Month: February 2011

The girls are about done and the boys start playoffs next week. More notes from the gyms of Indiana.

Last week I saw the most impressive individual performance in four years of working for my paper. A kid knocked down 9 of 12 three-pointers and scored 34 on the night. It was damn near effortless. This kid is just a junior and is getting some looks from D1 schools. I can see him going to a mid-major level school. He’s not super big or fast, but has a great stroke and understanding of the game.

Of course, he lit up the team I was covering, which made for another fun post-game interview with the coach. “So…..what could you have done to slow him down?”

I did not cover the game, but earlier this season I saw another D1 recruit in a tournament. This kid is going to Butler next year and, at least that night, was ridiculous. I was sitting in press row writing my story about the opening game and the first two minutes of the nightcap sounded like this:

Swish
Swish
Swish
Swish
Swish

Kid knocked down five threes on his team’s first six possessions. He looks like the stereotypical Butler player: 6’6”-ish, skinny, solid athlete, and can obviously shoot it.

Long time readers will recall that EHS is the home of our saddest girls team. My first game for the paper four years ago was covering them on a night they got hammered by a bad team, their coach was screaming at them the entire game, and most of the girls were in tears after the game. They improved last year, winning one game in sectionals, but then lost the best player in the history of the program. Not much was expected of them this year. I covered them in their first game of the year, and while they got smoked, the girls weren’t playing afraid anymore. I didn’t see them again all season. A week ago they won the first sectional championship in school history. That’s as much an indictment of how bad their sectional was as praise for their improvement. They lost in their first regional game, but they’ve come a long way since that awful night four years ago.

Speaking of sectionals, I only covered one game during girls sectionals. I knew early in the week that I would be covering the 4A sectional final three of our teams were slotted into. I expected to see the host team, FHS, and the #5 team in the state, WHS. With expectations like that, it makes sense that both got upset in the semi-finals.

Instead I was treated to the biggest school we cover, CGHS, facing a team that had won four games all year before sectionals. On paper, it looked like a complete mismatch. Again, my expectations were way off. CGHS controlled the first half, but they are not a gifted offensive team and never led by more than five. SHS carved into the lead early in the third quarter and, for the most part, completely controlled the second half. They had a five-point lead with less than two minutes to play. CGHS hit a couple free throws. Then, with under 20 seconds left, CGHS missed a three, got an offensive rebound, and a freshman hit a fall-away, guarded three to tie it. SHS couldn’t get a shot off and we went to overtime.

CGHS dominated the OT and won. They’ve got a lot of nice players, and their coach is young and good to talk to. It certainly made it easier to right my story with them winning. I was kind of hoping SHS won, though, so I had an excuse to talk to their coach. She was, how do you put it, attractive. Shockingly so. I covered her team earlier this year and honestly spent a lot of time just looking at her.

Now would be a good time to mention that I am happily married, for nearly eight years now!

We ended up sending two teams to regionals, although neither made it to semi-state. I was hoping to cover one of the regionals, but got sent to a boys swimming sectional instead.

Finally, Tuesday night I covered a boys game that featured two county schools. Also sitting at my table was a man keeping stats for one of the teams. We started talking and he mentioned his daughter played for the school last year. I had seen the county’s all-time leading scorer’s picture on his screensaver and asked if that was his daughter. Sure enough, it was. So we spent a lot of time talking about her (she’s at a D2 school in Kentucky) and about his career (he had been the girls coach at the school until her freshman year, when he quit not wanting to be her coach in high school). I wrote about her quite a bit the last two years. She’s small, only 5’4”, but was a terrific scorer. I asked him how she developed and he said he coached her when she was little but most of it was her raw talent and love for the game. I was hoping he had some secrets for getting short girls to average nearly 30 points a game. I did not tell him that I loved that her favorite player was Allen Iverson, the player I thought her game most resembled when I first saw her. It still makes me laugh that I compared a small, tattoo-less white girl from a rural Indiana school to The Answer and he ended up being her favorite.

