You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will (30 page)

Players are given remarkable freedom once they’ve established where they fit into the hierarchy. It would be outrageous—utterly unthinkable—for a manager to ask Josh Hamilton to bunt. Hamilton is a power hitter, and power hitters don’t bunt regardless of the situation. It could be the most obvious bunting situation, a spot where bunting is by far the smartest option to help the team, and it still wouldn’t happen. Same holds true for Albert Pujols, Adam Dunn, Miguel Cabrera, Robinson Cano. It’s simply out of the question.

It’s a year-round sport, which makes it extremely difficult for professional players to further their education. They go from year-round travel baseball in high school to year-round minor-league baseball, where they’re around only other baseball players, to major-league baseball, where it’s a clique-y sport centered on individual battles.

What’s the opposite of this? Take a look at football. The recruiting is done through the high schools. There is no such thing as travel football for high school kids. High school football is often the most galvanizing element of a high school community. The student body, cheerleaders, band—it’s truly a communal event. The
competition is team vs. team, city vs. city, region vs. region. There’s a huge amount of collective pride involved. Football players are a part of that greater community, and they are more likely to play another sport than baseball players who have devoted themselves to a year-round, singular pursuit.

Football is not the year-round sport baseball has become, which puts football players into contact with more people—parents, coaches, teammates—with different interests and personalities. When they get to college, football players once again become part of a diverse student body. Their games, once again, are communal. Pride in your school—something greater than you—is often a bigger deal than it was in high school.

And look at education: by rule, football players have to take classes for a minimum of three years. Even if they’re not scholars, they’re still exposed to renowned professors and supersmart peers and levels of thought they wouldn’t have achieved on their own. Even in the biggest football factory they’re receiving some semblance of an education. They’re not just playing Xbox in an apartment in some podunk minor-league town with guys who come from the same upper-middle-class suburban background and play a sport whose schedule makes it nearly impossible to further an education in the off-season.

An NFL locker room is home to a high percentage of college graduates. A professional football player is, in general, more worldly and media savvy and well rounded than a major-league baseball player. It’s not necessarily a criticism; these are simply characteristics that are bred into the culture of the respective sports.

As of 2012, just 4.3 percent of baseball’s nine hundred major-leaguers had a college degree. It’s the lowest of any major sport, and it absolutely has to have an impact on the people who play the game.

There are differences intrinsic to the game as well. Football is not an individual sport. It’s a choreographed sport. Snap counts, audibles—I depend on
you
for my
safety
on a set of specific rules based on teamwork. Think about that: it’s an awesome responsibility.

Unlike baseball, where it’s outrageous to take the bat out of the hands of Pujols, football is filled with situations where the individual is suppressed for the sake of the team. Peyton Manning, arguably the best quarterback of a generation, is told at the end of the divisional playoff game against Baltimore in 2012,
You will take a knee and not throw a pass
.

What does the football paradigm create? Humility.

Let’s compare the two:

Baseball is played by suburban and rural young men who are less educated, living in an insular world, driven by individual battles. The insularity of that world is obvious every time an outsider attempts to gain access. Unless you played baseball or cover it for a living, the “outsider” is treated like an alien. There is very little patience for the newcomer. Oh, and one other thing: once a player gets to the big leagues, his contract is guaranteed. There’s a certain level of invincibility that comes with that kind of security.

Football, on the other hand, is played by young men who are from all walks—suburban, rural, urban. It’s not insular; it’s broad based. They come up being part of a campus, a member of a diverse and open community. They play a choreographed sport based on efficiency and teamwork. Their contracts are not guaranteed, and they can be cut at any time.

As a football player, you have less freedom. You have an assignment, and your job is to do your assignment and your assignment only. You are scolded if you go out of your lane or miss an assignment. Despite the stereotype of the football player as a big,
muscle-bound aggressive beast, I find football players very easy to deal with. They’re humbled constantly. Their careers are cut short by injuries all the time; the threat is like the sword of Damocles hanging over their every move.

It seems counterintuitive to suggest that athletes whose careers depend on violence are the more civil species, especially in light of the Aaron Hernandez situation. However, I find people whose livelihoods are associated with violence—from football players to police officers to paratroopers—tend to be more humble. They need other people for their safety, and that one sentence—
I depend on you
—is strong medicine.

Nothing against baseball players—they just don’t exist in the same hypercharged environment. Their world is more insulated and bound by tradition and custom. They can’t help themselves; they’re made that way.

Take a look at the biggest guy in the room. He’s about 6 foot 5 inches and 240, which gives off an intimidating scent. But does big always equal tough? For all we know, he could have just inherited really good DNA from his large, muscular Norwegian father. He could be deathly afraid of carpenter ants. He could bawl his eyes out at Celine Dion concerts. He could have less courage than your average senator. You see his size as an advantage in life. He could see it as a curse.

Which is another way of saying this: sometimes you get the benefit of the doubt in life, even when you don’t deserve it.

