Competitive violence, that's why you're here

Astonishingly, I haven't talked sports in this space since January 15, or well over a month. That, of course, was the Bears' loss to the Panthers, which was seriously depressing but not so much of a letdown that it should have kept me from any sports discussion for five weeks. I suppose the larger point here is that there is very little on the sports radar screen to occupy me between the end of football and the start of the college basketball conference tournaments (which, by the way, begin this coming Tuesday), especially since I already have a separate blog to talk about soccer results that no one reads anyway.

Still, it seems kind of strange that someone who cares as much about sports as I do would go that long without discussing them at all. So here, in quick-hit format, are a number of things that I've been thinking about or consider worth discussing:

*First of all, the shameless plug: the 2006 BigFlax.com NCAA Tournament Challenge is looking for entrants. So far I think I only have two or three confirmed interests, and one of those is me. It would really be a shame if after five consecutive years I had to cancel the thing due to lack of interest, as though it were a college elective.

*What is Shaun White doing on the cover of Sports Illustrated for two consecutive weeks? I realize that the U.S. isn't exactly racking up the high-profile wins at the Winter Olympics, but can't we do a little better than snowboarding, a "sport" that was clearly only added to the Olympics to boost the American medal count? If I wanted to watch the Winter X Games, I would - but I don't. White Sox fans across the country were complaining about SI's failure to put the Sox on the cover after winning the World Series, which I thought was stupid because the Sox were on the cover (just not the featured picture) that week, and anyway they'd been on the cover after winning the first two games the previous week. But seeing Shaun White on the cover two weeks in a row has caused me to re-evaluate. A World Series champion can't make the cover two weeks running, but a snowboarder can? Come on. In addition, everyone I know agrees that "The Flying Tomato" is an idiotic nickname. You know it's one of those cases where it was given to him derogatorily at first, and he wasn't cool enough to escape from the shadow of the teasing nickname, so he just accepted it. To sum up, is there a single moment in this Winter Olympics you can imagine telling your kids about? Forget the Miracle on Ice, this doesn't even have the enjoyable controversy of the 2002 judging scandal or Sarah Hughes' come-from-behind win. You think there are going to be parents telling their kids about the gold-medal exploits of the Flying Tomato in twenty years?

*One other Olympic note: this whole Shani Davis thing is rapidly turning into the most overplayed and obnoxious sports story in recent memory. If it weren't for the fact that Davis has managed to be successful, his mom would be challenging Todd Marinovich's dad and Jim Pierce for the "Worst Sports Parent" lifetime achievement award. As it is, she's just giving Richard Williams a run for "Most Annoyingly Visible." And can't we just agree that Davis and Chad Hedrick are both douchebags? I love that Hedrick got mad that Davis refused to skate the team pursuit and made it seem like he was angry that Davis was turning his back on his country, when the obvious if unspoken real reason was because Hedrick knew the U.S. couldn't win the team pursuit without Davis and thus Hedrick himself couldn't challenge Eric Heiden for the record of five gold medals from Lake Placid. At least Davis was up-front about being in it only for himself.

*This could either be the best NCAA Tournament in a long time or one of the worst ever. The bubble appears to be quite weak this year, meaning either that we'll finally get the slew of talented mid-majors for which people have been agitating for years now (current projections actually have five teams from the Missouri Valley qualifying, along with small-conference leaders whose at-large hopes would have been considered unthinkable in years past like Bucknell and George Mason) or we'll get a lot of bottom-of-the-barrel major conference crap. I mean, who would you rather see in the tournament, a 22-7 Northern Iowa or a 17-9 Nebraska? Me too.

*The other thing is that the list of teams that jump out as "likely or even possible winners" seems really short. I mean, besides Duke, UConn, Villanova, and I guess Texas, which teams leap out? I have a hard time buying teams like Memphis and Gonzaga as national champions, ranked in the top five or not, and other teams hovering in the four-to-six-loss range are little more inspiring. (Ohio State? Florida? Pitt? Tennessee?) If Duke and UConn stay on pace, Villanova does enough to stay ahead of Memphis, and Texas wins the Big 12 Tournament, we could be looking at the first tournament ever to have four #1 seeds in the Final Four - I wouldn't trust Memphis, but it's hard to look at the others and say that a team from the rest of the pack would obviously knock them off. On the other hand, if a couple high seeds (and I mean #1s and #2s here) go down before the Elite Eight, we could be looking at a really crazy second weekend in terms of teams still playing. A lot of the major programs have struggled this year while a few less-than-traditional powers have shown up on the map - who knows, maybe we end up with a Duke, UConn, Ohio State, Tennessee Final Four. What is this, the women's tournament?

