liars, lawyers, Clemens, and the Hall

On Monday, Roger Clemens was acquitted. He had been accused of lying to Congress about his use of illegal drugs. Clemens has adamantly refused to acknowledge that he took performance enhancing drugs.  The government felt this was disingenuous and his repeated insistence to congress was a punishable crime.

During the last two days I have read some articles and heard sports commentary suggesting that it is a good thing that Roger Clemens was acquitted, but that his acquittal will not remove the obstacles that he faces in getting into the Hall of Fame. The argument apparently is that despite the jury's decision, the truth is that Clemens took the drugs to enhance performance.  Therefore his success as a player--which would  be the criterion for Hall of Fame admission--is so asterisked as to render him not sufficiently outstanding to be among the top echelon admitted to the Hall of Fame.

There is an article in today's Globe entitled, Clemens acquittal is justice served, which essentially makes these points. He should have been acquitted, but the Hall is another matter. There are a number of claims made in the article and in other communications arguing this point, that I find problematic.

The first is that lying to Congress about taking drugs is not enough of a big deal to warrant the government wasting resources prosecuting Roger Clemens. A corollary is that if he had lost, then he would have gone to jail costing taxpayers money which could go elsewhere.

I could not disagree more.  The use of performance enhancing drugs in sport is a problem. It is a problem primarily because there are those who don't take them and did not take them because it was illegal to do so.  Those that played by the rules were disadvantaged by playing by the rules.  The interest in sport lives and dies on the belief that the game is on the up and up.  People follow baseball statistics and can cite all time home run and rbi champions like most of us can recite our ABCs.  Is Barry Bonds really the home run king if he used drugs and Henry Aaron did not? How long will people care about sport statistics if the statistics are looked upon with skepticism.

As significantly, the screaming message advanced by cheering for Clemens's acquittal for any other reason than because he had, in fact, been telling the truth, is that cheating is condonable as long as you can get away with it.  I don't think this is a good message to promulgate especially when so many people who follow the game are kids.  The acquittal in the Clemens case informs the next generation that honesty is not actually the best policy.

I have also read that Clemens deserves to be acquitted because his lawyer was more effective than the prosecutor.  I am not sure I have heard a more fallacious argument in a while.  There is an old quip that a court case is held to determine who has the better lawyer. It may be, in actuality, that a not guilty verdict is more dependent on the quality of your representative, than the integrity of the evidence.  But to proclaim that Clemens deserved to be acquitted BECAUSE he had the better lawyer and because that lawyer was able to poke holes in the testimony of Clemens's chief accuser, seems, as my grandfather was wont to say, ridikalus.

A liar does not become a truth teller because she or he has an agent who can convince a body that she or he is telling the truth.  Liars are liars if they lie. If people argue that Clemens will not get in the Hall of Fame because he lied regardless of the jury's decision, then Clemens acquittal was NOT Justice Served.

I don't know for sure if Clemens told the truth or not.  I do know that he was a slim fellow when he started pitching for the Red Sox. Then he became a big fellow. Personally, I doubt that it was pizza and beer that tipped the scales.  Regardless, Clemens's acquittal should only be celebrated if he was innocent.

food deprived rat

I lived in a traditional dormitory during my freshman year.  Two beds in a room, two desks, small bureaus for clothes, a couple of closets and a roommate. There was a long corridor with about twenty of such rooms on either side and a common bathroom/shower area.

 I roomed with a studious fellow who hit the books hard studying to be a Biology major.   He is now a very rich man but not because of his work in the lab.  My roommate, a regular consumer of submarine sandwiches sold at a well frequented shop near the dorm, figured there were many consumers like himself, and now owns 25 sandwich shops.

Regularly guys from other rooms would barge into others' rooms relaying one saga or another.  Walk down the corridor at any time after dinner and you'd find clusters of guys shooting the breeze often in an attempt to avoid studying.

One day a fellow comes by and tells us that we have to read an excerpt in his psychology text.  He says that we will not believe it.  The excerpt is a description of an experiment.  The experiment is an attempt to assess how rats will react to food deprivation.  There is a long and comprehensive description of two groups of rats placed in separate cages.  One group is fed regularly with food deposited inside its cage. The other group is deprived of food.  After an interval, food is placed outside of the cages and the rats are let out.

