Tiger and the media on the media

One of the things that's interesting about the celebrity culture we're in now and the media environment that's created that culture (or fed it, whatever) is when those media organizations responsible for the around-the-clock coverage Migs refers to recognize just how responsible they are for the whole world they've created. I've been letting my TV run Sports Center at night while I play poker, so last night, I saw (two or three times) a piece on Tiger Woods in anticipation of Woods's prepared-statement-reading schedule for today. A significant portion of the piece was about the media's coverage of the car-crash incident, the later revelations that Woods basically had a harem, Woods's refusal to say anything, his entry into rehab, etc. etc. etc. And a significant portion of that significant portion was about ESPN's coverage of same. The audience was shown the absurd parade of New York Post covers, of course, but also clips and audio from Sports Center, including anchors saying things like "nobody really knows what's going on".


Come on, it's my shtick now.

What is interesting about all this is the way that media outlets seem mature and intelligent enough to realize what they're doing when they report breathlessly on Tiger Woods and yet they do it anyway. It's sort of the analogue to the person who buys Us Weekly at the grocery store and hides it from her friends. We know it's an unhealthy obsession, we know that it does far more harm than good, but we don't know how to quit.

Part of the issue gets back to my initial parenthetical above, about whether the media has created the culture or merely fed it. I'm not sure there is an answer, except for the bromide that we all bear some responsibility: if ESPN and TMZ didn't create the stories, we'd have nothing to click; and if we didn't click the stories, they wouldn't make any money from the creation. The media organizations can always fall back on the old collective-action problem, though: ESPN can't stop reporting on this stuff because no one else will stop, and so they'll lose viewers, lose money, and so forth. Consumers do have a version of this excuse, actually: if all your friends care, then you have to care or else you won't have anything to talk to them about.

Given the lack of solution, I guess we just have to hope for one of two things. First, the continued rise of meta, the media covering the media, which is covered by the media, ad infinitum. If we continue on this endless loop of coverage of coverage, the whole thing will have to just implode on itself at some point, and give us the opportunity to start over. (And thus my motivations for participating in this blog are revealed.) Second, we can hope that people just get bored. "Another steroid story. Blah. Another sex scandal. Blah." Sex and drugs are titillating material, though, so I don't really see this happening anytime soon. Sadly.

The Personalization of Celebrity Gossip

The John Mayer Playboy interview has got me thinking about a lot of topics, but the one on the table for this post is the way people now interact with celebrity gossip. There's always been an aspect of judging celebrities based on gossip stories, but it feels like that's increasing. I've talked to plenty of people who don't listen to John Mayer's music that don't just have an opinion about him, but have a strong opinion about whether or not he's a douchebag, whether he was a good boyfriend to Jennifer Aniston, and whether he's a misogynist. I've been trying to work through why that is.

I think there's two main contributing factors. The first I'll refer to as TMZ, but it really encompasses all of the expanding celebrity paparazzi coverage. As the coverage has gotten more constant, people feel like they know the "real story" moreso than in the past. Of course, we don't. We have no idea what went on between John and Jen, even if we saw more pictures of them than an analogous couple from 20 years ago.

But I think the bigger change are personal blogs and Twitter. They allow celebrities to speak directly to their fans. This is of course a lot of fun and occasionally enlightening, but it also gives people a greater sense that they "know" a celebrity. Of course, the picture you get of a celebrity from Twitter is still a mediated one - 140 character thoughts are to understanding a person what a paparazzi photo is to knowing what's going on in a celebrity's life. This works both ways: on the one hand, people have a greater sense that a celebrity is their friend, but they also judge a celebrity negatively if they say something provocative in a tweet.

What it all adds up to is that a person in the limelight now is subject to a scrutiny that is much more personal and heated than it was in the past. This has to be hard for celebrities who are aware of how they are perceived, and have to deal with the inaccuracies and out and out lies that get passed around as news. Of course, if they try and fight back using Twitter, they get an unfiltered communication device - but they also subject themselves to even greater scrutiny.

Championships and Luck

I think Wojo's point about the mano-a-mano nature of baseball is a good one. If a star player goes 1-for-18 in the playoffs, there's no one else to blame but the player, and maybe the quality of pitcher he faces - in basketball and football, its much easier to credit the defense. Now, if that 1-for-18 streak happened in May, we'd simply call it a slump, and people are now even well-versed enough to say things like "regression to the mean" and "small sample size." But only in May. Why?

If we recognize that a player's performance in an important baseball game is as likely to be good as performance in a regular baseball game (and lots of studies have showed this to be basically true), then a 3-for-4 game is just good luck, and an 0-for-4 game is bad luck. What follows from that is problematic for a lot of people - the outcome of a baseball game is determined by the talent of the two teams and the way the two teams match-up, but also by the luck of the draw in terms of players' performance levels. This idea is anathema to the way people want to think about champions as "the best."

