NFL draft, baseball's strikeout problem and a whiff of the old Hockey Night bully pulpit
A few quick hits before a main course of going full pretzel logic by criticizing and defending Hockey Night's Cassie Campbell-Pascal for Cherry-picking facts about playing hockey amid COVID19.
Succinct succulents that hopefully do not suck
Those great quarterback factories, Alabama and The Ohio State University
It is fun to think of Bill Belichick having two settings. The New England Patriots coach is either playing eight-dimensional chess, or has gone mad with his own power like that Albert Schweitzer guy. And some of the sweetest schadenfreude in college football comes at the end of the season, when the Playoff almost assures the audience of seeing one apex predator get torn to shreds by another apex predator, since both football factories are typically three-deep at every position with blue-chip recruits who do not how to react when they are losing.
On Thursday, both of the quarterbacks from last season’s championship game, Justin Fields and Mac Jones, went in the top half of the first round of the NFL Draft, and both went to teams that a true Minnesota Vikings fan resents, but for different reasons. Belichick drafted Jones out of Alabama to be New England’s quarterback. The Chicago Bears traded up to select Fields from Ohio State.
Here is the part of the take that might not age well. Neither ’Bama nor Ohio State has had a quarterback achieve long-term success in the NFL at any point in relevant memory. Tua Tagovailoa is already the most accomplished ’Bama alumnus quarterback in the NFL since 1993 based on one season with the Miami Dolphins. OF course, the past does not predict the future. Belichick and fellow Stonecutter Nick Saban are old coaching buddies, so that covers the intel part with Mac Jones.
Ohio State’s most accomplished alumnus in the NFL QB ranks also played for the Chicago Bears. However, it was Mike Tomczak, who threw more interceptions than touchdowns over a 15-year career.1 From Tomczak, the next best Ohio State QB in the NFL is Tom Tupa, who was actually a punter. Fields comes into the NFL with glowing notices and taking a quarterback early is a very un-Bears like move, but my higher commitment is to trolling.
More strikeouts and less offence. Great, MLB.
Corbin Burnes, the Milwaukee Brewers pitcher who is closing in on MLB’s record for the most strikeouts to start a season without issuing a base on balls, landing on the injured list, seems very parable-y. The lack of info about why Burnes is on the shelf (lcough, non-zero chance of COVID-19) is an opportunity to free-associate and say that he flew too close to the sun on the wings of baseball’s Three True Outcomes.
It is early, but for anyone wondering, strikeouts rates are up and batting production is down across MLB compared to 2020’s 60-game pandemic season. Coming into Friday, one in every 4.07 plate appearances had ended in a strikeout, compared to one in 4.27 in 2020. Team run scoring is down by 0.4 runs per game. And 13 points of on-base percentage and 29 points of slugging percentage are missing and presumed scared.
OK, but the National League wanted one more year of pitchers batting, since having the DH in each league made too much sense and threatened everyone with a good time. So far, American League teams’ batters are striking out once in every 4.11 PAs, a spike from one per 4.21 last season. The AL teams’ average run output is down 0.37 runs. The AL’s batters have also dropped by 15 points in OBP and 26 in SLG.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. cannot be expected to make up for all of that singlehandledly, people. But no, MLB does not have a pace-of-play problem.
On Cassie Campbell-Pascall, COVID19 and bully pulpits
The case before the court of public opinion, Campbell-Pascal v. Basically Everyone In Nova Scotia Other Than The Nova Scotians on Team Canada, is one where neither side seems to grasp the other’s foxhole mentality. The third rail is that Sportsnet, as a national broadcaster which has taken pains to move on from the worst of Don Cherry, relapsed into bully-pulpit mode by teeing up their talent to give a one-sided take on a serious issue.
Cassie Campbell-Pascal, as you know, is none too popular in Nova Scotia at the moment. Wednesday, on a national telecast, the Hockey Night in Canada analyst and Olympian demanded an apology from Premier Iain Rankin to Canada’s women’s hockey team for cancelling the world championship over COVID19 concerns.
It is not a good take. But every athlete turned commentator has those times where the competitive juices stir. Campbell-Pascall went to the wall for the current generation of hockey women who have lost two world championships to the pandemic. She is looped into that group’s mood and was probably channeling their emotions. Sometimes the dressing room gets into the public discourse.2 One should hold space for benefit of the doubt with self-analysis; it would not be the first time a commentator reviewed their performance and realized they punted away some perspective in the interest of making good TV.
