5. The Whole Love by Wilco

First listen was at a Starbucks in Boston. I was so excited I tweeted about it.

I point out both of these things because I think they probably both support New York magazine’s indictment of Wilco and similar acts as the new “adult contemporary.” This was intended as a knock because, the logic went, the music is no longer new or interesting enough to bother with.

The main criticism you hear about this kind of record—even outweighing references to Starbucks and/or the bourgeoisie—is that it is just too dull to even bother producing any more complex indictment of it. These acts, intentionally or not, have won; they’ve taken a lower-sales, lower-budget version of the type of trip Sting once took, from a post-punk upstart to an adult staple.

There’s something to that: if exploring new sonic space and witnessing bold new artistic direction in music is how you get all your kicks then yes, you should probably pass on The Whole Love. The critic seemed to grant that Wilco had already done this in their career. He was just disappointed to see that it appears they’ve stopped.

It’s a fair point, and I agree with it, generally. I disagree, though, with the subtext: that I should feel self-conscious about enjoying the new album. That’s the key distinction, I suppose, between the meaningfulness of a criticism like this to a music critic and the meaningfulness of it to a… well, human. It’s a great example of why one should not put too much stock in music criticism. It’s fun to talk about music. It provides a useful framework and let’s us better understand where we’re all coming from when we talk about how it makes us feel. But it ain’t rocket science, folks. A clever observation is just that. It most often won’t change how someone reacts to the music itself. And, as my adult contemporary Starbucks-jitters-induced tweet indicated, I reacted well to The Whole Love.

4. El Camino by The Black Keys

This is two years running on my top albums list for these guys. What’s interesting about that is that I don’t think of heavy, guttural guitar rock like this as something I’m particularly into. But the songs are so good! And the sound is so incredible! The Black Keys do what they do so well. I find them totally undeniable. This album made me pick up my guitar, find the three chords in the chorus of “Gold on the Ceiling” and rock out in my living room by myself. I hadn’t done that in a while.

3. The King of Limbs by Radiohead

Am I allowed to nominate the second half of an album if that second half is so good that it outweighs the terrifying fuzzed out blippiness of something like “Feral?” This is my goddamn list, so the answer is Yes. (Actually, I should say that the first half of The King of Limbs has grown on me somewhat, only because I trust Radiohead enough to give them the benefit of multiple listens. But really, this one starts at “Lotus Flower.”)

2. The Harrow and the Harvest by Gillian Welch

Gillian and Dave do it again. They are such incredible musicians that I think even their treatment of terrible songs would still sound better than a lot of what’s out there. I was lucky enough to see them again this year. When you see two people with acoustic instruments standing on a bare stage cutting straight through the guts of everyone in the audience, you rethink every other form of music out there. It’s like listening to Otis Redding after going a few months without. You say, “Damn. Why do I ever waste my time listening to any music other than this??”

1. The Rip Tide by Beirut

My love affair with Beirut continues to grow. With each successive album, I like them more and more. I remembering listening to Gulag Orkestar and just not getting it. But The Rip Tide is more accessible and emotive. Its percussiveness and horns and Eastern European influence are things that are all entirely new to me, and make me feel like I’m occupying some great movie involving coffee shops in Prague. This is the most consistently fun album of the year from where I sit.

honorable mentions

Bon Iver by Bon Iver, Ashes & Fire by Ryan Adams, Within and Without by           Washed Out

tracks

(spotify playlist)

10. “Black” by Danger Mouse, Daniele Luppi & Norah Jones

9. “Holdin’ on to Black Metal” by My Morning Jacket – O-whoa-whoa-awhoa-yeahayeahyeahyeeeeeeeeaaaaah!

8. “Gold on the Ceiling” by The Black Keys

7. “One Sunday Morning” by Wilco

6. “Give Up the Ghost” by Radiohead

5. “Hard Times” by Gillian Welch

4. “East Harlem” by Beirut – “Payne’s Bay” deserves an honorable mention, as well. But this is the best song on the album, no question. 

3. “Ashes & Fire” by Ryan Adams

2. “Rise to Me” by The Decemberists – I still goddamn hate this band. But this song is just great. The whole album is actually pretty great. The things about The Decemberists that grate on me are largely absent from it. Except for when Colin Meloy sings lines like “a panoply of song,” which bring out that old wanna-punch-the-wall feeling.