The group that has been fed regularly goes to the cheese and nibbles.  The group that has been deprived reacts to the cheese ravenously. They attack the food, jostle for position near the food, and devour it.

The description of the experiment ends with the following words in italics:  Therefore we may conclude that a food deprived rat, is a hungry rat. 


Now my roommate subsequently made a fortune on the premise that a food deprived student is a hungry student, but I don't think the psych text produced his entrepreneurial epiphany.  The three of us were cackling as we looked at the italicized words.  A food deprived rat is a hungry rat.   Heavy.

Today as I was making preliminary moves to get out of bed I heard a report on the news about a study that was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.  I subsequently went on line to read about it.  The study was about the effects of loneliness on longevity.  The conclusion was that loneliness was linked to premature death.

The researchers wrote that possible reasons for the correlation could be that people who lived alone had nobody urging them to go see a doctor, or that the reason people were living alone in the first place might relate to a professional or social trauma.  Yet, there is no physiological reason why being alone should increase the risk of premature death.  Apparently, though, it does.

Nothing really remarkable about the conclusion.  When I heard the story this morning the first words that came to my half asleep head were a food deprived rat is a hungry rat.  Humans are nourished not only by the foodstuffs we consume but the natural interactions we have with others.  Life 101.

In a way sports provides a community for fans.  People look forward to going to the ball park not just to see a game, but to be with like minded others.  How attractive would it be to go to the game tonight in Miami if you were going to be the only person in attendance?  Would it be more attractive to attend if you knew the place would be packed with crazies like yourself.  A buddy of mine swears that his grandfather died when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.  Sports and teams can be companions for us and it is one of the reason fans follow sports.  

Terry, The Killing, and the Heat

Terry did it.

Last year, in the spring of 2011, we got hooked on the AMC serial called The Killing.  Every Sunday night we scheduled our day so that we could be seated at 9pm to see who had killed Rosie Larsen. In June of 2011, on the night when the last episode of the season was aired, the show had me thinking in the shower about who could be the doer.  The producers slicked us, however, not solving the mystery for a year, and in April 0f 2012 the show began again engaging us by introducing one red herring after another.   Last night, we found out who did it.

Terry did it.  

She did it for the same reason that there is no business like show business, Hallmark exists, Father's and Mother's Day can be joyful or painful, the Russian five year plans failed year after year, and your heart can break when love is unrequited. She did it for the same reason there are season ticket holders in sports, the people of Oklahoma City slept poorly last night, and people in Boston at 9 a.m. call in to sports talk shows worried about when Becket will come off the disabled list.

Terry did it because emotion runs our show. Logic is a dependent variable; what fuels the rationale for alleged logical decisions, is almost always emotion.  We decide to live in one place or another; we choose professions; we buy clothing or cars or plan trips--the driving factor for our decision making is emotion.  That is why Terry did it.  A completely irrational act.  Maybe then Ames will love her.  Maybe then Ames will want to spend time with her.

At the same time we found out that Terry did it, the Heat was overcoming a ten point deficit in the third quarter.  If you have not been watching the finals , take some time out to do so.  LeBron James is making ignoramuses out of people who feel he does not have the backbone to be a champion.  Even on his off day Kevin Durant makes shots that are other worldly. The players are just so remarkably talented. The teams are stacked with skilled players and are essentially evenly talented.

Emotion will determine the victor. The ability to channel emotional energy wisely will determine who wins the series.  Either team is capable. Sure, the strategies and substitutions will be significant.  Miami seemed to employ a very wise game plan last night getting many baskets in the paint.  But both teams are well coached.  What will determine the victory will be how players deal with emotional energy.


Terry did it, because she loved so much, however irrationally.  The Heat won last night because they used the fan support in Miami and were able to channel their emotional energy to play intelligently.  Emotion runs the show.

The Beginner's Goodbye- Anne Tyler--Review

"In a way it's like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It's still there, but the sharpest edges are...muffled sort of. Then every now and then, I lift a corner of the blanket, just to check and--whoa! Like a knife! I'm not sure that ever will change."

Aaron Woolcott says this. He is the main character in Anne Tyler's latest novel, The Beginner's Goodbye.  In the first few pages of the book, we read that Aaron's wife had died in an accident.  The excerpt above is part of a conversation Aaron has with a colleague.  It is a while since Dorothy (the wife) has passed and the colleague asks Aaron how he is doing.  I don't think one has to lose a spouse to identify with that feeling.  

