Off the Top: Sports Entries
A Pitcher's Perfect Game is a Team Effort
Tuesday night Matt Cain of the San Francisco Giant’s pitched a perfect game (no hits, no walks, nor errors, and no runs). This was the first perfect game by a Giant in the 130 years the club has been around. Cain’s 14 strike out tied the best perfect game of Sandy Kolfax, so 2 of the 22 best perfect games ever.
But it Takes a Team
One of the most amazing moments in this perfect game was in the 7th inning when the Giants’ Gregor Blanco made an amazing play on the Astros’ Jordan Schafer’s smash drive to center field. There was a whole lot of amazing and special in his play, but the most amazing bit came in his talking about the play the following day.
From yesterday’s MLB.com article Cain bak at work as Giants revel in perfecto Gregor Blanco talks about his talk with Cain after the game and Cain’s deep appreciation of that catch that saved the perfect game…
Right fielder Gregor Blanco spoke at length about his remarkable seventh-inning catch of Jordan Schafer’s drive to the center-field warning track.
Blanco refused Cain’s offer to reward him for his impossible grab. “He asked me what I wanted – a watch, a car, a house,” Blanco said, prompting laughter from reporters. “I said, ‘No man, we’re a team. I’m always there for you.’” Having the chance to make such plays is its own reward, Blanco said. “I work hard, and it’s great to have a moment like this in my career,” he said. “I’m enjoying this, enjoying the moment, and I’m just thankful to the Giants for the opportunity.”
Blanco repeated that he didn’t think he could run down Schafer’s drive. It wasn’t false modesty.
This understanding of team is fantastic. (I do love Matt Cain’s gesture of reward, and Matt’s hat tip to Gregor just after the play as it was pure class and grace.) It is a great thing when many moving parts come together like this. When each member is looking out for the team and supporting those who are having a shining moment reach their best.
This, is what it is all about!
Baseball and Sports Open One's Eyes to the Exceptional
Tonight (Sunday the 6th of May) was a good evening if you are a baseball fan. There were some great games that are out of the norm. It seems that there are quite a few extra inning games this year, but two of my favorite teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Baltimore Orioles both took their games into extra innings. The Giants game started 3 hours after the Orioles game and yet they ended within a minute or so of each other. With the Giants going into the 11th inning to get a walk off single to win and the Orioles won in the 17th after a 3 run home by Adam Jones put them ahead in the top of the inning.
Looking for the Exceptions
One of the announcers for the Boston Red Sox and Orioles game that went to 17 innings had said he met a friend of his who brought his kid to the game and the announcer said to the kid, “I hope you get to see something special today”. That is a big part of the fun of baseball, and sport in general from a spectator’s vantage, it is the exceptions and the things that are special. It is also a great way to pick up the norms and customs in a culture (Gunther Barth’s “City People” is a great book on human social interactions and how the the social norms are found and set in cities includes the baseball stadium as one of the core elements for enculturation and social interaction with others). But, the understanding of norms and exceptions while watching a game being played with skill is where one learns to see the world. Sports fans stick out in the workplace, whether they are male or female as they often see things differently. They look for the exceptional and often look to see hints of things that stand out.
It is that seeing a world for the norms and the exception to appreciate them, but also to look to emulate them. This really is the standout out trait quite often for the deep fans. It is also the weaving of the story before your eyes and the potential for a great ending. But, it is also watching the unexpected player, or even the expected player, do something far from the norm and maybe even spectacular.
Tonight’s Orioles and Red Sox 17 inning gem had two unusual pitchers as the winning and losing pitchers, in that neither was a pitcher. The winning pitcher, Chris Davis is the Orioles designated hitter and occasional first baseman. He went to bat eight times tonight and didn’t get one hit. But he was called on to pitch in the 16th inning and stayed on in the 17th as there were no more relief pitchers available and Buck Showalter the Orioles Manager put him on the mound to pitch. This is exceptionally rare. What was rarer was Davis did rather well and in the two innings he struck out two batters. Really amazing.
Two Summer’s back when my dad was on in his last weeks another amazing game took place. It was the ninth inning and two outs with Armando Galarraga pitching a perfect game up to that point. All Galarraga needed was one last out. he pitched and the ball was hit and thrown to first base ahead of the runner and the umpire called the runner safe, a hit. The perfect game gone, but it was the wrong call. The manager argued his case and the replays clearly showed the runner was out and Galarraga should have the perfect game (there have only been 21 perfect game pitched in all of recorded major league baseball). The umpire Jim Joyce stuck to his call as that is what he saw as the runner safe. The game was over minutes later with the final out with Galarraga getting the win, but not the perfect game.