1. “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes – The Fleet Foxes generally don’t do much for me. They make beautiful sounds but for the most part I just don’t find it that interesting. But HOLY SHIT THIS SONG. It is gut-wrenchingly beautiful. 

… and other good stuff from 2011

SHOW   Radiohead at Roseland Ballroom. When I talked to my friend Jonny about it the next day, he asked, “You had seen them before, right?” “No,” I said. “Oh. Then, welcome.”

ACADEMIC FIELD OF STUDY   Behavioral Economics. Reading up on this stuff is fascinating. It’s like that Simpsons line about standup comedy– “It’s funny cuz it’s true!” All of these observations about human behavior and about how we make the decisions we do make sense because you immediately recognize your own foolishness and bad habits in them. I am really looking forward to reading Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

IPHONE APP   Instagram. How fun is Instagram? It made it OK to leave my point-and-shoot at home. Every single shot in my Flickr stream in 2011 was an Instagram. Check it out. Sure, someday we may look back on it as a silly fad of the times like Disco, but for now it’s great fun.

TRAVEL LOYALTY PROGRAM   Amtrak Guest Rewards. What a luxury it is to be able to zip up and down between DC and New York and Vermont. And these points make it possible financially.

CITY   New York. For the second year running. I knew there was a possibility I may grow to like this place, but there’s just no preparing yourself for the experience of living here. It is rich and complex and beautiful in an incomparable way. It’s no place for me to stay for the long haul, but it’s a great thing to experience. I was an asshole, way back when, for saying it wasn’t for me. It’s for everyone, and that’s part of what makes it so incredible.

BONUS SECTION!

2011′s most disappointing albums

5. Rome by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi

4. Codes & Keys by Death Cab for Cutie

3. Mondo Amore by Nicole Atkins

2. Mylo Xyloto by Coldplay

1. Angles by The Strokes

Since then, the company has done a lot of what I hoped they would do. Their desktop app went from being a remote control of your browser to being a fully-functional, beautiful music browser and player, they successfully negotiated rights for a lot more great indie acts, they totally revamped their iPhone app to enable more new music exploration.

Then Spotify finally launched in the U.S. This, after a solid year of reading tantalizing “Spotify coming soon! End of the month!” headlines. This, after already having fallen in love with rdio. I was annoyed.

Not annoyed enough, as it turns out, to not want to sign up and give it a shot. My first impression of the interface was that it is painfully ugly, especially compared to rdio’s. It is dark, industrial and heavy compared to rdio’s light, dynamic and swift look and feel.

rdio

spotify

And the ads. The free version looks like a banner ad with an interactive music player built into it. It’s disgusting.

But there are two key things that, once I got over the initial esthetic shock, made me stop and say oh, well THAT’s cool:

1. Imported iTunes playlists. This was one of my original beefs with rdio, and it’s one of the few things they have yet to tend to. I have literally dedicated years to creating and cultivating my iTunes playlists. I sort records by year and have dynamic Smart Playlists that auto-populate with my favorite songs from different periods of my life. These playlists (which could probably be better described as chapters) are the pillars of my music listening. They are the fenceposts and the starting points, not albums or artists or genres. They’re all about me. And who doesn’t like that? Importing playlists from iTunes is not perfect in Spotify– there’s no way to manually select only certain ones to import, they don’t update dynamically, the logic of Smart Playlists is lost– but it is close enough for now. And rdio makes you build your own from scratch. That’s just way too much work.
2. Other people use it. Within days of a limited U.S. launch, Spotify already had more users among my Facebook friends than rdio was able to accumulate over a year+’s time. Music as a social experience is still new and exciting and I really want to explore it, but there’s no way to do that if only a handful of people are using the same platform as you. Rdio just wasn’t able to get enough momentum in terms of acquisition to keep me around.

So, uh… I’m on Spotify now. I bailed on rdio. Chose VHS over Betamax. I don’t like it. I wish it wasn’t so. But such is the power of the herd.

Baaa.

5. God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise by Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs

I’ve talked to some people who think Ray LaMontagne’s style is a bit overwrought, and I guess I can see how one might think that. But I try not to over-think these things too much. All I know is how I felt when I heard “Beg, Steal or Borrow” when it came on the radio during a drive from New Hampshire to Maine this summer. That was the highlight of the year.

