Tag: sports

Four Umpires

JulianLeave a comment

Games require fairness. Fairness requires… Umpires?

Bottom of the ninth, tie game, runners on first and third, the coach signals for a new pitcher.

The Away team choruses from the first-base dugout: “You got this, Julian!” “Go get ’em, Julian!” (No relation.)

The new pitcher takes the mound. He has the wispy, windswept hair of an early-2000s teenage heartthrob, and just enough muscle to suggest he started working out when puberty hit a couple years ago. 

Julian throws his first warmup pitch.

A player walks from the third-base dugout to behind home plate. Maybe 15 years old. He accuses a woman old enough to be his mother: “Are you taking videos?” 

“No,” she replies. “You guys were [doing something she found objectionable].”

Julian throws his second warmup pitch. The boy continues the accusation: “Were you taking videos?” 

“No, just pictures.” She continues her explanation. 

“I don’t care.” The boy stomps back to third base. 

A third warmup pitch. The umpire calls the game back in play.

Julian straddles the mound. His neck swivels, unable to see the opposing players on first and third at the same time. The previous cheers have gone silent. Julian twitches his knee. Something catches his eye near first. He looks over at it.

“Bawk!” yells someone from the third base dugout. 

“Bawk!” the umpire agrees like a chorus of chickens. “He lifted his knee and put it back. That’s a bawk.”

“What’s a bawk?” Partner asks me. I start laughing. 

“What’s a bawk?” she repeats. 

“It’s…” I begin.

Suddenly, everything is happening at once. The umpire clears the path between third base and home, like he’s making way for prince Ali. The player touches home. His friends cheer. A tall man says “Excuse me” to someone beside us; he removes a sun-shaded phone from the fence, where it was probably recording or livestreaming the game. The umpire walks over to the Away team to explain the rule violation. A younger looking boy has both palms against his cheeks and mouth agape like a real life Scream. Someone says, “At least we gave them a hard fight.”

I turn to Partner and explain. “Basically, the pitcher isn’t allowed to trick the base runners. So there are a lot of very precise rules about what he can and can’t do. I think I’ve heard my father say ‘breaking the plane of the knee’ at some point, meaning you have to pitch immediately when you do that. If you break the rule, as punishment for your shenanigans, the players are awarded a free base.”

“And that’s called a bawk?”

“Yep. Spelled B-A-L-K.”

“Ballk.”

“Yeah, but pronounced like what a chicken says. Rhymes with ‘walk’.”

“Bawk.”

Fifteen minutes earlier, Partner and I arrived to the baseball fields. Four fields, spread out in this grassy oasis one third of the way from the top of Central Park.

Over the next hour, we will watch four ball games. The most notable play in every game will be by the umpire.

More Like Guidelines

The first players are either middleschool or highschool kids. Brown jerseys for the pitching team. No one on base. 

The pitcher throws a warm-up pitch. The ball bounces three feet before home plate; the catcher tosses it back.

The batter approaches the plate. The pitcher throws. This ball bounces too. “Ball,” says the umpire.

Partner and I watch eleven subsequent pitches. Some fly high, into the chainlink fence behind the catcher. Most bounce, like the first two. None cross home plate between the batter’s knees and shoulders. 

Dutifully, on each pitch, the umpire says “Ball” and the corresponding number.

One at a time, players populate the bases. After all twelve pitches are thrown, the bases are full.

The pitcher begins his windup. The batter steps out of the box. The pitcher stops. 

“That’s a balk!” the umpire shouts at the pitcher. “You can’t [I stop paying attention].”

“Let’s go to that game,” I say, gesturing across the field.

“Walk around or through?” Partner asks.

The umpire is walking back his previous position, calling it a “No pitch.” 

“We can walk through. He’s not going to throw anything hittable.”

Partner and I walk behind the third-base fence, then skirt into the outfield in foul territory. As we pass the left fielder, I notice the players on each base slowly advancing one base.

