The SportsThink Review #121
April 4, 2025: Best of the Century
The SportsThink Review highlights my favorite sport-related content. Most things I share are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read or encountered them recently. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my lifelong obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter.
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Howdy folks, happy Friday. It’s not quite fall sports madness, but there’s a lot going on: F1 is already spicy on the eve of the third race of the season, two final fours (finals four?) with excellent matchups (HOOK ‘EM), torpedo bats(!!, see below), and the Dodgers will never lose again. Here’s what got me thinking this week…
The Main Event: One Good Read
The 100 Best Sports Moments of the Quarter Century (The Ringer)
Feeling old with this whole “quarter century” thing; seems like just yesterday I was Y2K prepping. But this is too fun not to share. A reasonably well-thought out and very beautifully presented stroll down memory lane. It’s particularly wild how just reading about these moments can transport you across time and space. Derek Fisher’s .4 seconds to go buzzer beater against the Spurs in the Western Conference Finals is #64 on the list and I can smell the moment: we’ve dragged out a very large Sony Trinitron to the main lawn on the Haverford College campus and are running it via a sketchy daisy chain of extension cords. Terry, my Greek-Bahamian hallmate, is grilling lamb chops that are wayyyyyy better than they should be on a microscopic grocery store charcoal grill. The Lakers win and life is good.
Of course, a list like this is ultimately gripe-fodder. Angel Reese/Caitlin Clark is at 40; it should be top 5 as a watershed moment in women’s sport. Leicester City winning the Premiership at 32 seems criminally low. And Boise State over Oklahoma is #1 for me, definitely underrated at 26. THREE TRICK PLAYS AND A WEDDING PROPOSAL!!! (And trust I felt this way before I moved to Austin and received my complimentary OU SUCKS swag bag.)
I mean, you’ve got 8 minutes:
More on the Sports Integrity Ecosystem
What is a Torpedo Bat? Inside MLB’s Next Big Thing (Jeff Passan, ESPN)
The best overview of the science and (early) impact of the new(ish) baseball bats. Here’s Passan:
… what could be the most consequential development in bat technology since a generation ago when players forsook ash bats for maple. The creation of the bowling pin bat (also known as the torpedo bat) optimizes the most important tool in baseball by redistributing weight from the end of the bat toward the area 6 to 7 inches below its tip, where major league players typically strike the ball. Doing so takes an apparatus that for generations has looked the same and gives it a fun-house-mirror makeover, with the fat part of the bat more toward the handle and the end tapering toward a smaller diameter, like a bowling pin.
A few Yankees crushed a bunch of home runs using these bats and there is now a mild panic. The bats are legal by MLB standards. For some, any innovation that helps counteract the increasing dominance of pitchers is a welcome development, others are already calling to ban the bats, saying they make hitting too easy. In the niche corners of sports-tech academia, this is called “de-skilling” when technology or rules changes make the game easier. There’s also “re-skilling” when something alters how the game is played or won. There is a potential re-skilling issue here as well, as swinging these bats is biomechanically different from traditional bats. This leads to injury concerns, elevated in this conversation by Giancarlo Stanton’s use of the bat last year and his current pair of busted elbows. I’m not sure two elbows makes for a dataset and Stanton plans on using the torpedo when he returns.
I don’t have a strong opinion on the bats, at least not yet. But I love this as another case study in my vaunted Sports Integrity Ecosystem model. And by vaunted model, I mean the rough idea I proposed last week. The bats are obviously a competitive concern, their impact is interpreted through the so-called Spirit of the Game concerns. In turn, governance of the bats—the possibility of banning them—is an organizational concern. The questions I mentioned last week are at the heart of the matter. What is point or purpose of Major League Baseball? To make money? To entertain? To preserve players’ bodies? To generate heroes and legends? Do chicks still dig the long ball?
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See you next time,
Tolga