THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I heard today that the coach of the wining team refused to apologize despite the athletic director publicly apologizing earlier.

Not sure I would have apologized either.  What can you do?  Besides working on some new plays or drills or something, playing bench players, etc… I think it’s just as disrespectful to go out there and blatantly not try as it is to give your best and score the 98th point in a blowout.

If I was a coach of the winning team, I’d have tried to speak to the other coach at halftime about swapping players around for the second half and making it a scrimmage.  That has the added bonus of giving the losing team’s girls a little time with some good players to try some things and have fun out there.  Barring that… shut off the scoreboard, as tango suggests.  Counting those last 50 points is not helpful to anyone - the scorers or the scorees.

Sound like the game where the South Park Kindergarten had to play the Detroit Red Wings.

Well, it depends on how the winning coach directed his team to play. If the starters played most of the game, then the coach was probably in the wrong. If they were running a full court press the entire game and jacking up 3-pointers early in the shot clock, then the coach was probably in the wrong.

This actually reminds me of an incident from men’s college BBall from several years ago. Long Island University won a game 179-68 or something along those lines. The final margin of victory was over 100 points. LIU played a full-court press the entire game and just shot (and made) 3-pointers over and over again, even when the game was out of hand. When asked about it, the coach said (I’m paraphrasing) “most of my players are street ballers from NYC. They literally don’t know any other way to play.” It’s a bit of a cop-out, but I thought it was a funny excuse

The losing school is an insitution for slow learners and development impaired youngsters, too.

The winning coach claims he called the press off early, but man, why would you even be pressing from the start?

I think he had to know the opposing team was undermanned.

I doubt it applies here, but aren’t polls often based on how badly the good teams beat up on the bad? 

I haven’t seen a football game in years, but if one good team beats the worst team 10-0, and another good team beats them 80-0, the 2nd team will be ranked higher, right?

I’m not sure, but I think voters in the BCS are instructed to ignore margin of victory. However, it’s human nature to look at a team that wins every game by 40 points and assume they’re better than the team that wins every game by 7 points.

Just so everyone can rest easier and be holier than thou, the coach has been fired.

Most states have blowout rules in place. The fact that Texas doesn’t says that the people in that state are okay with it. And since they seem to be, why is it such a big issue?

Maybe they shouldn’t have run up the score so high, but the coach has a resonsiblity to his team (as does every coach) to get the most out of them.

The real question is, why were they playing a school of impaired students? This is like 6th graders playing against college players? It was stupid.

And for all the bleeding hearts who want to say that the impaired girls have the right to play, I agree. They do. Against similar competition. Lets look at the genius administrator who even put the girls in this position. Maybe he should lose his job also.

I think at professional or Division I collegiate levels, there’s no such thing as “running up the score”.  Those players are essentially playing the sport for a living, so they should take any humiliation that comes with getting blown out.

Now, the winning team should probably not have starters in, to avoid injuries, and not run any trick or aggressive plays, to avoid tipping their strategy for future games, but they should keep trying their best.  After all, isn’t it even more humiliating if you lose to a team that wasn’t even trying?

At lower levels, though, it’s trickier.  I remember watching my brother’s baseball team blow other teams out.  Once the score got out of hand, say 11-2 or something, his coach would have kids run only station-to-station.  Seriously, a hitter would hit a ball off the wall, and have to stop at first.

Now, I can see not stealing, or putting in your worse players to get them more practice, but you can’t fundamentally change the way the game is played.  It seemed patronizing to the losing teams to have players stop after advancing one base, as if saying, “We know you’re not good enough to beat us if we hit doubles, so we’ll just stop at first.”

If you look on YouTube, they have interviews with the losing girls.  They literally couldn’t care less what the score was.  It was completely irrelevant to them.  Their coach, however, was bothered.

If you take away the media from the equation, and then all of us adult yappers who love to get involved in stories, what you have is a complete non-story to the children involved.

And yet, here I am, thinking this MUST be a story, even if the participants disagree with me.  It’s almost as if I’m telling them HOW they should feel, when they are telling me they are fine with their feelings.

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In any case, turn off the clock.

And yes, swapping players is good too. We’ve done that in the past.  This happens all the time in practices.

I would be offended if we were getting blown out and the other team stopped trying.  Isn’t it better to get beat 100-0 knowing that everyone played their best, than losing 50-0 with the added humiliation that the other team took it easy on you?

Past a certain age, there’s nothing wrong with running up the score.  You do want to give your lesser players some ice time, and all that, but everyone should still be trying hard.

I play floor hockey, and I’m goalie, and I’m crappy.  I’ve been blown out a few times.  And near the end of the game, the better players are passing to the girls to try to get them some goals.  It used to bug me—do they think I’m emotionally incapable of dealing with more goals scored on me?—but now I realize they’re happier seeing their girls score 3 goals than their guys score 10.  But if I thought they were trying to spare my feelings, I’d be PISSED.