Baseball is an interesting sport to discuss for this point, because teams are much more bunched together than in other sports - no team has ever had a regular season approaching the '07 Pats or the '96 Bulls in terms of winning percentage (or, on the flip side, the '08 Lions or the current Nets). Good baseball teams win 60% of their games, and bad ones win 40%. It's not completely uncommon for a bottom team to sweep a series with a very good team. So, when two good teams play, the odds of either team winning have to be close to a coin flip (a better discussion of baseball odds appears in this Phil Birnbaum post). But the winner of that coin flip is exhaulted, and the loser is questioned. We don't give a title to the team that would win the most if we played the season 1000 times - we only play the season once.

To simply explain the results of a 7-game series as luck would make sports seem hollow. Who cares about a dice roll? So instead, we look for reasons why performance was good or poor in that moment. We find character flaws in the losers, and build the winners into supermen. Now, these discussions aren't completely without merit. How a player responds to pressure must have some impact on performance, particularly on the negative side (anyone who's played sports knows the feeling of being "tight" in a big moment and having to overcome that). But it's generally less than one might think.

Recognizing that doesn't necessarily take the fun out of sports, but it does take a lot of the morality out of sports, and baseball writers/fans love morals (see any discussion of steroids ever). Perhaps that explains the resistance.

Bad arguments about baseball and football

Migs's point about the relative mutedness of the discussion of Peyton Manning's testicle size seems dead-on to me. I suffer from even more selection bias, though, since I don't really read about football. I follow the Football Outsiders guys on Twitter and I read Bill Simmons, but that's about it. I'm much more well versed in baseball, so that's where I'm going to take this.

It strikes me that almost 35 years after Bill James hit the scene, seven years after Moneyball, almost fifteen years after the founding of Baseball Prospectus, five years after the founding (and two years after the shuttering) of Fire Joe Morgan, ten years after Voros McCracken published his Defense-Independent Pitching research, we're still having a lot of the same discussions about "clutchness", the value of a home run (every year, without fail, someone argues that homers kill rallies, and thus are sometimes less valuable than doubles), and the "hittability" of pitchers that we've been having since time immemorial.

In football and basketball, I understand why we're still clinging to outmoded ideas. Baseball has a long history advanced stats that doesn't really exist in the other sports. (John Thorn and Pete Palmer wrote "The Hidden Game of Baseball" in 1985. Earnshaw Cook wrote "Percentage Baseball" in 1964.) Second, interactions are vastly more important in football and basketball. Baseball is essentially a one-on-one-on-one sport, where a pitcher faces a batter, who then tries to put the ball where a defender can't get it. Defensive responsibility zones overlap to an extent, but for the most part, if a ball is hit in a particular area, we can assign almost all of the credit or blame for catching or not catching that ball to one defender. Thus, in football and basketball, it is more difficult for stats to have meaning because they have to account for significantly more context.

Perhaps it's that mano-a-mano atmosphere that has retarded the conversation in baseball. We know that fans and writers (through some interaction effect of their own -- I'm not really clear on how much I should blame fans for being who they are and thus forcing writers to write what they need to hear, or the writers for creating the myths fans believe in) love to oversimplify and focus on one particular aspect of a game or a team. Alex Rodriguez is the root of all evil for the Yankees, and Derek Jeter is responsible for all good. Peyton Manning is the greatest regular-season quarterback ever but chokes when it matters. Kobe Bryant has the balls of a horse but Dirk Nowitzki is soft and weak. But when you make these arguments in football or basketball, you don't have to make sophisticated counterarguments to shoot them down -- it doesn't take a stats genius to look at the video of the Manning interception and see that there might've been a slip or a miscommunication between Manning and Reggie Wayne.

In baseball, though, Alex Rodriguez striking out can only be placed on him. He doesn't have any excuses. The arguments have to get more subtle, because you have to point to studies about how clutchness doesn't exist as a skill. You have to impart the concept that 40 at-bats in the post-season just doesn't provide the same evaluative window as 600 in the regular season. What it all comes down to is that you have to convince people of the huge role that randomness and luck play every single day.

I'll conclude by going back to the word "understandable". I get why people have a hard time accepting this. We want to believe that we are in control of things. It's why we have debates about welfare and affirmative action, and why some people were actually on Paul Shirley's side regarding Haiti. The idea that the course of a significant portion of our lives (maybe more than a significant portion, depending on how you feel about free will in general) is determined by factors that are 100% out of our control verges on heresy.

Media Coverage of the Implications of a Very Close Football Game

"Any print columnist who writes that the Saints' victory will forever change New Orleans should be shot. Even the bloggers will do better." - Buzz Bissinger

Yes we will, I think. Totally agree with Wojo about the implications of the game for the city of New Orleans. It's a wonderful story. Certainly everyone at my party was cheering for the Saints, and word from the game is that 75% of the crowd there was cheering for them too. I think we all feel good for the city - a championship is a wonderful pick me up in a very difficult time of rebuilding.

