.

Chris Berman is a naturally positive, optimistic, likeable individual.  I once read an interview of The Fabulous Sports Babe, asking her who she liked in the world, and as I recall she came up with one name.  She thought Chris Berman, as a person, was awesome.

Boomer gave a memorable TV interview one time, which attempted to bait him into trash talk.  He ran through the line like Marshawn Lynch on 2nd-and-6.  "Two things that I love about America:  the price of a newspaper, and the cost of a postage stamp.  When I'm in the airport, I'll always pick up three or four newspapers.  And would you carry somebody's letter from one coast to the other for 40 cents?*

If you haven't signed up for Bill James Online yet, I'd be interested to know why.  I'm not challenging your right to not sign up; I'd like to know why you, as a sports consumer, decline to purchase the material.

One of Bill James' most instructive little op-ed's this year, I thought, was this one:

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My two writing interests, as you know, are baseball and crime.    HBO has restarted the series Eastbound & Down, about the life of the washed-up baseball pitcher Kenny Powers.   It strikes me that Kenny Powers is

                a)  not a realistic representation of an athlete, but

                b)  actually a brilliant representation of a criminal, of how a criminal thinks.

                Kenny Powers has a world-class entitlement mentality, very low ethics, and a remarkable ability to rationalize whatever he wants to do, no matter how childish or irresponsible.    I will tell you honestly that I have never known any athlete, and certainly not any major league athlete, who was even remotely like Kenny Powers.   

Athletes do have an entitlement mentality, but it’s not an entitlement mentality anything like that of Kenny Powers.    In some way that is hard to explain, the entitlement mentality of athletes is the exact opposite of Kenny Powers.   Athletes uniquely understand—much more than non-athletes, as a rule—that success comes from hard work, success involves suffering and not whining about it, and that the payoff comes through following the rules and respecting the team concept.    Very, very few athletes—basically none—don’t get that message.   Kenny Powers doesn’t have any concept of any of that.   

                The entitlement mentality of athletes has to do with the rewards of athletic success, with what benefits should flow to the person who is able to cut it in the extremely challenging world in which they live.  

                Kenny Powers is not an athlete; he’s a criminal.    What the show illustrates very well—ironically, much better than crime shows do—is how the criminal thinks, how the criminal convinces himself that he is justified in doing whatever he wants to do.   Give Kenny Powers any rule, and he will figure out—and he will explain to you—why that rule should not apply to him.    Show Kenny Powers any possession, and he will explain to you why he should have that possession.    Kenny Powers can express, in words that make perfect sense to him, why he is better than others, why he owes no respect to anyone, why he should be able to treat people as objects.

                In shows like The Godfather and The Sopranos—and obviously, The Sopranos was a vastly better show than Eastbound & Down—but in shows like The Sopranos, the criminals are generally presented as the winners of life’s competitions.   They have troubles, yes, and those troubles often end in death, but while they are alive they get whatever they want and don’t worry about explaining why or how.    Kenny Powers is a loser.   This is what makes the show a comedy, rather than a drama; it is not about a fatally flawed winner, but about a petty, envious, whining loser, endlessly rationalizing his failures as a sort of cosmic conspiracy to deny him what is rightfully his.

                Reading that over, I wonder whether I should have said "baseball player" rather than "athlete"?   The NFL, after all, seems to have a more significant number of criminals in their population.

                But even in the NFL, it seems to me, the criminals are not really very much like Kenny Powers.   The NFL criminals are, for the most part, thugs, a "thug" being a criminal who takes what he wants by the use of force.    Kenny Powers, for all of his failings, is not a thug, either.   He is sneaky, devious and cowardly, but he doesn’t overpower people physically or pull guns on them.    So that leads us back where we were.    Kenny Powers is just really not very much like a real athlete.

.....

That's one of my favorite James-ism's, when he gets to explaining the difference between a "jerk" (Billy Martin) and a "creep" (Leo Durocher).  Or the difference between a thief and a thug.  Three letters can mean the difference between night and day, even though to the naked eye there's no difference at all.

There has been a lot of discussion and debate, as to whether the NFL has too many criminals.  Those defending the NFL claim that actual arrests are lower in the NFL than in the general population.  Here's an article purporting to demonstrate that.  This point of view would argue that we simply notice the crimes being committed.

My question would be, how does this crime rate compare to a (non-athlete) population that is as rich and privileged as those in the NFL.  How many people making $1M a year find it necessary to go out and destroy property in a fit of rage?

.....

The NFL has a pretty high Thug Factor, if you ask me.  In fact we breed these men to be thugs, to take by force that which another man wants.  That's what we are watching down on the field, primal men fighting for primal turf, and it's an outlet for us.

Pete Carroll understands this, apparently better than the average football coach does.  He understands the nature of his sport, he does not apologize for it, and he's not a hypocrite about it.  Sure, if NFL players go out on their own time and commit (off-field) crimes, they must suffer the same penalties as other citizens do.  Carroll exercises reasonable supervision of his employees.  But does your boss get to tell you what to do on Friday night?  You can only expect so much of the Seahawks organization, in terms of what players do on their own time.

Me personally, I'm not going to clamor for a 10-1 football team, one that leads the NFL in pressure and in takeaways, and then question Pete Carroll for going out and finding men who take what they want.  We've drawn a barbed-wire fence around one acre of land in Seattle, and we've said that in that acre, we're going to get volunteers, have them fight each other -- within a barely-reasonable set of rules -- for millions of dollars.

Those men want to fight, and we want to see them fight.  Pete Carroll has gotten us men who fight hard.  Good on him.

......

Major league baseball is something different.  I'm thankful for that, too.  Come March, I'm going to be very eager for something less primal and more brainy.

My $0.02,

Jeff