King Kaufman

This was a refreshing contrast to the Los Angeles Lakers, who on Wednesday night won the NBA championship and acted like a bunch of guys who’d just finished a reasonably successful sales meeting at the airport Holiday Inn. Nice job, Kobe. Thanks, Shaq, you too. I liked that slam-dunk thing you did there. Yeah, thanks. Need a lift back to the office?

I’ve seen people demonstrate more emotion after winning a small fries and a Coke in a scratch-off game at McDonald’s.

Watching people experience total, all-consuming joy is one of the best things about sports. (The best thing is experiencing it, if it’s your team that wins the championship or the big game.) There aren’t that many chances in our daily lives to feel, or even witness, those kinds of feelings. That absence of whooping, leaping glee is spoofed in a TV commercial running these days for some sort of health-care plan. It shows office workers doing leaping belly-bumps near the copier, high-fiving at the coffee machine, leaping into the arms of their cheering comrades over a cubicle wall, like a Green Bay Packer who’s just scored a touchdown.

The joke is that if you want your office drones to be this happy, you’ll sign the company up for this health plan. Cute, but can anyone watch that commercial and not feel awful for those of us — most of us — who work in such environments, for whom such jubilation is so out of place it makes for an obvious visual pun?

So at least the Red Wings didn’t dis us fans by acting like the championship was just one more meaningless thing that all the little people care about for some reason, the way the Lakers did about their title. And while it’s hard to get too worked up about the Red Wings, who are, after all, a mercenary bunch united by massive amounts of cash spent by a purveyor of flavor-free pizzas for the purpose of securing the Stanley Cup, it’s also hard not to feel all happy and relieved for Dominik Hasek, the wondrous goalie who finally got to skate with the trophy at the age of 37, in his 12th year, or Luc Robitaille, the winger who has scored 620 goals but who had famously refrained from even touching the cup until he’d earned the chance, finally, in his 16th season, to carry it as a champion.

But for all the cheering and confetti and rapturous frolicking, and for all the undeniably spine-tingling history that goes with the very appearance of the Stanley Cup — did you know that in 1907, the cup, the actual same trophy, was won by the Kenora Thistles? — the fact is that the final series was a dud. Not as much of a dud as the NBA Finals, but a dud nonetheless. Series won in five games do not go down in history with the great ones, and well they shouldn’t.

The Hurricanes are being praised for making the Wings work for it, and good for them and all. But was there ever much doubt that the Wings would get the job done, even after Carolina won that first game? Sure, the Hurricanes pushed Detroit to three overtimes in Game 3, but if Detroit hadn’t been bouncing pucks off of goalposts all night, we all could have been home for Letterman. And even if Carolina had won Game 3 to go up 2-1, would that have meant the Red Wings were done? Hardly. The Vancouver Canucks had them down 2-0 in the opening round, and Detroit shrugged and won four straight. Is Carolina a better team than Vancouver? Well, um, yes. And what I mean by that is: no, I don’t really think so, but you’ve got to give them credit for winning three playoff series.

The problem in the NHL is that all the good teams are bunched up in the West. The NBA has the exact same problem. In both leagues, the Western Conference final was a humdinger, a thrilling, nail-biting, seven-game tilt between the two best teams in the league, the Wings and Colorado Avalanche in hockey, the Lakers and Sacramento Kings in basketball. The resulting finals were anticlimactic, pitting the triumphant survivor against an Eastern champion that would have been no better than the fourth or fifth best team in the West. The Hurricanes, in fact, would have missed the playoffs if they were a Western Conference team.

I don’t think there’s some structural problem with either sport that we can all take up arms against. It’s just one of those cyclical things. For most of the ’90s in the NBA and the first half of the decade in the NHL, the Eastern Conference finals were the de facto world championship series.

As a Westerner, I used to hope for a day when it would turn around, when the weak West would rise up and smite the elite East. Now I’m hoping for a comeback for the East, and a little parity, so that those year-end celebrations, whether buoyant and elated like the Red Wings or smug and vain like the Lakers, can be held in honor of something other than a foregone conclusion.

But it was Joyce’s response that turned this terrible tale into one that’s almost heart-warming. Not as heart-warming as a journeyman pitcher tossing a perfect game, mind you, but pretty toasty.