When a child has thrown twelve balls in a row, are you really going to call him out for a balk? Sometimes the spirit of the game calls for bending the rules. If a child pitcher can’t throw a single strike, that sounds like a rule problem. I’m reminded of the problems I experienced playing pony baseball: Stealing is legalized before any catcher has the arm to throw out the runners. A runner on first is effectively a runner on third. 

We walked to the baseball field where Julian would soon bawk, then continued toward the softball games.

The Competent Umpire of Slow-Pitch Softball

The softball game on our left looks competitive. The game on our right, less so. We go left.

The cocky third baseman nabs a line-drive one-handed. “Out.”

Partner and I walk behind home plate, where the umpire is chatting with an off-duty ump.

This umpire wears no mask nor padding. No padding for the catcher. Nor helmet for the batter. I learn something new about slow-pitch softball.

The next batter hits a ground ball toward third base. The third baseman fields the ball mid-stride and throws off-balance, clearly showing off.

The umpire calls “out,” then turns three-quarters of the way toward the fence behind him.

“I coulda played at Arizona,” the umpire continues. “A-S-U. Got a full ride. Said no. What did I know? I didn’t want to go to Arizona.”

He turns back to the game: “Ball.” 

He turns back to his friend: “I played everywhere. Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic…” Returning to the game: “Strike.” Returning to his friend: “Hawaii.”

I’m impressed by how he can both continue the conversation and accurately referee the game.

A batter waits just outside the batting box.

“Can we go?” asks the pitcher.

“I’m waiting for you,” the ump responds.

“I’m waiting for you,” says the batter.

“No you ain’t,” the ump responds.

As an unbiased observer at this game, I can confidently say: they were not, in fact, waiting for the umpire.

That Ain’t the Rules

Partner and I approach our final softball game of the day.

Ten kids in ragtag outfits and red pinnies, aged between 22 and 25, versus ten older guys, between 30 and 40, in matching jerseys.

The pinnies are having a blast — yelling and hollering, cheering among themselves.

The pitcher throws. Ball. Strike. The inning ends.

The pinnies take the field. I count ten players and seven gloves. 

“Don’t you have gloves?” the umpire says.

Someone shouts back, “No.”

Someone else says, “But it’s okay. We don’t need ’em.”

“You need gloves,” says the umpire.

I turn to Partner. “You definitely don’t need gloves. Gloves were only an early 1900s thing. I’m pretty sure they’re not required.”

Partner: “Might be a beer league thing.” (According to Partner, beer league is a type of casual softball where players drink beer in their dugouts between fielding.)

The older team lends three gloves to the pinnies.

Partner and I watch an inning or two. It’s riotous, raucous fun — all hijinks, everybody trying their best, but no pressure on winning.

One pitcher throws a ball that arcs around 13 feet high. The ump calls “strike three.” The batter taps the top of his head.

“That’s too high,” I say to Partner. “If it’s above 12 feet, it’s a ball.”

The ump says, “It bounced before the line. That’s a strike.”

The batter is out.

The game rapidly evolves into “Who can throw the highest pitch that still lands short of the line?” Some are clearly over 15 feet, landing at the front of the plate, and still being called as strikes.

I pull out my phone. In under ten seconds, I read aloud to Partner: “Four-to-ten-foot arc. Any pitch too high or too flat is a ball, unless the batter swings.”

The players are now chopping at pitches coming down above their heads. The game looks less like softball and more like swatting flies.

Yet, somehow, no one seems to mind.

Partner is getting cold. We’ll watch this final inning.

The pinnies are batting. Runners on every base.

The umpire yells something to one of the baserunners. Another pitch. “Ball.” Then the umpire yells, “He’s out! Three outs!”

I walk over to the third-base dugout. I ask one of the kids in pinnies: “How did that inning end?”

He tells me: “The ump said no leading off.” He gestures toward second base. “He wasn’t on the base, so he called him out.”

“And what about the pitches. Don’t they have to be under ten feet?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I don’t know the rules,” he tells me.