The book is about how Aaron copes with the loss.  Aaron and his sister own a family publishing business.  A successful component for the company is a series of thin volumes that superficially address popular issues. The series is called, "The Beginner's..." For example,  The Beginner's Guide to Marriage, The Beginner's Kitchen, The Beginner's Book of Birdwatching.   This novel, The Beginner's Goodbye,  is itself a thin novel (198 pages) and is, in a way, a beginner's guide to emotional loss as if Aaron's experience is an illustration of the inevitable stages.

I am a fan of Anne Tyler and enjoyed the read.  Not as good as Noah's Compass or a Patchwork Planet, or The Accidental Tourist, and probably not the book you want to be reading if your spouse has indeed left this life very recently. Still very good.  Tyler's characters are quirky yet we all know them.  The descriptions and dialogue are--as it is currently said by people twenty years my junior--spot on.  The excerpt that begins this post is an example. If you reread it, I think you will be able to identify a time when that sensation described exactly how you felt.

game 2

A large lead at the beginning of a basketball game often is no indication that the contest is over.  Usually--unless the teams are mismatched from the start--large leads evaporate sometime well before the final moments of a game.

Last night was atypical.  The Miami Heat went out to a huge lead and it was not until the final seconds when the Thunder put themselves in a position to contest the outcome.  Those who stayed up late to watch the end know that the Heat withstood the heat and prevailed.

LeBron James detractors and people like myself who wondered about his backbone need to reconsider their positions in light of what James has done in the last few games.  Last night, James made spectacular shots throughout and when the Thunder, with its fans screaming maniacally, put the pressure on, LeBron hit a beautiful (and contested) bank shot and then proceeded to hit two foul shots that barely grazed the net they were so perfectly aimed.

I've mentioned before that when I used to play tennis competitively I thought that if I could get my opponent to crunch time, then the victor would not be the person with the better game, but the player with the stronger spine.   This was not a 7th game, but had the Heat lost, it would have been very difficult for them to prevail in this series even with three home games looming.  If the Heat had lost they would have had to live with a second consecutive game when they lost a lead, this time having lost the lead in the last minute by falling apart.  So when James hit the bank shot and then the fouls, it was time for me to think this fellow might have not only talent, but it.  

Some other comments:

(1) My dad wrote to me this morning and remarked that Kevin Durant shoots threes like he (my father) used to shoot layups.  Very true.  Durant flicks them up as if they are effortless.

(2) It surprises me how many times we see a Heat player berating teammate Mario Chalmers.  I wonder if there is a pecking system on the Heat where the aristocracy of the big three--or at least Bosh and James--feel privileged to openly criticize the proletariat. This is not a good thing.

(3) If Battier stops hitting threes and Miller does not pick up that slack, I do not see the Heat winning more than one more game in this series.

(4) Basketball players are the best athletes in the world.  It is just jaw dropping stuff to see Russell Westbrook drive to the basket and make an acrobat like Dwyane Wade look second tier.

(5) When I listen to the coaches' comments during timeouts, I can't find much in terms of valuable wisdom contained in their talks.  It sounds as if they all have attended a cliche workshop as part of their training.

Van Gundy and Intangibles

There was an exchange on Tuesday night between Mike Breen and Jeff Van Gundy, the excellent commentators who are doing the NBA championship series. The exchange was related to "intangibles." Van Gundy was commenting that some player "intangible" was really tangible.

It's common to hear broadcasters and pundits of all media stripes talk about an athlete's intangible abilities. Typically, they are referring to abilities that are not regularly quantified.  You can count someone's rebounds per game, assists, foul shooting percentage, three pointers, and steals.  Those who speak of intangibles refer to non quantifiable capabilities.  For example, ability to bring about team cohesion.

I can understand how the label got its traction, but I believe that many of the factors that are called "intangibles" may well be as tangible as those that have been quantified. Moreover, these so called intangibles are likely to be more significant than the tangibles.

There is a new statistic that has emerged, the plus/minus.  The plus minus refers to the "score" while you were on the court.  So if you played 27 minutes of a basketball game, and your team scored four more points during these 27 minutes than the opponent you would be a +4.  Because of this statistic something that once was an "intangible" has become quantifiable.  How does a player contribute to the overall goal of winning a game?  Maybe what the player does is set screens well, dive for loose balls, help on defense thwarting a drive that forces the opponent to pass the ball away.  These are all tangible. It depends on what you decide to count and determining a reliable way to do the counting.  Even if you cannot find a reliable way, it does not make the action intangible, just not statistically quantifiable.