Having asked to see the video replay after the game, an emotional Joyce spoke to reporters: “It was the biggest call of my career and I kicked it. I just cost that kid a perfect game,” he said. “I missed it from here to that wall. I had a great angle, and I missed the call.” He also asked to speak to Galarraga, apologized to him and hugged him. Offered the next day off by his superiors, Joyce declined, saying he was ready to face what he assumed would be a hostile reaction from the Detroit crowd.

This eminently reasonable, grown-up reaction stood out because baseball umpires are ordinarily cloistered. They have what amounts to lifetime tenure. They don’t face reporters, rarely admit mistakes publicly and are not held accountable for their actions in any way that’s visible to the players or public. Don’t like that call? Replays showed the ump got it wrong? Tough.

Galarraga said he’d forgiven the umpire, and Joyce’s response to his error has been widely praised beyond baseball. He’s become a go-to example of how to handle mistakes in politics, religion and — especially because his straight-forward behavior came in the midst of BP’s oil-spill debacle — business.

Less than two weeks after the blown call, ESPN surveyed major league players for their opinions about umpires. Their overwhelming choice as the best in the business: Jim Joyce.

The entire conversation about umpiring has been predicated on the assumption that the only solution to the problem is a technological one, which is fascinating — and maybe just a little troubling — because everyone in the conversation knows two things: There are acres of room for improvement that has nothing to do with technology, and the technology itself is far from perfect.

We know from other sports, especially NFL football, that video replay is hardly perfect. Putting aside the unnecessarily long delays that accompany video replay in the NFL, it’s a simple fact about video that it does not always provide conclusive evidence of what happened. Camera angles can be as deceptive as the naked eye.

And more important, the NFL’s replay system is a laboratory of unintended consequences. Introduced for the same reason many people want to introduce replay to baseball — to put an end to egregious officiating mistakes — it has become the lord of officials. It has changed the way officials call games. Refs now err on the side of the reviewable call, or make no call at all so replay can be possible. They have changed the way they call fumbles and completions. Watch an old NFL game from before replay and you’ll be struck at the difference in officiating and rules interpretation.

People will argue over the specifics of those last two paragraphs, but there’s no one familiar with replay who doesn’t know that replay is far from perfect, that despite — I would say because of — replay being entrenched in the NFL for years, officiating is still such a problem that a huge number of fans can convince themselves that a recent Super Bowl was fixed by the refs.

Yet the only anti-replay argument that ever sees the light of day is the Luddite one: Instant replay would rob baseball, that most human of games, of an essential human element.

That’s a valid argument, but it’s a religious one. No one is ever going to be argued off of it, and if you don’t buy it, you’re not going to be talked into it.

But it’s interesting that the argument against it goes like this: Instant replay might not be perfect, but it’s better than what we have now, so we should use it. That argument ignores a vital question. Is instant replay better than some other solution?

If you’ve been around as long as most of the people who are in the most public part of this argument — media figures and baseball officials — technology has been a series of miracles in your life. You can carry a supercomputer in your pocket that connects you to anywhere in the world all the time? Are you kidding? I’m not even 50 and I remember when it was a big deal that someone could leave you a taped message when they called your house — the only place you could have a phone — and you weren’t there.

Got a problem? Technology can probably fix it, and if not, just wait a little. It’s coming. Marvelous times.

But I think we sometimes forget that technology isn’t the only fix, and it isn’t always the best one, and not just for squishy reasons having to do with idealizing human error. Human error is a bad thing, and technology is often fantastic at doing away with it. But it can also do away with some good human things, like judgment and holistic problem solving.

Think about law enforcement for a moment — and sports officiating is essentially law enforcement. Which is more effective at fighting crime, an elaborate system of video surveillance or a program of job training, substance abuse education and treatment, community investment and so on? Or if that’s too liberal-sounding for you, focus in tighter. If you’re a parent, which is more effective at getting your kids to behave like solid citizens, spy cams around the house or engaged, loving parenting?

If you wanted to design a system that would result in poor umpiring, you would design Major League Baseball’s system. It’s positively medieval. Umpires essentially have lifetime tenure. They are sequestered from the media and answer only to a review system that is as secretive as it is pointless, since it hardly ever results in umpires losing their jobs. Instant replay won’t change that lack of accountability.