“How did you guys get to be here?”

“We went to college together. Seemed like a fun thing to do.”

I wonder what it would be like to play a game without knowing such fundamental information as What counts as a strike? and I should bring a glove.

Walking home, I give Partner my shirt to stay warm, and I’m struck by how much more fun the pinnie team was having than any other team we watched that day.

They don’t know that the ump ruined their game. So maybe… he didn’t.

Forced Play

JulianLeave a comment

You can lead a human to a game, and you can make them play. 

In his seminal work Finite and Infinite Games, James P Carse posits that mandated play is not play: 

  • “There is no finite game unless the players freely choose to play it. No one can play who is forced to play. It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.” (End of his section 2) 
  • In other words: Play is only play when it is voluntary. 

I think this position is wrong. 

Carse is using “game” to mean something more specific than a structural definition. He mandates a specific quality (voluntary play). I think he’s wrong to exclude from the category of “game” things that share the structure but lack the voluntariness. In short: Carse’s definition is too narrow because games are structural, not single-trait-necessitating. 

Okay, so what about some concepts that are unquestionably games? 

  • Commerce is a game. It contains points, players, and rules regulating play, semi-arbitrarily defined
    • It is also *real* in that you cannot avoid playing it regardless of your culture. (I suppose the archetypical “mountain man” could avoid playing it by homesteading all his resources, alone. We could say he has shifted to playing commerce with nature, but I think that’s a step too far.)

Either Carse is correct and this is not a game, or there is a slice of “game” uncovered by his articulation. 

Carse has a light, airy definition of game. Like many writers, he intuits that a game feels like child’s play. Carse would claim wargames are games while war is a not-game. 

I don’t buy this. 

Imagine someone playing chess against an opponent. These two are unquestionably playing a game. Now, imagine that the pieces represent actual movers on the field of battle: each time player one moves his rook, an actual cannon shifts its position on a real-life battlefield. (Perhaps the pieces contain some sort of location-sensing technology that walkie-talkies directly to the pieces.) Are these two no longer playing a game? If the stakes of the game involve only one of them living (as, when one is surrounded, he surrenders and yields his kingdom), is that activity no less of a game? 

War is a game. To the people playing it, its practice is essentially indistinguishable from chess. Yet war is also, unquestionably, profoundly real and with the highest stakes imaginable. 

Why does this distinction matter? 

Well, sometimes people disparage games. A teacher will tell a student to “stop playing games in the classroom”. A CEO will say to their underlings, “We’re not here to play games”. A general could yell to his troops, “War is not a game!”

What they mean is take this seriously. And seriousness can be important. But it is not at odds with playing games. The teacher who demands focus is using that comment as a move in the authority-and-attention game they spend most of their day playing. The CEO is fanning the flames of the motivation game. The general is moving a piece in the morale-and-culture game. And then he returns to his nice, safe bunker where he pretends that those peons are chess pieces. 

Abstracting a game into its constituent pieces – players, goals, win conditions, rules – does not diminish the significance of the game itself any more than defining the goal of a war diminishes the significance of the war. Quite the opposite: by abstracting, we can often remove some of the demotivating emotion that prevents us (the players) from ideal movement. 

While you may naturally freeze when faced with a knife-wielding attacker, I would instead recommend avoiding that knife. Have you considered moving somewhere they cannot attack you? Perhaps one step to the side, because pawns can only attack diagonally. 

Clown School Break Day 50: Seeing Ahead

JulianLeave a comment

In which chair-sitting is frog-boiling. 

A coworker once taught our company how to sit in a chair. The problem: humans are very adaptable. So when we sit in a chair, we adjust our bodies to fit the physical circumstance. This is bad. We should instead adjust our circumstances to fit our bodies. (The desk doesn’t care if it’s adjusted to be higher or lower. Our bodies do prefer we don’t slump.) 

The rules of the game change your play. That sounds obvious, but its effects often go unrecognized. 

