I’ve been spending a lot of time lately at the Ball Park at Harbor Yard — better known as the home of the Bridgeport Bluefish, an independent baseball team. The stadium sits two Metro North stops away from where I live, in Milford, and the plan this summer is to write a series of dispatches on the team and on minor league baseball. The first dispatch is now up at Deadspin.

There’s some fun stuff in there, including a long interview with Tommy John, who became the manager of the Bluefish after Bobby Valentine recommended him. I talked to John right when Valentine was getting the worst of it from Boston fans, and John stood by his friend. “I guess what Pedroia’s saying,” John said, referring to the controversy over Valentine’s comments on Kevin Youkilis, “is that you gotta hold hands and sing Kumbaya. That’s not Bobby. He’s going to stir the pot. If those guys had to play for Dick Williams back in the 1960s, half the team would quit.”

Anyway, it should make for a fun series. I suspect John will reappear at some point, as well.

In Sunday’s New York Times sports section, I’ve got a long feature on the closing of the Wigwam, the 8,996-seat arena in Anderson, Indiana, that ranks as the second largest high school gym in the world. Or ranked, rather: Anderson’s school board closed the Wigwam last summer, in a decision that frustrated many fans and seemed to strike another blow to the city’s struggling self-image. Those elements certainly belong in this story, but I also tried to focus on the positive — the way the Anderson Indians got a chance to create, in the words of their coach, Joe Nadaline, “a new tradition.” I also took Nadaline’s idea one step further. What could the Wigwam’s closing reveal about the current relationship between Indiana and high-school hoops? Short answer: while it’s taken a few steps back, it remains powerful and pretty much without compare.

That doesn’t mean we should lapse into lazy “Indiana basketball” rhapsodies. (For example.) But it does mean the state continues to offer a surprising level of passion, quality, and, given its smallish size, talent. One way to see this is in the person of John Harrell. I quote Harrell briefly in my story, and his delightfully lo-fi website offers an indispensable resource for any local fan.

Harrell started writing for the Huntington Herald-Press while he was a senior in high school. He migrated to the Bloomington Herald-Times‘ sports desk in the early 1970s. Around the same time, Jeff Sagarin, a sports stats guru who now helps with the BCS rankings, also moved to Bloomington. Harrell started delivering him hand-written lists of Indiana’s high school basketball scores; Sagarin started churning out professional-grade rankings for the state’s programs. (Another reason to be optimistic about Anderson going forward? They played one of the 20 toughest schedules in the state, according to Sagarin.)

“It all developed into this website eventually,” Harrell told me. “I had all these records laying around.” In 2000, Harrell started uploading those records (and the latest scores and schedules) to his personal website. It became crucial for coaches, ADs, journalists, and super-fans, with data that goes back to 1993. Harrell says he still has the earlier stuff — it’s just stuck on a computer that can no longer transfer files to more modern machines. He may get around to transferring it by hand now that he’s retired. ”I haven’t been as busy,” he said. “I’ve had more time to devote to the site.”

Like any longtime observer of the Indiana hoops scene, Harrell brought up class basketball and attendance numbers before I could even ask the question. He admits the switch has hurt attendance, but also points out that fan interest has been slowly, steadily declining for decades. (I agree: when you crunch the numbers, you see that class basketball, more than anything else, provides an easy scapegoat for angry nostalgics. See this terrific Indianapolis Monthly story for more.) One thing’s for sure, according to Harrell: class basketball is here to stay. “The small schools have gotten a taste for Indianapolis now,” he said with a laugh.

Mack also had nice things to say about his former boss. (“He’s one-hundred percent basketball,” Mack said. “He doesn’t have any other interests. I feel bad for him.”) One place where Mack’s emphasized continuity is Xavier’s defense, which continues to deploy a man-to-man scheme known as “the pack-line defense.”

In Miller’s first season as head coach (and Mack’s first as his top assistant), Xavier ran a number of different defenses, depending on match-ups, in-game strategy, and so on. But this meant Xavier didn’t develop much of a defensive identity, and for that reason Miller spent most of his first offseason watching film of — and making phone calls to — the sport’s best defensive coaches. Eventually, Miller decided Xavier would become a pack-line team, emphasizing the scheme’s principles and philosophy at every opportunity. He brought in a new assistant, James Whitford, to help with the transition. Whitford had played for Wisconsin’s Dick Bennett and coached for Miami’s Charlie Coles, both of whom favored sticky, lane-clogging defenses. In other words, Whitford also offers an example of coaching continuity, and he’s now Miller’s top assistant at Arizona.

