a form of teaching. It would require a generation of my-kid-first parents to back off and let school sports become something more than an audition for a mythical college scholarship. It would require communities to see beyond a win-loss record to measure the value of a man or woman named Coach.

If you ask the men who played for the legendary John Wooden at UCLA what they learned from the "Wizard of Westwood", they won't talk about the wins and losses. They'll talk about the life lessons he imparted, about his Pyramid of Success.

In an era where we seem to want to measure a teacher's value by how her students perform on an annual test, maybe it's not shocking that we've allowed coaching to come to this. But before you dismiss me, ask yourself: would you rather see your kid coached by his history teacher or by Mike Rice?

Somebody Else's Fantasy

It's that time of year: workplaces and campuses everywhere are abuzz with the frenzy of the fantasy baseball draft. Fantasy-league managers are scouring various sources, looking for the hidden gems that will give them bragging rights all summer long.

Me? I'm sitting it out. Again.

Every year, I try to explain to my fantasy-smitten friends why I think these leagues are a pox, a blight, a blasphemy. And every year, more people play and more words are published and broadcast about fantasy baseball. I'm losing this battle.

My antipathy toward fantasy baseball has its roots in a tragedy in the summer of 1979. An enterprising young journalist named John Genzale had coaxed me and a few other baseball nuts into playing a new game: we'd submit a roster each week and score points based on the stats racked up by the players we chose. In those pre-Internet years, we tallied our numbers from newspaper box scores.

I've since learned that we were probably pioneers; the "Rotisserie League" created by Daniel Okrent in New York didn't launch until the following year. But we were way out in the woods of South Lake Tahoe and had no idea we were trailblazers.

Anyway. I was in the "newsroom" at KTHO Radio in South Tahoe on August 2, 1979 when the bells on the AP teletype machine started ringing (yes, children, bells really did ring when big news broke, even when your "newsroom" was formerly a bathroom in the converted motel that housed the radio station). The bulletin told of the death in a plane crash of Yankees star Thurman Munson.

My first thought: "This is big news!" My second thought: "Wait...isn't Munson my catcher?"

Naturally, I assumed I'd be able to replace a dead catcher in my lineup.  Wrong. Genzale, who would go on to a remarkable career in journalism and academia, acted "in the best interest" of our little game and forced me to wait until the weekly roster change.

It seemed wrong then and still does, 34 years later. I've used the Munson Incident as my excuse for avoiding fantasy baseball ever since. But the reality is that I have much deeper reasons for steering clear of fantasy baseball.

There are basically two flaws in the fantasy world. First, I'm a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan. I love the game of baseball, but once the season begins, I bleed orange and black. In fact, I don't really trust folks who say they're fans but don't make the emotional investment in a team. Sure, I keep track of how other teams and players are doing. But I damned sure don't want to be watching Matt Cain facing Joey Votto in a key at-bat with a little voice reminding me that Votto is on my fantasy roster and a three-run homer would be good for my team. Not!

My other problem with fantasy baseball (and fantasy sports in general) is that they reduce complex games to small sets of data. They tend to focus on a few statistics (hits, RBI's, home runs, ERA, strikeouts, etc.) while ignoring the broader sweep of the game.  Notably, most fantasy leagues ignore the role of defense. If they pay any attention, it's often the token inclusion of a stat like "outfielder assists"--hardly a true measure of an outfielder's overall defensive value.

As a consequence of the above, fantasy players tend to fixate on one-dimensional big-leaguers: mashers who can't play defense. This is why folks in our newsroom are horselaughing one colleague who used a second-round choice to take one of her favorites, Brandon Crawford, when Hanley Ramirez was available. His current injury aside, history says Ramirez is an offensive threat but a defensive liability. Fantasy ball cares not a whit for Crawford's defensive prowess.

I like to tell my fantasy-besmitten friends that I love baseball too much to reduce it to fantasy baseball. I feel differently about baseball strategy games (I grew up on Strat-O-Matic, APBA, and Gil Hodges' Pennant Fever); these simulations attempt to include all of baseball's nuances.

There's always a chance, of course, that the flood of modern advanced stats will find its way into fantasy leagues. (Vanessa, you'd feel better about your Brandon Crawford choice if "Defensive Runs Saved Above Average" was included; he was almost 20 runs better than Hanley Ramirez last year). If that happens, perhaps I'll be back. But I'll still be ticked off about that Thurman Munson deal.