4. Contra by Vampire Weekend

Ezra Koenig can sing. I don’t think people appreciate that guy’s voice enough. The songs are so good, their focus is elsewhere. My only complaint about Contra is that it was released in the dead of winter. This is a summertime album if there ever was one.

3. Brothers by The Black Keys

I had always liked albums from these guys, but until now they had all been too similar from song to song to be standout albums. “Brothers” is a bit different. I mean who could’ve pegged “Never Gonna Give You Up” as a Black Keys song on its own? (That song, incidentally, is amazing.)

2. Broken Bells by Broken Bells

Great songwriting and singing coupled with amazingly creative production. Not a bad song in the bunch.

1. Lisbon by The Walkmen

I feel like this album confirms that The Walkmen really found their sound with You & Me. They can still blow your ears out and leave you begging for more (a la “The Rat”) but they can also swagger along this subtle line between sounding boozy and sloppy and tight and pretty. They sound unlike anyone else out there, and it’s so damned good.

Thinking about it, the top three albums this year all had noticeably amazing sound. Guess that matters.

honorable mentions

Odd Blood by Yeasayer, The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man On Earth, The Suburbs by Arcade Fire

tracks

(spotify playlist)

10. “City With No Children” by Arcade Fire

9. “Bushwick Blues” by Delta Spirit

8. “Madder Red” by Yeasayer]

7. “Cold Blue Halo” by Jason Collett

6. “The Mall & Misery” by Broken Bells

5. “Ultraviolet Light” by Ryan Adams and the Cardinals

4. “Juveniles” by The Walkmen

3. “Diplomat’s Son” by Vampire Weekend

2. “I Can Change” by LCD Soundsystem

1. “Beg, Steal or Borrow” by Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs

… and other good stuff from 2010

VIDEO  Justin Townes Earle playing “Slippin’ and Slidin’” from his good-but-not-great album Harlem River Blues:

VIDEO  The Walkmen playing an acoustic version of “Woe Is Me” in the New York Public Library. There are no words to describe how much I love this video.

CITY  New York. I moved here. It’s big. There are a lot of people. I like it.

BONUS SECTION!

2010′s most disappointing albums

5. “Goodbye, Killer” by The Pernice Brothers

4. “Jupiter” by Starfucker

3. “Transference” by Spoon

2. “Rat A Tat Tat” by Jason Collett

1. “Forgiveness Rock Record” by Broken Social Scene

albums

5. Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros

It’s not always a compliment to say of an album or band “I have no idea whatsoever how to describe this sound.”  It is in this case, though.  I mean, who the hell are these guys?  What is this?  Where did they come from?  Who do they sound like?  Who cares?

4. Hold Time by M. Ward

So so solid.  Even though it’s been out for a number of months now, I still have a tough time ranking my favorite songs on this album.  And ranking songs on albums isn’t something I always do, but in this case I think it’s a result of there being about four songs that always make me say “Oh yeah, this one has got to be my favorite of the bunch.”

3. Dark Night of the Soul by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse

Gritty, twisted, dark and funny.  I think I remember David Lynch telling Scott Simon that Sparklehorse had many of these songs tucked away but unrecorded because Mark Linkous felt he didn’t have the right voice for them.  If that’s true, that the voices here fit so perfectly with the songs totally validates Sparklehorse’s thinking.

2. Merriweather Post Pavillion by Animal Collective

I brought a lot of baggage to this one.  The little I knew about Animal Collective (not much, but mostly influenced by being bored to death by the last Panda Bear album) made me think this would be over-thought, pretentious art rock.  And it was hyped, to boot.  Before I had heard it, I think I actually read a review of this album as introducing an entirely “new kind of music.”  Praise like that, when attached to a band name like this and all of the preconceived notions I had coming in, was admittedly enough to make me judge a book by its cover.

But then the 2:30 mark of “In The Flowers” happened.

