On the men’s side, for the most part the top seeds have been rolling along. Six of the top eight are in the quarterfinals, the most notable absence being that of Juan Martin Del Potro, who was taken out in a tough five-setter by #14 Marin Cilic, who now faces #7 Andy Roddick. #8 Robin Söderling went out in the first round, and the quarterfinalists are rounded out by #10 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
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In 1973 the NFL adopted a new way of measuring statistical passer performance. The passer rating system attempts to combine various aspects of the passing game into one metric.
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I don’t write about football that often, but wow, that was some game.
96 total points, an NFL postseason record. 62 total first downs, an NFL postseason record. 1024 combined yards, tied for third in NFL postseason history.
Kurt Warner’s line: 29 of 33 passes, 379 yards passing, 11.5 yards per pass, 5 touchdowns, 0 interceptions, 154.1 passer rating.
Aaron Rodgers’ line: 28 of 42 passes, 422 yards passing, 10.0 yards per pass, 4 touchdowns, 1 interception, 121.3 passer rating.
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Upon typing that title, I realized that it sounds quite like a modern fairy tale or children’s story. Of course, if it were a fairy tale, then the faithful sponsors would stick with Tiger as he attempted to slay the foul beasts of public opprobrium and frenzied media—but instead at least one major sponsor, Accenture, is walking away.
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Serena Williams was recently fined $82,500 by the International Tennis Federation for the actions leading to her exit from this year’s US Open. The ITF fine is in addition to the $10,500 she was fined by the USTA soon after the incident.
The fine from the ITF is the largest ever in tennis, and there’s significant controversy over the whole affair. I’ve read quite a few claims that racism and sexism are key drivers for the decision to fine her so much. I’m somewhat skeptical of those claims.
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Nikolay Davydenko won the 2009 ATP Finals yesterday with a surprise 6–3, 6–4 win over Juan Martin Del Potro. While Davydenko was seeded 6, just one behind Del Potro at 5, this was a significant upset. Del Potro looked very strong after his initial round-robin loss to Andy Murray, and won the last Grand Slam of the season, the US Open.
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The 2009 ATP year-end championships have finished the first, round-robin, stage, where the field of eight is split into two groups of four, and each group plays round-robin to winnow it down to the two who go to the single-elimination rounds (semifinals and final). There have been some interesting effects of running the tournament this way, and I wonder whether a different setup would be superior.
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They beat the Philadelphia Phillies in six games, finishing it last night with a stellar performance from Hideki Matsui, a solid outing by Andy Pettitte, and the usual lethal efficiency from Mariano Rivera. 27 titles is by far the most in baseball, and is also the most in the “big four” US sports of baseball, football, basketball, and ice hockey (the Montreal Canadiens have 24).
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Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball has something of a cult following, and helped its main subject, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane. The essential idea is that by focusing on non-traditional (in baseball terms) statistical analysis (called Sabermetrics), Beane could identify arbitrage opportunities in baseball markets.
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Living in a capitalist society, many of our pastimes and interests are based on exploitation of one kind or another.
Some of these forms of exploitation are reviled because of their outright cruelty. This revulsion isn’t consistent. One of the things that keeps us calm about them is a veneer of fairness, which allows us to move along in acceptance instad of trying to figure out how to fight. Even if we don’t believe it, either enough other people do or we think enough other people do, which is one of the things that keeps our current system ticking along.
Does our requirement for “fairness” increase the more direct the connection is between the exploitation and our enjoyment? This question is one that struck me while reading Malcom Gladwell’s “Football, dogfighting, and brain damage”.
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The new Yankee Stadium opened this year, and with it came a rather large increase in ticket prices. The most outrageously-priced seats are in the “Legends Suite”, and they go from about $500 to about $2500 each.
Reporter Wright Thompson got an assignment to write about what having one of those seats is like, and his article “Seats of Gold” is excellent. Included in it is a damning critique of Wall Street, because the corrupt culture of brokers inducing traders to buy things includes lavishing them with all kinds of entertainment, including prime Yankees tickets:
In exchange for tickets, the trader orders whatever the broker is selling. Everybody wins. The broker gets his sale. The trader gets his seat behind the dugout. Well, almost everybody. You, I’m afraid, get screwed with your pants on. Wall Street was not only trifling with our financial future but also driving up ticket prices.
—Wright Thompson. “Seats of Gold”. ESPN, 5 Oct 2009.
More accurately, Club Deportivo O’Higgins. I had already thought about visiting Chile, but now it seems like I should not only do that but try to see this team play a match, preferably at home.
Naturally, they’re based in Rancagua, capital of The O’Higgins Region.
(Yes, somewhere back along the line, I’m distantly related to Bernardo O’Higgins.)
After not making it to the playoffs last year, the New York Yankees returned to their rightful spot atop the American League East. They clinched against the Red Sox, and hit the one hundred game mark for the first time since 2004. Their record gives them home field advantage throughout the playoffs.
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Well, I didn’t see this one coming. I really thought that Federer would be too relaxed, too experienced, and just too good to lose this final.