Following the game the Jim Joyce went off field and looked at the replay and realized he made the wrong call. He went to find Galarraga and apologize and admit he made the wrong call. This was gut wrenching for Joyce, who is known for getting the hard calls right so often. But, the humility and deep showing of humanity in Joyce reaching out admitting he was wrong and feeling horrible as his call stood between perfection and it incredible rarity. Hearing this story choked me up (I had watched the end of the game and was in awe). I called my dad and told him about it, but he was medicated and not really able to share in it. The thought of the game and story of it is something I still get choked up with, because it is utterly amazing.
With an eye to the exceptional I hear designers talk with the same alertness, as well as others in various other professions. Quite often the best of any field have this same focus and often they see the world much the same way. Often when you sit and get to know them the stories of games watched come out where something amazing happened or something out of the ordinary. They have learned to look for that and keep their eyes and mind open and attentive to just that the seeds of exceptions starting and the desire to see it this time, the one time will they see the exceptional happen, as it happens.
World Cup Moves On
The World Cup for football (soccer in the U.S.) came to its completion today with Italy winning. This has been a month of wonderful games and drama. The World Cup seems to always grow in interest to me with each one. This year I was in Europe (Innsbruck, Austria and Amsterdam, Netherlands) for the first few days of the World Cup, being hosted in Germany. It was fantastic to be in countries that get and care about football and World Cup.
It always seems that the World Cup is more of a uniting event than the Olympics. Yes, more people Watch the World Cup. In the U.S. more people went to the World Cup home page this past week than the Major League Baseball homepage. There is more deep passion and country essence displayed in and at the World Cup than any other sporting event, or make that any other event.
I was able to watch more full games than any year prior and it made it quite enjoyable. I think 1990 was the first year I watched on satellite in an Irish Bar in the Haight Ashbury. I have been hooked since.
The more I get into the World Cup the more I see the U.S. out of touch with the world and rather parochial. I know more and more in the U.S. are watching the games, which I think is a great step forward. Football is a team sport like no other as the culture is portrayed on the field and in the stands. There is strategy, teamwork, and beauty that evokes passion and pride. There is pride emanating from the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Australia that put them on the same level as some of the powerhouse football countries. That seems like a healthy pride.
It was nice to see Germany be a great host and find it okay to be proud of a national team. It was nice to hear Germany television reporting enthusiastically about sports, well something other than Dirk Nowitzki. It seems like the fans this World Cup were rather well behaved, which is a very good sign as well.
I am going to miss World Cup, but the world still seems smaller and much more cohesive than it did a month ago. The world is made up on one people and this wee planet we call home and most of us enjoy a good game of football.
World Cup, Power, and Mobile
Yesterday (July 4th), our power went out in the 87th minute of the World Cup match between Germany and Italy. We did not get power back for nearly 8 hours. We also lost internet access for 14 hours because of the same storm and poor infrastructure planning. I was truly amazed at the lack of World Cup on the radio, dumbfounded actually.
I was a bit peeved, but I did finally find really good mobile access to match and World Cup information from Yahoo! Mobile. When I was in Europe I found great coverage from the BBC mobile sports site on my old Nokia. The version of the site I get on my Treo in the U.S. is much different and not really usable or helpful. I had been using the ESPN mobile site which was the worst mobile access of them all.
The ESPN site essentially was not built to recognize matches would go beyond 90 minutes (did they every watch a World Cup match before?). Access to further information was really thin and tough to navigate.
The BBC site in Europe was very good with minute by minute updates. It seemed to be cached and I would get updates I had seen already (this may well could have been the carrier doing the caching). The US site for the BBC I was getting on my mobile was really difficult to find the live game and the information was sparse for the game.
Yahoo had the best site on my Treo. It allowed for very detailed coverage and updates. It has photos and annotations of the game that was better than much of the U.S. broadcasters coverage. The problem with the Yahoo coverage was finding it. It was not until the coverage link showed up on my Yahoo! mobile page on my device that I got to the best site for World Cup coverage on the mobile. Oddly the World Cup site, run/hosted by Yahoo! did not make it easy to get to the World Cup mobile content as it tired to point to a download sort of thing, which was not available for either phone I own.
World Cup Celebration
It is that time in life's cycle where I get a wee bit distracted. It is time for World Cup. I had the wonderful fortune to be in Europe as World Cup started, but being in Amsterdam as het Oranje played was quite special. I managed to hang out with Peter at his workplace and watched. It was amazing how Amsterdam became silent then roared when the Dutch scored.