“We never know why or when they are fined, or reprimanded or held accountable,” Oakland A’s pitcher Brad Ziegler told ESPN’s Amy K. Nelson last week. “Any time a player is punished, suspended or sent down to the minors, the public knows about it. It would be a lot easier to communicate with umpires if everyone was held to similar standards. Our statistics as players are a lot more quantifiable than the umpires’.”

I am something of a Luddite when it comes to instant replay, not because I’m anti-technology — I have a long-distance line to New York in my pocket, and the call is free? Score! — but because I think baseball has been smart about being slow to change over the last century-plus. Replay would suddenly, irreversibly alter a game that has a pretty good history of solving its problems without radical, game-altering solutions.

I don’t believe baseball should absolutely avoid instant replay because instant replay is evil. I believe it should try to tackle the organizational problems that are leading to the poor umpiring rather than slap an electronic band-aid on them.

Nelson’s ESPN story is about a planned winter meeting between the grumbling players association, baseball officials and the umpires. Nelson describes such a meeting as “rare,” which is a problem right there. Shouldn’t the three parties involved in this major issue for Major League Baseball talk to each other more than rarely?

It’s a good step. I’m not too hopeful it’s going to lead to a new era of transparency and reform. No one from the umpires or Major League Baseball would comment for the story.

So it’s that old TV thing. NBC does a story on “Dateline” about families struggling through the recession in rural Ohio, and letters and donations and job offers come pouring in from all over the country.

The retired Air Force vet has “job offers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona, Iowa.” Someone sent him $5,000. A woman reads through tears from a letter she’s received: “In a couple of weeks I will be able to send you some money to help with expenses. I hope this letter raises your spirits and that you know I really do care. Most of all, you have a friend in me. You are going to be OK, and so are your children. I will be thinking of you, sweetie, and praying that lots of other people send you much-needed money.”

She says, “It’s really hard to believe that someone you’ve never met could actually care that much.”  

The food pantry lady has gotten 500 phone calls and donations from Texas, California, Florida, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maine and Canada. She says, “I just can’t even describe how good it feels to know that there are so many people out there that really do care.”

This is absolutely par for the course, it’s what happens every single time there is a sob story on the TV, but here’s the thing: People don’t care. They just respond to what’s on television.

There are folks right down the street in Texas, California, Florida and Iowa who need food and basic supplies. There are good, capable people, some of them retired military, right down the street in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona and Iowa who are looking for work. And, after NBC’s report, those people still need the basics and are still looking for work. And those people who sent the heartfelt letters and the donations and the job offers likely never moved a muscle for those people down the street.

A guy who drove to the food pantry with a Hefty bag of donations tells the food pantry lady, “Cincinnati Ohio’s thinkin’ of ya,” and she gives him a big hug. Really, guy who drove 170 miles to Lottridge to find someone to give your Hefty bag of stuff to? Because where were you and the rest of Cincinnati before NBC aired its report?

Curry, who is among the best in the business and whom I don’t mean to beat up on, gets “a smile” out of this, as she should. She did a good piece about people who are struggling, her viewers responded in overwhelming fashion and the people she reported about are deeply moved by their good fortune.

If you focus in tightly enough, it really is a wonderful thing. That a relatively tiny group of people in Ohio actually did get a lot of help they weren’t going to get without that TV report. It was like a little miracle, and you’d have to have a hard heart indeed not to be touched by the young mom reading the letter or the hardworking food pantry lady who is suddenly able to provide so much more help to so many more people. I love America too.

But back your view out to the larger picture and what you see is something much more depressing.

Obviously, the people who sent money and goods and job offers had both the means and willingness to help their neighbors in need, but instead they helped some people they saw on TV. Now, I suppose it’s possible that every one of them, from the donor of $5,000 to the Hefty bag guy from Cincinnati to the job offerers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona and Iowa, is doing just as much for lots of other people closer to home and not on the TV.

I would just be willing to bet a lot that they aren’t.

What Curry’s story suggests is that the generosity of the American people can solve the problems of a lot of folks who need help — as long as they can get on TV. Getting on TV is a lottery ticket, and the depressing part of it is that if you’re in trouble, your chances of getting on TV are about the same as your chances of winning the lottery.

What about all the desperate people who didn’t have a TV network drop out of the sky into their local food pantry? How do we turn their story into “a smile”? Because there are clearly people out there willing to help. There just isn’t enough TV to go around.

