MY FAVORITE SPORTS NICKNAME. Yahoo!Answers yesterday had this answer to the question “Is there a word without vowels in it?” Many of them have a “y” in them, but the words “cwm” and “psst” are nominated. I was reminded of my favorite sports nickname. Bill Mlkvy was a star for the Temple basketball team—the Temple Owls—back in the fifties, and still holds the NCAA record for the most consecutive points scored without an intervening score by a teammate (54 in a row). Mlkvy’s nickname: “The Owl without a Vowel.”
Archive for the ‘Basketball’ Category
MY FAVORITE SPORTS NICKNAME.
Sunday, October 25th, 2009BASKETBALL AND PIANO MUSIC.
Thursday, August 20th, 2009BASKETBALL AND PIANO MUSIC. Some time after Van Cliburn had burst upon the American musical scene by winning a major Russian piano competition, he gave a concert in Kansas City at the same time that a major basketball tournament was taking place. Some coaches took an evening to hear Cliburn, and one of them was heard to exclaim, “Six foot four with hands like that! What a waste!”
DIMAGGIO DID IT TWICE.
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009DIMAGGIO DID IT TWICE. There is an anomaly to Mlodinow’s contention that DiMaggio’s streak could be accounted for as the result of a random process— that there is a better than 42% chance that some major league player or other would have had a 56 game hit streak at some time in the years going back to the 1870’s. The wikipedia article I linked to displays the anomaly. The article lists hitting streaks for Minor League Baseball. There is a Minor League Baseball player who had a 61 game hitting streak—and that player was Joe DiMaggio.
RANDOMNESS AND STREAKS.
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009RANDOMNESS AND STREAKS. Kids, people underestimate how common streaks are when the events are random. What are the chances that if you toss a coin 100 times that you will get a streak of ten or more heads or tails? The answer is: more than 10%. Leonard Mlodinow had an article in the weekend Wall Street Journal about winning streaks which points this out. He also points out that there is more than a 75% chance that you would get a streak of six or more heads or tails in 100 tosses. Mlodinow takes Joe DiMaggio’s feat of getting a base hit in 56 consecutive games, which is considered to be an extraordinary record, one which may never be broken. This wikipedia article shows that no major league player has come within ten games of DiMaggio’s streak, even if you go back to the 1870’s. Mlodinow argues that DiMaggio’s streak is an example of a streak that could have occurred by chance alone. Given the number of players over more than a hundred years of major league baseball, the odds are better than 40% that some player or other would have matched DiMaggio’s hit streak. Mlodinow cites studies of the kind which show that basketball players do not have hot shooting streaks, as I posted on here.
EVERYBODY IN THE INFIELD.
Friday, May 29th, 2009EVERYBODY IN THE INFIELD. Malcolm Gladwell had an article about a girls basketball team (twelve and under) which had great success playing a full court press. The article turned out to be controversial (google new yorker gladwell basketball if you are curious). One of the criticisms of the article is that of course a press works well against young athletes who don’t have the skills of older players. The article reminded me of a time when my brother Elmer and I were in college and had a friend–Bill–who was coaching a team of young boys at a summer day camp. It must have been softball because the kids were young. It was the worst team in the league. They hadn’t come close to winning a game and they were very discouraged. This was long before THE BAD NEWS BEARS, but that is what it was like. Some had completely lost interest. We chatted and one of us had the thought that at that age the weak players were put in the outfield where they couldn’t do anything if a ball was hit near them. We wound up with a proposal that Bill would put all the players in the infield. The next time we saw Bill he reported success. The boys were tremendously excited by the new plan. There was lots of infield chatter. And a strange thing happened. The coach of the other team felt that he had to counter this new tactic. He did it by having his team bunt. And keep bunting. The way I remember it, Bill’s team won.
AN UMPIRE MAKES HIS RATING KNOWN.