Wojo decided to leave media coverage of the game to another time, and I've decided that time is now. This game has provided an interesting window into where we're at now in how we view major sporting events. On the one hand, there was the instant overreaction - Brees is the best quarterback in football now! Manning is a choker! But there was also a very quick backlash against the standard overreaction. The arguments are one's everybody's heard - Manning played well, made one bad throw (and it may not even have been - Wayne slipped coming out of the break), and shouldn't be punished because his defense couldn't stop the Saints in the second half. This has turned out to be the dominant way to view the game - not the choker/hero theme. Now, part of this is the bias in my selection of reading on football - Football Outsiders is my main source of football analysis, and they are among the most reasoned writers on the sport. They abhor the standard insipid football discussion. But it wasn't just them. Even Bill Simmons, popularizer of the term "Manning Face" wrote a surprisingly reasoned column (even if he did let his readers make the dumb arguments for him at the end of it). In searching for Manning "choker" stories, I found plenty of people saying that we shouldn't jump to conclusions based on one game.

This is a terrific moment. Smart, reasonable writers don't have quite the pull of newspaper columnists, but their power, relative to "bloggers" (and in that group, I'd include writers with mainly an internet presence, like the Football Outsiders guys, Will Leitch, and even Simmons) is decreasing. And thankfully, that may mean a world where excellent players don't get labeled "chokers" because they lose in big games for reasons beyond their control. Heck, people might some day understand the concept of small sample sizes and the non-existence of clutch. But at least for now Manning's legacy is safe.

"Big" win for New Orleans

Well, that was quite a Super Bowl. In the end, I found myself rooting more for the Colts than the Saints, probably 55/45 or 60/40. Somewhere in that range. I am 100% with Migs on the 19-0 issue, but in the end, I think (although it wasn't really a rational process) I wanted Peyton Manning to win more than I wanted Jim Caldwell to lose. That said, I'm completely happy for the Saints and for their fans to get to have this feeling.

Austen made an interesting point to me in a text, though: this doesn't do anything for the city itself. It doesn't help it rebuild, it doesn't help repair the massive racial and economic inequalities that exist there. If anything, in fact, it might give us the opportunity to paper over those issues. When I (and every other person who writes about this win) write something like "good for New Orleans", I worry that this is just one more unconscious tactic in the battle to forget about the plight of the less fortunate.

It's funny, in the other major sports, the championship teams actually provide a tangible benefit to their city by hosting the big games, resulting in additional revenue for local businesses and so forth. New Orleans, though, doesn't get to host tens of thousands of people traveling to see the game, but they do get to pay for hundreds of hours of police overtime for security for the eventual championship parade.

I don't want to come off completely sour about this, but, related to something I tweeted, I think we ought to take care not to blow this up into some life-changing event for the people of New Orleans.

(That tweet was making a dual reference, by the way; the other point being "let's not start talking about how Peyton Manning has no testicles". But in the interest of keeping a post fairly well confined to just a topic or two, I'll leave the issue of media coverage (creation) of the larger implications of one very close football game for another time.)

It has to be the Saints

Unlike Wojo, I'm fully declared for this game. I've decided which delicious team colored cupcake from Crumbs I will eat after I down 2-3 large pulled pork sandwiches. It's the Saints. It has to be.

• First: New Orleans, Katrina, destruction, Superdome as hell, revitalization, rallying around the team, epic season. No decent human doesn't appreciate this angle, even Colts fans.
• Second, this is a franchise that until this year had won two playoff games total. This fan base has suffered for a long time. It'd be nice to see them win one.
• Most importantly: what the Colts did in the Curtis Painter game was not okay. I'm a Jets fan, and I was cheering for the Colts that day - I wanted to see perfection, just to be able to say I saw it happen. I love Manning for the same reasons Wojo does. I'd have been fine with a Jets win, but the way they got it was repulsive. The goal of football is to win games, particularly if there is something to compete for, like, perhaps, being the greatest of all time. If the Colts win, it will somehow justify their strategy to people - "their goal was to win the Super Bowl, and they did." But they didn't need to do that to win the Super Bowl. Manning has never missed a game and never takes big hits. They could have rested hurt players, but played to win. They didn't. So I don't want to see them win the Super Bowl and somehow think Jim Caldwell has been vindicated in any way.

I'm not exactly sure why the Colts decision makes me so angry. I think its this: our attachment to sports is an emotional one. We have goals and hopes for the teams we follow and enjoy. We want teams to care in the same way we do, or else we feel like chumps - why should we care if the people attempting to make the history don't? The Colts resting their starters made it clear that they and their fans did not have the same goals. The Colts said "This is a business; we have no need to attempt to be the best ever, just to achieve our general goal. We will be risk averse in doing so." It felt cold. (That blank look on Jim Caldwell's face did not help. Neither did the anguished look on the faces of the players.) It made me feel bad for caring that a team was approaching 19-0. The Colts told me, in so many words, that I was a sucker, and that all the fans filling their stadiums were suckers.

So scream (full bellied and drunkenly) with me: "Who dat?! Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?!"