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The annual Christmas Bird Counts in Santa Barbara County are serious affairs, almost too serious for me to have enjoyed participation in the past. This year (2013) I took part in two counts – Cachuma and Santa Barbara – and found myself more involved than I ever expected.
I accompanied Joan and Bill Murdoch to their allotted territory on Happy Canyon Road, on the side of Figueroa Mountain, for the Cachuma count December 27. The birding was slow, very slow: we struggled to pull hermit thrushes and wrentits out of the bushes. Finally, as the road pulled alongside the creek, we heard some chips and we fanned out, mostly in search of the fox sparrows that had been advertised in the area.
Looking across the creek bank, I saw a fox sparrow dropping down to drink or bathe, then another, then another. Although they skittered about, I decided I had seen six in all, when another, smaller sparrow appeared in their midst, at the top of the bank. It had black on its face, very unusual for a sparrow, and a prominent white eye ring, also unusual. I had no idea what it could be – it was a bird I’d never seen, so far as I could remember – but I didn’t think, given the black face and white eye ring, that there could be many possibilities. I called for Bill, who was downstream, but by the time he got to me, a fox sparrow had chased my bird off.
Back in the car, looking through my Sibley bird guide, Bill suggested a sage sparrow, and I readily agreed. The pose chosen to illustrate the bird, leaning forward with raised tail, was exactly the pose I had seen, and the listed size, one inch shorter than the fox sparrow, meshed with my observation. I didn’t know how rare this sighting would be, but the fact that Bill had suggested the species made me comfortable with the identification.
The rest of our day was largely uneventful, except for the pair of rufous-crowned sparrows that Bill spotted, perched in a bush. The sage sparrow, we thought, would be our main contribution. Because it was unusual, Joan asked me to document my sighting; so I sent her a narrative, much like what I’ve written here. The count leader was appreciative, and apparently my sighting was unusual enough that he sent me an official Audubon count form, in which I had to detail where I was, what binoculars I used, how I made the identification and other matters.
This was my first encounter with CBC officialdom, and it didn’t go well. The leader apparently reported to a committee, and after consultation, they decided not to “submit” my sage sparrow. The fact that I was a single observer – no one else in my party saw it – played a large role; I suspect the fact that no one the committee had ever heard of me also mattered. I didn’t really care, one way or the other, although I was slightly miffed at the “official” reasons for the rejection, which made no sense and which I duly rebutted, just for the record.
(Since then, I have looked up the sage sparrow on my Audubon bird app: the third photo looks exactly like the bird I saw.)
A few days later, January 4, Santa Barbara held its count, and I had been volunteered to scour the Westmont College campus in Montecito. I didn’t expect to find any unusual birds in this suburban setting, an expectation confirmed on a scouting trip two days ahead of the count. Still, it gave me a reason to walk the pretty campus, and if I contributed numbers of birds, even common ones, to the count, it would, presumably, serve some purpose.
Arriving at 8, I staked out a spot at the top of the campus, above a small creek bed, and watched a small flurry of sparrows, towhees and wrens. To my surprise, a white-throated sparrow, in beautiful plumage, stepped out from a group of golden-crowned sparrows. It was one of my childhood favorites, and I hadn’t seen one in Santa Barbara before. I worked my way down campus, seeing birds that were fun, if not rare: Townsend’s warbler, lesser goldfinch, even a trio of mallards on an ornamental pond.
As I was heading back from the bottom of campus I came across a flock of juncos, just below the tennis courts. Mixed in was a smaller bird, nondescript brown with a striped cap. “Chipping sparrow,” I instinctively thought, as it had a remnant chestnut cap, but it had no other particular markings and, again, I couldn’t remember having seen chipping sparrows in Santa Barbara. I was debating whether to count it in my report – was I certain? – when I spotted a Hutton’s vireo on a woodpile behind the junco flock. As I have only recently learned to distinguish the vireo from a ruby-crowned kinglet, I thought, why press my luck: two less-than-100% sightings at my last stop might be too much. And besides, the vireo gave me a round 30 species on the morning.
Back home, I called count leader Joan Lentz, who had requested a before-noon report. “Anything unusual?,” she casually asked. Equally casually – I didn’t know what would be considered “unusual” – I said, “Well, I did see a white-throated sparrow and a chipping sparrow, which I don’t normally see.” She sounded pleased by the white-throat report, mentioning that her group had “missed” this bird that day.
