Posts tagged sports
Nullary Sources
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I was a staff writer on The Onion’s “SportsDome” show on Comedy Central which aired in 2011. We had a story, pitched and scripted by David Iscoe (twitter.com/realhumanbeing), about an athlete overcoming rape that I was reminded of today when I read about CNN’s coverage of the Steubenville rape verdict. Our story sounds like it might have been produced by the folks at CNN responsible for the Steubenville coverage.
I haven’t seen the CNN segment in question, but I can imagine it being awful on account of CNN being awful.
Here’s an ABC News article & segment on the Steubenville verdict.
Here’s a thing that totally happened a couple of days ago, photographed by Jason Mojica for VICE Media via the Associated Press and pasted by me from NBC News’s PhotoBlog:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and former NBA star Dennis Rodman watch North Korean and U.S. players in an exhibition basketball game at an arena in Pyongyang, North Korea, on Thursday. Rodman arrived in Pyongyang on Monday with three members of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team to shoot an episode on North Korea for a new weekly HBO series.
Truly basketball is the great equalizer.
IOC Drops Wrestling from 2020 Olympics
ESPN.com and AP reporting:
The executive board of the International Olympic Committee reviewed the 26 sports on its summer program in order to remove one of them so it could add one later this year. It decided to cut wrestling and keep modern pentathlon…
The article goes more into the factors the board weighed: ratings/popularity, how it’s managed, etc.
The replacement sport hasn’t been decided yet:
Wrestling will now join seven other sports in applying for 2020, but it is extremely unlikely that it would be voted back in so soon after being removed by the executive board.
The other sports vying for a single opening in 2020 are a combined bid from baseball and softball, karate, squash, roller sports, sport climbing, wakeboarding and wushu, a martial art.
England cricketer Sarah Taylor could make history in men's county match
Donald McRae writing for The Guardian:
Sarah Taylor, the England wicketkeeper, has revealed that she is in talks to play men’s second XI county cricket this summer in what would be a groundbreaking move for women’s sport.
Taylor, widely regarded as one of the best female cricketers in history, has an informal agreement with the coaching staff at Sussex that if their second team needs a wicketkeeper at short notice this year, she will be selected to play.
So just an alternate; no guarantee that she’ll play. But it would be really neat if she does!
Ken Burns wants Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens to 'suffer'
Me too, Ken. Also, I think they should be put in Cooperstown in a special “Cheats & Liars” wing. I’m thinking Clemens can go right next to the Black Sox.
International Cycling Union introduces equal prize money for women and men
Short news story by Gregory Blachier for Reuters (couldn’t really find anything more substantial to link):
Female riders will earn as much as their male counterparts at cycling World Championships from next year, the governing body of the sport said on Friday.
Apparently this didn’t happen before, so hooray for progress!
I also enjoyed the final sentence:
Money has been an issue in some sports including tennis, with some men complaining about women having equal prize money at grand slam events despite playing shorter matches.
‘Ili: OH YOU THINK A PAY DISCREPANCY IS UNFAIR HUH
‘Ili: PLEASE TELL ME MORE
Colin: Sarcastichz
So on yesterday’s NBC broadcast of Sunday Night Football, Bob Costas had a ninety second segment during halftime. He used it to talk about Jovan Belcher, who shot and killed his girlfriend and himself on December 1.
Costas spent most of the segment talking about and quoting an online piece for FOX Sports by Jason Whitlock about gun culture and gun control. I’m not going to express an opinion on gun control or focus on that. What I will say is that I’m really just amazed this happened during a nationally televised football game, and I’d have had the same reaction even if Costas expressed the opposite opinion.
What I really want to talk about are the first thirty seconds of the segment, where Costas dropped one of the fiercest burns on the platitudes of sports press conferences that I’ve ever heard:
In the aftermath of the nearly unfathomable events in Kansas City, that most mindless of sports cliches was heard yet again: “Something like this really puts it all in perspective.” Well if so, that sort of perspective has a very short shelf life, since we will inevitably hear about the perspective we have supposedly again regained the next time ugly reality intrudes upon our games. Please. Those who need tragedies to continually recalibrate their sense of proportion about sports would seem to have little hope of ever truly achieving perspective.
Sports press conferences are a disgustingly hollow spectacle where the same words are repeated day in and day out until they no longer mean anything. After Costas finished this thought, I just stared slack-jawed at the television for a while, and then I slow clapped harder than I’ve slow clapped in quite some time.
Three Stats and You're Out
Will Leitch, writing on Sports on Earth:
The disconnect between the way advanced statistics are used in baseball front offices — the Philadelphia Phillies perhaps being the lone, stubborn exception — and the way they are used in media coverage of baseball is so vast that you’d almost think television is covering a different sport entirely. Inside the world of baseball, WAR and OPS+ and so on are simply the way general managers and team staff talk about their jobs, the way CPAs talk about spreadsheets and financial advisors discuss Roth IRAs, the way any profession talks about anything.
But outside, on our televisions, they’re treated as some wonky dork sorcery, pencil pushers trying to pretend they understand baseball more than those who have far more experience (and who may currently be wearing protective cups). Baseball broadcasters treat advanced statistics like Billy Bush and other red-carpet Oscar idiots would treat an experimental short film about lesbian sects in Uganda. They act like they don’t matter, when, in many cases, they’re almost all that does. It would be as if political reporters said, “Who cares about all those math nerds in their mother’s basements with their ‘electoral college’ charts? I want to know what’s in these candidates’ hearts.”
It’s attitudes like this that keep me coming back to baseball on the radio. Which is not to say that radio broadcasters are throwing around BABIP and xFIP. But that the anti-intellectual, vapid, “go git ‘em boys” locker room atmosphere that you hear on most TV broadcasts is nowhere to be found. Maybe because there’s no room for it with all the play-by-play. Maybe because there is a long, proud tradition of calling baseball on the radio with respect, verve and aplomb. Maybe for other reasons entirely.
San Francisco Giants' Melky Cabrera launched fake website in ruse, report says
ESPN.com and the AP:
San Francisco Giants star outfielder Melky Cabrera mounted a campaign to avoid his 50-game suspension that included a fake website featuring a fictitious product in an effort that was quickly uncovered by MLB investigators, the New York Daily News has reported.
…
“There was a product they said caused this positive,” the source told the Daily News. “Baseball figured out the ruse pretty quickly.”
Why would you try this? Why would you even think this would work?
Clive Rose took this photo for Getty Images of, presumably, some sort of elder sea creature devouring a helpless human. This gruesome shot was posted in a set from the 2012 Olympics at The Big Picture with this caption:
Sebastian Stoss of Austria and Derya Buyukuncu of Turkey compete in heat 1 of the Men’s 200m backstroke on Day 5 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Aquatics Centre, August 1, 2012.
Colin: Water: How Does It Even Fucking Work
