The Chiefs, Taylor Swift and the Secret to Winning: Part 1

Which is way too much for one article, so there will be two…

The original plan was to write about sports movies and how misleading they are, but then the Chiefs started playing poorly and Professional Sports Loudmouth Skip Bayless suggested maybe Taylor Swift was the problem, so I tried to include stuff about the media and how clueless we can often be and what actually goes wrong with teams and the article was getting longer and longer (much like this sentence) and if I kept writing I got the feeling I’d eventually mention obsessed sea captains and white whales, so I decided to go back to Plan 1 and write about sports movies and then come back the next day and write about the Chiefs, Taylor Swift and the media, so let’s see if I can pull all that off and we’ll start with my original subject…

What We Learn from Movies

The first time I had to hail a cab in Real Life, I remember feeling dumb because I wasn’t 100% sure how to do it so I just imitated what I saw people do in movies: I put one foot in the street and lifted a hand while staring at the cab I hoped would stop.

And it worked.

An experience which made me think how often we learn how to do things by watching movies, like ordering a bottle of wine, kissing a girl, throwing a punch and (if you manage to do all that in one evening) demanding to see a lawyer before speaking to the police.

Anyway…

If you think about it – and I have – we learn a lot from movies and sometimes what we learn is useful and sometimes what we learn is wildly inaccurate because in Real Life you can’t shoot guns out of people’s hands without blowing off a finger and you can’t jump your car off the Hills of San Francisco without bending your car’s frame and you can’t get punched in the head repeatedly without suffering some sort of brain damage that will eventually make you a Metallica fan.  

Some of what movies show us is useful and accurate, but some of it’s dumb and harmful and right about here we should finally get to one of today’s many topics:

Inaccurate Sports Movies  

The typical sports movie ends with some fantastic feat like a long touchdown pass or a half-court shot that goes in after spinning around the rim 12 times or a home run that somehow makes the stadium lights shoot off fireworks or getting knocked down repeatedly until you look through the ring ropes and stare into your girlfriend’s eyes and then get up off the canvas and win the fight by knockout because now you’re finally inspired.

If you see enough sports movies you might think that’s how you win: by spending 98% percent of the time getting your ass kicked and then getting really worked up and emotional and doing something fantastic at the end.

But if you think about – and once again I have – if you need to do something fantastic to win you’re going to lose a lot because those feats are considered fantastic because most of the time they don’t happen.

Relying on longshots is kinda like marrying a Kardashian: once in a while it might work out, but mostly it won’t.

For instance: 2022’s home run champion was Aaron Judge (no relation, although the athletic similarities are remarkable) with 62 home runs. Judge also had 696 plate appearances, so do the math and 634 times Aaron did something less than hitting a home run which means if you needed a home run to win a game, 91% of the time the best home run hitter in baseball would fail.

So if getting emotional and doing Really Big Things doesn’t work consistently, how do you win consistently?

Good Fundamentals

Former Kansas City Royals coach Doug Sisson once said all kinds of teams have won the World Series – from the “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates to the “Let’s Beat the Shit Out of Each Other” Oakland A’s – but they all had one thing in common:

Good fundamentals.

Now here’s the deal on that:

Talent is pretty much God-given and for some reason we can’t fathom He (and/or possibly She) gives one guy an arm that can throw a baseball 100 miles an hour and another guy an arm that would be more useful attached to a rocking chair.

But you work on your swing and/or pitching mechanics because good fundamentals allow you to get the most out of your physical talent and bad fundamentals limit how much you get out of that talent and you develop good fundamentals by repeating them over and over and over which is really boring and explains why some athletes don’t want to do it.

According to the internet, during the NBA season Steph Curry will take 300 shots a day after practice and in the offseason take 500 shots a day which explains why athletes say:

“The more I practice the luckier I get.”

Turns out, the more you do something the better you get at it, although I should probably mention you can take too many swings or shoot too many baskets because if you get physically exhausted your mechanics will break down and now you’re practicing the wrong thing. So when you hear Steph Curry takes 500 shots a day you should give him credit for being in the kind of shape that allows him to do that. Which means Curry conditions fanatically and if you’re making a list of shit pro athletes hate, wind sprints will be in the Top 10 along with “making curfew” and “sports journalists like Skip Bayless.”

As someone smarter than me (which doesn’t cut down on the number of suspects) once said: “Practice does not make perfect – perfect practice makes perfect.”

And now a word about that.

A look at just one play: covering first base

Every year spring training starts with PFPs which stands for Pitcher Fielding Practice and if you attend spring training and watch pitchers work on it, a lot of them just go through the motions and waste everybody’s time because they don’t take it seriously.

