Month: March 2016

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Sports

LeBron James says he needs to ‘do more’

On Oct. 30, 2014, the Cleveland Cavaliers staged a pregame ceremony to mark a homecoming for LeBron James, who had left four years earlier to play for Miami.

About a minute into the observance, before an arena packed with fans who waved sabers that glowed red, a video of James appeared on the so-called humongotron that hangs from the ceiling of the arena.

“If there’s one thing we all know,” intoned an announcer, before the video cut to James. “There’s no place like home,” James finished, before tossing chalk into the air as tends to be his pre-game ritual. The fans, who seemed to embody the chalk’s trajectory, leaped from their seats.

Fast forward to Friday, when we awoke to news that the Nets had upset the Cavs the night before in Brooklyn.

The Nets entered the matchup with 20 wins in 71 tries and ranked 14 of 15 in the NBA’s Eastern Conference. The Cavs started the game atop the conference and, seemingly, poised to compete for an NBA championship after losing to Golden State in the finals last year.

The loss to the Nets capped a week that featured a series of questions about James’ ability to lead the Cavs back to the finals and his commitment to the team after this season.

Five days earlier, the Cavs lost in Miami after James spent halftime chatting with his friend and former teammate, Heat guard Dwayne Wade, rather than warming up with the Cavs, who trailed by 21 points at the half.

That earned James a talking-to from coach Tyronn Lue, who said James apologized for his behavior. “I just told him we can’t have that, being down like we were and him being the leader,” Lue told cleveland.com.

On Monday, a tweet appeared that suggested James had unfollowed the Cavs’ Twitter feed.  (James declined to discuss it.)

Then on Wednesday, James received another talk, this time from Cavs general manager David Griffin. The prompt: a story by Howard Beck in the Bleacher Report that quoted James as saying he hoped to team someday with his besties Wade, Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony.

The talks seemed to have their effect. “I just need to do more,” James told reporters after the loss in Brooklyn.

James will have his chance on Saturday night in New York, where the Cavs will take on the Knicks. “I feel like we’re ready to make a championship run,” James told reporters on Saturday morning before Cleveland’s shootaround.

In a gift of scheduling, the game at the Garden will feature a matchup between James and Anthony.

Of course, the Cavs all need to do more if they hope to return to the finals. “These handpicked Cavs, with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, should never have to be a one-man team, and they’re doomed if they are,” Barry Petchesky noted on Deadspin.

Though James, 31, has said he plans to end his career in Cleveland, he also has signed a series of one-year deals that enable him to become a free agent again this summer.

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Sports

New York set to ban smokeless tobacco from ballparks

It may be time for the Mets and Yankees to buy more Bazooka.

The New York City Council this week is expected to vote on a bill that would ban smokeless tobacco from sports arenas throughout the five boros. The bill, which would take effect upon being signed into law by Mayor de Blasio, would make both Citi Field and Yankee Stadium tobacco-free.

The measure also would make New York the fifth major league city to prohibit use of smokeless tobacco at ballparks. In the past year, Chicago, San Franciso, Los Angeles and Boston have enacted similar bans, which are backed by Major League Baseball, as well as by both the Yankees and Mets.

The main sponsor of the measure says distinguishing tobacco based on how players consume it reflects stereotypes about snuff that no longer hold sway.

“I couldn’t imagine us being OK as a city or society as a whole with a baseball player standing in left field smoking a cigarette while the game was going on, on national television,” Councilman Corey Johnson, a Manhattan Democrat who chair’s the council’s health committee, told the Daily News in February. “But… just because of culturally what has existed for a long time, it’s OK for professional athletes to stand in left field or in the dugout and chew wads of smokeless tobacco.”

Though the sight of players dipping has marked baseball for decades, the habit takes a toll. Two years ago, Tony Gwynn, a Hall of Fame outfielder, died from cancer of the salivary glands that he attributed to chewing tobacco.

