Soccer: Beautiful Game, Ugly Games

This week, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution endorsing rights for gay, lesbian and transgender persons. Russia voted against it. How can you be on the "Human Rights Council" and vote against rights for humans? Obviously, because the Human Rights Council is wrapped up in politics, but that's not my focus today.

Russia voted against these rights. Russia was recently awarded the 2018 World Cup. Anyone else see a problem here?

Sepp Blatter has talked about soccer and the World Cup being separate from the issue of global politics, that it should not be predicated on a country's position on key issues. Diplomacy through sport, connecting countries with blemishes to the rest of the world--and the possibility therein of moderating societies which the rest of us would like to see moderated. This is reasonable, and it is why Saudi Arabia, for instance, with its primitive tradition of not allowing women to drive, will still be allowed to compete for a place in the World Cup. We'll just have to hope for their incompetence as a team to prevent them from World Cup glory. We'll hope for the same for Russia.

So yes, this notion of soccer diplomacy, but it appears more and more that FIFA is not in the business of diplomacy through sport, but solely in the business of . . . business.

Say what you will about the qualifications of Qatar as a host for the World Cup in 2022, the fact that multiple members of the FIFA executive committee appear to have accepted bribes in connection to that election leaves the result in a dubious light.

Then you have the fact that FIFA has the power to investigate ethics claims against itself.

Then you have the fact that Mohammed Bin Hammam, from Qatar, in running against Sepp Blatter for the FIFA presidential election earlier this month, demanded an investigation in ethics violations on the part of Sepp Blatter. (This is nothing new. Corruption charges against Blatter have been around since at least 2002.

Then you have the fact that similar charges were filed against Bin Hammam, forcing him to drop out of the presidential race, leaving Blatter to run uncontested. It turned into quite the sideshow.

It all seems very sketchy, and distracts from the point of soccer, which is the game itself, and not the monetary elements that drive the global presentation. We will see if Blatter lives up to his promises to reform the controversial aspects of FIFA's governance and the World Cup host selection process. In the meantime, I'll watch the US play Jamaica today in the Gold Cup, and let myself believe the point of the game is indeed the game itself.

Small Steps

It is fascinating how so many small details in baseball become truly pivotal. In tonight's Giants victory over Arizona, with two outs and the Giants leading 4-0, Cody Ross was on third base, Brandon Crawford was on first. The Diamondbacks caught Brandon stealing and had him dead to rights at second base; however, Crawford stopped halfway, forced Arizona to chase him to get the third out of the inning, and Ross alertly ran home for a fifth run of the game.

When the Diamondbacks pulled within one run later on a three run home run off Matt Cain, that bit of smart baserunning by Cody Ross became so much more important, considering we ended up with a 6-5 victory. Not only was it an extra run in a one run victory, it also prevented the Diamondbacks from actually tying the Giants at any point, which meant that Matt Cain earned his sixth victory of the year. Morale is boosted by such statistical means.

On the flip side, consider how much one small miscall might have changed things. In the ninth, when Arizona runners tried to advance on a ball dropped by the catcher, Pablo Sandoval took a strong throw from Eli Whiteside and applied a tag. The umpire called the runner safe, even though Pablo's left foot actually blocked the bag and prevented the Diamondback from tagging the base before Pablo tagged him. Replays showed this clearly. Such a small call, but it could have be disastrous. Fortunately, Brian Wilson remained indomitable and struck out the final batter to win the first game of a three game series in Arizona, against the Diamondbacks who are now 1 1/2 games behind us in the division.

Subtleties like that make baseball fascinating from an intellectual level, I think, even for those who are not particularly fans.