TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

W/W - Bills +8.5 at Steelers: Steelers cover. Oh yeah, remember that team that had a Super Bowl hangover last season?

W/L - Colts -7 at Titans: Colts Cover. The Colts only won by 2. In Simmons’s picks column, he took my joke to the next level by pointing out that the end of the world occurs when Peyton Manning is actually in a Chevy commercial. I hope in the commercial he kareoke’s This Is Our Country.

L/L - Bengals -6.5 at Browns: Bengals cover. F*ck the Browns. I’d like to thank the NFL for going bat-sh*t crazy in my annual bookie dry-run for the fourth year running. Each year, before I actually get in touch with someone that’ll take NFL picks I do a week where I pick everything I would pick with the dollar amounts I’d pick them. I’d like to thank the NFL for knocking 75% of my gambling budget out in the dry-run week. Money that won’t be spent again this year.

L/L - Packers at Giants: Giants. As I already mentioned… I’m pretty sure I’m already punching out for the season. I’m looking to rent a few square feet on the Patriots bandwagon. If anyone has some available, let me know. What can I say? I used to root for the bad guy in wrestling, too.

L/L - Texans +6.5 at Panthers: Panthers cover. Note to self, never gamble on the Texans. You have no idea what they’re going to do but it apparently is going to involve lots of points.

L/L - Saints -3 at Bucs: Saints cover. Who gets to be America’s Team after everyone starts evacuating the Saints’ bandwagon? I vote for Houston.

W/W - Falcons +10 at Jaguars: Falcons +10. Yeah, that whole “sleeper team” thing? Not happening.

W/W - 49ers +3 at Rams: 49ers outright. Actually, I’d rent space on the Niners bandwagon if I wasn’t afraid at who I’d run in to from high school.

W/P - Vikings +3 at Lions: Lions cover. God healed John Kitna and wants the Lions to win 10. Seriously. Watch out NFC North!

W/W - Cowboys -3.5 at Dolphins: Cowboys cover. Filthy Cowboys.

L/L - Seahawks -3 at Cardinals: Seahawks cover. The Seahawks were getting 3 points and lost 23-20. I guess there is something to this “spread” thing. By the way, this was another game on my dry run.

W/W - Jets +8 at Ravens: Jets +8. So, apparently, the coaching staff of the Ravens has accused Eric Mangini and the Jets of cheating during the game. Anyone other than me wondering if Mangini broke some kind of unwritten coaches’ code?

W/L - Raiders +9 at Broncos: Broncos cover. This is still not reason for me to believe I should start picking the Raiders under any circumstances.

W/W - Chiefs -12 at Bears: Chiefs +12. Nothing fancy to say here, just that I shockingly got one right. This was the one game this week I won in my dry run.

W/W - Chargers +4 at Patriots: Patriots cover. Lost in the whole Patriots’ cheating scandal was the fact the Patriots just crushed one of the two teams that were supposed to be their competition this year. If ever a team could go 19-0, it’s this one.

W/W - Redskins +7 at Eagles: Redskins outright. Tiebreak points: 51. Take the over. OK, so this was right… I managed to get my friend Hulse into a 3-2 straight up bet (we were going to do 5-2, but I balked… not because I thought I was wrong, but because I feel somewhat bad about taking that much money from people I like). While the game wasn’t the score-fest I expected (20-12), I feel much more justified in my prediction of the Redskins being better than everyone thought and the Eagles being worse than everyone thought.

I also got bounced out of BOTH of my Knockout Pools this week. Pool one, as I mentioned, was Bengals over Browns. I also was talked into another one at the last minute and went with the Saints. Quickest $20 ever.

This Week
- Straight up: 11-5
- Spread: 8-7-1

Overall
- Straight up: 22-10
- Spread: 17-12-3

Locks of the week: 1-1

Or, by the full name Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager by Buzz Bissinger.

When the Fire Joe Morgan guys talked about this book they gave it one paragraph:

If you haven’t already, I invite you to read Buzz Bissinger’s book 3 Nights in August, about La Russa. The purported aim of the book is to show how brilliant La Russa is as a strategist. The actual accomplishment is to make one feel like one wouldn’t trust La Russa to take care of one’s cats, much less one’s baseball team. It starts with an anecdote about how Albert Pujols has a severe arm injury — one that allows him to swing a bat but not throw. La Russa wants to play him anyway, to like intimidate the other team (which doesn’t know about the injury), so he puts him in left field and tells him to casually underhand the ball to the SS if it gets hit to him. A doctor has told La Russa that Pujols, the most important player on the team by a factor of fifty, is risking severe like career-threatening shit if he throws a baseball. This is a not-super-important game. I mean, what the hell?