Take a simple rule – like the football rule that the clock stops when a player runs out of bounds – and imagine the changes to the entire game that could result. Obviously the end of the game is faster: more hurry-up plays, less pre-defined set-ups.

Now consider how different technology was when this rule of this game was established – at some point before 1909 (citation: pg 214 here). Was this rule intended to play out the way it is? No – no way – not really – it can’t be. But it shapes how today’s entire game is played. 

We often accept the slight changes in our environment, in the rules that govern our games. But adjusting our behavior to maximize our desired outcomes is not easy. Do you think second-order effects (Since A happened, B will happen) are hard to predict? Third-order effects (A, therefore B, therefore C) are even harder!

Eg: If we changed the clock-stop rule, would Quarterbacks make more in-the-moment decisions? Become more skilled at rapid decision-making? Would we select for quarterbacks who are more tacticians and less strategists? Would that change lead to the rest of the team being more strategic (to fill the gap) or less (because their leader is less strategic)? Is this even the right pathway to follow, or would quarterbacks actually become more strategic because they would plan their whole series of plays ahead of time for those low-on-time situations? Would timeouts become so incredibly valuable in the endgame that they’d never be used otherwise? How would that impact how strategic a quarterback needs to be?

It’s really, really hard to tell. Those who can see the second-order effect in a very complicated situation are often highly-prized experts.

A chess grandmaster can sometimes see 10+ moves ahead. On the other hand, one former chess world champion is commonly crediting as saying, “I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one.” 

Which would you rather do? And in what areas? 

–(Oh, and GO BEARS!!!)

Clown School Break Day 30: Cooperative Games

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In which Our Hero collaborates. 

My family has recently taken to playing cooperative games. Growing up, we played mainly competitive games. Sometimes team games, but more often individual competitive games.

My partner recently posed the question: What if a person grew up playing mainly cooperative games?

An interesting question.

For one, most sports are competitive. (Sure, some are team-based, but those are still generally against other people rather than a challenge against nature or circumstance.)

For two, most contrived games (as distinct from natural games like science or business) are competitive.

For three, most good contrived games are competitive. Taking board games as a field I know quite well: only over the last ~20 years have cooperative board games taken off, and still they are much less popular and less created than competitive ones.

Bad games are generally not worth playing. They’re unfun and teach poor / useless skills.

Good games are, well, good.

I learned to count and perform basic mental math through the card game cribbage. I’m not aware of a cooperative equivalent that’s as engaging and strategic (and building one’s strategic muscle is worthwhile in itself).

Cooperative games teach communication, team coordination, collective strategy, leading and following, ebbs and flows.

I used to ghostwrite for the founder of the video streaming platform Twitch. He and his brother both sold companies for ~$1B, and they credit their parents’ chore system with teaching them to collaborate and strategize. The chores had to be completed, but the how and the who were up to the children’s choices. (For more, search the word “chore” in this article or this article.)

Collaborative games are excellent. And in the grand scheme of things, many competitive games are really about collaboration on the meta level anyway. Tennis is about (i.e. funded by) encouraging people to play tennis, which is generally good for physical health. Individual competitive sports like running are about setting a new record, thereby pushing human physical ability to new heights.

Perhaps it’s true: Even when we’re competing, we’re collaborating.

Clown School Day 17: The LeBron of Tic Tac Toe

JulianLeave a comment

In which Our Hero learns that leadership means getting the simple things right.

THE SETUP

The game is simple: tic-tac-toe.

The complication: teammates.

Two teams of 11 players, across a ten-foot-by-ten-foot tic-tac-toe board. Each team has three handkerchiefs of their team color. At the sound of the drum, the first player sprints to a spot on the board, drops their handkerchief, and sprints back to tag the next player.

When all three of your handkerchiefs are placed, your move is to move one of your handkerchiefs instead of placing a new one.

At three in a row, you win the point.

THE ESCALATION

How is this so hard?

First, foot faults. Were both of your feet inside the square where you dropped the kerchief? If not, your placement doesn’t count. (More than one clown kicked the game board itself, forcing a complete game stop and reset.)