Thursday, May 28th, 2009AN UMPIRE MAKE HIS RATING KNOWN. I have urged in several posts, including here, that the grading of the performance of sports officials should be made public. Now an umpire has made his rating for a game public. Umpire Bob Davidson was criticized by pitcher Ted Lilly for a game in which had been the plate umpire. Lilly told Davidson to “concentrate.” This article in the Chicago Tribune tells the story: “[Davidson said:] “I just found out I scored just about a 96 [out of 100] on my plate job, so my concentration was pretty [darn] good in my opinion.”
MLB umpiring supervisors grade umpires on a daily basis after reviewing videotapes.
Davidson said out of 215 pitches Monday, he was told he’d missed 10.
“Eight of them were pitches I called strikes that shouldn’t have been,” he said. “The other two, one went against Pittsburgh and one went against Chicago. My concentration was excellent.”
A grade can be a protection for an umpire. Hopefully, this kind of thing will happen more frequently.
NOT CARING ABOUT THE SCORE.
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009NOT CARING ABOUT THE SCORE. The seventh game of the series between the Chicago Bulls and the Boston Celtics featured something I have never seen in any high school, college or professional sporting event. As reported here and here, the score was wrong for almost all of the game. Mary Jane and I were watching when Ben Gordon made a three point shot early in the first period and was only credited with two points. We noticed it immediately (I may not know the score of a game, but I know the amount of the lead). We watched with increasing discomfort as nothing was said by the announcers. (The articles I linked to refer to a review of the shot, but it seemed clear that it was a different shot). Finally, with less than six minutes left in the game, Doug Collins said that there had been a “technical error” and the Bulls were being given an additional point. Remarkable. And more remarkable for several reasons. There was no controversy about the basket. Gordon was well beyond the three point line. One point mattered. The mistake was early in the game. The series had been close; there had been a total of seven overtimes in six previous games. When the change was made the Celtic lead was reduced to three points. Even more remarkably, nobody on the broadcast noticed—the announcers didn’t notice,and the entire staff for the broadcast didn’t notice. The referees didn’t notice. (I would say that it was a situation like the ones in this post where it was time to brew another cup of coffee, except that Collins said that the Bulls had been trying to get the score corrected). Finally, it is remarkable that journalists are not very excited about the extraordinary occurrence of the score being wrong. I have seen no report on what happened. What was the “technical error”? Why did it take so long to correct? And how did it finally get corrected? I qualified what I said in the first sentence that I had never seen anything like this “in any high school, college or professional sporting event.” I have seen this kind of scoring in T-ball games.
SCAMS: FLOOD PREPARATION.
Saturday, March 28th, 2009SCAMS: FLOOD PREPARATION. The article by Pablo Torres tells about an athlete ” who invested almost $70,000 in an invention: an inflatable raft that would sit under furniture. The pitch was that when high-rainfall areas were flooded, consumers could pump up the device, allowing a sofa to float and remain dry.” The promoter came back with a request for an additional investment of of $500,000, but by this time, the athlete had obtained professional investment advice. Somehow I was reminded of the precautions against flood that are taken in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale.”
IT’S NOT ONLY MADOFF: ATHLETES AND INVESTMENT SCAMS.
Saturday, March 28th, 2009IT’S NOT ONLY MADOFF: ATHLETES AND INVESTMENT SCAMS. This article from Sports Illustrated by Pablo Torre says that 78% of National Football League players have either gone bankrupt or are under financial stress within two years of retirement. For National Basketball Association players, an estimated 60% are broke within five years of retirement. Many of these men made millions of dollars during their careers. The biggest factor is bad investments (including real estate). Just as a number of Madoff’s victims were social friends, many of the bad investments by athletes result from investing with friends.
BENCHMARKS FOR FREE THROWS.
Thursday, March 5th, 2009BENCHMARKS FOR FREE THROWS. This article by John Branch reports that the average for free throws made by male college basketball players has basically stayed at 69% since the mid 60’s. Women in college have been close to the men’s percentage for the last two decades. NBA players average about 75%. The article cites a rule of thumb that players shoot about ten percentage points higher in practice than they do in games.