1. Midnight at the Movies by Justin Townes Earle

Last time I’ll mention/list this one, promise. But I just liked it too much not to give it the top slot for the year.

honorable mentions

Dark Was The Night by Various Artists, March of the Zapotec & Realpeople: Holland by Beirut, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by Phoenix, The Fall by Norah Jones

tracks

(spotify playlist)

10. “Gentle Hour” by Yo La Tango – This band had always bored me. But this track (from the amazing Dark Was the Night compilation) jumped up on the earbuds as I walked to Georgetown to renew my driver’s license early one sunny morning.  Slayed me.

9. “Up From Below” by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

8. “Jailbird” by M. Ward

7. “Laundry Room” by the Avett Brothers

6. “Daddy’s Gone” by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse featuring Nina Persson – The sleeper track with the beautiful chorus that rewards you on about the 6th listen of the album.

5. “They Killed John Henry” by Justin Townes Earle

4. “Percussion Gun” by White Rabbits – Winner of “Best Air Drum Song of the Year”

3. “Summertime Clothes” by Animal Collective

2. “My Night With The Prostitute From Marseilles” by Beirut – I recommend listening to this one jetlagged and exhausted in a part of the world about which you have no knowledge or expectations.  On the ferry from Piraeus to Naxos, Greece, say.

1. “I Dreamed of My Old Lover” by Elvis Costello – Still not over that standup bass. This one’s ranked #1 because, of all of these songs, I think it’s the most timeless.

(an incomplete playlist can be found here)

… and other good stuff from 2009

BOOK  The Road by Cormac McCarthy – Finally read this at the beginning of the year and it gutted me.  I’ve heard mixed reviews of the movie, but I think that’s because some people have a hard time seeing the redeeming parts of the story.  Which is understandable given the, you know, hopeless post-apocalyptic setting of cannibalistic craziness, death and overall misery.

FOOD The annual OysterFest at Hank’s Oyster Bar – $60 for all you can eat and drink at my favorite DC restaurant.  I tackled 34 raw oysters and the bliss was totally worth the monetary and gastrointestinal cost.  And yes, we kept count.

TV Top Gear from the BBC – Bloody brilliant show of car reviews, challenges and auto-related cross-country adventures.  I’d never seen it until my vacation in Ireland this past summer, when rain kept me and my brothers locked in to our rented shepherd’s cottage for a few days.  I am far from a motorhead– I don’t know the first thing about cars or about their inner workings.  But, as with any other excellent programming, it doesn’t matter because they present it so well– beautiful film work, spot-on humor, easy-to-understand language, the whole nine.  Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are all hilarious and have off-the-chart “I’d like to get a beer with that guy” ratings.  Now one of my favorite TV shows.

COUNTRY Switzerland – It was even more amazing than in my fantasies of living in a ski chalet in Wengen and skiing through 18 inches of fresh powder to work at the beer and music factory every day.

]]> http://mgallivan.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/my-top-albums-and-tracks-from-2009/feed/ 0 Matt http://mgallivan.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/my-top-albums-and-tracks-from-2008/ http://mgallivan.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/my-top-albums-and-tracks-from-2008/#comments Sun, 19 Dec 2010 16:20:14 +0000 Matt Gallivan http://mgallivan.wordpress.com/?p=634 ]]> (This was originally posted on my old music blog, but I’m moving them all over here.)

albums

5. Visiter by The Dodos

Just barely beating out You & Me by The Walkmen.  Such an original and amazing release.  No one else sounds like these guys (same could be said for The Walkmen, I suppose, and Vampire Weekend, for that matter).  Punchy, rocking and intense.  I love it.

4. Vampire Weekend by Vampire Weekend

Hype schmype.  You will be playing this record while you make potato salad for your kids in a summer vacation beach house one of these days, mark my words.  And you know what?  It will still be great.  Best track: “Campus.”

3. Starfucker by Starfucker

By any objective measure, this should not be my type of music at all.  In fact, I can easily see how some may find it obnoxious.  But, man, I just love it.  So infectious.  It reminds me of the days when I couldn’t stop listening to Air.  There’s something about electronic music that makes it automatically thematic for everything going on around you.  I love that.

2. Viva la Vida by Coldplay

Bring on the hate.  Come on, seriously.  Bring it.  This is an awesome record.  Had they continued down the X&Y path, there would be no bigger detractor than me.  But this is big, it’s grand.  We still need rock albums like this.  Coldplay at least had the guts (the ego?) to try to make it.

