Category: Sports

NU football and sports journalism

football_20091123Football has never been a big deal at Northeastern. Still, it’s a surprise to see the program canceled just a couple of years after it survived a major review. (Huntington News coverage; Boston Globe story and Dan Shaughnessy column; Boston Herald story.)

From my parochial perspective, I feel bad that aspiring sportswriters in our School of Journalism will no longer have a football team to cover. Yes, there will still be plenty of sports news. But football is a big part of what our student newspaper, the Huntington News, does every fall.

I’m not just an employee of Northeastern; I’m also an alumnus. During the 1970s, when I was a student, I probably went to three or four football games, either as a member of the band or to tag along with the future Mrs. Media Nation, a photographer for the News.

As Northeastern has become more of a residential university, sports in general have become more important on campus. Football, though, could never compete — certainly not with the hockey program.

Ironically, I went to graduate school at Boston University, which canceled its own football program more than a decade ago. (Honest — it’s not my fault.)

I guess the lesson is that football is so expensive that if you can’t do it big, like Boston College, you shouldn’t do it at all.

The Blutarsky theory of Red Sox futility

Blutto_20091013If you’re like me, you probably hadn’t thought about “Animal House” for many years, even though it is the greatest movie of all time.

So what were the odds of finding two Blutto Blutarsky references following the collapse of the 2009 Red Sox?

First, on Monday, the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy informed us, “In that moment, Papelbon was working on a string of 27 consecutive scoreless postseason innings. His career playoff ERA was John Blutarsky’s grade-point average: 0.00.”

Then, today, Gerry Callahan writes in the Boston Herald: “Guerrero flared a single to center, and just like that, the previous six months of Red Sox baseball was like Blutarsky’s seven years at Faber College: down the drain.”

Must be just a coincidence. (Thanks to Media Nation reader J.M.)

Wait till next year

The shocking truth was that I didn’t see today’s game. Weeks ago, I’d volunteered to lead a church hike through the Lynn Woods. I updated myself on the score several times on my BlackBerry, and made it back to the car just in time to hear the top of the ninth. Ugh.

Tonight, I punched up WEEI just in time to hear some bozo caller ranting that Jonathan Papelbon should be “run out of town.” Can you imagine? Fortunately, the hosts were having none of it. If the Red Sox had been able to hit during those first two games, Papelbon’s rare failure today wouldn’t have mattered so much. Pap’s performance looks a lot worse because others didn’t do their jobs.

Still, despite the holes on this team, if Papelbon had done what he almost always does, and if the Sox had won Game Four, all the pressure would have shifted to the Angels. Who knows what would have happened?

Not that they were going all the way. I agree with something the Boston Globe’s Chad Finn wrote on Twitter: “Bottom line: It’s a crushing way for the season to end, but once Beckett stopped dominating, had to figure a title wasn’t in the cards.”

Maybe the Red Sox need new fans: Just saw this, from Rob Bradford at WEEI.com. I had not realized that some fans were booing Papelbon. What a disgrace. Maybe the Sox need new fans even more than a mobile third baseman and a DH who can hit good pitching.

Red Sox by the numbers

The Boston Globe’s Adam Kilgore has the statistic I was looking for. The notion that the Red Sox can’t hit good pitching isn’t just a cliché — it’s actually true. Kilgore writes:

The Sox sputtered all season against frontline pitchers. Against the top 15 American League pitchers in ERA+, a stat that adjusts ERA for ballparks, the Red Sox hit .220 with a .266 on-base percentage and a .327 slugging percentage. The league average against those pitchers was .248, .292, and .387.

Next, one of my own favorite stats. The Sox ended the season 95-67, for a very respectable winning percentage of .586. It’s hard to believe they finished eight games out with a record like that, but that’s what happens when the Yankees sign the three best free agents on the market.

But if you eliminate the woeful Orioles, against whom the Sox were 16-2, then the Red Sox’ record for the year was 79-65, for a mediocre winning percentage of .549. Not that every team doesn’t have a cousin or two, but that’s ridiculous.

Granted, that still would have been good enough to get them into the post-season, and it’s better than Minnesota’s .534. But it is, perhaps, a more accurate measurement of their actual abilities.

The Sox still have a chance to prove us all wrong. But right now things don’t look good.

Getting ready for the stretch run

In Theo Epstein-like fashion, the Boston Globe is getting ready for the stretch drive by bolstering its sports staff.

Peter Abraham, who covers the (gasp!) Yankees for the Journal News, which serves the Lower Hudson Valley, is joining the Globe to cover the Red Sox for the paper and Boston.com. “I’m sure some of you will accuse me of being a traitor because I’ll be covering the Red Sox,” Abraham writes on his blog. Yet the comments are surprisingly kind.

And speaking of refugees from Yankee country, Matt Pepin of the Times Herald-Record [now fixed] of Middletown, N.Y., has been named the sports editor of Boston.com. He’ll join the staff on Oct. 5, just in time for the playoffs. Adam Reilly has the details.

Odd station out?

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. According to the Boston Globe’s Chad Finn, ESPN’s ratings- and signal-challenged Boston radio station, WAMG (AM 890), will shut down just as ESPN’s Boston Web site is making its debut.

But sports-radio ratings leader WEEI (AM 850), locked in a war with new sports station WBZ-FM (98.5 FM), will start carrying some of ESPN’s programming. Then, a few months from now, WEEI will match ‘BZ’s far better signal by moving to the FM dial. That, in turn, will open the way for ESPN to start a new Boston station at AM 850.

So ESPN goes from being number two in a two-station battle to number three in a three-station battle. It will have a better signal than it does now, but it will still be pretty lousy. And it will continue to deal with the challenge of not having any local professional games to carry.

Wow. Doesn’t sound smart to me.

On “Beat the Press” yesterday, ironically, we talked about how smart the folks are at ESPN, which is marking its 30th anniversary.

Earlier: “Optimism amid the newspaper gloom.”

Assessing the sports-talk competition

Bruce Allen has been paying far more attention to the sports-talk competition between WEEI (AM 850) and upstart WBZ-FM (98.5) than I have, and he’s got some interesting things to say. His bottom line: ‘BZ may not be firing on all cylinders yet, but ‘EEI finally has some competition on its hands.

I would love to see ‘EEI taken down a few notches, but here’s my problem. The Red Sox and the Celtics are on ‘EEI. The Patriots and the Bruins are on ‘BZ. I love baseball, prefer basketball to football, and actively dislike hockey. So I may wind up choosing WEEI more often than WBZ for reasons other than quality. (Via Universal Hub.)