A Classic In Name Only

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig's bombast to the contrary, the World Baseball Classic is little more than a transparent attempt to add some hype to the normally-lazy days of spring training (and you'll note, I refuse to use the capital letters--Spring Training--that baseball has adopted in yet another effort to aggrandize itself).

Four years ago (and quick: tell me who won the 2009 World Baseball Classic), Selig was moved to declare, "I think this is tremendous. Long after I'm gone this is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and you can count on that." Hard to know if he's right since he won't go away, but if you define "bigger" as "being flogged mercilessly by the poobahs of baseball", Selig may have a point.

The weekend brawl between Mexico and Canada (and we always thought our US neighbors were so peaceful) gave the whole enterprise a black eye, figuratively and literally. It happened because a Canadian batter bunted for a base hit with a 6-run lead in the 9th inning. That's a breach of baseball etiquette, except this isn't really baseball. 

Apparently unbeknownst to some of the Mexican players, notably Dodgers third baseman Luis Cruz, the World Baseball Classic uses run differential as a tiebreaker.  Cruz strongly suggested that Mexico's pitcher throw at the next Canada hitter. He finally nailed Rene Tosni on the third try, and that's when the fight started.

You could blame Cruz, or pitcher Arnold Leon, or any of the players who duked it out. But how about blaming the Lords of Baseball, who created a format that looks like the game these guys play for a living but isn't exactly the same? To amplify: had Mexico been sitting on a 9th-inning lead, logic would have dictated Sergio Romo be on the mound. But WBC rules forbade that, because a pitcher can't pitch for three straight days in this tournament.

Of course, the MLB teams that lend their players to this enterprise do so unwillingly. Does anyone really think Bruce Bochy and Brian Sabean are thrilled to see a third of their starting lineup, one of their starting pitchers and their closer exposed to full-bore baseball midway through training camp? God forbid one of these guys gets hurt, and of course, nobody can really guess how this will affect them come September or October.

Selig and his crowd think baseball needs boosting overseas. Really?  The sport seems to be doing just fine in the places where it's taken hold. Japan, Korea and Taiwan have active pro leagues, and of course many Latin American countries have a deeply-embedded beisbol culture.  Naturally, Major League Baseball benefits greatly from this: 28% of the players on Opening Day MLB rosters last year were foreign-born.

The reality is that the world serves as a giant farm system for the Big Dog, Major League Baseball. Any kid anywhere who wants to really make it big wants to play in The Show, and the WBC does nothing to enhance that.

At the end of the day, I'm left with the sneaking suspicion that the whole enterprise is yet another way to sell a few shirts and caps and tickets. No problem there, but please, let's not pretend  otherwise.  This whole charade in which ballplayers dig up their grandparents' birth certificates so they can play for, say, Italy just adds to the silliness.

I wouldn't miss the WBC if it just faded away. But Bud Selig is nothing if not relentless, so I doubt this thing is going anywhere.  So, a few suggestions:

• Use minor-leaguers, amateurs and college players. If the real goal is to develop the sport, use up-and-coming talent.
• Set it up more like the World Cup in soccer, where countries qualify over a period of several years (the US is automatically "in", of course). Then play the 8-team "finals" over the course of a week or ten days in one city, like the College World Series.
• Do away with this "run differential" idiocy. That's not baseball. 
• Require participants to actually be from the country they represent. Grandpa's not good enough.

With these changes, the biggest problem the WBC faces--its interruption of spring training--would vanish. It would become a nice little sideshow to the start of the Major League season.

And Canada and Mexico could still have a fight if they wanted to.

Midseason Form

To those who think baseball spring training games are just a way for ballclubs to shake off a little rust before hitting the golf course, I offer two words: Dusty Baker.  Oh, and two more: Kirk Gibson.

You may have heard that the two got into it at home plate while exchanging lineup cards before a Cactus League game. Seriously: before a Cactus League game.

What the heck? When you hear what ticked them off, it seems so petty: Baker's Reds were playing Gibson's Diamondbacks at the D-backs' Salt River Fields complex.  The location is important because that made the Diamondbacks the home team and gave them the option, under Cactus League rules, to use the designated hitter--or not.