1. Here’s To Being Here by Jason Collett

It’s a testament to this album’s quality that it was released in early February and is still in heavy rotation in my music library, and not yet tired or old.  I love Jason Collett’s voice, and the quality of songs on this album is remarkably consistent.

tracks

(spotify playlist)

10. “Grapevine Fires” by Death Cab for Cutie

9. “Canadian Girl” by The Walkmen

8. “Walking” by The Dodos – If only for the string vibration at 0:03.

7. “Mississippi” by Bob Dylan

6. “Flume” by Bon Iver

5. “Grounds for Divorce” by Elbow

4. “Go Easy” by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – If only for the change at 2:20.

3. “The Rip” by Portishead

2. “Nothing to Lose” by Jason Collett

1. “Strawberry Swing” by Coldplay – What can I say? I’m a sap when all is said and done.

… and other good stuff from 2008

ALBUM The Good Life by Justin Townes Earle – Steve Earle’s kid put out a great country album this year that I highly recommend if  you are looking for something a little less pressed-gray-slacks and a little more dirt-under-your-fingernails.  Highly recommended: the brooding Civil War tale “Lone Pine Hill.”

ALBUM  House With No Home by Horse Feathers – Was hooked at the first track. If you liked Bon Iver this year, I bet you will be too.

MUSIC VIDEO  “Time To Pretend” by MGMT – Best. Video. Ever.  HE RIDES A CAT.

NOVEL  The Other by David Guterson – I was blown away by Snow Falling On Cedars years ago, but then disappointed by Guterson’s East of the Montains.  This one reminded me how good he is.  I hope he focuses more on novels in the future; his short stories aren’t his best work.

PODCAST  Planet Money from NPR – Brilliant podcast and blog that is thrown together so ably by Adam Davidson, Laura Conaway and others, teaching you all you need to know about how the world as we know it is ending.  I can’t recommend it enough.

CITY  San Francisco.  How come no one told me about this place?  Jeez.

Congrats on your coming out party today.  I’m loving your service so far, but here is my wishlist for your future.

• Privacy. You need privacy settings. I searched for how to limit what other users saw of my music collection and listening history, but found no way to do it.
• On a related note, please let me delete artists, albums or songs from my collection and from my listening history. I know that I shouldn’t care if people see that I own Train’s “Drops Of Jupiter”… but I do. I have never trusted people who say they “don’t believe in guilty pleasures.” I do, because they exist. “Drops of Jupiter” gives me goosebumps, and this fact deeply, deeply embarrasses me. There’s no contradiction there; it’s just the way it is. Allow me to hide this fact from people who know me. Please.
• iTunes playlist support. My playlists are how I organize my music listening life, and they’re hugely important to me. I’d love to be able to have them sync up to rdio just like my music collection does.
• Allow “add to playlist” from artists and albums, not just songs. How else will I make the requisite Bob vs. Bob playlist?
• iTunes rating support. I neeeeeed to be able to keep track of what songs do it for me and what songs don’t. It forms the basis for all my future listening, not to mention the structure for all of my smart playlists. (I realize I’m asking for iTunes features where you’re trying to create a whole new listening experience, but I think there’s room for both. And I think you should support my current listening habits– they’re actually really important to me– as a gateway to getting me to change them in the long run.)
• Enable more connections between my collection and your catalog. You have so much great music by artists in my collection that I don’t have already, but there’s no way to find it short of searching the artist’s name. If I could see an “All Artist Albums” option when an artist is highlighted on the site or in the app, that would be unbelievable. Come to think of it, the “Play Artist Radio” option should be there, too.  My listening experience needs a starting point, and that starting point is often going to be my collection. Poke and prod me from there to branch out and explore based on things I’m looking at or “own” already.
• Make your desktop player a player, not a remote control. I think it’s elegant and beautiful, but robust it ain’t. Please allow me to browse to and start other music without using a browser. For that matter, please allow me to open the player and start music without having a browser open and logged in to your site.
• Genre-specific Top Album charts. Get Eminem off my computer screen.
• Pavement. Arcade Fire. You get the point. More rights, please. I’ll do my part to make it worth your money.

