The case against football

I don't mean to sound like a sports prude, if there is such a thing, but if you're an NFL fan, these guys are suffering catastrophic brain injuries so you can be entertained. How can you be okay with that?


On various other blogs I've issued screeds about football-why the teams aren't really trying to win (they make money regardless), with the result that the sport is basically just a hugely successful TV show. Or about how the sixteen game season's small sample size makes it all kind of pointless anyway. Not to mention the degree to which the game's success is linked to all the free publicity it gets in the media, or how the hype to thrills ratio is pretty skewed given that there may be five or six exciting plays (lots of "three yards and a cloud of dust" skirmishes) in a dreary three hour TV show.


But those are simply matters of taste. Much more important is that we now know much more about how risky the game is, which may be why kids' participation in the sport is declining-America's parents have the good sense to protect their kids.


Dr. Bennet Omalu, whose pioneering research into football's dangers was actively resisted by the league, says kids under eighteen shouldn't play football at all. He has the same opinion, it should be added, about other contact sports-they are simply too risky for the developing brain.


For the NFL'ers themselves, Omalu says no equipment can prevent the injuries caused by huge guys moving at great speeds. Far too may become suicidal, or zombies.

Of course there are other arguments against the game-the current kneeling idiocy, the fact that so many of the players are, well, thugs.


But the safety issue is the big one.

Trump approval-down 5.9%

That is, Trump's current approval rating with registered/likely voters of 40.2%, according to the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls, represents a 5.9% drop from his election popular vote percentage.


That 40.2% compares unfavorably with his 42% figure the last time I checked this on September 21. Will a stronger economy and a grownup foreign policy push these numbers higher, or will Trump's hyper-ventilated reactions to all criticism continue to blot out his considerable achievements to date? I have no idea.

Category error

Pandora thinks ultra high energy jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson and pop trumpeter Herb Alpert are "similar artists". I have a certain not entirely rational affection for The Tijuana Brass, but that's like calling Charlie Parker and Kenny G "similar artists" because both are saxophonists.

By the numbers

We are knee-deep in the baseball playoffs, which look to be yielding a potentially classic Yankees/Dodgers World Series. The games have been good, if rather long-averaging about half an hour longer than the regular season...in fact no game has been less than three hours (ALCS game two was exactly three hours).

Here, though, I wanted to talk about some regular season questions. We baseball fans like numbers. We argue about which ones matter, when if ever they should take second place to intangibles like the evergreen notion of the "veteran clubhouse presence", and whether "statheads" are universally guys who couldn't play (in my case, yes).

I just wanted to take a quick look at a few correlations between wins (ranging from the Dodgers' 104 to the Giants' and Tigers' 64), and factors like payroll, batter age, pitchers' strikeouts, etc. Nothing too sophisticated here. And yes, correlation is not causation. This is quick and dirty stuff. Anyway...


The highest positive correlation I found was between wins and pitcher strikeouts per nine innings: 0.76. Think teams like Cleveland, the Dodgers, Houston. Baseball is more and more about power arms, and numbers like this one will only encourage the trend.


The highest negative one was between wins and runs against per game, not surprisingly, at -0.86. The correlation for runs scored per game was 0.72.


There is a decent sized positive correlation for pitcher age, at 0.32, and a tiny negative one for batter age. The former figure would seem to contradict the number above on the value of young flamethrowers.


And with modest-payroll teams like the Astros and Diamondbacks making the playoffs, it's not a shock that while payroll is an important factor in success, it isn't necessarily central-the positive correlation here is 0.37