And this is where things start to go off the rails. Typically, in the first couple of weeks of exhibition games, National League teams will use the DH, waiting until the last few games to give their pitchers a few at-bats. But Gibson has a new starter, Brandon McCarthy, who is not only imported from the American League but is also coming back from that skull fracture sustained when he was hit by a line drive.

So Gibson, understandably, wanted his guy to see some live pitching. Baker had his own issue: outfielder Shin-Soo Choo has a sore leg and Baker wanted to let him DH so he could avoid any extra wear-and-tear in the field.

Remember: it's Gibson's decision. He made it, notified the Reds, and the sparks flew when Baker produced a lineup card with a DH penciled in. A mild Scottsdale afternoon got ugly as the two exchanged unpleasantries. And Baker, who never met a grudge he couldn't carry, kept the flames burning. He ordered star pitcher Johnny Cueto to stand stock-still and take three strikes when he batted.

What do I think? I think Baker is still searching for a new nemesis now that the longtime burr under his saddle, Tony LaRussa, has retired (the two were frequent combatants as Baker managed the Giants, Cubs and Reds while LaRussa ran the Cardinals). And I think Gibson's hard-guy routine is designed to build some esprit de corps on a team struggling for identity in the Giant-and-Dodger-dominated NL West.

And I think I will make a note of June 21st: the first regular-season meeting between the Reds and D-backs this year.

By the way, Dusty: it's in Phoenix. And yes, the pitchers will hit.

The Subtle Charms of Spring Training

The secret about spring training got out a long time ago. Nowadays, the quaint ballparks of Arizona and Florida fill up with sun-seeking fans and the teams charge regular-season prices. I've already expressed my dismay about this trend.

But I'm here to tell you that there is still a way for real fans to have a meaningful (and reasonably priced) spring training experience. It's simple: show up before the teams start playing exhibition games.

Sure, you'll have to actually know Angel Villalona's backstory to know how remarkable it is to see the young Giants prospect taking ground balls with the big club. Or, staying with this photo, recognize Ricky Oropesa as a guy who put up huge numbers in his college days at USC.

And yes, you'll have to find enjoyment in watching the likes of Brandon Crawford and Marco Scutaro rehearse their double play turn, over and over again.

If all you care about is the final score, this isn't for you. But if you appreciate the finer points of the game, come on down. In the week between "first full-squad workout" and "first exhibition game", you'll see teams work on the little things that win or lose games in the heat of summer.

I watched Giants third base coach Tim Flannery working with everyone from relief pitchers to veteran outfielders on baserunning. How many times has a Hunter Pence or an Angel Pagan been through this before? Yet it's important; that extra base gained from a good read on a line drive could be the difference in a game in August.

Batting practice? Sure, everyone loves the long ball (and when big first baseman Brett Pill hits them, they stay hit). But watching Scutaro and Buster Posey hit line drive after line drive to right-center gives one fresh appreciation for their singular talents. And you don't have to know anything about Kensuke Tanaka to recognize a Japanese import: just look at his batting stance and swing.

This first week of workouts has a languid feel to it. There's plenty of room to stretch out in the nearly-empty ballpark. Kids gently badger players for autographs ("Mr. Posey...pleeeeeease!") but otherwise, it's quiet. Just the snap of ball into glove and the rap of the fungo bat. Oh, and Shawon Dunston's laughter--a constant.

Sure, you'll need a roster to identify all these guys, but somebody will offer you one. For free. The kindly folks who work at the ballpark will recognize you by your second day, and you'll wind up meeting somebody who tells a funny story about the sleepy Colorado Rockies players staggering into a nearby coffee shop each morning before their workouts ("nobody orders decaf").

Yes, it can seem a little weird sitting in the stands to watch ballplayers stretch. But the experience is, I think, humanizing for both fans and players. You'll never hear someone boo or jeer; the intimacy of this setting renders that sort of behavior unthinkable. You might see a lady call out to Andres Torres, "Welcome back!" and watch Torres spin around with a big smile on his face and say, "Thanks! It's great to be here!"

I couldn't agree more.

Bargain of the Century

Long ago, NFL Commissioner Bert Bell famously said, "on any given Sunday, any team in the NFL can beat any other team." It's worth noting that Bell died in 1959, long before the current edition of the Oakland Raiders took the field.

