Childress Still Unsure of Favre Decision

This guy’s act was old and tired three years ago, and yet he keeps it up, and the Minnesota Vikings put up with it, and the press pants after him, and there are millions of NFL fans who consider him almost divine.  Yeah, he’s a great QB—the most overrated QB this side of Joe Namath, but great nonetheless—but his perpetual dithering about, unconcerned about its impact upon his team (or, one would suspect, much of anyone besides himself and his family) does more to harm what should have been a great image than anything else I can imagine.

Jim Joyce is a class act.  He knows instinctively, already, hours after blowing the call, that his name will forever go down in infamy as making one of the all-time worst calls in sports history.  And yet his concern is for the effect that his bad call will have on Armando Galarraga.  To err is human, and Jim Joyce erred, mightily in sports terms, But having the good grace to act as he did shows us a lot about his character.  Here’s the account of Galarraga taking the lineup card to home plate ump Jim Joyce before today’s game.  A lot of class on both sides.

Then, there’s Bud Selig.  Bud Selig is not a stupid man.  Granted, he looks like George McFly’s weird uncle, but no one can achieve the position he has in life and actually be the abject moron that he so regularly appears to be.  He must be smart in some senses of the word, whether or not the average baseball fan can ascertain such by the naked eye or not.  But in the dictionary beside the word “doofus”, Bud Selig’s face should be emblazoned, and the reason is that it’s hard for me to remember a person—let alone a sports commissioner—who just so regularly is out-of-step with common sense.  I mean, love to see this guy on the dance floor; he’d make Elaine Benes look like she’d been dancing with the stars.  I used to say—and I still do—that if 20 years ago, the powers that be in baseball (and Selig became Commish—albeit “acting Commish”—in 1992) had sat down in a brainstorming session and said, “hey, for the next 20 years, let’s do everything we can to alienate Byron Harvey as a baseball fan”, they couldn’t have done a much better job than they have.  The strike season of 1994 happened under Selig’s watch.  The drug saga happened under Selig’s watch.  The tremendous competitive inequity between the haves and the have-nots has happened under Selig’s watch.  Interleague play, that godless monstrosity that should never have seen the light of civilized society, happened under Selig’s watch.

But beyond this, it’s the general out-of-step doofusnosity that this man has an incredible capacity for that just takes the cake.  An All Star game ended up tied on his watch, he lacking apparently even the most modest shred of creative thinking for achieving a winner and a loser in a game that never, ever ends in ties, and so as all of baseball fandom is watching, Selig sits on his keister and allows a tie.  The man just misses the notes; he’s tone-deaf to common sense.

And then this Galarraga thing comes along, and he has a chance to do the right thing, a thing that does not affect the outcome, even the final score, of the game.  A thing about which the truth is not in doubt.  A thing that would give to a deserving young nobody of a pitcher, Armando Galarraga, a moment of lasting fame.  A thing that wouldn’t even have done harm to one fantasy baseball manager’s record, because not one soul in the world had penciled one Jason Arnold into his starting fantasy lineup.  I’m looking on my Blackberry, which gives me the first few words of a news headline in a certain function, and the headline says, “Baseball commissioner Bud Selig…” and I have to click on the link to get the full headline and story, and as I click, I’m thinking, “hey, maybe, just maybe, Bud Selig got it right and overturned Jim Joyce’s decision.”  And then the link opened, and then I remembered, “Who am I kidding?  This is Bud Selig we’re dealing with!”  And of course, Selig missed the note again, and refused to overturn the call and grant the rightfully-earned perfect game.

Tim Kurkjian said that if Selig reversed the call, “he’d be opening a box that’s basically never been opened in baseball history”.  Dumb argument, Tim.  Selig has already opened some far more stupid boxes than this, and if you’re worried about precedent, here’s the precedent that would be set: if ever an obviously wrong call is made on the very last out of an otherwise perfect game, it should also be reversed.  Period; that’s all.  15th out?  We’re talking about Galarraga losing a perfect game early on, on a bad call; OK, it happens, but every other piece of this interrelated game is somehow affected.  26th out, even?  We’re talking about Galarraga throwing a nice one-hitter that was nearly perfect.  But we’re talking about a game that is by all rights over; there is no further chain of events to unfold.  I’m a baseball purist, but for Pete’s sake, get the call right (oh, and purist or no, I’m a fan of instant replay on calls like this one.  “Human element”?  Sure, for pitchers pitching and batters batting, and even for umps calling balls and strikes.  But if a player has the ball in his glove, with his foot on a base, prior to the runner gaining the base, the runner is out.  Period.  And if an ump misses that call, it should be reversed, no less so than getting home runs right.).  For the love of all that is right and decent in the sports world, Bud, liberate yourself just this once from your eternal bad taste, your wonkish, slavish, silly adherence to needless principle, and reverse Jim Joyce’s ruling.