Everyone seems to agree that the subjective calls of umpires are an inherent part of baseball. What I haven’t heard anyone talk about, though, are situations where those calls have created an unearned perfect game rather than taken away an earned perfect game. More specifically, I’m wondering if there’s ever been outrage over a debatable called strike on a 3-ball count in a perfect game? And if not, should there be?

Taking a look at the box score from Roy Halladay’s perfect game on Saturday, I count 3 instances of called strikes on 3-ball counts.  Dallas Braden’s perfect game from May 9th is a bit more impressive: he had only one called strike helping his cause (against Evan Longoria in the 3rd). In the third-most recent perfect game, Mark Buehrle’s on July 23rd last year, Buehrle had two consecutive called strikes on a 3-ball count against Jason Bartlett in the 6th and another in the 9th against Michel Hernandez.

Last night, though, Gallaraga got up to a 3-ball count only once, only to have Travis Hafner pop a foul ball that was caught. So with respect to Wednesday night’s game, the point is moot. But I think there’s a larger point that’s more broadly relevant.

The instances of called strikes on 3-ball counts seems relatively low on a per game basis in these situations, but across all 20 perfect games, there are likely around 35-40 instances of it happening. I just don’t buy that every one of those calls was indisputable.

But called strikes are temporary, ephemeral. We see them all the time, so we don’t give them a second thought when they happen. Even in potential perfect game situations, no one would likely give a called strike on a 3-ball count a second thought unless one or two conditions were in place: 1) it was late enough in the game where the possibility of a perfect game was within sight and people were scrutinizing pitch counts accordingly, or 2) the called strike was a third strike.

Questionable strike calls are not uncommon, and in a situation where a batter has 3 balls and the pitcher is otherwise flawless, the resulting “perfect game” would be something no less artificial than what happened on Wednesday. But no one would seriously propose overruling a called strike in a situation like that, even if it were obviously miscalled. We’d accept it. Why? Because everyone knows that calling a strike is hard. It’s imperfect and subjective. Umpires can be forgiven for getting them wrong. Wednesday night’s call, on the other hand, seemed easy because we all have the benefit of hindsight and a million viewings of the replay. What’s more, it happened on what would have been the last out, when everyone was waiting and hoping for the same thing to happen.

That’s why I think that to retroactively award a perfect game to Gallaraga would be, on some strange but important level, phony. If that was done, then it’s entitling us to all sorts of revisionist sports history.

And besides, who would benefit from changing the call? Gallaraga has already gained more positive press and career capital (for not only his performance but for the way he handled the situation) than he ever would have without the disputed call. Joyce would only be further shamed to have an official asterisk added to his career history. Every baseball fan knows it was a perfect game, even if it’s not in the books as such. The lucky people at the game not only know they saw a perfect game but were witness to the biggest story in baseball this year, and will still tell the story to future generations of baseball fans.

There’s no need for Bud Selig to retroactively change the call so that “everybody wins.” Everybody already has.

The Freakonomics blog raised an interesting idea from a reader the other day: should the role of a starting pitcher be reconsidered altogether and traded in for an “opening pitcher” instead?  The thinking, basically, is that having a knuckleballer or other slow-speed pitcher throw the first couple of innings each game would enable your best pitchers to throw a less-stressful 3rd-8th or even rest-of-the-game stretch. The idea is based partly on the premise that starting pitchers in their current role only pitch until they fail.  If a starting pitcher is highly unlikely to only pitch 6 or 7 innings in a game anyway, why not give them a finite timeframe in which to perform?

I urged my friend Wally– much more knowledgeable on the topic of baseball than I– to write a response to the idea, and he did so.  My thoughts aren’t so much an opinion as they are a fleshing out of the idea for my own sake.

When I try to think about how this might look, I can’t help thinking that a manager wouldn’t be willing to remove an opening pitcher after just two innings if he was pitching particularly well.  As any Red Sox fan can attest, there are games– and they may be few and far between, but there are games– when Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball is practically untouchable.  In situations where that’s the case, why remove him from the game after two innings or a predefined low pitch count, only to introduce a lesser-known variable– another pitcher’s “on-ness” on this given day– into the situation?