Baring a weather-related cancellation I will cover a boys game Friday night (a team I’ve seen lose five times this year) and 2-3 games in sectionals next week. Then the season is over. I’ll be ready for football to start about a week later.

A terrific essay about a legendary night and how things have changed.

Twenty-five years ago was another world. The game was over and I was by myself—my parents and brother presumably asleep—alone in the late night with the incredible fact that had just come into being. Len Bias beat Carolina. There was no one to shout it to, nothing to do with the joy but wrap it up and hold it, reverberating, inside the ribcage. Len Bias beat Carolina. It was true, and if you were lucky enough to know it, you would know it forever.

I remember this game clearly. Rather, I remember watching the highlights over-and-over late that night and early the next morning.

But I remember this feeling well, too. A lot of my sports memories involve sitting in a room, alone, listening to a radio, free to make the scene look however I wanted it to.

<a href=”http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/scocca/archive/2011/02/20/len-bias-in-chapel-hill-february-20-1986.aspx”>Len Bias in Chapel Hill</a>

With the beginning of spring training, baseball is slowly working its way back into the main sports news feed. The big story this week was the deadline for contract extension negotiations between Albert Pujols and the St. Louis Cardinals. Pujols said months ago that he would not continue to discuss a new contract with the Cardinals once spring training started. If the sides could not come to an agreement by Wednesday, the Cardinals would have to wait until the off-season to attempt to resign their star.

He did not say he would not talk to the Cardinals after the season. He did not say he would never resign with the Cards if a deal wasn’t in place by his report date. He did not say that he would hold the failure to complete an agreement against the Cardinals front office either during the season or when he becomes a free agent in the fall. He just said he would not negotiate once the job he is paid to do officially began.

Naturally the sports media went bat shit over all of this.

They reported breathlessly, live from the Cardinals spring training facility as the deadline approached. They floated rumors about what the Cardinals were offering and what Pujols wanted. They speculated about Pujols’ motivation and character. They skipped over nine months of baseball and began breaking down what team he will sign with for next year, since he clearly is done in St. Louis.

Manager Tony LaRussa didn’t help matters by throwing bombs at the players union, claiming they were forcing Albert to ask for a maximum contract. Never mind the fact that as the best player in the game, HE’S FREAKING WORTH IT. ¹

I point this out not to argue that none of this was news, because it certainly was. The best player in the game is in the final year of his contract with a team he has spent his entire career with. That alone is a big story. Spending his entire career in a medium-sized, borderline large baseball market city adds intrigue to how the process will progress.

But every major media outlet, with ESPN as always the worst offender, seemed intent on turning this into LeBron’s Decision 2.0. The coverage has been completely over-the-top in relation to the reality of the situation. That reality is that Pujols is still under contract for the up-coming season. He’s not threatening to sit out part of spring training until he gets an extension. He hasn’t said a word about this being the Cardinals only chance to resign him and if he hits the open market in November, they might as well not bother calling his agent. All he wanted to do was create a window in which they could talk extension, and then set it aside until the season was over. But ESPN, Yahoo!, and the other major sports sites did all they could to turn this into a dramatic, dire situation.

Pujols has handled the situation fantastically, saying all the right things and affirming his commitment to the Cardinals this season and his desire to stay there for the remainder of his career. I haven’t paid as much attention to what the Cards’ front office has said, but it seems like they are handling the situation well, too. Neither side is trying to embarrass each other or find some dark angle that will provide them leverage.

Yet we’ve heard rumors of lowball offers from the Cardinals reported as fact. When those rumors were debunked 24 hours later, the headlines were much smaller. You get the feeling that Pujols’ wife could take a trip to LA to visit a friend and there would be ESPN reporters following her, insisting that she was searching out places to live once her husband signs with the Dodgers or Angels.