The decision-makers in Nova Scotia have earned more benefit of the doubt, though. The province’s track record with COVID19 is “pretty solid,” according to at least one health-sciences person whom CTV Atlantic conferred with. Its foxhole mentality involves not taking ‘mockdowns’ like, say, Ontario. The efficacy of Nova Scotia’s lockdowns is self-evident. On Tuesday, Nova Scotia had a single-day high for new cases with 96, but it dropped almost 22 per cent the following day when the segment aired. It is understandable that residents would have their back up about the criticism, especially when other provinces are more deserving of a good dragging.
Hockey women are about the last team-sport athletes who should be called entitled. How overdue are they for a league that pays full-time salaries? It sucks out loud that the International Ice Hockey Federation did not have an alternative. That is where the critique begins and ends; Nova Scotia’s numbers since the cancellation show bringing in 250 hockey players, even with strict isolation rules, was potentially one Jenga layer too many for a small province. There are areas of Ontario with appropriate hockey and hotel facilities and low case counts, but their intensive-care-unit beds beds are full of COVID19 patients who have been transferred from hotspots.
I was reluctant to take this on, since Campbell-Pascall trends on Twitter every time she commentates on a national telecast because some Fraggedy Andys3 are threatened by hearing a woman point out NHL players’ mistakes. But the people and institutions that you admire are also the ones to whom you owe your candour. So, yeah, HNIC blew a tire on this play.
The players want to play, and the rights holders want the games to be held. But it is a year into a pandemic and few seem to realize that Big Rona will say ‘when’ hockey is safe for fans and players.
The case of Minnesota Wild first-round choice Marco Rossi, who tested positive for COVID19 in November and played for Austria at the world men’s under-20 championship in December, should be a sobering reminder. Rossi conveyed to The Athletic’s Michael Russo that he was told, “if I (had) played one more game in the World Junior Championship, this could have ended completely different.”
Big gulp.
Furthermore, how is the Vancouver Canucks’ return to play from a teamwide outbreak of the P.1 variant going? It started with two wins against the Toronto Maple Leafs, and we all had a good laugh. The fancy stats tell another story: since the day of their restart, Vancouver is dead last in five-on-five expected goals-for percentage. They are dead last in scoring-chances share. And three guesses about what team is bottom-three in the league at both generating high-danger chances and in allowing high-danger chances, but the first two do not count.
Perspective counts on a national broadcast. Generally, Hockey Night in Canada’s between-periods analysis has taken a positive tack since the sponsors decided 18 months ago that they no longer wished to signal-boost Don Cherry. Based on what is and what is not in that two-minute segment, it veered back in that direction. The equal time consideration should be to have Rankin and Nova Scotia CMO Dr. Robert Strang on to give their perspective to the hockey audience.
Hey, if a bunkered-down schlub can think of it, no doubt someone who actually knows how to make good TV has thought of it already.
Wrapping up another week that felt like a lifetime
The kicker with the NFL Draft, for me? That the players’ association agreed to it when it had a chance to get rid of it once and for all.
The corner that Canadian Olympic boxer Mandy Bujold is in shows why there needs to be a more “federated” effort to support athletes who are mothers.
Doug Ford: one cannot decide between an invisibility joke or an irrelevancy joke — boom, roasted. Also, the headline below is not from The Beaverton.
Here is hoping that you are enjoying this esoteric sportswriting sojourn slash irregularly updated plea for help. It is helping me deal with the isolation caused by the pandemic and job loss, and I am satisfied with adding free email signups at a rate of almost one per weekday. And I have maintained a goal of posting four times per week.
That is more than enough for today. Thank you for allowing these words on your screen, please stay safe, and be kind.
It must have been the wind. Every time.
On the off-off-chance this blows up, “dressing room” is not a sexist term. All hockey teams dress in dressing rooms, where there are no lockers, hence hockey teams do not have a locker room. Alberta has the highest per-capita count in North America, not the most cases.
Fraggedy Ann and Fraggedy Andys is a straw-person term, admittedly, that one only breaks out when people need to be punched in the patriarchy bone.