I grew up not listening to Ernie Harwell but to the man who replaced him in the Brooklyn Dodgers booth in 1950, Vin Scully. I hadn’t come to know Harwell until 1999, when baseball broadcasts were still streamed online for free and Harwell had returned to the radio side after five years on TV. Like generations of Michiganders, I quickly fell for his warmth, his charm, his knowledge of the game, his old-timey broadcast voice.

When he announced that 2002 would be his last season, I wanted to write about him, so I got in touch with him through the Tigers, asking if I could come to Detroit for a few days, hang out with him, shadow him. A day or so later there was a voicemail message. That incredible voice was right on my phone! I saved it for as long as I could. I wish I still had it:

“King, this is Ernie Harwell from Detroit. I don’t know that there’s much to write about me, but sure, come on up.”

I had planned to write about a fundamental shift in the way people follow baseball, about how Harwell was one of the last of the old radio men who were identified with a team as much as any player, often more than any player. Now, with most games on TV, far more games on national TV, larger squads of announcers and the Internet providing more baseball information than any one person could ever absorb, fans weren’t dependent on that one broadcaster to serve as the conduit to their team.

Yes. Well, it seemed interesting in my head. A little of that stuff made it into the piece, but after about 10 minutes with Ernie Harwell, I knew that my story couldn’t be about anything but Ernie Harwell.

It’s hard to talk about what kind of guy Ernie Harwell was without sounding like you’re talking about a guy on the night of the day he died. But it was just as hard when he was still alive. I spent three days with him, and he was unfailingly kind, generous, cheerful, energetic, positive and humble. And not just with me. At 84 years of age, he was tireless, making sure as he roamed the ballpark — which he did a lot — that every fan who wanted a moment with him — and there were many — got the moment he or she wanted.

I talked to a lot of people about Ernie Harwell that summer, and in the eight years since then I’ve talked to more people about him and I’ve heard and read many things said about him, and I’ve never heard a hint that the man I came to know in those three days wasn’t the genuine article. It may be that there has never been an unkind word said about Ernie Harwell.

Jon Miller, the ESPN and San Francisco Giants announcer, was hurrying across a field when I sidled up to him asking if I could talk to him for a minute. He kept walking as he asked what I wanted to talk about. “Ernie Harwell,” I said, and he stopped on a dime. All of a sudden, I had his attention and he grew animated as he told stories about Ernie.

Mike Shannon, the longtime St. Louis Cardinals broadcaster, was pressed for time just before a game one day but he told me to sit in the press box and wait for him. Minutes before the first pitch, he leaned out the door of his radio booth. “Where’s the guy who wanted to talk about Ernie Harwell?”

Ty Cobb liked Ernie Harwell, for crying out loud. Ty Cobb didn’t like anybody.

“He’s so generous with his time,” I wrote back then, “that a reporter in town for three days to research a story on him confesses on the third day that he’s just about run out of questions to ask.” That reporter was me, of course. We were sitting in an empty broadcast booth in the Comerica Park press box when I told him that. He looked out at the field for a few seconds, then started throwing out some suggestions, things I might want to ask about.

It sounds silly to say, but after spending time with Ernie I told myself that I would try to be a better person, more generous, more cheerful, more optimistic, more kind. More like Ernie Harwell. I failed miserably at this, of course, but I’ve returned to that thought fairly often over the years, and I like to think I’ve moved just a tiny bit in an Ernie-like direction.

Here’s the story I wrote about Ernie. I think I worked harder on it than on anything I’ve ever written. I did things I never do. I made outlines, wrote things on index cards and arranged and re-arranged them.

I swung for the fences, wanting to do justice to the living legend and the time I’d had with him. I used a flamboyant structure, organizing the piece around Ernie’s call of a single game, weaving his epic story between snippets of a thoroughly ordinary contest between two lousy teams, the Tigers and the Kansas City Royals.

I’m not sure it worked. But you don’t get to hang out with the greats that often, and it’s less often that you end up liking them. I wasn’t going to write just another piece about Ernie Harwell in his last year.

A few days after it ran he sent me an e-mail thanking me for the piece. “Best thing that’s ever been written about me,” he wrote. I’m sure he said that to every single person who ever wrote a story about him. And here’s the thing: I’m sure he meant it every time.