I was staying in a nice little hotel, ACH Leidse Square, near the Vondel Park and not far from Leidseplein. This made it easy to walk through one of the central location for people to aggregate during football matches, the Leidseplein. From about five blocks away I could hear the roar as a goal was scored from nearly any team. The Leidseplein was awash in many block colors of people's home or favorite national team. This is not something that the USA really gets. Football is an international sport with more viewers for the World Cup than 12 Super Bowls. World Cup connects the world and cultures, probably more closely than the Olympics. It is a pageant of color and passion for national and regional pride. There is beauty in the game of motion and dance. It is a game where size and power is not essential, but skill and cunning can level a playing field. It is a game of teams and working together.
The USA has a team in the World Cup, but it is seemingly lost on many who live in the country.
Since the 1980s I have grown to enjoy World Cup more and more. In 1998 many work meetings seemed to fall in mid-afternoon lunches at tapas restaurant bars in Washington, DC as our work was with Europeans and Latin American clients. A little wine and espresso wrapped discussions about strategy and assents of telecom markets with clients. But the main focus was the game with work interspersed. If the client's national team was doing well the work went well as they had a positive feeling about the meeting, but if their team was not doing well they focussed a little more on the meeting and a lot got done.
This summer I have the ability to catch a few games around work and share it with our international neighbors. We all wear our colors of pride and our kids learn about passion, color, dance, and sports of beauty.
Le Tour 2004
It is Le Tour time again and we are following Oskar's Tour updates and his Tour links. Here in the U.S. we are following the Tour on OLN. It may finally be time we got Tivo so we don't miss a bit of the peddling.
The summer is the time we turn our focus to Europe to watch the tennis Grand Slam's of French Open and Wimbledon (these were the calming influence when we had horrible reverse culture shock in 1988). But, it is the Tour that brings back memories of Hinault, LeMond, Roche (watching him ride into Paris in person), Indurain, and Armstrong. Le Tour is summer as it has been since the 70s in our memories. It is always a reminder how little we are on our bike, even the years we were putting well over 2,000 miles under our peddles.
NBA does Moneyball
Fans of Moneyball will like the Washington Post story on the NBA wiz kid executive. The focus of the article is the San Antonio Spur's Sam Presti, age 27, who is applying MBA tactics to the NBA. Yes, quantitative analysis to mitigate risk and control cost is behind the NBA version of Moneyball, just as it is in Major League Baseball.
Bobby Bonds passes
Bobby Bonds dies. He was one of my early sports heros, along with Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. He was able to coach his son, Barry, and got to watch him dominate the game like no other. Bobby was a San Francisco Giants as well as a New York Yankee, California Angel, Chicago White Sox, Texas Ranger, Cleveland Indian, St. Louis Cardinal and the Chicago Cub. He will always be remember a Giant in my eyes.
Sports venues go high tech for added experience
There are two recent articles about how technology is changing the experience at sporting events. Chris Monicatti adds flavor and details to St. Paul Hockey and Safeco Field swimming with data and replays at will. These technological advances are now in the luxury boxes, but the ability to add to the experience for the fan the the nosebleeds, should not be that far behind. Although the venue modifications in St. Paul can enhance any event, including concerts by changing the content of the images on the walls and the content available in the devices, which is a little bit more of a challenge for those in the cheap seats.
Currently, for the rest of us, the best it gets is box scores and news on handhelds while we are at games. Sports are data and information treasure troves for those of us that love delving into the info. Digging in the box scores and stats are how many learned to love math and statistics. Having updated info at the tips of your fingers at games would be incredible. The SF Giants had (and may still have) in 2001 a beaming portal to beam updated game day info to those with Palm OS devices so to keep score and keep up on the stats of each player. It was a nice treat. What is being touted is so much more.
Take me out to the ballgame.
Georgetown loses to Seton Hall 6 players on the floor
During last night's Georgetown and Seton Hall basketball game Seton Hall went a head with a in bounds pass to a player who dunked. The problem is Seton Hall had six active players on the court, which is easy to see on the highlight (and to many of us at the game) as the Georgetown Hoyas go back down the court. The refs did not call it as Seton Hall called time out to hide their lack of playing by the rules.
ESPN Sport Center and College Gamenight are calling this exact play great coaching, but ESPN does not count the Seton Hall players. Ken Denlinger of the Washington Post does not catch it in his Georgetown Seton Hall coverage.
The Big East Conference has been providing horrible officiating all season and many of the league coaches have been very vocal about the lack of skill. This is hurting the fans and the players who decide to play in the Big East.