So, what is the pack-line defense? I asked Mack for a layman’s definition, and this is what he said:

It’s a defense that stresses keeping the ball out of the lane, being a team that doesn’t get spread out defensively, that isn’t denying in the passing lanes, that isn’t taking chances and trying to make the game chaotic, that’s more worried about keeping the ball in front of them. We want to have a little more organization to us on the defensive end. We want to make sure every shot you take is outside of the lane and is contested.

If you read my profile, you’ll see why this scheme appeals to the hyper-organized Mack. The pack-line defense still demands intense individual defense — ”We’re going to pressure the ball really hard,” Mack says — but it forces the other players to think about their positioning. “I came to believe in the pack-line defense because it gave answers,”  Mack says. The players knew what they needed to do, the coaches knew what they needed to teach, and the team knew how it could get better. In fact, Basketball Prospectus has demonstrated that Xavier’s defense got better every single year under Miller. Mack remembers Miller’s final 2009 Xavier team that made the Sweet 16: “We were so doggone good on defense. We weren’t the most talented team, but we had kids who’d been in the system three or four years, who knew how to defend.”

You can see, then, why Mack wanted to keep the pack-line defense — and why that continuity between Coach Miller and Coach Mack mattered. “I was teaching a system, as an assistant, that I completely bought into,” Mack told me.

One final point: this is not to say that all coaches are the same, or even similar. In fact, Mack and Miller couldn’t be more different in terms of personality, if not intensity. All the info in this post came from my interview with Mack. I asked Miller the exact same questions, and here’s what I got: “The pack-line defense was my contribution.” That’s it. Even when I asked about Mack’s role in defensive gameplans, Miller stayed terse: “He contributed, in my mind, to every aspect in the development of our program.”

So while coaches may share strategy and tactics, they remain different people, and those differences surely inform their strengths and weaknesses. In fact, I’d planned to ask Thad Matta about the relationship between him and Miller at Xavier, but, in an outcome that will surprise very few Xavier fans, he ignored my multiple requests. Matta, it seems, had completely moved on.

In the March issue of Cincinnati Magazine, I’ve got a long profile of Xavier head coach Chris Mack. It centers on the lead up to the Xavier-Gonzaga game on New Year’s Eve, and while we continued to tweak the story as Xavier’s season progressed, that lead time makes it feel a little . . . strange, especially since this week Xavier pretty much ended its NCAA hopes by losing to St. Louis. I hope the access and the reporting help compensate for this lag. One thing that definitely helps is Mack himself. He was the most honest and upfront interview I’ve encountered in the sports world, and I’ll try to do a couple follow up posts with stuff we couldn’t fit into the profile — especially his discussion of the theory and praxis behind Xavier’s pack-line defense.

Before getting to that, though, I want to highlight (and substantiate) what I suspect will be the most controversial part in the profile. It deals, to no one’s surprise, with the Xavier-U.C. brawl at the end of this year’s Crosstown Shootout. Near the end, I write:

But there’s a bigger problem here, and it gets at Xavier’s dirty little secret: The brawl has been a long time coming.

From the beginning, Mack’s been up front about wanting a nasty team. That’s why he practices the way he practices. (Mack pushed his players so hard in a January practice that he blew out his knee again while attempting a motivational dunk.) That’s why he recruits the way he recruits. You can find evidence of this from former players and coaches, from on-court incidents, and from opponents. But here’s a particularly telling example: In October, before the season even started, Jeff Goodman of CBS Sports stopped by a Xavier practice and noted how the team relied on a potentially combustible edginess. “We’re straight tough,” guard Mark Lyons told him.

The profile makes lot of the comparison between Skip Prosser and Chris Mack, and I should say that Prosser also ran a tough team. In Michael Perry’s excellent book Xavier Tales, he quotes the following Prosser pep talk: “You’ve got to hit them first; don’t give up a step.” Perry also quotes former Xavier player (and later, assistant coach) Pat Kelsey on Prosser’s practices: “It was three hours of just up-and-down the floor, bodies flying around; it was almost like you needed helmets and shoulder pads.”

