THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

It seems like Baseball is the only sport where you have essentially no contact with your opponent, and you’re barely even within chatting distance during the flow of the game. Every major sport from football/hockey/basketball/soccer has very close quarters battles that involve constant contact between players. At first I was considering some sort of culture difference between sports here - but people are people. And no matter what, when you pit two or more athletes together in meaningful (or not) competition, they are going to get chippy eventually… just pop down to your local public bball court for proof. But there’s really no catalyst for that in baseball outside of the occasional bean ball, dirty slide, or perceived “slight"/breaking unwritten rules of the game. And when those happen, there usually are immediate actions take.

So in the end, I’d say baseball is just like other sports, there’s just so much less opportunity for human nature to rear its head.

Aren’t basketball, tennis, and baseball, different cultures?  Isn’t that your answer itself?

It’s not the same group of fans.  There is some overlap, and I think those folks have similar opinions across each sport, i.e. if they are against trash-talking in baseball, they’re against it in basketball and tennis too.

It’s the non-overlap fans that define the identity of the culture.  And basketball fans are different from baseball fans.  Or perhaps more likely… selection bias ensures that those who support trash-talking are more likely to belong to the culture of basketball, and those who are against it are more likely to belong to the culture of baseball.

I like Lee/1.

Mike/2: the question is WHY.  The same fan will accept trash-talk in NBA but not MLB.  A player will trash-talk in NBA but not MLB.

There’s no trash talking here pretty much in all of the sports here in Korea. It’s something “foreign”. The Korean on the other team is still your Korean “brother”.
Players only get upset about isolated incidents (i.e. getting intentionally hit).

Also, if a player does something bad, it will make the news and web portal sites which are more visited/ influential than the U.S.

I’m not sure the McEnroe tennis example is apt. Tennis players occasionally get angry at the refs, but they very rarely show up each other on the court. I would say that tennis--at least the top tier matches that I see--is still quite gentlemanly, even more so than baseball.

And I like it.

Tango/2, we disagree on that point.  I said:

“if they are against trash-talking in baseball, they’re against it in basketball and tennis too.”

If I were arguing for your perspective, I’d say: we create arbitrary rules for situations because we enjoy the challenge of competing under those rules.  And we enjoy watching others compete under the constraints of those rules.  So perhaps we enjoy watching golfers compete under the constraints of silence, politeness, and those crazy protocols where they disqualify themselves for forgetting to write a number on a card, more than we’d enjoy watching it if they were downing beers, belching, and trying to distract each other.  And when I say “we”, I know your disdain for the penalties in golf, but I also believe that you are not representative of the average golf viewer in your disdain for this.

There’s no one more ignorant about tennis than me, but I’m inclined to agree with Dave Smyth. The tolerance of McEnroe’s antics shouldn’t be proof that such behavior is generally accepted. That seemed like a “Manny being Manny” situation where a super star is allowed wide latitude that very few others would receive. If some no name who barely qualified for a tournament acted that way, do you think the fans and media would have responded the same way? The fact that McEnroe stands out despite not having played in decades is a pretty sure sign that such behavior is not widely tolerated.

I think the extensive trash talking that goes on in basketball (and in football too) is in large part due to the fact that it is a street game here. Since kids grow up playing b-ball in parks and playgrounds in their free time, the result is an emphasis on flashiness, showing off and showing up your opponent. The natural extension of this is trash talking. I suspect in Europe where basketball isn’t such a street game, trash talking is much less prevalent.

I would bet that soccer is the reverse. In Europe and Latin America and elsewhere, trash talking is probably frequent (remember Zidane’s head butt in the World Cup which came after an exchange of words with his opponent) while Americans are more likely to keep their mouth shut. I also can’t help but notice that Americans don’t flop in soccer but do it in basketball.

With baseball, I think you had a situation where unwritten rules about conduct evolved along with the development of the sport such that they got ingrained into the game its self. Once these rules became entrenched, they continued be perpetuated by each generation. Kids may have played in the sandlot after school which would have promoted the sort of street attitude described above, but any resulting behaviors that violated that unwritten code would have been pounded out of them by their Little League and high school coaches. (In the Little League World Series a few years ago, I remember a coach chewing out his team because of the way the players acted when they hit a home run).

I don’t follow golf.

Is it true that in Europe, the fans do NOT stay quiet?  That they even laugh at American golfers if they ask for silence?

One reads a lot about “bench-jockeying” in the early decades of baseball, which would certainly seem to be baseball’s version of “trach-talking.” Has bench jockeying declined over time?  My impression is that it has.  If so, the real question is why the culture of baseball has *changed*, rather than why it is *different from* basketball.

And note that the NFL has adopted fairly strong rules against various forms of trash-talking and acting-out by players.

You know, when I was a kid (pre-teen), we’d chant on the opposing pitcher, about being “brule” (burnt) and “arrose” (we need to drench him).  It was a fun rhyming chant.  By today’s standards, it was huge trash talking and very unsportsmanlike, especially for kids.

At a comparable age in my little league, all the fielders, as the pitcher was about ready to pitch, would repeatedly yell, “C’mon batter.” They’d do that over and over, and as the pitch came near the plate would yell, “Swing!” I can’t remember if kids on the bench joined in.
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As French-speaking people tend to be proud defenders of their language, shouldn’t there be some penalty for brûlé being presented without its accent acute and circumflex?

I don’t know how to use accents in Firefox.  I suppose there’s some sort of add-in?

I’m so ignorant when it comes to using Windows that it’s possible someone more knowledgable will say this is a terrible method. But the below-linked Microsoft support document suggests it’s basically the same as on a Mac once you have the US-International keyboard layout installed. That is, you type a shortcut to indicate you want the accent, then type the letter, and the accented letter appears on screen.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306560/en-us

Internet (email) french is absolutely written without accents.  It is difficult to find a french keyboard everywhere in the world, so people have taken to using english keyboards.

When I played kids baseball (7-10 year old)) in San Francisco in the early 80s, we kids on both teams were encouraged by the coaches and teammates to yell “Hey batter, batter...” continuously and obnoxiously during opposing players’ plate appearances.  When the pitch would reach the plate we would yell “SWING!” I rarely participated.  While I may have been influenced by some sense of sportsmanship, mostly the whole activity just seemed bizarre and absurd.

I think in baseball trash talk or chatter is prevalent amongst young kids but by the time they get to high school and the separation between good and bad players becomes more obvious, it goes away.  I think it is just the nature of baseball and all of the ‘unwritten rules’ that say you don’t do it.  It seems as if usually first basemen and sometimes catchers get rather chatty but that’s it.

In regards to tennis, McEnroe wasn’t alone especially in the 70s and 80s.  You had Ille Nastase, Yannink Noah even Jimmy Connors had routine outbursts, but the Bucharest Buffoon was the ‘master’.  Lendl, Sampras, Wilander, and older Agassi led with a more steely determination instead of outbursts to get into your opponents heads and young kids were trained in that stoic style.

I think ‘trash talk’ is more prevalent in basketball and football, because they are more fast twitch, aggressive, in your face sports and the behavior is less frowned upon than in other sports.  It is not considered taboo and that probably extends to spectators as well.  Futbol is probably the same way, especially in Latin, Central and South America…