Why you should watch the World Series and John Smoltz

I try to write and post something at least twice a week and I often write about cartoons I’ve drawn or new cell phones or highway rest stops which seem like a great place to meet a serial killer or just about anything else that I get interested in and to be perfectly honest (enjoy the moment…it won’t last) I’ve been working on a piece about how bad some sports reporters are because they don’t know jack shit about the sport they cover and are reduced to asking lame questions like:

“What does it mean that your team (fill-in-the-blank)?”

BTW: Sports reporters always fill-in-the-blank with something positive because they don’t want to ask:

“What does it mean that your team blew a six-run lead and folded like a house of cards in a hurricane?”

Postgame interview questions that start with phrases like:

1. “What does it mean…”

2. “What does it say…”

3. “Tell me about…”

Are a pretty good indication that the reporter asking the question just watched a three-hour sporting event and didn’t learn a damn thing and can’t come up with a good question and now wants the athlete to do all the heavy lifting. And for the most part, athletes play along and respond to cliché questions with cliché answers like:

1. “It means the world to us.”

2. “We’ve got a group of guys who never give up.”

3. “We know that’s a good team over there and we have to be ready to play again tomorrow.”

Now here’s one of my favorite postgame interviews of all time because the reporter asks a softball question about scoring a touchdown, but Los Angeles Rams receiver Cooper Kupp does not give her the expected cliché answer, he tells her the truth:

And as Jack Nicholson might say, “You can’t handle the truth.”

Whether it was intentional or not (and I like to thank that it was), Kupp’s answer shows there’s way more going on out there than we realize and we don’t know all that much about it.  

San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is famous for not enjoying in-game interviews (apparently he’s under the mistaken impression that he should be coaching his team during a game, not satisfying the needs of the media) and here’s a video that demonstrates the Popovich Policy of ridiculing reporters and putting about the same amount of effort into an answer that the reporter put into the question:

When a reporter pointed out that Popovich’s team was shooting poorly and asked:

“What’s the problem?”

Popovich answered:

“The ball didn’t go in the hole.”

OK, so that’s the article I was going to write (and I guess I kinda have), but now I want to say something nice about Hall of Fame pitcher and current TV guy, John Smoltz.

And we’ll start with the difference between results and process

“Results” are who, what, when and where and those are pretty easy to talk about, it’s right there on the scoreboard; “process” is how and why and those are much harder to analyze, so if they don’t actually know how and why something happened, a lot of sports analysts will link results to emotions.

• “Team A beat Team B because Team A wanted it more.”

• “Bobby Baseball had a great game because he overcame the pressure and rose to the occasion.”

Emotion does play a role in sports, but it’s mainly a negative role because, unlike all the sports movies we watch, in the Real World the guys who “try harder” or attempt to “rise to the occasion” usually play worse by overthrowing or over-swinging or attempting low-percentage plays that rarely work out. If you could actually throw a ball harder or hit it farther by simply wanting to enough, you’d do it all the time.

“Yeah, I could throw 98, but I’m only throwing 94 because I just don’t care that much.”

Which, if you think it through, sounds pretty unlikely.  

The better sports analysts talk about “process” like pitching mechanics and pitch selection and pitch sequence and give logical reasons for the results we see on the field and right now John Smoltz is conducting a Masterclass in a pitcher’s thought process.

How the last pitch dictates the next pitch

I managed a team in a men’s baseball league and one of the players I managed was former big league pitcher Danny Jackson, if by “managing” you actually mean giving Danny a baseball and letting him pitch as long as wanted to and hoping he’d give the baseball back whenever he was through.

Before his first game I asked how Danny how he liked his outfield defense set up and he said:

“Put ‘em in the bare spots, they’re there for a reason.”

Which tells you all you need to know about the quality of fields we played on – there were bare spots where the outfielders stood – so I asked Danny why he wanted his outfielders playing straight up and he said it was because he didn’t know what pitch he was about to throw until he saw the hitter’s reaction to the last pitch.

If he had a left-handed hitter set up for a fastball away, he wanted to be able to throw that fastball away and if his left fielder was playing over in the left-center gap, a fastball away had a decent chance of being hit to a place the left fielder couldn’t cover.

Which is one of the reasons it’s a bad idea to force the players to stand wherever those positioning cards they pull out of their hats tell them to, because while it’s good to have a game plan going in, players need to be able to adjust to what’s actually happening that night.

Extreme positioning limits the pitches a pitcher can throw.

But a lot of front-office guys are control freaks and see the players as pieces on a chessboard that they control while sitting in a suite three floors above the dirt, but that’s a totally different story which I believe I’ve already written on more than one occasion.

Anyway…

John Smoltz is in the booth for the World Series and he’s explaining how a pitcher reads swings (or at least how they ought to read swings) and why you don’t want to throw an off-speed pitch for a strike when the hitter has already shown he’s late on your fastball. (An off-speed pitch solves the hitter’s problem for him; he was late on the fastball, but is now on time for the slider.)

Or why a pitcher might want to “climb the ladder” on a hitter who fouls a ball straight back. (The hitter was on time, but under the ball; throw the next pitch higher and see if he’ll chase that too.)

Smoltz also answered a question I’ve often wondered about; if a hitter chases two sliders, do you throw him a third one or do you assume he’s going to make some kind of adjustment and throw a fastball? (Smoltz said he wasn’t going to change what he was doing until a hitter showed him he had to.)

The game is about pitching

On Tuesday night the Philadelphia Phillies knocked the living snot out of the Houston Astros with five home runs and won the game 7-0; on Wednesday night the Philadelphia Phillies got no hit.

Different pitchers, different results.

Baseball is about pitching and if you want to understand it and why things happen the way they do, you need to understand pitching and right now John Smoltz is doing a great job explaining it and the Series is tied 2-2 so you get at least two more games to learn from him and if I were you (and I think we’re both thankful I’m not) I wouldn’t miss the opportunity.

Enjoy tonight’s game.