It just so happens that I have something in common with the biggest guy in the room. In my case, the perceived advantage concerns sports gambling. I don’t know where my aura comes from, but it’s there. Maybe it’s because I lived in Las Vegas for seven years. Maybe it’s because I once rubbed out a guy who gave me lousy information on a Lions game. Or maybe it’s because I set some sort of world record for correctly picking NFL games in 2012. Whatever the case, there are some people out there who think I really know my stuff.

The truth is … no, wait. Let me back up for a minute. The
partial
truth is that I was pretty freaking amazing with my NFL picks last year. However, the larger truth is this: beyond me being amazing, there was some blind luck involved.

I have some advantages. I have a little better access to former players and coaches than you do. I might get a slight edge by using tidbits of information gleaned organically throughout the week, scouring some free scouting report services offered by ESPN and other media outlets, and monitoring a handful of different betting
services. I also bet without an ounce of emotion or loyalty. So yeah—those factors might provide an edge.

A slight edge.
Slight
as in “I’m slightly better than your cousin Larry ‘The Velvet Touch’ Lassaro but probably not as good as Larry’s good friend, Tony ‘The Golden Retirement Plan’ Valdosetti.”

Here’s all you need to know about betting on professional football games: if you asked the actual head coaches, the guys who have built game plans all week and slaved over game tape with their assistants, they’d tell you they couldn’t and wouldn’t regularly pick winners against the spread. How do I know this? Easy—I’ve paid attention to the former coaches who broadcast games. They watch tape all the time. They get inside juice from their buddies who are still coaching.

And these guys—these smart guys who know the game and have inside information—couldn’t pick out drapes to match a couch.

It is nothing more than educated guesswork. Any wise guy will tell you it’s
when
you bet that helps you make the profit. The real sharps bet games as early as Monday morning when the lines are usually posted first. That should tell you one thing: if you’re waiting until Friday for my picks—or the picks of some radio goober—you’ve already missed the best lines of the week. You can’t get the freshest produce if you’re shopping four days after it’s been delivered.

The real pros also bet several times on the same game as a means of protecting their slim annual profits. Fans can fail to fully understand the nature of the game. You’re betting against odds-makers’ lines. In other words, you’re betting against professionals who sit in a room and say, “Let’s create a number to bet against for
this game that makes it virtually impossible to make a living predicting who wins.”

Yes, Pundit Tracker—a website that follows media picks—named me the most accurate forecaster for politics or sports in 2012.

And yes, two weeks into 2013—based on the same polling—I trailed stray cats on
Animal Planet
.

Occasionally fans ask me if I bet my own picks. That never makes any sense to me. Why would you care?

Would I only use a respected doctor to save my daughter’s life if and only if he’d saved his own daughter with the same procedure?

Can I never use a marriage counselor who’s had troubles in his own marriage? Does a bankruptcy attorney merit respect only if he, too, had to file for bankruptcy? Must a dermatologist have perfect skin?

Advice comes from all over. If you feel it’s quality information, use it. Even the so-called mavens in the world of sports gambling have off-weeks and even down years. Billy Walters, profiled on
60 Minutes
and recognized as the industry’s sharpest and wealthiest bettor, was not having a particularly memorable 2012 with his NFL picks.

Me? Well, that was a different story. After hitting my eighth or ninth straight winning week, I got a call from a well-connected friend of mine in Los Angeles. He wanted to know if he could get my picks early. When I asked why, he said, “Billy’s guys told me they may just follow your lead for the next few weeks. You’re the hottest guy in the country.”

That’s one way to look at it, I suppose. Here’s another: I was probably just the luckiest.

Cesar Geronimo was buried near the bottom of the star-studded batting order of the Big Red Machine of the 1970s. Slender but strong, an elegant outfielder with a respected arm, he probably wouldn’t have even made the team without his defense. He had a nonchalant style, gliding more than running, and occasionally he’d wear an old-style batting helmet without an earflap. He had speed but never seemed to steal as many bases as he should have.

Everybody knew Pete Rose and Johnny Bench, but insight on Geronimo could set you apart from other kids.

One day Geronimo was behind in the count to Dodgers lefty Doug Rau, himself an overlooked guy on a roster of bigger names. The count was probably 1-2, and Geronimo put a big, swooping swing on a fastball—low and away, if I remember correctly—and pulled it over the short set of trees for a home run.

In my front yard.

I was twelve years old and coming to the realization that I was alone. All the time. Maybe this memory is embedded in my brain because Geronimo had only 51 career homers and I had finally come to understand how desperate I had become in my efforts to entertain myself.

My sister, Marlene, five years older, left junior high and high school about the time I was entering both. We shared precisely zero friends and, really, what fourteen-year-old girl wants to hang with a nine-year-old brother? She had her Beatles and Peter Frampton albums, and I had my imagination.

I didn’t just talk to myself. I talked back—even argued.

My early years were probably no different than many of yours,
especially if you, like me, came from a small town. In rural areas, convincing your mom to drive you across town is the difference between riding bicycles and laughing all afternoon with a friend and playing a doubleheader in your front yard.