Joe Posnanski has another great post up at SI.com. (From now on, when I use the name Posnanski, just assume “greatness”—it’ll save me a few characters.) He starts off by examining—after Just Verlander’s no-hitter last Saturday—how pitchers perform historically in their first start following a no-hitter. Posnanski found the information so easily (via Baseball Reference) that the post turned into something else.
In the past, sportswriters used to be able to mold a game’s or a week’s or a season’s events into a snug, form-fitting, apparently logical narrative. They seemed to make sense, so no one could argue it. But now, with stats for nearly everything and stats so easily accessible, any easy narrative gets beaten down. Posnanski writes:
Now, the stats will often pour the cold water of reality over our most beloved myths. And many people don’t like that. They prefer a little bit of myth over a cold shower of reality. I can understand that. I prefer a little bit of myth myself. I have the same instinct to downplay the effects of luck and the weather and the small and boring things that shouldn’t matter and instead believe in a storyline. It makes sense to me that a pitcher who has just thrown a no-hitter will go out the next time and be overflowing with confidence and will feel locked in and will pitch great. It makes so much sense. It just so happens that—like so many other things that make sense in sports and in the world—it turns out to not be true.
We all want these narratives. We all want these myths. That’s why we watch sports, no? Otherwise we’d just be staring at numbers. We wouldn’t even need to watch the games. A computer screen could spit out some code and that would be that. The result would be more important than how we got there, but it’s not.
We want more—and there is more, we just don’t necessarily know what it is. Take the NBA Eastern Conference Finals. It’s LeBron against Derrick Rose. It’s the artificial superheroes against the grown-and-groomed Bulls who spurned last summer’s sweepstakes and built from within. (Except for, you know, that $68 million they paid to that Alaskan guy with more hair on his face than his head.) For Yahoo, Dan Wetzel writes:
Rose never saw it as his job to become a salesman, though. He’s a player. He’s a pro. If LeBron James wanted to talk about playing for the Bulls, well, the phone works two ways. Besides, Chicago already had a small forward in Luol Deng, and where’s the loyalty in trying to bring a guy in to replace your teammate?
Wetzel sets the series up as a battle between the team that didn’t need LeBron—the team whose superstar didn’t even try to recruit him—and LeBron himself. It makes sense, and it fits everything we want from a series: the guys who did it the right way versus the guys who did it the wrong way. It’s not good versus evil, but it’s close.
As nice as it sounds, it probably just isn’t true. Yes, circumstances created the possibility for this story, but it’s really just a lot simpler than that. As ESPN’s Tom Haberstroh tweeted, “The Bulls didn’t reel in LeBron because he wanted to go to Miami, not because of Chicago’s teammate loyalty.”
Derrick Rose is quiet, a blank canvas to paint on whatever personally satisfying stories we want. He doesn’t talk much and he loves his mom, which makes it easy for us to assume that he’s this great guy, different from the league’s other stars. So why not take it a step further and suggest that he’s built up an environment that wouldn’t welcome an image-conscious personality like LeBron? Why not make it look like Rose is the star who’s fighting against the superstar-team trend that’s sweeping the league? Well, because it’s not true.
The Heat got LeBron and Wade. The Bulls didn’t. That’s what this series will be. That’s what makes this series interesting: Have the Bulls, specifically Rose, improved enough to overcome missing out on all of last summer’s stars? And can they beat those same stars in the process? A Bulls win would be an achievement for continuity and personal improvement, not loyalty. That would be a myth.
—Photo AP/Charles Cherney