But then every year without fail somebody loses a game because a pitcher didn’t cover first base correctly.

To make a point we’re going to talk about that one play – a pitcher covering first base – and you need to remember there’s a right way to do absolutely everything and we could talk about cutoffs and relays or tagging runners or making turns at a base and it would be just as complicated and just as important, but we’ll talk about pitchers covering first base because it’s so obvious when they screw it up.

First thing:

Each and every time a ball is hit to his left, a pitcher must break for first base immediately. 

The pitcher can’t wait to see if he’s needed, he has to break immediately and run hard, but he doesn’t run directly at first base because that would mean he’d cross the path of the runner and that leads to collisions.

The pitcher is supposed to run to the first base line about 15 feet short of first base and at that point, turn and run parallel with the foul line so he and the runner are headed in the same direction which avoids collisions. Once he’s running parallel with the foul line the pitcher holds his glove up chest high and gives whoever fielded the ball a target because the pitcher needs to catch the ball before he reaches first base. If the pitcher is late he might have to catch the ball and step on first base at the same time and we’ve all seen pitchers drop the ball when they look down to figure out where the base is.

Pretty simple, but we still see this play screwed up all the time because somebody didn’t take it seriously during practice.

This is just one of about a thousand plays you have to practice repeatedly if you want to get them right when it’s Game 7 of the World Series and 40,000 people are screaming and you feel as panicked as Tiger Woods wondering where he left his cell phone.

Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers were running a play over and over in practice because Lombardi would spot some small imperfection and make them run it again and finally an exhausted and frustrated player said:

“Coach, we could run this play in our sleep.”

Lombardi smiled and the player realized that was the point: to relentlessly practice fundamentals until they were second nature and they could run the plays perfectly and some player on a different NFL team once said they knew exactly what the Packers were going to do, they just couldn’t stop the Packers from doing it.

So what happens when you don’t practice perfectly?

Before Vince Lombardi took over the Packers, they’d have long, disorganized practices because the coaches hadn’t thought about what they should do next and would argue about that while players stood around and waited for the coaching staff to get its shit together.

Lombardi promised his players they’d never have a practice longer than 90 minutes which the players thought sounded great…right up until they had one.

Lombardi’s practices were so organized that the players were in constant motion and now 90-minute practices were exhausting, but that was part of the deal; the Packers were going to be in better shape than their opponents and keep playing hard the entire game and when you see teams that are known for comebacks there’s a good chance that’s part of it.

They condition harder and the difference in conditioning shows up in the fourth quarter. That’s actually part of the Miami Heat’s philosophy which is one of the reasons they show up in the playoffs as often as they do and the fact that it’s not part of every team’s philosophy tells you how many players don’t really want to work that hard.

What you practice also matters and when I first started managing a baseball team I ran those long, disorganized practices and I once spent most of one practice working on a double steal to be used against a left-handed pitcher that I thought would pitch against in the playoffs. But when the playoffs started the lefty never showed up (which happens in men’s amateur leagues) and we lost a doubleheader because we made seven errors.

So maybe I should have dumped the trick play and hit my team more grounders.

Trick plays and the Chiefs

The Chiefs ran some trick play and everybody loves it when those work and the punter passes or there are three handoffs or two guys grab a third guy and throw him over the line of scrimmage (which used to be an actual football play until they outlawed it) but in this case the Chiefs’ trick play blew up on them and the former player in the TV booth (and if I recall correctly and I often don’t, it was Chris Collinsworth) said everybody loves those trick plays, but how often do you practice them?

If you’ve got a trick play in your playbook it’s good for maybe one use because everybody will see it and be ready next time, so how much practice time will you devote to one play and any play you don’t practice a lot has a chance to go wrong and this one did.  

OK, so today’s lesson is that practice and conditioning help you win, but for most people (and that includes way too many athletes) that’s boring and they’d rather talk about what celebrity a player is dating and how that can be a huge distraction and right now seems like a good time to bring up a name:

Derek Jeter.

Google “women Derek Jeter dated” and the internet (which means it may or may not be totally accurate) gives you a long list with some pretty impressive names like Mariah Carey, Jessica Alba, Jordana Brewster, Tyra Banks, Gabrielle Union, Jessica Biel and Scarlett Johansson.

So apparently you can date hot, famous women (and by “you” I mean Derek Jeter because most of us would have absolutely no shot in that dating league) and play well because despite his busy pre-marital social life, Derek’s got a lifetime .310 average, five Gold Gloves and 14 All-Star appearances and made it to the Hall of Fame.

So just maybe the Chiefs’ problem isn’t Taylor Swift and we’ll talk more about that tomorrow.

See you then.