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High today, here: 19. Dewpoint then: 15. High dewpoint: 15.
High today in TO: 17. Dewpoint then: 15. High dewpoint: 15.
Low today on the balcony: 15. High: 20.6. Currently: 15.
In other news, with the elimination of the Buffalo Sabres, I have clinched a sub-.500 record for this year's playoff predictions: I'm currently 6-for-14. This, at least, ties me with TSN talking head Pierre McGuire, but it leaves me hardly even in the dust of Maggie the Macaque. I'd really like to see a study on how well the experts do at picking the winners. It's striking how badly the football guys in the papers seem to do; the guy in the Star never seems to be much above .500, and often seems to be well below.
At the CPA reception, I was telling one of my fellow recent York PhD escapees, who's also a CFL fan from Saskatchewan and sometime flag football coach, about that exchange in the Journal for the Philosophy of Sports about the ethics of intentional fouling. He told me that he once had one of his kids, who was in the clear and about to score a go-ahead touchdown on the third-last play of the game--when flag football gets inside a minute left, or something, he says, you play three plays instead of counting down the time--when it occurred to him that, if the kid scored, the other team would get the ball back, and, it being very easy to score in flag football, would pretty likely score a touchdown to go back ahead and win. So he yelled at the kid: "FALL DOWN!" And the kid somehow got the message not only that he wanted him to fall down, but that this was actually a good idea. And so he fell down, on the one yard line. On the next play, they spiked the ball, and on the last play, they ran it in for the winning touchdown.
Now, this sort of strategy bears a certain similarity to intentionally fouling in the last minute of a basketball game, except that it doesn't involve the violation of any rule. Yet it seems worse than intentionally fouling in basketball (in that intentionally fouling in basketball doesn't seem bad at all to just about anybody except that guy in J Phil Sports, whereas that flag football play strikes me as evil). Probably, in large part, that's because kids are involved, but even so, that flag football play seems worse than having kids intentionally foul in basketball.
I'm really not sure whether having kids intentionally foul in basketball is, on the whole, ethically objectionable or not. But here's the thing: that guy told me about another play that he once ran, which was essentially a football version of the hidden ball trick--the centre surreptitiously hands the ball to the quarterback, who hands it off before the other team knows the play has started. And he said he'd never do that again; it was too evil. I think I tried the hidden ball trick about three times when I played baseball. The first time, it got a balk called on our pitcher, because he went on the mound without the ball, and he's not allowed to do that. After that, I did it twice successfully. But it pissed everyone off--especially the last time, because it ended the game. Basically everyone--at least, everyone who cared one way or another--seemed to think I shouldn't have done it, that it was basically cheating, even though it does not, of course, involve the violation of any rule.
More than that: there's a history of it in the game; it's part of baseball tradition, though an esoteric part. That's, after all, why it has a name. It's like, say, the flea-flicker--though a better analogy might be the fumblerooski. (I didn't know, until I just wikipediaed those, that Joe Theisman had his leg broken on a flea-flicker, and that the fumblerooski is banned in American football. One of the weirdest things I ever saw in a football game was in the Canadian university championship game (the Vanier Cup) sometime around 1991, when a team ran the fumblerooski successfully but had it called back on a penalty for failing to notify the officials that they were running a fumblerooski. It's just pretty damn weird to see the ref stand there and say "fumblerooski" with a straight face. Anyway, the banning of the fumblerooski is yet another logical outrage of (North) American football. (Baseball, I think, is guilty of two logical outrages: the infield fly rule, and the third-strike-clean-catch rule. The latter I've never been able to begin to make sense of, which leads me to suspect that maybe there is some logic to it that I just haven't seen, whereas the former is just an artificial mechanism to make the game "fairer".)
And this is why I think there's no question about the ethics of intentionally fouling in the last minute of a basketball game, or hooking a guy from behind when he's on a breakaway (which, actually, can lead to some even more remarkable plays, when the guy scores anyway (see, e.g., Alexander Ovechkin), not to mention the fact that everyone loves a penalty shot), or the hidden ball trick, or the fumblerooski in Canadian football, but there is about intentionally falling down in flag football: all but the last are part of the game.