Curt Schilling, the retired pitcher for the Red Sox, blames smokeless tobacco that he chewed for three decades for cancer of the mouth that he has battled since 2014.

“You will develop sores, you will lose your sense of taste and smell,” Schilling wrote last year in a letter to his younger self that was published in The Players’ Tribune. “You will develop lesions. You will lose your gums — they will rot. You will have problems with your teeth for the rest of your life.”

Smokeless tobacco contains nitrosamines, which form during the curing of tobacco and can cause cancer and heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As many as one-third of major leaguers use smokeless tobacco despite the dangers.

Efforts to ban smokeless tobacco have met with pushback from the players’ union, which asserts that baseball cannot ban snuff so long as it remains legal. As the union sees it, smokeless tobacco presents no danger to others from second-hand smoke.

Still, the union supports efforts to persuade players to quit the habit. “It’s definitely an addiction and it’s a tough addiction to get away from, because you’re always around it and there’s certain triggers,” an unnamed player for the Mets told the New York Post. “But I think if they apply a rule, we should abide by it.”

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Sports

Goose Gossage rails against ‘nerds’ who run baseball

At a reunion on Friday of three of the four inventors of Moneyball, Michael Lewis, who wrote the book, discussed the innovation that Bill James, who pioneered statistical analysis of baseball, brought to the game.

As James saw it, the baseball diamond “was a field of ignorance,” Lewis told an audience at MIT’s Sloan Sports conference in Boston. James, who self-published his analyses starting in 1977. (He also pioneered blogging, you might say.)

James’ work formed a foundation for the use of statistical methods by Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta after Beane became general manager of the Oakland A’s in 1997. Since then, front offices throughout sports have adopted (and refined) statistical tools to inform everything from scouting to strategy.

So it was with amusement that we greeted comments by Goose Gossage, the former Yankees pitcher, who on Thursday unleashed a diatribe against teams’ reliance on math.

“The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it,” Gossage told ESPN. “I’ll tell you what has happened, these guys played Rotisserie baseball at Harvard or wherever the f— they went and they thought they figured the f—ing game out.

“They don’t know s—,” he added.

Whatever you think of the state of baseball, Gossage has impeccable timing. This weekend marked the 10th anniversary of the MIT event, which opened with the aforementioned reunion of Lewis, James (who did not attend Harvard) and DePodesta (who did).

Grousing by the Goose aside, it helps to appreciate how baseball operated before James, now a senior adviser to the Red Sox, began studying the game. In 2002, the average draft, which lasted 50 rounds back then, produced one everyday major league player, according to DePodesta, who now serves as chief strategy officer of the Cleveland Browns.

“We aimed to be wrong 48 out of 50 times, instead of 49 out of 50,” DePodesta recalled.

Gossage, it seems, goes with his gut, though even he acknowledges there is a role for statistical analysis, according to Andrew Marchand, who covers the Yankees for ESPN.

Still, it makes you wonder what Gossage might think of “Tracking pitcher performance with instantaneous component ERA and moving averages” or “zWins, an alternative calculation of wins above replacement in baseball,” to cite two of the papers presented at the gathering in Boston.

The tirade, in which Gossage also blasted Jose Bautista as a “f—ing disgrace to the game” for flipping his bat upon hitting a home run in the playoffs last October, earned Gossage, who is at Yankees’ training camp this spring as an instructor, a talking-to from General Manager Brian Cashman and Manager Joe Girardi.

In the end the nerd had his revenge. “That’s what’s changed since 2002,” said James. “You used to have to pay attention to those guys [like Gossage]. Now you can just ignore them.”

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Sports

Jacob DeGrom declines to sign

The Mets made Jacob deGrom an offer: take it or take it.

The right-hander will earn $607,000 this season because that’s what the team offered to pay him. DeGrom, who is entering his third season in the majors, has yet to amass enough time in the big leagues to be eligible for arbitration.