*The World Baseball Classic: Baseball is still my favorite sport, and probably always will be as long as I live in this country, but I'm not sure I care about this. It just reeks of "stunt," a flailing attempt to stay relevant internationally - if it were a real World Cup, there would have been qualifying rounds. The WBC appears to have been invitation-only, and I'm not even sure how some of these teams got the call - South Africa? Italy, that hotbed of baseball and ancestral home to Mike Piazza? Plus, national pride forbids me from rooting against the U.S., but how can I be gung-ho for a team starting Roger Clemens, Derek Jeter, and Alex Rodriguez? At least Derrek Lee will likely be the starting first baseman.

*There's nothing like looking at the WBC rosters to make you feel kind of weird about how global the game has become, though. I'm not saying that's bad - just interesting. During a recent Champions League soccer game, Derek Rae (the play-by-play man) noted how interesting it was to see Real Madrid, a Spanish side, starting two Englishmen (David Beckham and Jonathan Woodgate), while Arsenal, an English side, wasn't starting any (UEFA formerly had a rule that a club was not allowed to have more than five players from outside its home nation on the pitch at any one time, but this was deemed illegal in 1995). Things aren't quite that dramatic in baseball, and certainly the ability of players to beg out of the WBC affects this a bit, but the U.S. roster has a distinct "That's it?" feel about it in most places, whereas, in particular, the Dominican team will likely be starting Albert Pujols, Miguel Tejada, David Ortiz, Adrian Beltre, Vladimir Guerrero, and Alfonso Soriano, a potent offensive lineup if nothing else. (This doesn't even include Manny Ramirez, as the latest rumors have him not playing.) You can see why A-Rod ended up picking the U.S. - much less to overshadow him from a hitters' perspective.

But the point here is this - 20 years ago, just as you would have seen mostly English players playing soccer in England, you would have seen mostly American players on baseball teams in America. The Latin American influx had certainly begun long before, but it was nothing like it is today in terms of percentages, especially at the top of the sport. Look at the leaderboards from 1986, for example - the only foreign-born players to crack the NL top five in any important statistical category were Juan Samuel (Dominican Republic; #2 in triples, #5 in doubles, t-#5 in stolen bases); Chili Davis (Jamaica; #3 in walks); Mariano Duncan (Dominican Republic; #4 in stolen bases); and Fernando Valenzuela (Mexico; #1 in wins and #2 in strikeouts). The AL was about the same - George Bell, Tony Fernandez, Jose Canseco, Ruben Sierra, Teddy Higuera, Bert Blyleven (and of course the latter was not Latino, but from Holland). You'd have to go to more useless categories like "total games played" to add a couple more to the list - but basically it was about a dozen top-shelf foreign-born players in Major League Baseball. Almost none led their categories, additionally.

Now look at the 2005 leaderboard. Looking just at hits, runs, RBI, average, SLG, OBP, doubles, triples, and homers, we find Vladimir Guerrero, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Miguel Tejada, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, and Alfonso Soriano; Ortiz and Ramirez were 1-2 in RBI and Tejada led in doubles. Meanwhile, Johan Santana and Bartolo Colon were among the best pitchers in the league, leading in Ks and wins respectively, while three of the top five closers - Francisco Rodriguez, Mariano Rivera, and Danys Baez - were from abroad. Carlos Silva even slipped into the ERA top five. That's 13 foreign-born players among the five best players in the game in a number of major categories. Oh, and I forgot to mention - that's just the AL. The NL adds another seven and could even add a couple more if you stretched to slightly more obscure categories or counted Dave Roberts, who was born in Japan and is half-Japanese, though he was raised in the U.S.

Sure, the numbers aren't overwhelming, but then again we're not talking about pre- and post-integration here. There's an obvious increase, and more importantly an obvious increase in the number of major stars. People didn't stop what they were doing to see Tony Fernandez or Juan Samuel hit; tickets were not scalped like crazy when Teddy Higuera came to town. But if you hear that Manny Ramirez or Albert Pujols is at the plate? Pedro Martinez is starting against your team? These are guys people know, guys they want to see, guys who are quantifiably among both the best and most talked-about players in the league. That's the difference. And that's why when you see a WBC roster for the U.S., and it doesn't have nearly as many guys of that caliber as you'd expect from the home of the game, it makes you feel a little weird inside. In the mid-80s, it would have been unthinkable for the U.S. not to have far and away the best roster in any such event. Today - well, at least from an offensive perspective, we don't.