Finally, when it comes to class acts, we have to give a nod to Ken Griffey, Jr., who retired last evening after 22 years in baseball.  He leaves the game fifth on the all-time home run list, with 13 All-Star appearances, 10 Gold Gloves; you name it, Kid Griff could do it, and he was one of the all-time greats the game of baseball has ever known.  In an era in which cheating was rampant among superstars, childish men who couldn’t be content with the gifts God had blessed them with, but needed even more and thus used performance-enhancing drugs, The Kid did it the right way.  Every one of his 630 home runs was a legit homer; no taint of cheating such as mars the memories of Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Alex Rodriguez, and Rafael Palmeiro.

The biggest question surrounding Ken Griffey Jr. will always be, unfortunately, “what might have been?”  The Kid missed the equivalent of four of his 22 major league seasons, snakebit by the injury bug time and time again.  Could he have been the greatest home run hitter of all time (answer: yes!)?  What other records could/would he have set, and would we regard him as one of the five or ten greatest players ever to play the game?  I think that the answer to that question is likely “yes” as well.

But I’m a stats guy, and so I did a little fiddling with the numbers to try to guess how many home runs Kid Griff would have ended up with had he stayed healthy.  Here’s what I did: first, I gave away the strike and injuries he sustained during the 1994 and 1995 seasons, which limited him to 72 and 140 games respectively.  Every player has at least a few injuries during his career, unless his last name is Ripken, and so I wrote those off.  I dealt with years 2001-2006; in each of those years with the Reds, Griffey had some form of injury that limited him by a few to the majority of the 162-game schedule.  I took his average number of at-bats during the years 1996-2000, and then calculated the number of at-bats missed during those six seasons.  I figured out his home run rate during 1996-2000, and once I had those numbers, it was easy to figure that Griffey would have hit about 125 more home runs had he remained healthy—which would have tied him with Hank Aaron for second place all-time with 755, just 7 home runs behind The Cheater Who Shall Not Be Named.  But…in those injury-plagued years, he hit home runs at a less-prodigious clip; I figured out the actual rate at which he homered in those years, and divided the “at-bats missed” by the rate.  By that calculation, Griffey would have hit 94 more home runs, and thus not threatened for the all-time title, but he would have eclipsed both Willie Mays and Babe Ruth (who is, hands-down, the greatest hitter who ever lived), finishing third all time with 724 homers.  But that’s flawed as well, in that you have to figure that a guy who is injured and tries to play through it—or is coming back from injury too fast—is likely to hit home runs less prodigiously, and so my best guess is that Ken Griffey Junior would have hit about 740 home runs lifetime had he not been injured.  Of course, if he were that close to setting the mark, you gotta wonder what percentage of pitchers would have been (in blowout games) lobbing him underhand stuff just so a class act like Griffey could supplant The Cheater Who Shall Not Be Named.  By the same calculations, by the way, Griffey would have easily ended up third in RBI all-time as well, behind Aaron and Ruth.

Bottom line: a first-ballot, should-be-unanimous (but won’t because of some dorky sports writer) Hall of Famer retired yesterday, and I for one am proud to have been his fan since Day One.  Enjoy your retirement…”Kid”.

I first noticed it several years ago when networks carrying NASCAR would, in the middle of races starting sometime in July, it seemed, began carrying “if the race ended right now, these guys would be in the ‘Championship Chase’.”  Well who gives a rip?  The race isn’t ending right now. And there will be a lot more races to come.  And what comes across is that these folks have so little to talk about, or more accurately, to display, that they feel they must pump us with useless “knowledge”.

But now, it’s gotten worse.  A few years ago ESPN began making a pretty big deal of the NFL Draft.  OK, I admit, I have an interest in that–it’s kinda fun.  But now, it’s incessant–and it began in mid-February, more than two months before the actual draft.  Last week–or is it this week?  I couldn’t care less–they were talking about the NFL Combine, what guys ran what times in the “40″, or who did how many reps at what weight, and how all of this might project into where guys ought to go in the draft, who’s “stock is falling” and whose is rising–and all this, as I said, better than two months before the draft.  Starting talking about it a week out, and I’d have some interest, but February?  It’s asinine.

And then the other “gem” of ESPN coverage is guys speculating incessantly–there’s a “guru” now, the “Mel Kiper” of college basketball, I guess–who’s pontificating on which teams are “in” the tournament and which are “out”, but if that’s not bad enough, there’s a ticker that runs on the bottom of the screen, regularly, which lists “last four teams in”, as well as “last four teams out”.  I’m honestly trying to figure out if there could be a more worthless piece of information given to us in February than this “news”.

