Stardate 20040627.1351

(On Screen): Greg writes:

I'd be thrilled if you had thoughts on what constitutes honorable sports play in a game which is officiated by referees. In that situation, should one "play by the spirit of the rules", or should one manipulate the presence of the referees to one's own competitive advantage? If you're the parent of a high school athlete, it is a perplexing question.

His blog post discusses the problem in more detail. It strikes me that the reason Greg is confused about this is that he's confused about his goal.

What is high school sports for? Why do you want your kid involved in it?

Is it all about winning?
Is it a way of learning how to compete, how to win, and how to lose?
Is it about learning how to be part of a team?
Is it an end in itself?
Is it a means to an end?

Oddly enough, Greg has stumbled into Clausewitz. Sports is a form of conflict. Team sports are stylized and abstracted allegories for war and institutional competition. And Clausewitz's most important observation about war also applies to sports.

There are five main elements of warfare: objectives, strategy, tactics, logistics, and morale. There are reasonable analogs of all five in team sports.

The analog of logistics is important, but relatively uninteresting in terms of analyzing the conflict. The sports logistics question has to do with making sure that there are playing fields available for scheduled games, and making sure that required equipment, referees, and both teams are at the field at the scheduled time for the game so that it can be played. It's a problem, but usually it's not considered a partisan problem.

In war, interdiction is the strategy of attempting to interfere with enemy logistics. Anyone who tries to use interdiction in sports will be roundly condemned if caught at it.

One example of "interdiction" in sports would be to try to prevent a competitor from being able to compete, thus causing them to forfeit. It's happened. (More than once.) But it's also damned unusual.

The other four elements are much more significant. For instance, it's obvious how morale manifests. It relates to team spirit, to player dedication. And it can be targeted by an opponent, and often is. You can try to psyche your opponent; convince them that they are going to lose, in the hope that it will make them play worse. You might try to intimidate them. Fancy uniforms, a good band at the football game, and pretty cheerleaders are all helpful. So is "gamesmanship", which can be carried to extremes. (Consider, for instance, John McEnroe and Bobby Fischer.)

Strategy manifests in different ways for different sports. For baseball, one element of strategy is how the coach decides to schedule his starting pitchers. Choosing the starting five in basketball is strategy. Deciding when to take them out as a function of how many fouls they have is strategic.

Fouls in basketball are moderately analogous to formation casualties in war. A given unit becomes useless once it takes too many casualties, and you as a commander might decide to hold some of your best units back to be used later in a battle, while making a decision to commit other good units early, accepting that they would be rendered useless before the battle ends. You also have to decide where and how to use units which are not as good, recognizing that they will represent a vulnerability the enemy may try to exploit. Equally, a basketball coach might decide that some of his best players should get a lot of playing time continuously until they foul out, and decide that one or two should be taken out when they are one or two fouls away from fouling out, so that they can be put back in near the end. He has to decide when and how to use his bench, presumably made up of players who are not as good as the starters. He may decide to use a lot of players from his bench simultaneously, or might decide to stage them in one or two at a time.

Football plays are an example of tactics in sports, but that kind of elaborate organized play is only possible because football is played in discrete chunks. Most sports are more fluid. Hockey, basketball, soccer, lacrosse and the like are played continuously. There are still plays, where opportunities arise and two or more players will try to arrange themselves so as to exploit that opportunity, but it isn't the same as in football.

Baseball players practice how they will respond when the batter hits the ball. That varies depending on where the ball gets hit, whether there are already base runners (and where), and how many outs remain. Pitchers must charge towards first base if there's a bunt or a slow grounder going towards the first baseman, because he has to field the ball and needs the pitcher on the bag to make the out. All infielders practice making double-plays. All of that is tactics, and that kind of