Still, I think Mack (and, as we’ll see, Sean Miller before him) took this nastiness to a new and more intentional level. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I believe it created a tension with the Prosserian classiness most people associate with Xavier — and certainly, it made the fall out of the brawl that much worse.

So, what’s the evidence I alluded to above?

• Former players: Before his first Crosstown Shootout, Mack showed his team a five-minute montage of previous Shootouts — the fights, the shoving, the dirty plays — to motivate them. After the game (and I’m drawing all this from Scott Gaede’s book NeXt in Line), Jordan Crawford said that U.C. “tried to come in and be the bullies, and we wanted to be the bullies, too. We ain’t going to back down from nobody.” Later that year, in the Butler game that ended with a bizarre game-clock error, Tu Holloway had to be restrained from charging into the crowd. Afterward, a Xavier player allegedly tore a water fountain off the wall of Hinkle Fieldhouse. I mentioned this to one of Xavier’s media guys, and he maintained that the player meant to slam a table but hit the fountain instead; the age of Hinkle Fieldhouse did the rest. That may be true, but as far as defenses of militant behavior go, it seems a little lacking.
• Former coaches: This seems like the most telling evidence, to me. When an Arizona reporter asked Sean Miller about the brawl, he said this of his former team: “They’re deep, they’re tough, they don’t back down. If Cincinnati tries to do what they did today, they’re going to get a fight. That’s what happened. So I’m proud of those guys.” The reporter followed up with Miller after he’d seen the tape: “Happens every game,” Miller reaffirmed. “I’m proud of those guys, I really am. I would fully expect there to be a fight.” Miller tried to walk these statements back the next day, but I think they reveal how central this nastiness was to his team’s culture and to his coaching identity. Remember that in one of Miller’s Crosstown Shootouts, Derrick Brown started a small fight and was ejected. It seems clear that Miller expected the Musketeers to react this way because he (and later, his former assistant Mack) stressed these qualities on a regular basis.
• Opponents: On his radio show, to take one instance, Matt Painter said of Xavier that “right away from watching film, they talk! And they talk a lot. So that was one of the first things we talked in a scouting report was that, ‘Don’t get caught up in that.’”

I asked Mack about the Painter example. “That’s Matt’s opinion,” he said. “That’s not who we are nor who want to be. It has nothing to do with the talking on the floor, the false bravado. It has everything to do with being the first person to dive on a loose ball.” Again, this may be true, but I think it also creates a tension with Xavier’s broader image. That tension was really the only thing Mack was less than candid abut.

Let’s end with a great example of what I’m talking about — and an example that suggests this tension bothers Xavier’s administration, as well. Almost a month after the brawl, a university dean announced mandatory “reflection sessions”  for the student section based on their behavior at the game. Xavier cancelled the sessions, after they were widely mocked, but what’s truly interesting is that the university decided to react to the student section only post-brawl. After all, Matt Howard of Butler, who was surely one of college basketball’s most widely traveled players, called the Cintas Center and Xavier’s student section the most hostile he’d ever experienced. That’s the way Xavier has grown used to doing things, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, it does seem odd to freak out, but only after being caught.

In today’s Los Angeles Times, I’ve got an op ed on the Jefferson Bible — back in the news, thanks to a new edition from the Smithsonian, and more relevant than ever, thanks to the Republican presidential primary. I could say a lot more about the history of the Jefferson Bible, and somewhere down the line I will. For now, though, I’ll write about something else — another recent story in the Times, this near-crazy column about Lakers reserve Josh McRoberts.

The column comes from Bill Plaschke, a Fire Joe Morgan favorite who’s made a career out of getting things wrong. In fact, I single this instance out only because it reveals a lot about how the media continues to mythologize “Indiana basketball.”

Plaschke starts with a promising topic — how a prep and college star handles being a role player in the pros. There are some good details, too, like the fact that McRoberts moved to L.A. so quickly that he’s been taking an airport shuttle to games. Where the column goes off the rails, though, is when it addresses McRoberts’s Indiana roots. It doesn’t help that Plaschke relies on one of those lazy, column-by-number structures that FJM loved to hate. McRoberts is Josh McRambis, he’s Josh McFly, and, now, he’s “Josh McHoosier”:

He grew up swallowing wood chips that landed in his mouth from his splintered driveway backboard. His other childhood gym was a goal hammered to the side of his grandmother’s barn. He was the nation’s top-ranked player as a senior at an Indianapolis-area high school where, during the recent NBA lockout, he served as an assistant coach. And, oh yeah, he can’t stand to watch the movie Hoosiers anymore because, basically, he lived it. With his Indiana twang, he even sounds like it. “Where I came from, all I’ve been through, that’s made me who I am,” he says. “Hoosiers is about right.”