They were jacking up three pointers the whole game.  The coach could’ve put a stop to this.  He could’ve told his girls to take some time off the clock on offense and play a zone on defense.  This is a high school game, where one of the teams has girls with learning disabilities, not a Div I or NBA game.  The coach should’ve apologized, the school principal did.  Tango is right in that they should have a mercy rule and better yet they shouldn’t be in the same conference.
vr, Xei

Xeifrank, the amount of 3-pointers taken is debatable, since the coach refuted that statement and none of us have a box score.  And frankly, it may actually work against your argument.  If I’m playing against LeBron James in 1-on-1 basketball, and he truly wants to embarass me, why would he take 3-point shots?  He knows he cannot hit 100% of them, maybe only half.  However, he could walk right in and dunk/layup on me every time if he wished.  I guess my point is, if you’re trying not to blow out a team, I think taking 3-pointers is actually a reasonable thing to do.  It’s a low percentage shot (especially in high school), but it looks like you’re still trying because you’re at least taking some shots.

Phil, from my perspective, I think you’re correct that their decision-making had nothing to do with you and everything to do with their teammates.

Tango/10, insightful.  Good to hear they weren’t bothered by it.  Now back to the important issues, like Adam Dunn’s WAR as a LF vs DH

Tango, although it’s good to hear that the girls weren’t bothered by it, what kind of example does it set for the girls who scored the 100 points? That having success isn’t enough, you need to embarrass and humiliate people to truly be happy? These are impressionable 15 to 18 year old girls. The coach should be setting an example for his girls. Teaching poor sportsmanship is detrimental to the well-being of these girls. It’s like if a math teacher told all his A students to brag about their test scores and mock the stupider students.

And most of the people who stick up for the coach like to say “it’s more insulting for a team to play half-hearted”, like what Phil/#11 said. But you can run out the clock in a game without completely tanking. They can hold the ball for a majority of the shot clock (like what most teams do). They can play the reserve players. They can play a vanilla defense, without a full-court press. I don’t know if the coach did these things, and if he did, then he did not deserve to be fired. But what makes it even worse was the fact that he was defensive about the whole situation. He didn’t come out and explain what his thought process was and/or if he took precautions against running up the score. He just took a defensive stance and said “I have nothing to apologize for”. Through years of experience, I’ve learned that people who get defensive instead of explaining themselves tend to be guilty of what they are accused.

After leading 57-0 at the half, the tam had established their dominance. They also established that the team they were playing was no competition for them. What do you learn from running your standard offense against an overmatched team? Nothing. What would LeBron James learn from practicing against me? Nothing. What would Johan Santana learn from pitching to me? Nothing. There was no positive lesson to learn for the girls that won that game. All they learned is that trying to embarrass and humiliate people is better than succeeding with dignity and grace. There is a such thing as a sore winner, and those girls learned that it’s ok to be one

I agree that they can’t take layups.  At the same time, they can’t take 3-pointers either.  The fair thing would be to take shots from the outside, perpendicular to the backboard, but inside the three-point line.

That gives you the lowest percentage shot, while at least playing basketball.

As for defense, they should all be waiting around the key, and play zone.  The steals should only happen if the opponent is silly enough to accept a pass while charging into the key.  Otherwise, just wait for the airball.

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The more troubling one is hockey.  It’s not like in basketball where the whole defense can get behind the center line before even one attacked gets there.  In hockey, the transition happens so fast, that you’ve got at worst a 1-on-3 situation (one attacker, three defenders).  So, that attacker is free to skate right through, if those three defenders can’t contain her.

You can’t accept skating at half-speed, either, so eventually you will have 3-on-2, etc.  And if they pass the puck back-and-forth to each other, they’d look like they were toying with the defenders.  Indeed, taking a shot (and scoring) actually puts the defenders out of their misery.

I guess, in mathematical terms, the polite thing to do is take the approach with the lowest expected value.  My contention is, for high school girls basketball, 3-pointers just might be precisely that, if they can drive in for a layup at will and score with near-100% frequency.

In hockey, if my team is up by 6 goals or so, against an obviously weaker opponent, I tend to make a rule that I either shoot as soon as I cross the blue line, or I try to score with only backhands, or something.

In indoor soccer, my team used to try to score with headers when we were up by 6 or more at the half.  It’s easy to take it down the sideline, and cross it in the air towards the net.  It’s a low-percentage play - we maybe scored on such a header once every 25 minutes - and it leads to losing ball control to the other team as well, quite frequently.

But the bottom line is, 15 to 18 year olds are not stupid.  Yes they’re impressionable, but they’re young adults.  I hate to act like an old codger here, but back in my day, if you lost 100-0, you went to bed and got over it the next day.  Likewise if I won 100-0.

If the kids have no problem with it, we have to treat them as adults and respect their feelings on the matter.  Otherwise they’ll never “grow up” in our eyes.

"I guess, in mathematical terms, the polite thing to do is take the approach with the lowest expected value. “

Ah, beautifully said.

Yes, the lowest expected value would be to dilly-dally to run out the shot clock, then do a last-second hurry shot from the baseline, just inside the three-point line, so that you don’t have the benefit of the backboard.

That would give them, what, 60 possessions, and maybe get 40 points total?

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For hockey, you can put the defensemen at forward, and forward at defensemen.  And only let two skaters cross the blueline, or make sure that you are always one man down inside the blueline.

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Loved the way you put it…