We don’t know where Albert Pujols will play next year. It’s fine to speculate. That is news. But making something that won’t begin to happen for nine months, and from which we won’t see the effects for over a year, a bigger story that everything that will happen between now and then is just a chase for headlines and page views.

If I had to guess, I say Albert stays in St. Louis. I think he wants to. The Cardinals almost have to keep him. I believe both sides will find a way to make it happen. He may not get the $300 million he allegedly wants, but he’ll come close. People keep saying that the Yankees and Red Sox are out of the running because they already have Mark Teixeira and Adrian Gonzalez. I say not so fast. The Yankees will have no trouble finding a spot for the best bat in the game and for them money is not an issue. And if the Red Sox thought they had a legitimate shot at Albert, they would find a place for him, too. The biggest thing those teams have are not their massive revenue streams, but the chance to win. If Albert doesn’t resign in St. Louis, it will be because he sees his chance to win another World Series being with the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Angels, or another franchise. Not just because they can offer more money than the Cardinals.

One last comment on Pujols. I love the rumors, which have jumped to many national baseball sites, that the Royals might go after him. Please. Despite going to high school and college in KC and batting about .800 in Kaufman Stadium, he’s never showed any particular interest in going back there to end his career. It’s another nice story to spend some time day dreaming about in February, but if David Glass is going to spend $300 million on free agent talent next fall, he’s going to spend it gathering up 5-6 players to fill out the spots the team’s farm system can’t. And he’s not spending $300 million dollars.

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This is it. I officially begin my training for May’s Indianapolis Mini Marathon today. Technically I began yesterday, with a strength and stretch day.¹ And I’ve been on the treadmill consistently for three months now, although never pushing the distance since running on treadmills sucks.

But today is my first official run. A modest three-miler, but the first three miles of many that will make up my training for the 13.1 miles I plan to run on May 7.

I’m very excited to be starting. I’ve taken a couple other half-assed cracks at training programs since I ran a marathon in 2001, but always began them half-heartedly and quickly gave up. This time, I’m excited about the process and looking forward to, once again, becoming a true runner.

I also begin my training with the sober understanding that I’m getting older. I knew I had put on a few pounds over the past couple years, but when I visited my doctor for a physical over the holidays, I was a little shocked by what the scales said. I had felt my jeans tighten up and saw more flab than I was used to when I took a shower. But still, to hear that I weighed more than I had ever weighed, by a good 10 lbs., hit home pretty hard. At my doctor they weigh you on the way back to the exam room, and only ask you to remove your shoes. When he read off the weight the nurse had put into my chart, I almost demanded that we go back and do it again with all my clothes off. ²

We had already signed up for the Mini before my visit, and I viewed it as a standard get back into shape project. It remains that, but now has the added element of helping me drop some pounds.

I know to some of you that sounds easy. “You’re going to be running 3-4 times a week, working out on a couple of those other days. Surely the pounds will melt off, right?”

I wish it was that easy. Ten years ago, during my six-month training for the Chicago Marathon, I managed to hold the exact same weight from beginning to end. I ate a lot to begin with, and whatever extra calories I was burning were apparently off-set by the additional food I was shoveling in after long runs, the endless energy bars and gels that kept me going, and lots of Gatorade. Now, a decade later, when my metabolism has obviously slowed down, it will take extra discipline to get closer to the weight I’d like to be at.

But that’s all secondary. The important thing is I want to be in great running shape on May 7 and enjoy the run. Oh, and I get to buy some new gear along with way, which is always a fun side-benefit to training.³

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The first concrete sign of spring has arrived. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to Florida and Arizona! This long, bitter, bitch of a winter is on her last legs!

Spring training always brings a burst of excitement. This year I’m a little extra excited because this could finally be the beginning of the end of the Royals long spell of sucking. This season should be ugly and hard and full of frustration. But that seems like the last piece of suffering we will have to go through before things finally begin to turn around next season.