High today in TO: 17. Dewpoint then: 15. High dewpoint: 15.
Low today on the balcony: 15. High: 20.6. Currently: 15.
In other news, with the elimination of the Buffalo Sabres, I have clinched a sub-.500 record for this year's playoff predictions: I'm currently 6-for-14. This, at least, ties me with TSN talking head Pierre McGuire, but it leaves me hardly even in the dust of Maggie the Macaque. I'd really like to see a study on how well the experts do at picking the winners. It's striking how badly the football guys in the papers seem to do; the guy in the Star never seems to be much above .500, and often seems to be well below.
At the CPA reception, I was telling one of my fellow recent York PhD escapees, who's also a CFL fan from Saskatchewan and sometime flag football coach, about that exchange in the Journal for the Philosophy of Sports about the ethics of intentional fouling. He told me that he once had one of his kids, who was in the clear and about to score a go-ahead touchdown on the third-last play of the game--when flag football gets inside a minute left, or something, he says, you play three plays instead of counting down the time--when it occurred to him that, if the kid scored, the other team would get the ball back, and, it being very easy to score in flag football, would pretty likely score a touchdown to go back ahead and win. So he yelled at the kid: "FALL DOWN!" And the kid somehow got the message not only that he wanted him to fall down, but that this was actually a good idea. And so he fell down, on the one yard line. On the next play, they spiked the ball, and on the last play, they ran it in for the winning touchdown.
Now, this sort of strategy bears a certain similarity to intentionally fouling in the last minute of a basketball game, except that it doesn't involve the violation of any rule. Yet it seems worse than intentionally fouling in basketball (in that intentionally fouling in basketball doesn't seem bad at all to just about anybody except that guy in J Phil Sports, whereas that flag football play strikes me as evil). Probably, in large part, that's because kids are involved, but even so, that flag football play seems worse than having kids intentionally foul in basketball.
I'm really not sure whether having kids intentionally foul in basketball is, on the whole, ethically objectionable or not. But here's the thing: that guy told me about another play that he once ran, which was essentially a football version of the hidden ball trick--the centre surreptitiously hands the ball to the quarterback, who hands it off before the other team knows the play has started. And he said he'd never do that again; it was too evil. I think I tried the hidden ball trick about three times when I played baseball. The first time, it got a balk called on our pitcher, because he went on the mound without the ball, and he's not allowed to do that. After that, I did it twice successfully. But it pissed everyone off--especially the last time, because it ended the game. Basically everyone--at least, everyone who cared one way or another--seemed to think I shouldn't have done it, that it was basically cheating, even though it does not, of course, involve the violation of any rule.
More than that: there's a history of it in the game; it's part of baseball tradition, though an esoteric part. That's, after all, why it has a name. It's like, say, the flea-flicker--though a better analogy might be the fumblerooski. (I didn't know, until I just wikipediaed those, that Joe Theisman had his leg broken on a flea-flicker, and that the fumblerooski is banned in American football. One of the weirdest things I ever saw in a football game was in the Canadian university championship game (the Vanier Cup) sometime around 1991, when a team ran the fumblerooski successfully but had it called back on a penalty for failing to notify the officials that they were running a fumblerooski. It's just pretty damn weird to see the ref stand there and say "fumblerooski" with a straight face. Anyway, the banning of the fumblerooski is yet another logical outrage of (North) American football. (Baseball, I think, is guilty of two logical outrages: the infield fly rule, and the third-strike-clean-catch rule. The latter I've never been able to begin to make sense of, which leads me to suspect that maybe there is some logic to it that I just haven't seen, whereas the former is just an artificial mechanism to make the game "fairer".)
And this is why I think there's no question about the ethics of intentionally fouling in the last minute of a basketball game, or hooking a guy from behind when he's on a breakaway (which, actually, can lead to some even more remarkable plays, when the guy scores anyway (see, e.g., Alexander Ovechkin), not to mention the fact that everyone loves a penalty shot), or the hidden ball trick, or the fumblerooski in Canadian football, but there is about intentionally falling down in flag football: all but the last are part of the game.