In fairness, that’s not exactly true. The Pujols anecdote, I think, was supposed to show La Russa thinking “outside the box” to keep his team in a playoff hunt. It was the middle of August and the Cardinals were fighting out the division with the Cubs and the Astros. La Russa couldn’t really afford to have Pujols out of the line-up and didn’t have a DH slot to hide him in so he had Jim Edmonds shade over to left on deep balls and Edgar Renteria shade back on shallow balls. Pujols was ordered to not fire the ball to the infield under any circumstances but rather to flip the ball either to Edmonds or Renteria. This was after they attempted to play him at first for a bit until runners realized they could steal bags even on a pick-off throw. It wasn’t exactly a “not important game”. It was more “middle of a divisional race.” Pujols was in because he was the most important guy on the team.

As much as I expected this book to be a response to Moneyball (especially considering it promised in the opening that it would not be) it really didn’t turn out that way. It didn’t delve into stats or overvalued and undervalued players. It didn’t start by underlining the woe that is the St. Louis payroll, though it did get in it’s shots at the Yankees and Red Sox over-hyped rivalry. I quote:

The rivalry between the Cubs and the Cardinals is probably the oldest and perhaps the best in baseball, no matter how much the Red Sox and Yankees spit and spite at each other. That’s a tabloid-fueled soap opera about money and ego and sound bites. That’s a pair of bratty high-priced supermodels trying to trip each other in their stilettos on the runway.

This is before it gets in to the history of the Cubs/Cards rivalry which in itself was pretty interesting. What it did end up responding to was the Moneyball, or more precisely Billy Beane’s, view of a manager. Beane considers the manager of a baseball team to be a middle manager. A guy with (usually) very little education who is tasked with managing the most important asset of a major league baseball club: the team. Beane points out that no other industry in the world would consider doing business this way. Hence, in Oakland, the manager is a figurehead while the front office decides who bats where, what reliever comes in when, and who pitches when. The manager is just there for show.

Three Nights In August takes a different view of it. It picks up the Cardinals’ 2003 season in the midst of a three-game series against the Cubs in the midst of August. At the beginning of the series, which runs from August 26th to August 28th, the Cardinals’ record sits at 68-63. They are a half-game behind the Cubs (68-62) and one game behind the division leading Houston Astros (69-62).

The format of the book is pretty simple. Bissinger takes you through each game, step-by-step, starting with the pre-game meeting the team has before each series and culminating with the post-game celebration following a walk-off home run in game three. Along the way, you’re treated to a little backstory on some of the players as they come up. Much like Moneyball branches off into chapters about Scott Hatteburg and Jason Giambi, Three Nights branches off into chapters about even lesser known names, like Cal Eldred and Bo Hart and even delves in to Rick Ankiel and Darryl Kile.

It allows the reader insight into parts of baseball he’d never see: like a pre-game meeting between the Dave Duncan and Garrett Stephenson. Duncan sits each starter down before a start. He has spent hours watching DVDs of Cub batters and has a strategy for each batter. He tells Stephenson that Kenny Lofton kills him when he throws a sloppy breaking ball but that he tends to strike Lofton out with his change-up. He lets us know that Cub hitters are overly aggressive and tend to attack the first pitch. We find out that Moises Alou, in particular, has feasted off Cardinal starter’s first-pitches to the tune of four home runs. He tells Stephenson that another hitter, Randall Simon, has killed him whenever he gives him something up in the strike zone… so don’t do that.

Of course, it does then delve off-course into it’s (thankfully) few forays into the world of statistics. The reader finds out that Stephenson has been complaining at the lack of run-support on the season. We also discover that La Russa is angry about Stephenson being angry. After all, it proclaims, Stephenson should be pitching in his 2000 form if he wants to go 16-9 again. It then uses Stephenson’s statistics to make the point:

2000: 31 starts, 16-9, 4.49 ERA 209H 31HR 63BB 123K in 200.3 IP
2003: 25 starts, 7-12, 4.41 ERA 148H 26HR 57BB 83K in 159.3 IP (it’s only August).