We should see the first of the highly touted prospects stacked in the system arriving in Kansas City just as summer begins to take hold. By the end of the season, if all goes right, a handful of them will have collected a couple hundred plate appearances or few dozen innings out of the bullpen and begun to earn their Major League stripes. Next year will bring more new faces. The hope, confirmed by the opinions of some of the most respected talent evaluators around the game, is that 2013 will be the season when the Royals should expect to win with a roster made mostly of 20-somethings grown in the organization’s farm system.

Why get excited when winning is, at best, still three seasons away? Especially when we’ve been promised youth movements before and continued to see 90 and 100 loss seasons. Simple: this one feels different. The Royals had a batch of good arms in the system in the late 90s, but they either didn’t pan out or the organization ruined them along the way. A few years later a bunch of bats followed, and while many of them worked out (Damon, Sweeney, Beltran, and Dye who arrived in a trade), there was little else around them. They could hit and make a game exciting, but you generally knew they’d find a way to lose a lot of 10-8 games. And then they all left.

This time, though, there are bats and arms. And plenty of each. It’s not just one pitcher or one hitter that we’re pinning our hopes to. There is a broad core around which a team can be built. Sure, there are still holes that will need to be plugged. But the secondary hope is that with all this cheap, young talent the Royals will have a lot of money to spend on proven MLB talent to address those holes. The wealth of talented young players and a weak division, the thinking goes, would make Kansas City a very attractive destination for free agents.

There are dozens of assumptions and hopes and wishes based on potential and possibility rather than known facts in there, obviously. But after so long of being so bad, it feels like this is the time that believing again makes sense.

So I’m pumped up about spring training this year. I’m anxious to hear how Moustakas and Hosmer and Colon and Cain and Escobar and Lamb and Duffy and Collins and Crow and all the other minor leaguers do in camp. I’m hopeful one or two of those guys might surprise and be ready to go north with the Major League club in April. And then I’m excited about what this summer will bring. I’ll be following the developments in Omaha and Northern Arkansas and the various A level team locations as closely as I’ll follow how things go at the K.

Two years from now I may hate myself for believing again, for getting so excited about unproven talent. But right now, it’s making baseball interesting and fun again.

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As promised, some thoughts on whether should buy an iPad or perhaps something else.

To quickly recap my initial thoughts about the iPad from a year ago, I thought the iPad was super cool and immediately set aside some money to get one when they were announced. After that initial interest waned, though, I reconsidered and evaluated the tech products I already owned and what I couldn’t already do with them. With a laptop on my desk (and lap) and an iPhone in my pocket, I had most of the things the iPad brings to the table covered. The one thing that was left was reading e-books. Thus, I bought a Kindle. ¹

When the iPads hit the stores, I went and played with them a little. Holding one confirmed my opinion: they are super cool. But I still didn’t understand where it fit into my tech life.

And that’s what I tell people who ask me about whether they should get an iPad or not: carefully examine where it will fit into your life. If you have a decent laptop and a smartphone, it’s tough to justify owning an iPad as well. If, however, you only have a desktop computer, or have a work laptop that you can’t use for personal web browsing, emailing, etc. and you have a generic cell phone, then I think the iPad is a reasonable purchase.

Also consider what you want to do with it. Another big problem for me about the iPad is that I want to have a portable writing device. The iPad, in its base form, is not made to crank out thousands of words at a time. Sure, some people say that you can spend a lot of time on the virtual keyboard, but based on my experience with the iPhone’s keyboard, I don’t see the iPad as a device I could use to write lengthy blog posts, use for covering games, etc. And the idea of adding a Bluetooth keyboard to it seems silly to me. You might as well go for a full-powered laptop if you’re going to carry around an iPad and a keyboard.

Which brings me to something else I’ve been meaning to write about for months. Despite having a perfectly good laptop already², I fell in love with the new MacBook Airs when they were announced in October. Thus I did something I’ve never done before: I pre-ordered a first generation Apple product. Of all the money I’ve spent at the Apple Store over the past decade, this might be my finest purchase.

