Sports
drorzel | October 16, 2007Via a mailing list, the Gingerbread Haka:
If you don't get the joke, there's a video of the original below the fold, with bonus shirtless ruggers:
There are dozens of other versions on YouTube, including one with French subtitles, if you really want to know what they're chanting. It's a pre-game tradition for the New Zealand All-Blacks, based on a Maori dance.
It's worth watching a couple of them, just for the "What the...?" looks on the faces of the opposing sides, who have to stand there and watch this.
jlynch | October 12, 2007Tonight #16 Hawaii played San Jose State and won 42-35 in overtime. That’s the same San Jose that ASU beat 45-3. Hawaii go 7-0 but frankly, given whom they have beat, are horribly overrated. Despite being unbeaten. Hawaii haven’t really met any real opposition (witness Northern Colorado, Louisiana Tech, UNLV, Charleston Southern, Idaho, Utah State). They certainly don’t deserve a BCS bearth. As for Colt Brennan’s Heisman hopes. Nope, ain’t gonna happen.
Later tonight, it’s ASU (#14, 6-0) versus Washington.
oracknows | October 9, 2007The game ended too late last night, and I was too tired to do a quick celebratory post, but better late than never.
In case you were wondering, Orac is pleased. Not as pleased as he would have been if it had been the Tigers who beat the Yankees, but pleased enough.
Look out, Boston!
oracknows | October 6, 2007...for the Indians to advance to the ALCS.
I know, I know, long time readers know that I'm a Detroit Tigers fan. Sadly, after dominating their division during the first half of the season, my hometown team took a late season plunge right out of playoff contention, much to my dismay.
Fortunately, there is one other.
I lived in Cleveland for eight years before I headed to Chicago in the mid-1990s. During that time there, I saw a team that was once considered a joke make it to the World Series in 1995. I became a fan and to this day retain a soft spot in my heart for the Indians--except when…
drorzel | September 24, 2007I had a long post about Norman Spinrad all typed up when Firefox crashed, so you'll have to wait for train-wrecky SF goodness. So here's some sports commentary to pass the time.
It was a good sports weekend in Chateau Steelypips:
1) I don't really follow college football, but I do have a certain affection for Syracuse, so it was great to see the Orange, 36.5 point underdogs according to the bookies of the world, upset Louisville 38-35. It's always sweet when a 30-point underdog wins a game, but it's especially nice when it's one of my teams.
2) My Giants won in improbable fashion, stopping…
drorzel | September 10, 2007I don't normally pay much attention to preseason or off-season sports, and my isolation has been better than usual this year with regard to the NFL, what with being in Japan for the past three weeks. As a result, I vaguely expected my Giants to suck this year, but I was not prepared for the season to be effectively over after one game.
Hyperbole, you say? Maybe, but it's not just about the loss to the hated Cowboys, or even the injuries to key players, it's about the way they lost, and the players they have left.
Consider: what were their weaknesses last year? Well, their big problem was a…
bergman | September 2, 2007Because my team, the Forty Niners, aren't. Neither apparently is Michigan. On the other hand, my co-guest blogger is surely happy.
evolgen | August 29, 2007
That's the poster for the upcoming football season at Penn State. It's purpose is both utilitarian (it's got the schedule of games printed on it) and motivational (it's supposed to get you all geeked up for the upcoming season). This year's poster is using the slogan "FIGHT ON!", and I bet someone in the athletic department thought they were real clever when they came up with that. It also sounds mighty familiar, almost as if I'd heard it before. Oh, yeah, it's the name of the USC fight song (see here). It's not as bad as Auburn printing "Roll Tide" on their poster or Ohio State printing "Go…
drorzel | August 16, 2007A couple of days ago, Brad DeLong hoisted a proposal from comments (originally suggested by Bernard Yomtov):
A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball.
Kevin Drum isn't sold on the idea:
Man, does this seem backward. If you asked me what was wrong with big-league political reporting in this country, I'd say its biggest problem is that is has too much in common with big league sports writing. Reporters like Adam Nagourney and John Harris don't lack for expertise in politics, after all.…
drorzel | August 15, 2007Legendary Yankee shortstop Phil "Scooter" Rizzuto died Tuesday at 89. I've never been a huge baseball fan, and Rizzuto's playing days ended well before I was born, but as an announcer and pitchman, he was an absolute fixture of my childhood.
(Obligatory Celebrity Dead Pool: If famous people's deaths come in threes, who completes the set with Alpher and Rizzuto?)