DeGrom is unable to negotiate his pay, per the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that governs the terms and conditions of employment for major league players. To be eligible to bargain over pay, a player must either qualify as a free agent (defined as at least six years of Major League service and no contract for the coming season) or have between three and six years of service.

DeGrom can claim neither, which led the Mets to offer him a raise of $50,125 for the coming season. DeGrom, who had 14 wins last year and helped pitch the team to the World Series, responded by declining to sign his contract, as is his prerogative.

“Like the Mets, he is simply exercising his rights under the [collective bargaining agreement],” Brodie van Wagenen, deGrom’s agent, told ESPN. “But given Jacob’s standing as one of the top pitchers in Major League Baseball and his 2015 performance, his worth cannot be properly valued by a formula.”

The drama, which unfolded in Port St. Lucie four days before deGrom faced the Yankees in his first outing of training camp, reveals as much about the uniqueness of deGrom’s career as it does about the vagaries of the CBA.

DeGrom, whose birthday falls on June 19, will pitch most of his third season at age 28, or a year older than Matt Harvey, and five years senior to Noah Syndergaard.

In short, deGrom happens to be older for a third-year pitcher, if by older you mean between one and five years older than the other main members of the Mets’ starting rotation. Harvey will be eligible for free agency in 2019. deGrom won’t be a free agent until 2021.

Thus, the Mets have deGrom pitching for them, relatively inexpensively, in the prime of his career.  Sandy Alderson, the Mets’ general manager, defended the offer as the product of the team’s “straightforward approach to determining salaries.”

“Yes, it is based on a formula, predicated on performance,” Alderson told reporters.

That sounded to some like the Mets might be letting the exercise of their rights under the CBA cloud their judgment, especially when the player in question happened to be among the best in the big leagues and one whom the Mets are counting on to pitch them back to the postseason.

Given deGrom’s “unusual circumstances — an outlier on the developmental scale but an instant and charismatic star — would a few extra hundred-thousand dollars have bankrupted the Wilpon family,” asked Harvey Araton in the Times, referring to the Mets’ owners.

Still, you needn’t worry about deGrom, who is poised to earn more money that most people will in their lifetimes. After this season he likely will qualify as a so-called Super Two, which affords arbitration to players with at least two but less than three years of service if the player has accumulated at least 86 days of service during the immediately preceding season and he ranks in the top 22% of service in the group of players who have between two and three years of service, all as agreed to in the CBA.

Provided deGrom stays healthy and continues to win, the Mets likely will offer him a series of million-dollar seasons in the hope of coming to terms before an arbitrator imposes an award. And that’s just for arbitration. Free agency holds the prospect of millions more.

During the latest offseason, the Diamondbacks signed Zach Greinke to a deal that reportedly will pay the pitcher $206.5 million over six years. Greinke will turn 33 this October.

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Sports

Mets’ Herrera hits inside-the-park home run

Dilson Herrera may give Mets fans a reason to care less that Daniel Murphy moved on.

Herrera, in his sophomore year with the club, hit an inside-the-park home run on Friday to tie an exhibition in the bottom of the ninth against the Marlins.

As it happens, Herrera is the top prospect to replace Murphy, who in January signed with the Nationals. Murphy walked and grounded into a double play in two trips to the plate on Thursday as the Nationals topped the Mets in the spring opener for both teams.

Herrera, who turned 22 on Thursday, hit .211 with three home runs in 90 at-bats for the Mets last season after starting the season with the team’s triple-A affiliate in Las Vegas. Last May, in his first game in the majors, Herrera turned a double play with a backhand flip to the shortstop.

The Mets have “a viable alternative from within the organization” to succeed Murphy at second base, general manager Sandy Alderson told reporters last fall, referring to Herrera.

Herrera’s homer on Friday bounced off the left field wall and rolled to the foul line. He churned around the bases and dove head first across home plate.