Let’s get the stats out of the way: I purchased a 13” model with the 128 GB solid state hard drive and 4 GB of RAM. I considered the 11” model, but based on my experience using a netbook briefly last year, I knew my old man eyes couldn’t handle a screen that small.

This is a great freaking computer. I can work comfortably on the 13″ screen, although here at home I generally keep it hooked up to an external monitor. The battery life is insane. I’ve yet to run it down where the old MacBook Pro burned through a charge pretty quickly. Despite having a slower processor, this thing is certainly faster than the old Pro model thanks to the solid state drive. Most of you probably have no idea what a solid state drive is. Basically the Air is using flash memory to store all your data. Instead of a mechanical hard drive with moving parts, there is just a big stick of flash memory. This makes everything about this computer super fast.

But this biggest thing is the size. The Air is insanely light. It almost feels like it’s not a real computer, but maybe a case where all the parts have been removed. Carry it around the house or throw it in a bag and the weight barely registers. S’s 13″ MacBook, which is in many ways a very light computer, feels heavy compared to the Air.

My only real concern in going to the Air was the small storage space. My old Pro had a 200 GB hard drive. While I was not close to filling that up, I do like to keep around 25% of my hard drive free. Going to the 128 GB Air seemed like a challenge at first. But I conquered that problem in two ways. First, I separated my iPhoto collection into two libraries and store all my old pictures on an external drive. They’re right there if I need them, but I also removed about 25 GB of data. Second, I undertook a major reevaluation of what I kept in iTunes. I prune my iTunes library often, but still had around 5200 songs and a few movies and TV shows in there, good for about 25 GB in total. I went through, song-by-song and made some hard decisions, deleting some stuff I had kept for years and eventually shaved off another 6 GB or so of space.³

So that’s roughly 30 GB of space I reclaimed. As I write this I’m about even in usage and free space: both checking in at 56 GB and change. I didn’t need to make those changes; I would still have had plenty of room if I had included all of those photos and songs. But in the spirit of a leaner machine, it seemed like a good time to put the data on a diet as well, and only keep the files I absolutely had to have.

The iTunes pruning offered the added bonus of improving my listening experience. While most of my time listening to music is through a series of smart playlists that are designed to constantly plumb the depths of my library and bring forward songs I haven’t heard in ages, I had a lot of chaf in there. Filtering out the songs I wasn’t really interested in hearing has brought back some of the wow factor iTunes had lost, or at least mine had lost, in recent years. I’m hearing the songs I really want to hear and not having to skip over songs I kept just in case I wanted to hear them.

As I said, this is a fantastic computer. And it’s where things are heading. A year from now, I would imagine most Apple laptops will have solid state drives and hold more batteries than anything else inside. There will still be build-to-order options for high end displays and larger mechanical drives. But soon the entire line will look more like the MacBook Air than they do today.

To sum up: buy an iPad if there is a clear space for it in your digital lifestyle. If you already have a laptop and a smartphone, skip it. Or try to win one in a contest so you don’t pay for it. And if you’re looking for a new laptop, take a long, hard look at the MacBook Airs.

More blurbs from the notebook of a roving sports correspondent.

Wednesday I got my second crack at a college basketball game. It’s been two years since I’ve been to a game of the small college we cover, FC. The experience was similar to my last visit. Enjoyed seeing a Division 3 game. Marveled at the size of the gym, which was smaller than only a couple high schools gyms I’ve visited this year. It’s also interesting that the gym that games are played in is the campus gym, as well. Walk upstairs and there is an elevated track that surrounds the court. Go around a corner and there are treadmills, elliptical machines, and stair masters. After the teams left the court following their shoot arounds, a group of students there to watch the game walked onto the court and shot around until the official warm ups began. Life is very different below the D1, BCS level.

