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life

The Sailing Experience

I recently decided to browse through an old blog of mine, last updated in 2011 and no longer visible to the internet at large, to get a sense of myself in days of yore. There are a few posts that are worth saving and sharing for posterity – this being one of them. Almost 20 years later and I remember this experience vividly.

I haven’t edited the content at all. This is me in youth, warts and all. First published in November of 2009.

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By the way, I went sailing for the first time recently. And because I’m hardcore I went sailing when it was raining and cold. That’s because I’m a man and real men have a bit of hardcore sea dog in them. But enough horn-tooting and let me tell you what it’s like to go sailing if you’ve never been before. I do hear that it’s better in fair weather but even with the elements conspiring against us it was a marvelous blend of the miserable and exhilirating.

Dressed halfway with the boat in the background

I got a random call from my seasoned sailor buddy Rog Mahal asking me if I wanted to fill an open spot on a boat, knowing full well I’d never sailed. This came with the caveat that I make a weight limit. I was immediately suspicious because other activities that involve weight limits – like boxing and wrestling – come packaged with broken faces or nasty diseases. In any case, the weight limit didn’t matter nor did the drive to Annapolis at 8 in the morning – on daylight savings day no less, the best day for sleeping in the entire year. On my way over, I kept giving dirty looks to the heavens with their dark clouds showing no sign of letting up the downpour. But I gallantly strode on cause, you know, I’m hardcore like that.

Lesson Number One of sailing is to stay as dry as possible. Which means don’t wear jeans and a t-shirt. Thankfully, I was provided some slick gear but had to make do with my old Adidas, leading to an uncomfortable lack of feeling in my right foot halfway through the first race. Borrowing some fancy waterproof socks fixed the numbness and made me confident I would be keeping all of my toes at the end of the day. My Big Bad Wolf (the rollercoaster) hat (with ear flaps) was looked upon with disdain so I had to use alternative headgear. Gloves would have been useful but my hands got used to the cold eventually. PS – chap stick comes in handy.

That’s me to the right by the mast holding the boom in position

The races themselves were exciting because half the time I didn’t know what was going on. Sitting on the side of the boat, I look out at a sea of other boats and had no idea how we were doing until the very end. That makes things more interesting. The near-crashes, the mid-race course changes and angry skippers get the old hemoglobin flowing as well. Maybe if I were a little more experienced it would have been even more fun but there was a definite element of enjoyment in two basic principles I followed: don’t fall off and don’t mess up.

Waiting for the magic words – “Heartily!”

Another great aspect is the camaraderie. It’s just great having the skipper curse your name and desecrate your gods during the race and then be all chummy when all is said and done. And, hey, he got me a t-shirt so I must have done something right. After all, the day I raced we finished 13th and 9th – which, by the way, was the best the boat did all weekend. I’m not sure if I did anything positive that was statistically significant or if I have the God-given gift of providing ballast, which, by the way, was my main job. One of three, as follows:

1. Provide ballast

Basically, the boat is tipped over to one side so precariously that everyone has to be on the other side to prevent the boat from falling over. When the skipper decides to tack – which just means turn right or left – he says some jargon to prepare you and then something like “Heartily.” Upon that Pavlovian keyword, the idea is to duck so as to avoid the big-ass boom pole swinging toward you, scramble to the other side and sit your ass back down. Doing that about 30 times in a couple of hours and you’re covered in bruises the next day. When you’re going with the wind it’s called jiving (I think it’s with a ‘v’ but might be ‘jibing’) and you have to loosen some random rope.

The blue sail is the spinnaker – soon it and I become one

2. Push the boom pole

This part sucks. When you go with the wind, the spinnaker sail comes up and then the unlucky Number Five (which is what I call my position – I can’t remember the real name but it was dumb) has to make sure the boom pole stays forward. This means keeping your arms up for a long time cause you still have to be sitting. Boring and tiring.

3. The Human Pole

Great name and definitely an exhilarating experience. When it’s time for the spinnaker to come down, the bowman detaches the metal pole that connects it to the mast. But while that’s happening someone has to act as the pole for the spinnaker. That someone is Number Five. Being the Human Pole entails grabbing on to something on the boat, leaning most of your body off the boat and holding the end of the spinnaker so that 1) it doesn’t fly away and 2) still catches wind optimally. It’s really a lot of fun balancing the concepts of staying on the boat and keeping your shoulder from separating. You keep doing that for a few minutes until someone yells more jargon at which point you throw yourself back on to the deck and start pulling the sail back. At least that’s what I did.