This is absolute nonsense. That “Indianapolis-area high school”? It’s Carmel High School in Carmel, Indiana, easily the richest city in the richest county in the state. The 4,600-student high school boasts a national reputation for college prep. The city just built a fancy concert hall known as The Palladium. Carmel isn’t famous for its hardscrabble Hoosier-ness. It’s famous for its roundabouts.

Now there’s nothing wrong with this. But McRoberts talking about the goal on his grandmother’s barn — and let’s note that his dad played basketball at Butler and his mom teaches at a Carmel school — makes as much sense as me talking about the rusted-out combine on my grandfather’s farm. Does it exist? Yes. Does it mean I deserve a Walker Evans portrait? Hardly.

It’s interesting that McRoberts can no longer watch Hoosiers. I heard the same thing from several high schoolers in Milan, Indiana, when I did a story on the town’s basketball legacy. In both cases, it seems like the natural, reasonable reaction of people who’ve seen the same lazy story line projected on them way too many times. If it’s basketball and it’s Indiana, then it must be Hoosiers — underdogs, outhouses, twangy accents. Honestly, I don’t even blame McRoberts for mentioning his grandmother’s barn. I’d bet you a pile of wood chips Plaschke was gunning for details of just that sort.

In Slate today, I’ve got a story about Major League Baseball’s new CBA — and about its changes in how teams can acquire (and compensate) amateur talent. Among baseball pundits, a sturdy consensus has formed: these changes will make it even harder for small-market teams to compete. I try to show how this analysis overlooks a few key ideas, including the lessons of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball.

The gist of my argument is that spending tons of money on amateur players does give small-market teams an advantage — but that it’s such a big advantage everyone else will catch on and catch up, leaving the draft as stratified as every other element in baseball’s economy. It’s the classic Moneyball narrative: team exploits undervalued asset until it becomes properly (even overly) valued. One of the funny things here  is that Billy Beane and the A’s themselves undervalued draft picks. After all, a big part of Moneyball centers on the 2002 draft in which the A’s had a whopping seven first-round picks (and 35 picks overall). Instead of loading up on high-ceiling, high-cost amateurs — the kind of players you have to pay “over slot” — the A’s looked for players who would sign under slot. Now, as Lewis tells it, the A’s didn’t have much choice since their owner had allocated only $9.4 million for draft bonuses. But that was a terrible move. Bargain-hunting makes sense with big-league players, not with amateurs.

In the last few years, other teams — and, crucially, other owners — have wised up. The Royals provide the best example. But even now you’re starting to see big-market teams invest more and more money in amateur players, players they can keep or trade. The Tigers used two “over slot” prospects to trade for Miguel Cabrera; the Red Sox used two more to get Adrian Gonzalez. And if baseball’s new CBA hadn’t better regulated the draft, this trend would have only increased.

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N.B. If you’re a baseball-slash-economics fan, you might enjoy a long feature I wrote this summer on the Cincinnati Reds and their fans. In it, I erroneously predicted that baseball “has too many people making too much money for anything major to change [in the new CBA].” But there’s lots more I did get right about small-market teams and how they can (and can’t) compete. A .pdf of the story is here.

On Sunday’s Cincinnati Edition, I had a nice conversation with Mark Perzel about my feature on the Bengals, the county, and their ruinous stadium lease. You can listen to it here.

Well, after a couple teasers — a miscellany of quotations from the county official who became a Bengals exec; an appreciation of Mike Brown as a “near-brilliant litigator” — my feature on the Bengals and their stadium lease is finally here. The story doesn’t break much news, other than a few hints about a potential solution to this 15-year mess. But I do think it synthesizes that mess into a coherent story.

It’s also a very depressing story. If you follow Cincinnati sports and want something a little more uplifting, check out the previous story I did for the magazine — on the Reds and their efforts to win back their fans.