After the game, as I wrote my story, I sat by the school’s sports information director. I noticed he was typing away, too, and he told me that he was writing a story about the women’s game. The women had played on the road earlier in the evening. Apparently the host school sends him the full stat sheet, a running play-by-play, and from that he constructs a story. I mentioned that it was kind of like old-school baseball on the radio, where announcers in the studio read a teletype account of what was going on and created a broadcast from those details.

He then told me that way back in the day, when FC was a power, the entire town and surrounding community was enthralled by the team. They played in the same gym we were sitting in, which holds about 1500 or so. Because there was so much interest in the games, local movie theaters would sell tickets and “broadcast” the game based on the teletype account. That is some serious, old school, Hoosier basketball!

FC is an interesting school. There is a banner in the corner of the gym claiming the 1923 national championship. I thought that was interesting, because I know another school in the Midwest claims the national title for that season. I looked up FC’s history, and perhaps the most heralded high school team in Indiana history, which won three straight state titles across town, made up FC’s team in 1923. They were quite good, if the Wikipedia is to be trusted. I’m sure KU would have spanked them, had they played.¹

Some other things from the notebook:

I believe I’ve mentioned before how I think it’s amusing how so many high school girls who play basketball spend time in tanning beds. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. One team in particular, WHS, appears to have a group rate, because all but a couple girls look like they just got back from spring break. It makes me laugh to think that they leave practice and go to the nearest tanning salon, en masse, once a week.

Two weeks ago I covered the boys half of a WHS double header. That’s when I realized a lot of these guys had darker skin than the average Indiana white guy in January. It seems that almost the entire boys team tans, too. Now I wonder if there are a couple tanning beds in the locker rooms somewhere so that any athlete can pop in and get some color when they need to. I’m sure a lot of old men sit in the stands, see these boys with tans, shaved legs, baggy shorts, tattoos, and fancy hair and think the country has gone to hell.

That WHS boys game was notable for another reason. It was the worst officiated game I’ve ever covered. It’s not that the officials were biased towards one team, making lots of bad calls, or just calling way too many fouls and ruining the flow of the game. It’s that they obviously didn’t care and were doing their best to get out of the gym.

WHS fell behind early, but it was always in the 12-18 point range. A couple threes and a few stops and they could have easily been right back in the game. It was obvious that wasn’t going t happen, but still there was the possibility.

The refs let the teams play in the first half, but at least made the effort to look like they were working. In the second half, they gave up any pretense of caring. They called four total fouls in the second half. Four. Both teams were beating the crap out of each other, yet there seemed to be an agreement amongst the zebras to only blow the whistle when absolutely necessary. On one play, a WHS defender stepped out and blocked the path of the MHS point guard. There was a collision, both players went flying, and as he fell the MHS guard reached for the ball and knocked it out-of-bounds. None of the refs did anything at first. Finally one blew his whistle and pointed MHS’ way. No block, no charge, no foul of any kind and then they got an obvious possession call wrong. Both coaches just about lost it, screaming variations of “There had to be SOMETHING on that play!” There was something, but all the refs either weren’t paying attention or chose to ignore it.

It got worse. I noticed a couple possessions later than none of the refs were counting on closely guarded situations. On one possession, a guard dribbled around for six or seven seconds, always with a defender on him, but no whistle came. I looked at the ref closest to the action and he was just standing there, not waving his arm in a count. The same thing happened on the next possession. And then the next. Finally one of the WHS assistants started yelling a count out. One of the refs glared at him and swung his arm in an exaggerated motion, but obviously wasn’t actually counting.

Meanwhile the kids were playing very physical basketball. It’s a credit to both the players and the coaches that there never was a fight or even a harsh word. I think they understood what was up and figured there was no need to get angry about elbows or pile ups for loose balls.

It’s one thing for refs to move a game that has a 30-point margin in the third quarter along. But to just give up and not care is unfair to the kids that are putting their all into the game.