A likely result, then, of a team implementing an opening pitcher strategy would be an inevitable regression to the current starting pitching strategy.  Once a pitcher has started pitching, a manager’s decision making becomes inherently more informed: before the game began, you were placing a bet on this guy’s performance based on his recent outings or history against a certain lineup, but after the game begins, you immediately have much more information.  Does that knuckler look good today? Are guys connecting with it, even if they’re flying out?  Is Wake’s beet-red neck sweating too profusely? And if your guy looks good, then you know you’re more likely to have continued success with him– after all, he’s pitching well now– than you are to have success with someone else.

Right?

Well, yes, but only to a point. And there’s the rub.  Wakefield’s knuckler will start to hang sooner or later in most cases. If you cut him off early, you are preserving the non-outs you otherwise would have had to give up to find out precisely when that time will be.  That seems to be the crux of the argument: that by reducing your odds of seeing an opener fail by limiting him to a couple of innings, you are effectively doing the same thing for the person pitching the middle innings. It’s just a smarter distribution of risk.

So I guess the question really is this: at what point do the odds of your opening pitcher continuing to pitch well become worse than the odds of a “starting” pitcher doing as well?

That, I think, is a question too complicated to be addressed by a strategy that’s defined by holding an opening pitcher to an arbitrary number of innings or pitches. That inflection point would probably come at a very different time for different pitchers (or, more accurately, for different pairings of pitchers) on different days.  The opening pitcher idea seems valid, but much more difficult to implement smartly than by using predefined time periods.

NBC, content four years ago to pillory Miller as a burnout, as a lazy athlete uninterested in competition, as nothing but a party animal, is now more than happy to paint the picture of a man reformed.  After his bronze in the Downhill, the on-camera interviewer noted how different he looked than he did four years ago and asked what he had changed about his approach.  The hosts back in the studio reclined by their fake fireplace and reflected on how– despite it being a cliche– being a parent really does change a person.  Bode, clearly, was a man with a renewed sense of purpose.  His whole worldview had shifted, and seeing how to properly approach the Olympics had been a byproduct of that life change.  Truly, a remarkable Olympic tale of someone seeing the error of their ways, and changing their attitude in a shot at redemption.

Thing is, nothing that Bode actually said lent any sort of truth to that narrative.  When asked about what he had done differently than in Turin, he basically replied (and I’m paraphrasing liberally), “Nothing. I’m the same skier I was then, I just executed a bit better today.” And when it was pointed out that his silver in the Super G came on his daughter’s second birthday, Miller acknowledged that yes, it was in fact his daughter’s birthday and that, yes, that is a very nice coincidence, but he didn’t say that that was what drove him.  He didn’t cite some renewed perspective on life thanks to his being a father.  I’m sure that Bode Miller loves his daughter very much, but she did not seem to play a particularly big role in his skiing.

To drive home their story line, though, NBC asked Miller for a message to his daughter after he had analyzed his slalom run in the Super Combi.

“Daddy loves you, Dace,” he said.  See?  He’s a new man!

In reality, I’m guessing that Bode’s Olympics performance has nothing to do with a new attitude or a new philosophy.  And, as important and life-changing an event becoming a parent is, I’m guessing it has nothing to do with that, either.

Instead, I would argue that it has everything to do with his not being forced to shoulder the burden of unreasonable expectations that he did four years ago. Placed there by people who know little about ski racing, those expectations were gasoline on the fire that is Bode’s general approach to the sport.  Knowing the sport, he knew that predicting a win on any given day would be insane, and that the best one can do is focus on skiing the best way they know how.  Results in Turin weren’t important to him, he said, because there’s only so much he could control.

That’s all that Miller was trying to say four years ago, and he’s been sticking to his guns this time around.  This morning on NPR they played a clip of him saying, “The way I skied is what’s more important to me than medals. I would have been proud of those runs regardless of the outcome.”

That is the same Bode as four years ago, and shows that the attitude was not a cop out after all. It’s simply an acknowledgement of ski racing’s realities, and a pragmatic approach to succeeding in a sport where all you control is your own run.

Nothing in any of his interviews after these three medals indicates that he now considers himself a new man, or that he has changed who he is or his attitude as a result of what the press saw as a major failure in Turin.  He has, however, made one distinction this time around: that he has come to terms with how important the Olympics are, despite any problems he may have with the commercialism, phony patriotism or short-lived appreciation for ski racing that come with them.  Doing so, he said, allowed him to feed off the energy of the moment and to capitalize on it.  In other words, he was able to free himself from all external baggage and to focus on his skiing, something the combustible combination of his free-speaking ways and a press unfamiliar with his sport and his personality made impossible four years ago.