Rizzuto's best days as an announcer were probably also behind him when I used to hear him doing Yankee games-- by the 80's, he was mostly just charmingly addled, offering rambling anecdotes that he sometimes lost track of-- but he was…
jlynch | August 7, 2007
Eh, no. The rest of the world of sports doesn’t care when a cheating misanthrope hits a ball and shatters the "most-hallowed record" in American sports.
Bonds, of course, played for ASU and his name hangs in the baseball stadium. This is nothing for ASU to feel proud about.
[Picture from Sports Illustrated.]
jlynch | August 3, 2007Doing this
and only suffering bruises of the liver and lung, stress fractures to vertebrae and a small fracture on the top of one hand.
drorzel | July 26, 2007No, this isn't about the theological component of NASCAR (though the popularity of auto racing is perhaps best explained by sophisticated brainwashing techniques)-- it's much more important: A story on ESPN.com about the Williams-Amherst rivalry:
Although the unusual history of the two schools inspired the rivalry, the annual success of both programs certainly has turned up the heat. And since schools in the New England Small College Athletic Conference don't participate in postseason football, the Williams-Amherst matchup has decided more than a few conference championships.
The 1997 season…
drorzel | July 19, 2007Because it seems to be a good day for psoting about totally non-controversial political topics that I will undoubtedly not have time to follow up on, here's an article from Inside Higher Ed that takes a dim view of current arguments about Title IX:
Right now, the situation is getting us nowhere. Ultimately, all we ever talk about is the number of men and women playing sports at a given institution, and whether the women's number is as high as it ought to be. Raw participation numbers occupy a pretty small portion of the U.S. Department of Education's Title IX regulations, but the overwhelming…
drorzel | July 17, 2007While on vacation in Michigan, I played a round of golf, which I do a few times a year. I shot reasonably well, when you consider that it was my first round of the year, and it was pouring rain. I even birdied one hole, by chipping in from about thirty feet off the green, so go, me.
The course we were playing is a fancy club in a resort area, and so the rental clubs were nicer than the clubs I own. In particular, they had one of those oversize drivers, and now I understand how it is that people come to believe that there's no problem in golf that can't be solved by spending money.
I generally…
oracknows | June 9, 2007Here's a tragic story:
NEW YORK - A medical examiner blamed a 17-year-old track star's death on the use of too much muscle cream, the kind used to soothe aching legs after exercise.
Arielle Newman, a cross-country runner at Notre Dame Academy on Staten Island, died after her body absorbed high levels of methyl salicylate, an anti-inflammatory found in sports creams such as Bengay and Icy Hot, the New York City medical examiner said Friday.
The medical examiner's spokeswoman, Ellen Borakove, said the teen used "topical medication to excess." She said it was the first time that her office had…
evolgen | May 31, 2007In yesterday's post, I argued that, when flipping two unfair discs (or coins), there is a greater chance that both discs will land with the same side up than different sides up. As pointed out in the comments, I was assuming that the probability of heads is equal for both discs:
Aren't you assuming that p (and q=1-p) are the same for both discs? But isn't it more reasonable to assume that, while no disc has a perfect p=0.5 probability of landing 'heads', the p's of no two discs are likely to be the same? (Assume, perhaps, that each disc's p is drawn independently from some kind of larger…
evolgen | May 30, 2007The beginning of many Ultimate (nee, Frisbee) games is marked by flipping discs to decide which team must pull (kick off) and which goal each team will defend at the start of the game. This is sort of like the coin flip before an American Football game. Two players -- one from each team -- flip a disc in the air. A third player -- a representative from one of the teams -- calls "same" or "different", referring to whether both discs land with the same side (top/bottom or heads/tails) facing up or different sides facing up. If he guesses right, his team gets to choose whether they want to pull…
drorzel | May 29, 2007Ethan Zuckerman offers a recap of the latest developments in sumo:
The May basho at Ryogoku Kokugikan ended yesterday with a clash between two profoundly talented rikishi. One was Asashoryu, who has been the sole Yokozuna - grand champion - of the sport since Takanohana retired in 2003. The other was Hakuho, who held an Ozeki rank (one rank below Yokozuna) and defeated Asashoryu to win his second Emperor's Cup in a row.
The criteria to be promoted to Yokozuna aren't exact, but it is generally accepted that winning two tournaments in a row as an Ozeki is sufficient for promotion. So unless the…