You might be shocked at how I think any of this is enjoyable especially when considering that the weather was pretty much mixed rain all day long. But it was enjoyable. It’s taxing on the body, it’s precarious and it was effing cold but there’s a constant adrenaline rush and flurries of pure undistilled excitement. Despite the fact that at least 10% of the sailors out there were female, it made me feel like a man. If I were married, I would have gone home, ordered the wife to make me some meat and potatoes and bacon, cracked open a six-pack and watched football the rest of the day. Right after I stopped shivering.

Rocking the adidas and providing ballast

 

Categories
culture sport

The Soul of a Stadium is in its Name and the English are Preserving it

The sports stadium is a part of the fabric of a city. Any municipality worth its salt has a sporting complex but a stadium or an arena that supports top-flight athletics is something that many urban centers pursue for prestige. One of the marks of a megacity is the number of stadiums and arenas: one is not enough and the more there are the greater the prestige and the more diverse the sporting interests. The very size of modern stadiums speaks to the popularity and centrality – and, of course, the economic possibilities – of sport.

The modern sports stadium has evolved from Hellenic and Hellenistic models. Sports stadiums were often large in antiquity, demonstrating that the popularity of sport and its ability to bring people together in one place is not a modern phenomenon. Like seemingly much else, this central sporting landmark did not exist in feudal Western Europe. One could certainly argue that the dourness and backwardness of medieval Europe are connected to the lack of proper sporting complexes.

The tradition of the large stadium may have bypassed some eras but there is a traceable lineage back to those ancient archetypes. I recently visited Afrodisias and marveled at the size of the stadion. The grandeur continued into the Roman age, best exemplified by the Colosseum in Rome and later the Hippodrome of Constantinople. The modern stadium, which arose in the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century, built off the antique example.

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Categories
data sport

Premier League Head-to-Head Records

I recently came across an article that explored the idea of the “nemesis” in football, i.e. that team against which a club performs the worst. It’s a concept that crosses the minds of many fans – in the context of existential angst when you lose yet another game to your closest rival; in the context of hubristic triumph, when you consider a game won before it’s played because of past history;  and in the context of casual fandom when television producers flash up some obscure statistic of past head-to-head encounters.

At the same time I found that article, I was building a new head-to-head exploration feature for my football site (it’s under the Tables section). The functionality displays a matrix showing head-to-head results using points, goals, and results metrics. I’d already built a rivalries page with historical data on the biggest derbies and the ability to explore past results for any match-up (also under the Tables section). So the idea of head-to-head match-ups was something I’d looked at casually before and the article helped me to think about other angles to explore in the data.

For this article here, I’ll show each Premier League side’s favorite opponent and most truculent adversary using average points per game as it’s what I’ve personally used to think about performance on a per-game basis. I’ve limited the analysis to match-ups where teams have played each other at least ten times, or at least five season of Premier League football together. That’s useful as it removes the perfect records that top teams have against minnows who have barely thrived in the top flight and allows for more interesting results. The tool on my site does not have any such limit so fans of Bournemouth, for example, can mosey on over there for more details.

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Categories
data sport

Ranking the most exciting and dramatic Premier League seasons using data

Football seasons can live long in the memory for many reasons. Club supporters will rely on their own team’s successes or failures to measure each season. The broader football-watching and the sport’s historians will craft narratives that can be revisited time and again, narratives that true or not become the measure of a how a season is remembered as time softens the true memories of a football season long ago.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been collecting and collating a wide variety of football data. And I began to wonder: so much of data analysis in sports looks at individual and team performance but can we also measure seasons? Can we use data, instead of rose-tinged memories and Wikipedia entries, to objectively identify which seasons were the most exciting, which ones were the most dramatic?

Of course, first we need to try to measure excitement. I decided to look at three general dimensions: the title race, the relegation battle, and everything else. The following sections spend a decent amount of time exploring different metrics which, perhaps, lend themselves to measuring the inherent drama of a season. Unless otherwise noted, each metric covers the second half of the season instead of the full season. I’ve made a simple assumption that seasons are more dramatic and memorable in  more for what happens in the second half instead of through their full course.

It’s worth noting that, for the author, the purpose of writing this article was as much the exploration of the metrics and using them to uncover interesting trends from the past as it was with developing an actual ranking. I am by no means a mathematician nor a statistician, and there will perhaps a couple of areas where a data scientist may shake their head in bewilderment at certain methodologies. I certainly enjoyed diving into the metrics and learning more about Premier League history, especially the earlier years, and it is my fervent hope that some casual fan stumbles upon this article and finds some entertainment in it.

Continue reading “Ranking the most exciting and dramatic Premier League seasons using data”