But that's just mean. My actual goal here is to salute the Raiders. Pro Football's Dynamic Organization, as the late Raider boss Al Davis liked to call his team, has just dropped some season ticket prices to an astonishingly low level.

As part of a plan to shrink capacity at the Coliseum to about 53,000 (and make TV blackouts less likely), the Raiders have cut some season ticket plans to $250. That's $25 a game (the NFL continues its rapacious practice of making buyers pay full price for exhibition games).

You read that correctly. Sure, these are up in the top deck at the Coliseum, but still: $25 for an NFL ticket.  The league average is almost $80. Just for kicks, I ran some numbers. Let's say that instead of paying for that Raiders ticket, you grabbed a seat at the bar at Pican in Oakland's Uptown and watched on TV. A couple of tasty mint juleps will set you back $24, and you haven't even tipped the bartender. Or eaten.

In fact, a $25 Raiders ticket is a bargain of historical proportions. My esteemed colleague Steve Bitker recalls his family held Raiders tickets when the Coliseum opened in 1966. They cost $6.50 a game.  Adjusted for inflation, that's about $46 today, or almost twice what the Raiders are now charging.  

The Raiders say they are hoping to create a "vibrant game-day environment with a community of season ticket holders." Good for them. A full stadium beats the heck out of a swath of empty seats. Of course, a winning team really helps with that "vibrant game-day environment" thing and the Raiders haven't been one of those in a decade. The last time the Raiders had a winning record, they went to the Super Bowl.

These low prices come as the Raiders face a 2013 home schedule that will include visits by the Broncos, Steelers, Redskins (hey, maybe RG3 will have a miraculous recovery!) and Eagles (come see new coach Chip Kelly import his brand of madness to the NFL!).

The fact of the matter is, ticket sales matter less and less to NFL teams every year. Teams already get close to 2/3 of their revenue from the NFL's TV packages, and that particular pot of gold is about to get a lot heavier. Annual NFL TV revenue will jump to around $8 billion starting next year when new contracts kick in. The Raiders get exactly the same share of that as any other team.

With that kind of money from TV, the league can almost afford to ignore actual paying customers. The Raiders may be on to something here: if the NFL wants to keep its product from being a purely television spectacle, it's going to have to look at ways to convince people to abandon their HDTV's and come to the stadium. A cheaper ticket sure helps.

Another Meaningless Record

Is there a more hollow phrase anymore than "That's one for the record book"?

I ask this in the aftermath of the bizarre game between the Warriors and the Rockets that saw Houston tie the NBA record for 3-point goals in a game. The Rockets were winning in a blowout on a night where the Warriors had apparently made up their mind not to let guards Jeremy Lin and James Harden beat them by driving to the basket.

The Warriors packed their defense all night to prevent the drive, and the Rockets responded by kicking the ball out for three-point attempts. It worked.  They tried 40 and hit 23 for a crazy 57.5% long-range shooting percentage.

So far, so good. Just another example of two teams engaged in the kind of physical chess match that is at the heart of sports.  And then, the record book got involved.

By mid-4th quarter, Rockets coach Kevin McHale had cleared the bench. But this time, "garbage time" was accompanied by chants from the crowd for "one more three!". See, they wanted to say they were there when a record was set (that's a whole lot more fun than saying you stayed to the end of a blowout win).

So now, the Rockets' benchwarmers get busy trying to hoist up threes. And the Warriors, who have let Houston gun away all night, suddenly decide they need to guard against the three.  And then, Houston scrub Patrick Beverley is handed a free path to the basket. He accepts this largesses by slamming home a dunk and then mugging his way past the Warriors bench.

And then it's really on. Warriors coach Mark Jackson makes it clear Houston will not get that record-setting 3-pointer. The Warriors accomplish this by committing a series of hard fouls on Houston shooters. Predictably, there's jawing, shoving, etc.

In the aftermath, Jackson defends his team's approach, saying he's "old-school". "If you're going to try to get the record," says Jackson, "we're going to stop it."

Silly me.  I thought the point of the whole exercise was to win the basketball game. You're playing a Western Conference opponent, and your big concern is the record book? Mark Jackson is a smart guy, a good basketball coach. He should know better.