How To Be A Pro, from 42 to Augusta to Bracketology

Three-Dot Tuesday 4.15

Who is this player? He’s a foot taller than everybody else and he’s a Yankee. (photo by author)

April 15^th is the anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in the big leagues in 1947, and all MLB players wear 42 to honor the man. This is also a great way to tell which MLB broadcasters are actually doing their homework, and which might be, shall we say, a little lax. For when everybody is wearing the same number, you can’t rely on identifying a player that way…

One of the first unofficial rules of being a good pro broadcaster in any sport is being able to recognize a player without looking at the number on the jersey. Sometimes the number is obscured and as a play-by-play person your job is to get it right the first time, so you have to learn to identify players in other ways. How they wear their socks, whether they’re a foot taller or shorter than everybody else- Aaron Judge is pretty easy to spot even when all the Yankees are wearing the same number (that’s him in the photo at the top if you weren’t sure)- and so on. (There are some pretty funny recordings of national football broadcasters back in the days of radio-only yelling “and so and so laterals to (correct player)” to correct their mistake midway through.)

So, this is the day to check and see if your people are professionals. If there’s a delay in identifying players that’s longer than usual, well then, maybe they haven’t quite studied as hard as they should. But chances are really excellent that if you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t notice a difference. And that’s the sign of a pro…

The most likely time today a broadcaster will admit they’re not sure is when a relief pitcher is warming up in the bullpen. But then, in these days of roster churn they might not be sure who’s warming up even when everybody is wearing their regular numbers. We can give them a pass on that one.

The NHL regular season ends this week, and for the first time ever, all four U.S “Original Six” teams- the Boston Bruins, New York Rangers, Chicago Blackhawks and Detroit Red Wings- will miss the playoffs.

(We will only take the time to note here that the phrase “Original Six” is absurdly incorrect, considering that the NHL was not founded with those six teams, and there were many more teams in early incarnations of the league before those Six- those U.S. teams plus the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs- were the only NHL clubs for 25 years, from 1942 to 1967.)

The Golden State Warriors finished at 48-34 this season, a record that usually is close to being considered pretty danged good, but this season is only good enough for 7^th place in the NBA’s Western Conference and puts the Warriors in the play-in, meaning they still have to win one more game to make the official playoff tournament (the first chance is against Memphis on Tuesday night).

A regular reader of this column insisted I mention that an NBA team with a worse record than the Warriors had this season has gone on to win the NBA championship- the 1994-’95 Houston Rockets, who finished 47-35 and were the 6^th seed.

The one thing that must be noted about those Rockets- they were the defending NBA champs and made a big mid-season trade to shake up their roster- getting Clyde Drexler from the Portland Trailblazers so he could team up with former college teammate Hakeem Olajuwon…

Kind of like the Warriors shaking things up by acquiring Jimmy Butler this season? The same Jimmy Butler who led the Miami Heat from the play-in tournament to the NBA Finals a few years ago?

Yeah, kind of. And who would the Warriors play in the first round if they win on Tuesday? Why, the Houston Rockets, of course…

Let’s get one thing out of the way here: golf courses are a tremendous waste of space and resources. They all require an absurd amount of chemicals and water to make the grass grow- and then slice that fast-growing turf to the bare nubs. It would be like engineering a slinky that could jump 30 feet, and then doing everything possible to make sure it could only go a foot…

And that “nature all around?” The heavy hand of man is evident on a golf course everywhere you look, from the perfectly manicured flowers and hedges to the trees and pathways lining the course. Golf courses are about as natural as plastic surgery.

All that said… Rory McIlroy’s long-time coming Masters victory to become just the 6^th man in modern history to complete the Grand Slam was a tremendous individual thing.

In truth, he is the 7^th man to complete what we now call the “Grand Slam” in golf. That’s winning all four majors at one point in your career- the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship, the original Open (aka the British Open) and the Masters. The first man to actually accomplish the feat was Bobby Jones, who in 1930 won all four of the then-majors: the U.S. Open and Amateur, and the British Open and Amateur…

And then all Jones did after that was create a golf course outside of Atlanta in the early 1930’s and invite all his good golf-playing pals to come play in a tournament every year. You know this little shindig as The Masters. Yeah, creating the most prestigious major championship of them all because you felt like building a golf course and having a tournament AND being the first man to actually win the “Grand Slam” before it was even considered a thing should really get him on the list…

Bobby Jones, 20 years before inventing The Masters (courtesy: LOC/Bain Collection)

Curiously, the man who helped popularize the term “Grand Slam” never completed the career accomplishment. In 1960 Arnold Palmer won both the Masters and U.S. Open, and on the way to St. Andrews for the Open chatted with some newspaper guys and decided that winning all four would be a Grand Slam. I’m sure they were all completely sober at the time. Anyway, Palmer never won the PGA Championship and therefore never completed the Slam…

McIlroy completing the Slam gives me another excuse to tell this story: In 2009 I was in Phoenix for spring training. Some of the fellows in the group were big golfers and went out to watch the tournament that was being played there instead of a couple of the games. I have always told the story as being the big rowdy Phoenix Open, but I looked it up today and it was actually the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship.

Anyway, I had recently seen “Tin Cup” on teevee again, with Kevin Costner playing Roy McAvoy, before heading to Phoenix. So, when the guys came back from the tournament and were talking about who they had seen play and mentioned the best guy they had seen play that they didn’t know anything about before then was “Rory McIlroy,” I interrupted and said, “Wait, Rory McIlroy and not Roy McAvoy???!!!” Being golf guys, they knew exactly who I was referencing. I became a Rory fan that day, because that’s a good enough reason as any. Rory ended up losing in the finals of his bracket to Geoff Ogilvy, who went on to win the tournament- and only won two more tournaments in his entire career after that. Rory has done significantly better, and is now one of the all-time golf pros…

Somehow, Rory winning the Masters was only the second-best sports news I heard this week. As a human with empathy, I generally do not want to see anybody lose their job, right? These are people with families and hopes and dreams, etc. Wanting to see somebody get kicked out and then being glad that they did get canned is not nice. We can all agree on that.

Now, preamble over: The worst men’s NCAA tournament bracketologist of all time with a major platform is losing his job, and it’s not a moment too $%#&ing soon.

Bracketology, as a quick reminder, is predicting which teams will make the men’s NCAA tournament, by saying which team will be in what seed- from 1-16, for four different 16-team pods- plus eight play-in tournament teams. Therefore every time you publish a bracket, you’re predicting which 68 teams will make the field and where they will be seeded.

Jerry Palm was the staff bracketologist for CBS Sports. As a consequence, Palm’s predictions (or the ones made by a staff that his name was attached to), were seen more prominently than most other people. The problem was his predictions were generally absolutely garbage. And he is now leaving CBS Sports to do… hopefully not this any more.

This is not a joke: Jerry Palm was worse at his paid bracketology job than a group of high schoolers doing bracketology as an elective class.

Delphi High School in Indiana does bracketology as an elective. They got 50 of the 68 NCAA tournament teams completely correct- team and seed- for this season. (The average, according to BracketMatrix.com, was 52, with nobody getting more than 57.) Nobody got all 68 teams in part because none of the “experts” thought North Carolina would make the field (they ignored the money that putting Tar Heel basketball in the tournament would generate, but I saw coming it a mile away).

Jerry Palm got 39 correct. That’s right. The man paid to make brackets was much, much worse that a group of kids who are still on learner’s permits.

So yeah, he had to go. He was not the pro he was paid to be, and it was pretty easy to see. You didn’t need every player wearing the same number to figure that one out.

photo by author, last year on Jackie Robinson Day in Toronto.