Second, speed. Your next teammate goes when your previous teammate tags them. If you dawdle, the opponents may get two moves to your team’s one: a death knell in tic tac toe.

Third, skill errors. Can you picture the board as it currently is, and how you would like it to be after your play? Can you balance both your team’s desire for three in a row with the importance of blocking the other team?

Fourth, panic. If you’re not sure where to place the handkerchief, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the twenty clowns yelling at you.

THE CHAOS

If this sounds intense, that’s because it is. It’s the most competitive I’ve seen clowns in four weeks of class. One clown classmate commented to me: “Usually you and I are the only two trying to win. In this game, everyone is.”

And the best part: it’s tic tac toe.

You know, the game that even a monkey can play.

When I played this same game in the summer course, I was dubbed “the LeBron of tic tac toe” by a Boston-accented TikTok star who’d gained school-wide notoriety for roasting himself in a Trump impression.

This time, my team came out to a strong start. 2-0 in the lead.

Their team called a time out.

From across the board, I could see one member of their team — a former death row attorney now turned stand up comedian — giving an impassioned speech.

Members of my team jeered at him. I thought of strategic elements I wanted to share — if unsure, play the middle or corners, not the sides; run back quickly to tag your teammate — but kept them to myself, unsure how to make them land. I didn’t want to come off as the pushy, out-for-victory teammate.

The game restarted. Their team came out on a tear. They won three of the next four points, and ultimately took the match 11-9.

All game I mused to myself: What had he said? They started to coordinate so well. What strategies did he share? How did he inspire them to listen to his suggestions without coming off as pushy?

THE REVELATION

At lunch, I asked him. I complimented him on his success, then I asked what he had said.

“Oh, that? Some of our team didn’t understand the game. I just explained the rules.”

There’s a Polish expression I enjoy that translates to “Not my circus, not my monkeys”.

Unfortunately, this is my circus.

And unfortunately, it is not populated with monkeys.

Clown School Day 10: How to Win by Losing

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In which Our Hero finally beats himself

I loved it when a classmate called me a douche. It raised a key question: Am I a douche?

To that, I had to answer yes. Because anyone who steamrolls friends at silly games is a douche. And I’d been playing silly games to win, despite frequently being much better than others.

A knight without chivalry is a douche. An assassin without honor is a douche. The powerful, when they flex on the powerless, are acting like a douche.

(He said this after I grabbed a ball he was juggling. Not a big deal. Still, a douche.)

I wrote in my notebook: Stop always playing to win. Try playing to play.

Then we started wall ball.

Wall ball is simple: hit the ball, it hits the wall, bounces once, next player hits. Compared to my group, I’m very skilled at wall ball. Last time I won the tournament (ahem, ladies 😉)

This time, I decided to try play. My game:

  1. Don’t die.
  2. Give the next player the easiest possible hit.

Using this approach, I eliminated only one person (on a challenging shot where a gentle hit might have put myself at risk). Still, I reached the finals.

At the finals, a question arose: keep playing my game, or now play to win?

I chose my game. Either he’d win, or he’d beat himself.

First to three wins.

He won the first point.

He mis-hits. All tied up.

I thunked one off the side.

He botched another.

Two-two. Next point wins.

He fired a zinger to the corner: unreturnable. He wins.

The crowd went wild.

Everyone loves seeing David beat Goliath.

I cheered too. It felt better than winning the tournament. That had been awkward. This was joy. I led the chant: “Speech! Speech! Speech!”

The victor obliged.

I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a game before. This didn’t feel like throwing. It felt like optimizing for something bigger.

I didn’t lose. I won at a bigger game.

Sometimes the point of the game is play.

In theater, the point of the game is the play.

—

Later, our class watched another student play a game on stage with the same man I’d met in the finals.

The student was far more skilled. My teacher said:

“When you play with someone much worse than you, you must have good humor.”

That’s why I’m here.

To learn good humor.