In general, I believe that assessors of team sports do not do a good job of deconstructing success into its likely elements.  If I look at how many baskets a player scores and how many rebounds, and do not look at the plus/minus maybe I am looking the wrong way.  Some examples of factors that were or are not quantified but can affect success:

When Paul Silas played for the Celtics I am not sure the statisticians counted offensive vs defensive rebounds.  Silas was the best offensive rebounder I ever saw, better than Rodman.  An offensive rebound provides your team with an extra possession. If you score on a certain percentage of possessions, and you get more possessions because you have a Paul Silas on your team, then that is a very important statistic to consider.

Carmelo Anthony is a terrific player, but if everyone else on the court stands around playing jacks while he does his one on one moves, then the players who are stagnating will not force the defenders to move much, which may tire them less, which may allow for a shooter on the opposing team to have more legs in the fourth quarter to elevate for the jump shot.  So Anthony scores 40, but it is possible that his one on one style results in a deficit.

In team sports what are called intangibles are really those components to success that have not been identified clearly yet.  We don't know what we don't know and it is arrogant to think that what we do know and what we can count is all that there is.

Love is different. In South Pacific, Rodgers and Hammerstein write about love, "Who can explain it, who can tell you why. Fools give you reasons. Wise men never try."  In sports, you can explain it, but you can't assume that what has been counted or can be easily counted will be wholly explanatory. There are likely other tangibles.

Analogies

In high school most of us took the SAT exams. SAT stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test. The exams, at least then, consisted of reading comprehension, math skills, and vocabulary.

I am a reader now and read then, but had difficulty concentrating on the reading comprehension portion of the SAT. The selections often dealt with something so beyond my world and uninteresting-- for example a species of pelican that sleep only on Tuesdays--that by the time I got to the end of a selection I could not remember that the mother pelican typically was a lefty so I had a hard time answering the important questions.  

The math for me was fun.  Always good with numbers, those questions were easy and I enjoyed trying to figure them out. Occasionally when I am in the library I pick up the SAT preparation books to try my hand at the math questions therein.

The most challenging portion of the test was the vocabulary portion. The comprehension was only challenging to the extent that I was challenged to stay awake during the selection. The math, as I wrote, was more like doing Sudoku than an academic exercise. The vocabulary though was something else.

Then, if not now, the vocabulary consisted mostly of a series of word analogies.  Winter is to Cold as X is to Y, and you had to pick out Summer is to Hot from a list of four choices. However, the questions were not nearly this easy. Often the words themselves were alien to me, but even when I knew them the trick was to understand the relationship.  So, resilient is to vulnerable would require that you could identify the relationship between resilient and vulnerable.  So it could be, someone who is resilient is less likely to be vulnerable and you had to pick out a similar pairing.  This could become very difficult and was made even more challenging because the test writers threw in questions in which the relationship had nothing to do with word meanings.  You might get kook is to civic and spend time thinking that the relationship is that a kook does not have an understanding of civic responsibilities, when the correct relationship/answer was another pairing in which both words, like kook and civic, were palindromes.  There was one I recall where the answer to "berry is to cherry" was not two words representing two types within the same category, but two words like lunch and crunch because the relationship was the rhyme.

I would find these questions exhausting, but I do see the merit in assessing one's ability to think about relationships between words and/or concepts.

Last night while I was watching the Heat succumb to the Thunder analogies came to mind.  Durant is to James as James is to Pierce.  Thunder is to creative as Heat is to staid;  Westbrook is to today as Wade is to yesterday.

These analogies do not do real justice to the quality of the Miami Heat. The Heat players are terrific, but I could not get over how good Durant and Westbrook were and how out of this world athletic the Thunder seemed to be.  When the Celtics played the Heat, Paul Pierce looked like an old man compared to LeBron James. LeBron James despite his incredible skill, looked long in the tooth compared to Durant. Dwyane Wade is a joy to watch but he too looked old school to Westbrook who had me shaking my head over and over.

One game does not a championship series make, but unless there is an injury or last night was a grand aberration, Thunder is to Plunder, as Heat is to Beat