And you put all this together, and it really, really turns me off to ESPN, and to some degree, to sports in general, because while for years we’ve been saying that sports occupies too great a position of importance in our society, this is really so far over the top as to make ESPN not enjoyable watching, at least to a point.  Ironically, after our “contract” with DirecTV runs out in September, and we pay the last dime of our lifetimes to that awful company, we’re strongly considering getting “minimum cable”, like 12 or 13 channels, the package they don’t advertise but which they are required to carry by law.  That would mean no more ESPN.

At this point, that’s sounding pretty good…

P.S. Somebody’s going to write and say, “why not just switch the channel?”  Fair question, of course–to which the response is, “to what?”  Note so self: check out what the History Channel is playing tonight…

1. It’s ridiculous–preposterous is an even better word–that NBC, ABC, and CBS are going to preempt their regular programming in order to cover Tiger’s statement live.  You’ve got to be kidding.  You’ve got to be kidding.  Now, I’ll concede that there’s probably little that they ordinarily broadcast at that time of day–or any other time of day, truth be told–that’s worth watching, but the fact remains that the networks are breathlessly awaiting the pre-arranged, carefully-scripted, no-questions-allowed words to be uttered by a guy who makes a living smacking a ball into a hole.  I say that as a golfer and sports fan, and I say that recognizing that Tiger is the eminently-watchable, greatest golfer of all time (IMHO).  But still, there’s little in the way of rational perspective going on when you shut everything down to hear a golfer apologize for his indiscretions.

2. Does Tiger owe us an apology?  I submit “no”.  He owes his wife a massive apology, his kids, his mistresses, his enablers, etc.; he doesn’t owe us anything.  We are not personally harmed one bit by his actions.

3. Piggybacking on that, if Jason Bohn (a no-name regular on the PGA Tour) were found out to be doing this, it’d be a yawner (news-wise, not to his wife), something that might rate a back-page blurb.  Nobody would care.  The sin is the same; the difference is that it’s the most visible athlete in the world rather than some second-tier hack.

4. Tiger Woods never should have been made a role model by anybody.  Period.  Those who made him such might feel they owe him an apology, but why would we make of Tiger a role model in the first place?  I say this not to be mean to Tiger, nor to try to hold him to a (Christian) standard when he professes no faith in Christ (we have no warrant to do that), but the fact is that he lived with Elin before marriage, cusses a blue streak when shots go awry, and can be surly and even mean.  Do I want my kids to grow up to be like Tiger?  Nope, and that’s true even if none of this stuff ever came out.  Do I appreciate some things about the man?  Without question: his determination, his discipline, his sportsmanship, his commitment to excellence; these are certainly praiseworthy qualities.  But a role model?  Uh, no.  And anybody foolish enough to lift him up as such deserves the letdown they felt a few months ago.  He’s never been a role model I’d have ever encouraged (not that there aren’t some in sports–though of course we have to be careful; Kurt Warner comes to mind as one example, as does Tony Dungy, both committed believers).

5. The carefully-scripted nature of this news conference does raise questions about what’s going on here.  At the same time, let me suggest two seemingly-contradictory thoughts that aren’t: one, it’s really not the business of the press to get the intimate details of his philandering.  Their prying appeals only to our prurient interests, as the press encourages–and we play along with–this hellish spectatorism that causes us to think that things that are in no way “our business” in fact are.  When I was first blogging, one of my semi-regular posts said something like this: “it’s been (insert time period here) since Laci Peterson was murdered, and it’s still none of our business.”  Two, though, is this: if Tiger is truly repentant–and why would he understand what that even means, particularly in this warped society that doesn’t understand repentance, and in light of the fact that he’s not a believer–he’d not so carefully script things in such a way that no questions can be asked.  Now, I’d suggest that if he opened up to reporters, he ought to rightly reserve the right to refuse to answer certain particular questions, but repentance is characterized, among other things, by a willingness to allow appropriate transgressions to come to light to the appropriate degree.  There are questions that could be asked that would be appropriate for Tiger to answer, it seems to me; his unwillingness to allow such raise real questions about the nature of his “repentance”.

6. I wish the best for Tiger Woods.  I have exactly zero faith in the “sex addiction rehab” he’s undergoing; I expect it to yield only temporary results at best; if his “rehab” isn’t grounded in a new relationship with Jesus Christ, then what’s the point?  Appeals to change, strategies to change, power to change: all of these will be grounded in the shifting sand of philosophies and ideas found “under the sun”, and will amount to “vanity” in the end.  Yeah, it’s possible, though, that he’ll be so concerned about his “public image”, or “the effect that his actions have on others”, or his bank account, that he’ll stop chasing every female that breathes.  That isn’t totally without merit; given the fact that we as believers live in this world, and there are many more unbelievers than believers, I prefer it if unbelievers behave decently as opposed to indecently (though I have no right to expect it), but in the end, even if he maintains from this day ’til his dying day unswerving devotion to his wife (if she’ll have him back, which I doubt), but doesn’t become a follower of Jesus, he’ll go to hell a faithful man.  And that, I submit, would be the worst thing of all.