Scorecasting (37 page)

Those of us in the sports media have an interest in selling the most extreme scenario. Collectively, they (we?) pick and choose data accordingly. Take, for instance, a September 15, 2009, game between the New York Yankees and the
Toronto Blue Jays, a showdown between Alex Rodriguez and
Roy Halladay, arguably the league’s best hitter and best pitcher at the time. The Yankees
broadcasters might have framed the encounter along the following lines, using the most positive statistics at their disposal:

Upon receiving this information, it sounds almost like a foregone conclusion that A-Rod is going to crush the ball. In fact, one almost feels pity for Halladay. It’s as though he should have taken the mound wearing a helmet and protective covering.

Now listen to how the Toronto broadcasters might have addressed the showdown, using the best available statistics to make their case:

After hearing this we’d be surprised if Rodriguez made contact with a Halladay pitch, much less reached base.

Both renderings would have been perfectly accurate. Both sets of statistics are true. Yet they paint radically different pictures. Incidentally, in that Yankees–Blue Jays game, Halladay pitched six innings, allowed two earned runs, and got the win; Rodriguez was one for three with a double against Halladay—pretty much what a neutral observer, ignoring the noise and looking at as much data as possible, would have predicted.

Teams are complicit in this selectivity, too. Check the scoreboard next time you’re at a baseball game. Had you attended a White Sox–Tigers game at U.S. Cellular Field in the summer of 2010, you could have learned that Chicago’s outfielder
Carlos Quentin was “hitting .371 over his last nine games.” Although this was impressive and meant to convey a hot streak, it told us … what exactly? Not much, not with a sample size that small. If the White Sox were attempting to predict the outcome of Quentin’s next at-bat, they would have provided a more meaningful statistic, using a larger data set. But noting that Quentin was “351 for 1,420 (.247) for his career” doesn’t quite stir up passion.

When Nate Robinson declared Ray Allen the best shooter in the annals of the NBA, he may have been right, but not because Allen had one torrid shooting half. Otherwise, you could just as easily make the case that based on the following night’s game, Allen was the worst shooter in NBA history. Robinson’s more convincing evidence would have been this: For his NBA career Allen has taken more than 6,000 three-point attempts and made roughly 40 percent of them.

Those two games of extremes during the 2010 NBA finals? Unsexy as it might have been to use the largest available data set and note Allen’s career average, it would have helped the viewers. Between the two games, he was 8 of 19, or 42 percent, on three-point attempts, conforming almost exactly with his career mark.

ARE THE CHICAGO CUBS CURSED?
 

The ball collided with the bat of
Luis Castillo and made a hollow
thwock
, the tip-off that it hadn’t been hit cleanly. It wafted into the autumn night sky and descended between the foul pole and the third-base line at Wrigley Field. The Cubs left fielder,
Moises Alou, ambled over, tracking the ball.

It was a foregone conclusion that Alou would make the catch, completing the second out of the eighth inning in this, the sixth game of the 2003 National League Championship Series. Ahead of the Florida Marlins 3–0 this night and leading in the best-of-seven series three games to two, the Cubs would then be just four outs from reaching the World Series for the first time since 1945. Already champagne was nesting on ice in the Cubs’ clubhouse. The Marlins’ team president had just called his wife to tell her there was no need to come to Chicago because there would be no game seven. Alou, a capable fielder and a veteran of several all-star games, positioned himself under the ball. The crowd, already rock-concert-loud, thickened its roar. Alou extended his left arm, yelled “Got it, got it,” jumped up alongside the stands, unfurled his glove, and …

You probably know the rest of the story. A 26-year-old consultant
had managed to score a sweet ticket for this game: aisle 4, row 8, seat 113, the first row before the field. A mishandled nacho and the cheese would have landed in the dirt of foul territory. For Steve Bartman, this was about as close to nirvana as he could get. A Chicago native, Bartman was the kind of long-suffering citizen of Cubs Nation whose moods moved in accordance with the team’s fortunes. Bartman had recently graduated from Notre Dame but had returned home, yes, because of his job and family but also because of the proximity to his beloved baseball team. His level of fandom was such that despite his prime seat, he still listened to a radio broadcast of the game on headphones as he watched.

When Castillo’s foul ball traced an arc and began its downward flight, Bartman rose to catch it, a reaction almost as instinctive as withdrawing one’s hand from a hot flame. A souvenir foul ball? What better way to garnish a magical night. In less time than it will take you to read this sentence, Bartman’s life—to say nothing of his magical night—was turned on its head. In his zeal to catch the ball, he interfered with Alou and knocked the ball away. After realizing an out had been lost, Alou popped away as if bitten by a snake. He shot Bartman a death stare and, in a gesture unbecoming a 37-year-old man, slapped his glove in the manner of a Little Leaguer throwing a tantrum. “Alou, he is livid with a fan,” intoned the television broadcaster.
Mark Prior, the Cubs pitcher, turned to left field and also stared darts into Bartman.