After the first World Cup race this season, I said that I would love it for Bode to quietly medal in Vancouver while the country has its eyes fixed on Lindsey Vonn, because doing so would enable him to say that he achieved Olympic success entirely on his own terms.  Well, he hasn’t done it very quietly– I don’t think anyone would have predicted three medals in his first three events– but he has most certainly done it on his own terms.  And he’s not even done yet.  He still has two more shots at medals.

A new man?  It doesn’t look it to me.  It just looks like he’s been freed to ski for himself, which to Bode means trying to ski in an inspired way.  When his brain allows himself to do that without distraction, all the contrived story lines in the world can’t stop this guy.

He was promoted as capable of winning five Olympic medals because he had won World Cup events in all five disciplines.

The widely fluctuating variables in ski racing — weather, snow conditions, wax, equipment choices — should have been given more consideration.

“It’s not like somebody in track and field where, if you’re the best in the world in that event you’re supposed to win, you’re almost guaranteed to win,” Ligety said. “Ski racing’s the exact opposite. If you’re the favorite, most of the time you’re not going to win. It’s such a finicky sport.”

It’s good to see the inherently unpredictable nature of ski racing made clear to readers who are likely only reminded of its existence once every four years.  What’s more, it comes by way of explaining why the expectations lumped on Miller four years ago were so out of whack with reality.  It’s almost enough to make all of my hand-waving feel not so crazy.

But it was destined to be short-lived, I suppose, as along came Bill Pennington’s Times magazine piece on Lindsey Vonn, saying of the expectations of her forthcoming Olympics:

We have been through this before. Four years ago, the skier Bode Miller was expected to win multiple gold medals at the Winter Games in Turin. Instead, he won none, and his Olympics were portrayed as a failure borne of apathy and late-night barhopping.

Did you catch that? Bode Miller was expected to win multiple medals.  No, sorry, multiple gold medals!  If you ever need proof that Miller was the victim of overblown hype, there it is for you in black and white.

Multiple gold medals would never happen for Bode Miller (and most certainly will not happen in Vancouver) for two reasons.  First, there are too many external variables at play in the sport and, secondly, the talent margins necessary for something like that have not existed in men’s skiing since a guy named Killy was around.  The former of those points, one thinks, must surely contribute to the latter.

The difficulty of dominating in ski racing just reinforces the absurd level of awesomeness that is Lindsey Vonn.

It’s not an entirely accurate exercise,  comparing women’s skiing to men’s skiing.  The shrinking talent margins on the men’s side have not been mirrored perfectly on the women’s side, where the better racers more frequently exert some form of dominance over the rest of the field.

But, that said, I think it’s instructive to look at Vonn’s World Cup season results heading into Vancouver compared to Miller’s heading in to Turin, while keeping in mind that Bode was most definitely the Lindsey of 2006 in terms of what was expected of him, as confirmed by the quote from the Times above.

Miller (remember, the one who was “expected to win multiple gold medals?”) had six podiums in the ’05-’06 season leading into the Olympics, with the GS in Beaver Creek being his only win (the races at Are look like they came after the Olympics):

Not terrible results, but if you were a sports reporter writing up a piece on America’s best hope for Olympic skiing gold, is there any pattern here that would make you feel comfortable predicting it would actually happen?  I don’t see one.

Vonn, on the other hand, has had thirteen so far in the 2010 season.  THIRTEEN!

Looking at Downhill and Super G results, where Vonn has recently been completely dominant, puts the difference into even starker contrast.

Miller’s World Cup DH results from 2006

Vonn’s World Cup DH results from 2010

Miller’s World Cup Super G results from 2006

Vonn’s World Cup Super G results from 2010

This isn’t to make the argument that multiple gold medals are a fair expectation of Vonn, but simply to say that she is insanely good and deserving of the burden of high expectations, if any skier ever has been.

Of course, her shin injury and course conditions in Vancouver are the big unknowns right now. I, for one, think that if she is capable of skiing, she is capable of winning. But the important thing to remember– and the reason high expectations may not be fair, even if they are deserved– is that no one should ever expect anything in ski racing.