Meanwhile, if I couldn’t outline the absurdity of the “Win” before, allow those two lines above to do so. Stephenson has been essentially the same pitcher in 2003 as he was in 2000, except in 2000 he got 16 wins because the team scored more runs.

It took a lot of effort to muscle through that chapter.

Fortunately, it got better. After the team meetings, the book takes you in to the dugout. It gives you a chance to actually be in the manager’s head and see what he’s thinking and why he makes the calls he does. You see why the manager pulls a hit-and-run when he does and when he decides to send the runner. It gives you the reason why managers view certain guys as bench players and some guys as full time players even giving the story of one of the Cardinal’s bench players who makes a trip from the doghouse to superhero in the course of the series.

It even manages to be oddly psychic. The Cubs started Mark Prior in Game 1 and Kerry Wood in Game 2. Mark Prior was framed as the entitled, cocky young pitcher who didn’t have a care in the world. The book uses that chapter to give some history on another cocky, young pitcher who didn’t have a care in the world; Rick Ankiel. It mentions that Prior, who at the time was on top of the world, should be careful that he doesn’t take his arm for granted. The Game 2 starter is Kerry Wood. While it doesn’t make specific notes about Wood’s personality, it does mention that Dusty Baker had a tendency to overuse him a bit.

What it does particularly well is convey the million things that are going on during any given ballgame that the casual (or even the hardcore viewer) doesn’t realize. One particular anecdote, in the part of the book that delves a little bit into sign-stealing and ways to avoid it, tells about Roger Clemens warning a proficient sign-stealer that if he didn’t stop, “somebody was going to get killed.” Also, in this same section, it mentions that Shawn Green, currently of the New York Mets, has an almost uncanny ability to steal a catcher’s signs. It gives you a sense of how manager’s go about responding to one of their player’s getting hit (On the Cardinals, the order always comes from La Russa). The manager’s inner struggle over whether to hit-and-run or steal. While it doesn’t go so far to say that certain batters “clog up the basepaths” when they work walks, it does make the rather obvious assertion that a walk isn’t always the best thing to get… especially as an 8-hitter in the National League.

Now, the stat-head in me can easily say that any person can make that decision. Any person could look at a hitter’s trends and know where to position a defensive player. Really that the manager could be replaced with a particularly well-programmed super-computer that analyzes match-ups and trends and positions the player’s accordingly. But other stuff that managers have gut instincts for, like managing 25 egos ranging from fragile to over-entitled, is a talent. JD Drew, for instance, is the guy in the book set forth as the one person that La Russa has no idea how to motivate. He said, frankly, that there is nothing he can do to get Drew “fired up” to play. On the drastic other end he gives you Matt Morris. Morris, days before his start in game 3, twisted his ankle badly. Instead of going on the DL, he made his start. Most of Game 3 is written with Morris in mind, as he manages to hit 2 slow rollers that force him to bust down the line on a gimpy ankle. He does it both times.

The Morris part is springboard into the death of Darryl Kile. While “play the game right” is a line that stat-heads like to tear apart and goof on, Kile is the guy who taught Morris to play the game right. By that, they mean be there when the team needs you. As much as I respect most of the Jamesean theories and statistics, I think the tendency to ignore player’s personality is the biggest. The issue, outlined particularly well with JD Drew, is that no matter how good a guy’s numbers are: he doesn’t help you when he isn’t playing. Bissinger makes it a point to mention all the situations where La Russa could have used JD Drew during the series. Since Drew is on the DL, it does him absolutely no good.

What you walk away with at the end is the sense that the manager has a million things going on in his head during the game. Whether to hit-or-run, steal, defensive positioning, pitch-outs, trickery, sign-stealing, and the like.

One final thing to mention is the Epilogue. It jumps to the 2004 post-season. It mentions how the entire city of Boston conspired to beat the Cardinals in Game One and Two. The Red Sox, sportsmen that they are, booked the Cardinals in a hotel 40 miles outside the city. A security guard at Fenway Park left his car parked in front of a team bus, stranding them at the stadium until the wee hours of the morning. By the time they got back to their hotel, the kitchen had no real food left to serve them. To the book’s credit, it also mentions La Russa’s tendency to get swept in the World Series.

The Yard Sez: Fantastic read if you’re even remotely interested in the game of baseball. Otherwise: interesting read but much of it will be lost on you.