Given new life, Castillo walked. It was around that time that Bartman was escorted from his seat by security. “It’s for your own safety,” he was told. Even then, he was heckled and cursed and doused in beer. Bartman buried his face in his sweatshirt as if doing a perp walk through Wrigley—the ballpark, incidentally, nicknamed “The Friendly Confines.”

It was a good thing security arrived when it did. Castillo’s walk catalyzed an eight-run rally. There were wild pitches and cheap hits and an error by the Cubs shortstop,
Alex Gonzalez, on what should have been an inning-ending double play. The Marlins won the game. By then, Hollywood production companies were already
angling for movie rights. According to the next day’s
Variety, Fan Interference
, starring Kevin James, would tell the story of “a [fan] who screws up an easy out, and then has to deal with the ramifications.” Thanks to the speed and power of the Internet, Bartman’s identity was revealed by morning. At his office at Hewitt Associates, a management consulting firm in the North Shore suburbs, his voice mail was clogged with profane messages. Bartman released a statement, stating that he was “sorry from the bottom of this Cubs fan’s broken heart.”

No matter. The following night, the Cubs would lose the decisive seventh game to the Marlins, who would go on to win the World Series. And poor Steve Bartman would take his rightful place alongside Mrs. O’Leary and her cow among the city’s bêtes noires. With Halloween a few weeks away, Steve Bartman masks began appearing at parties, outnumbering witches and ghosts and Osama bin Laden costumes by a healthy margin. A comic at the famed Second City comedy theater soon did a routine dressed as Bartman, bumping into a fireman as he tries to catch a baby from a burning building. A local radio station began playing a song, “Go Blame It on Steve Bartman.” Then there were the T-shirts spoofing the MasterCard “priceless” commercials:

Law and Order
began taping an episode about a “foul ball guy” who deprived his team of a victory and was subsequently found murdered in a bar. Interviewed on the local news,
Dan May, a local law student, explained that if he were to cross paths with Bartman, “I wouldn’t shoot him. But I’d break his knees.” Richly,
Rod Blagojevich, then Illinois’s governor, stated that Bartman “better join the witness protection program.” He added that if Bartman had committed a crime, “he won’t get a pardon from this governor.” Meanwhile, Florida’s governor at the time, Jeb
Bush, jokingly offered Bartman asylum. Bartman went into hiding and declined to give interviews or make appearances, including an invitation to attend the Super Bowl. There were rumors that he underwent plastic surgery. At the time of this writing, he has yet to resurface in public.

Bartman didn’t catch the ball that night. It squirted away from him and eventually was recovered by a Chicago lawyer who sold the ball at auction to Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group. The winning bid? $113,824.16. That off-season, the ball was destroyed in a ceremony that drew more than a thousand Cubs fans and Chicago celebrities on the order of Smashing Pumpkins lead singer
Billy Corgan,
Caddyshack
and
Vacation
director
Harold Ramis, and Caray’s widow, Dutchie. The detonation was overseen by
Michael Lantieri, an Oscar-winning Hollywood special effects savant. (Disregarding suggestions to use Caray’s thick glasses to ignite the fire that would melt the ball, Lantieri utilized a no-smoke detonation device.) Fans stood outside the tent—some wielding signs reading “Death to Bartman”—chanting “The ball is dead. The ball is dead.” The steam from the ball was gathered, distilled, and used to prepare pasta sauce for Caray’s restaurant. Really.

If all this sounds a bit—how to put it?—
extreme
, to many fans “Bartman’s blunder” confirmed what they had already believed for so long: The Cubs are simply doomed, a star-crossed franchise that has done something to anger the fates. A curse once ascribed to a vengeful billy goat now had a human face, one wrapped in a terminally uncool set of headphones.

Maybe the misbegotten fans—and, for the sake of full disclosure, we count ourselves among the legion—were on to something. The last time the Cubs won the World Series was 1908—the longest championship drought in all major North American professional sports. For the sake of perspective: Teddy Roosevelt was president, the concept of a world war was yet to be conceived, and the horse and buggy was more common than the automobile. It
was
Jack Brickhouse, the longtime Cubs play-by-play announcer, who noted, “Everyone is entitled to a bad century.”

When Bartman made that awkward attempt to catch the ball, it was as if karma, suddenly awakened, reminded us that the Cubs and success don’t mingle. After Castillo’s walk, a parade of miscues ensued, hits dropped between fielders and the fortunes of the team did a pirouette. Proof of a higher power at work. The Cubs were—indeed,
are
—simply the unluckiest franchise in all sports. In a word: cursed.