He wasn’t. He lost 6–3, 6–7 (5), 6–4, 6–7 (4), 2–6 in a match that was actually closer than the scoreline reflects—Federer really had multiple chances to close the door on Del Potro and just couldn’t seem to quite take them.
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Rain delays over the last few days mean that the US Open men’s final isn’t until tomorrow, with the men’s semifinals and women’s final today. Those three matches produced some excellent tennis, although none of them were particularly close.
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The biggest story so far is Andy Roddick getting knocked out by John Isner in a battle of big servers. I was somewhat surprised, as I’d thought that Roddick would do well, and that he was a likely semifinalist. But in coming up against another big server in a five-set match in New York, he had to face a final set tiebreak against someone he didn’t have a serving advantage against. Isner took it with a single point against the Roddick serve and without losing any on his own serve, 7–5.
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The NCAA is the National Collegiate Athletics Assocation, the governing body for American college sports. One of the responsibilities it has taken upon itself is the policing of student amateur status, to make sure that colleges do not entice star athletes to join their progams with money or other bribes. I already considered this a ridiculous situation, but realized today that I underestimated just how ridiculous it was.
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I tried listening to this podcast by Bill Simmons and Jon Wertheim, but Simmons’ pronunciation drove me nuts. I actually like some of his writing, but listening to him proved incredibly irritating.
If you don’t follow tennis, well, you might not know how it’s pronounced, fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all screw up pronunciations of unfamiliar and foreign words, and clearly something about American placenames pushes Americans to devoice that consonant. No problem.
Wimbledon has a “d” in it. No “t”. Not all Americans pronounce it with a “t”—Wertheim pronounced it properly without difficulty—but I’ve only ever heard Americans do this. Simmons doing it in this podcast was all the more annoying because he was talking to someone who was pronouncing it correctly.
If you’re a major sports journalist talking about it, and you’re talking to another sports journalist who’s pronouncing it correctly, what the fuck is your excuse? Either Simmons is unbelievably oblivious, or he’s doing it on purpose as some kind of schtick—which would be even worse. Deliberately pronouncing it the wrong way to show that you’re “a common man” who doesn’t have any truck with the educated types and their high-falutin’ ways of talking is just horrible. See, for example, “nucular”.
I don’t know if Simmons is actually doing it on purpose, but what, nobody ever took him aside and said, “look, Bill, it’s ‘Wimbledon’”?
Federer won his fifteenth Grand Slam title, and his sixth Wimbledon title, today in a remarkable five-set match, 5-7, 7-6 (6), 7-6 (5), 3-6, 16-14. That last set isn’t a typo, it really was sixteen games to fourteen. The longest fifth set, in terms of games, in Wimbledon history, and probably in playing time also. Andy Roddick did better, far better, than I or many others expected, and did not lose his serve until the last game of the match.
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I commented on Sunday that I’m not as interested in women’s tennis as in men’s tennis. I’ve been wondering why the disparity is so significant at the moment, as this hasn’t always been the case for me. While that was on my mind, Wimbledon and the BBC decided to throw this into the mix:
A BBC source said: “It’s the Wimbledon play committee, not us who decides on the order of play. But obviously it’s advantageous to us if there are good-looking women players on Centre Court. No one has heard of many of the women now, so if they are pretty it definitely gives them an edge. Our preference would always be a Brit or a babe as this always delivers high viewing figures.”
—Emily Andrews and Colin Fernandez. “Babe, set and match: Why looks count for more than talent when Wimbledon decides which girls will play on Centre Court”. Mail Online, 29 Jun 2009.
Huh, well, that’s to be expected from a channel trying to boost ratings, I suppose, but surely the organizers of the most revered tennis tournament in the world would have no truck with such an approach?
[L]ast night, the All England Club admitted that physical attractiveness is taken into consideration.Spokesman Johnny Perkins said: “Good looks are a factor.”
—Emily Andrews and Colin Fernandez. “Babe, set and match: Why looks count for more than talent when Wimbledon decides which girls will play on Centre Court”. Mail Online, 29 Jun 2009.
Halfway through, and there aren’t too many big stories that weren’t present at the start of the tournament—the big three are still Nadal’s absence, Federer’s attempt to break the Grand Slam record, and Murray’s chances of being the first British men’s player to win in 73 years.
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The The New York Times tennis blog mentioned DFW’s “String Theory” essay the other day, bringing to my attention the fact that it’s available online. I loved it when I read it in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and highly recommend it. David Foster Wallace wrote a number of truly excellent pieces on tennis, and all of them are absolutely worth reading. Here are those that I could find available online:
Unfortunately “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” doesn’t seem to be available online. It’s not about tennis in the way the others are, but it’s a fascinating look at the mentality of high-level athletes. It’s in Consider the Lobster, which is also full of other excellent essays.
Jelena Janković was the number one female tennis player in the world at the start of the year, but has fallen rapidly since (like her compatriot Ana Ivanović ). Janković is now number six, while Ivanović is number twelve… but Janković seems a tad more desperate, as rumor has it that she’s considering a coaching switch to the guy behind this video:
I don’t think that can be a good sign.