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One more thing: I should elaborate on one part of my stadium-fund story — the end, where I claim the Bengals’ mistreatment of Carson Palmer ”tells you everything you need to know about Brown.” After the issue went to press, the Bengals traded Palmer in one of the most slam-dunk deals of all time. That might seem like a vindication of Brown’s pettiness. After all, the Bengals now have two extra draft picks to go with their promising rookie quarterback. But I think this misses the larger picture. Throughout this saga, Brown treated Palmer, maybe the best (and certainly the nicest) player he’s ever drafted, with zero class. After the trade, Palmer took time to call the Cincinnati media, saying all the right things and handling the whole thing like a professional — like an adult. What did the Bengals do? Well, in the team’s statement — and you could obviously forget any interaction with the media — Brown didn’t even bother to thank Palmer for his years with the team. Marvin Lewis stooped even lower, bashing Palmer to reporters.

So here’s a question: how do you think players around the league perceived this? The Bengals have long struggled to lure free agents to Cincinnati. This offseason, Jonathan Joseph, a free agent and one of their best defensive players, bailed on the team despite its best efforts to resign him. Right now, it seems the Bengals can’t give their money away. Here’s a second question, then: What happens in five or six yeas when those two new draft picks become free agents?

Sometimes these stories seemed too tangential. (Remember when an aging Barry Larkin asked for grass in Riverfront Stadium? Brown [allegedly] blocked it because of the decades-long feud between the Bengals and the Reds — even though Larkin wanted off the knee-grinding astroturf so badly he was ready to pay for the switch himself.) Sometimes the stories were too detailed. (It would take plenty of space to explain how, since they’ve moved into Paul Brown Stadium, the Bengals have managed to sue their own fans — twice.) Sometimes the stories felt too thinly sourced. (Last year, Cincinnati CityBeat reported the recollections of a former township trustee who said Stuart Dornette and Bob Bedinghaus — two key members of the Bengals’ braintrust — came to him in 1995 with a quid-pro-quo election offer so long as he agreed to provide “a second vote on the County Commission for the stadium sales tax proposal.”)

Like I said, lots of stories. But there is one other episode, alluded to in my story, that I’d like to summarize here since it highlights one of the most frustrating aspects of the Mike Brown era. The Cincinnati media loves to praise Brown’s “business savvy.” They’re wrong to do this — Brown’s stubborn belief in Family First, and in his own football acumen, has cost him millions in profits and a whole lot of capital appreciation. But Brown does seem to be a near-brilliant litigator. And that’s what’s so frustrating — he becomes quite creative in legal matters, even as he refuses to spend on players or to delegate football decision-making.

One thing my story tries to do is show just how much money Brown made in the mid-1990s (and, by extension, how much he continues to make today). It’s not just the Bengals’ year-to-year profits, though those consistently rank near the top of the NFL. It’s the millions in salaries and bonuses collected by Brown and his family — and, more than that, the appreciation in the Bengals’ value, which is how modern sports owners make their real money.

This last point isn’t news to Brown. In fact, one reason he ran the Bengals so cheaply the 1990s — players flying in coach, whirlpools that didn’t work, and so on — is because he was funneling every spare dollar toward his attempt to buy out the team’s other major shareholders. In this, Brown succeeded. “From 1984 to 1993,” the Enquirer noted in 1999, “the Bengals paid out every penny of profit — $66 million — to shareholders.”

Why could the Enquirer note those numbers? Well, the Bengals ended up in tax court because of their deal, and even more numbers came out when the shareholders’ heirs decided to sue. You can see why they were angry: the Bengals’s valuation has skyrocketed from $8 million, when Paul Brown co-founded them in 1968, to $875 million today — and most of that growth came after Brown bought up all those shares. Again, he can be near-brilliant when the business matters line up with his worldview. But Brown also feels zero guilt when it comes to diverting money from the team’s best interests to his own. In 1989, the Bengals went to the Super Bow. Over the next decade — a time when Brown was maximizing profits in order to buy up stock — the Bengals ranked last in the NFL in wins and next-to-last in payroll.

In short, Mike Brown ran his team into the ground in order to hoover up its shares. If that angers you, it’s only because his priorities are not your own.

Speaking of priorities, here’s a sublime quotation from the Brown family’s testimony in that tax court case:

Super Bowl teams do not make as much money as the public thinks. Revenues are shared among all 28 teams and expenses are only borne by the teams that play in the Super Bowl. Super Bowl teams lose more money in the following years because they have to pay their players more for their superior performance.