Bad Teams Overcoming Badness With Good Coaching

Lacking the height and weight of an offensive lineman, and also other subtly related or possibly fictitious physical advantages – good wrist-ankle coordination, a high liver-to-brain ratio, etc. - I must confine my athletic fantasies to the purely cerebral. One of them has to do with coaching, not that I ever want to do anything like that. I can understand that with some competitive activities – like combat, or football – the guy who shouts a lot and has a whistle on a chain around his neck can only do so much. The game, or more exactly the game’s plays, entail speed and strength and mass and impact, and at some point it just doesn’t matter how feverish or menacing the entreaties from the sidelines are.

Still, there are, uh, leaders of men who really do turn around teams’ fortunes quite quickly. Jim Harbaugh has done that with nearly every employer he’s had; I think Bill Parcells did too; and now there’s Curt Cignetti at Indiana. I gather that at least for the first two men, there were rapid-to-instant improvements with largely unchanged personnel. Whoever was running the team before these guys may have been terribly misusing what were in fact valuable human resources. (“Student-athletes” on the other hand hardly hang around, so Mr. Cignetti’s feat may be of a different nature.)

Now that I think about it, maybe Gil Hodges worked similar magic with the Mets in the late 1960s. They went rather abruptly from last place to first. So did both teams that played in the 1991 World Series. I leave it to the motivated reader – and in sports, every reader usually is – to examine in detail the Twins and the Braves and their, uh, corporate cultures. I think however that even the unmotivated, sports-are-just-stoopid reader will agree that, sometimes, it’s who’s in charge that makes almost all the difference. My question now is whether that is reproducible, within games or across leagues.

It is not obvious what sport would lend itself to clever or inspiring leadership getting more out of inferior players. What may be needed is not really fire-breathing as much as X’s-and-O’s. Scheming, they call it in football. Although in baseball the grosser forms of the defensive shift are now out, there can still be some nuanced and complex repositioning of players on the diamond and in the outfield. Well, there always has been, if you count the McCovey Shift, but I bet nowadays this is an art that has got vastly more sophisticated.

I’m really no more qualified to speak on baseball than on football – the main idea I got from reading Jim Bouton's Ball Four was that I just don’t drink enough beer – so instead, I’ll venture an idea on yet another sport: girls’ softball. Once – just once – I watched a game on a motel TV. (Then again, once – just once – I saw lacrosse on a motel TV. I sort of miss those long drives between Texas and South Carolina.) I had of course played softball, but never seen the really competitive version. It, or this, was indeed that. I had no idea anyone could throw a ball underhand at 70 mph! And so it occurs to me that this game, at this level, might be a good one for coaching to flourish. It’s a physical one but not a contact one. And it’s episodic, with a set-up of personnel before each such episode. Perhaps most germane to my point, it may be underexamined. If you study enough film, you may be able to propose unprecedented plays.

On the other hand, let’s not get too carried away. Ultimately, athletic skill is what matters. And even (or especially) in female sports, an old idea is old for a reason: good teams soon copy it or overcome it.

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Unrelated sports news, which isn’t even news since I think I saw it the summer before last: one afternoon I was bicycling by a coed softball game and in the time it took me to pedal parallel to the first-base foul line from short right field to the coach’s box, someone stole home! That was so cool. It was also close: the pitcher and the catcher reacted smoothly. The umpire was not caught unawares, nor were the spectators.

And one more thing: I did see, on TV, some Australian rules football. The women’s game. Could’ve been the Hawthorn-Carlton one, though the date is a bit off. Maybe the show was a recording. But it was notable all the same. The score was lopsided, which I thought wasn’t supposed to happen. (Whatever I saw had been in its early phases even more imbalanced. I do not know if this sport accommodates or indulges the idea of "garbage time.") As for the interpretation or rather enforcement of the rule against running farther than 5 meters with the ball, I remain uncertain. Maybe it’s different for the ladies? In whatever version, though, I think you’re obliged to kick or punch the ball away, never throw it, and sooner rather than later.

This is stuff which really needs to be in newspapers. Reading it off a screen just doesn’t work.