To my surprise, however, that turned out not to be the lead story. Other counters had also found the white-throated sparrow, but mine was the only chipping sparrow seen by anybody. Thus, again, please tell us more – where exactly did you see it and how did you identify it? (No Audubon form this time.) Joan said she was inclined to accept my sighting – mainly because chipping sparrows had been seen in years past on the Westmont campus, although never since the disruption of the Tea Fire in 2009 and subsequent construction activity.
Whether my single-observer sighting would have stood on its own, however, I’ll never know, because the following day I received an email from Joan: “Congratulations! I went to Westmont today and I refound your chipping sparrow. It was in a flock of juncos between the tennis courts.” Thus, because of my participation, the Santa Barbara CBC for 2013 stands at 222 species, not 221.

Thanks to my daughter’s Christmas gift, I turned on MLB.com to watch my first Twins game of the season. It was the 7th inning and they were down, 2-0, to the Tigers. With a man on first – Plouffe had walked – Parmelee and Dozier both struck out looking on fastballs down the middle. After a squib double by pinch-hitting newcomer Wilkin Ramirez scored the Twins’ first run of the year, rookie Aaron Hicks struck out swinging on a 3-2 fastball high out of the strike zone. I decided then and there, after one half-inning, that the Twins just have too many black holes in their lineup to be a factor. In the 8th inning, Mauer and Morneau wasted a walk to Willingham with weak ground balls, and I further decided that their supposed big boppers weren’t big enough to make up for the aforementioned black holes.                                                                                                   Then came the 9th, after two fine shutdown relief innings from Burton and Perkins, the team’s main holdover strength from last year, Plouffe again walked (the Minnesota offense consisted of more walks than hits today). After a Parmalee flyout against new Tiger closer, lefty Phil Coke, Brian Dozier, hitless for the year, lofted a soft liner to right and pinch-runner Jamey Carroll dashed to third. That brought up #9 hitter Eduardo Escobar, whom I had never heard of and who, we learned postgame, speaks no English. He had been inserted at shortstop after Ramirez had pinch-hit for Pedro Florimon. On the first pitch from Coke – against whom righties hit over .400 last year, we’d been told – Escobar drove a deep fly to left, far enough to easily score Carroll from third to tie the game. Even better, the Tiger outfielders shied away from each other, the ball bounded against the wall, Dozier scored from first and the Twins had their first win of the season, a walk-off against their nemesis, Detroit. Almost lost in the late offensive outburst was the performance of starting pitcher Kevin Correia who, like Vance Worley the day before, held the potent Tiger offense, last year’s best plus Victor Martinez and Torii Hunter, to two runs. It’s one thing to be workmanlike and eat up the innings – already an improvement over 2012’s starters – but it’s another to do that and help your team get a win.                           So where does that leave me with my prediction for 2013 – having seen only three innings of at bats? You know, it really doesn’t matter, or at least I don’t really care. Everyone else has picked the Twins to finish last. I think they have a shot at finishing as high as third in their division, but with expectations so low we’re in the pleasant position of being excited by every unexpected win. Everyone is also excited about the future now in the farm system – Sano, Buxton, Gibson, Meyer – so we can view any positive signs from the Major League team as a launching pad for 2014, 2015 and beyond. And then – as I’ve said every year this decade – if Morneau happens to get hot, the Twins will go as far as he takes them.

In the Yankees’ three-game playoff sweep, the Yankees displayed superior starting pitching, relief pitching, power hitting, clutch hitting, defense, baserunning, bench and managing*. The Twins excelled in…nothing I can think of. How do you explain the one-sided nature of a series between two teams that finished only one game apart over the regular season?
First, their similarity of record was largely a chimera. The Twins amassed wins over weak Central Division teams, while the Yankees’ schedule largely consisted of the Rays, Red Sox, Blue Jays and Orioles. Based on head-to-head competition, it is not unreasonable to speculate that the Twins would have finished fifth in the Eastern Division this year.
Going down their lineups, one to nine, there wasn’t a Twin I would take over the corresponding Yankee. Yes, Mauer has a higher average than Texeira, but which would you consider more dangerous in a playoff game? Same for Delmon Young v. Alex Rodriguez.
Still, talent in baseball, unlike football, only counts for so much. The best Major League team will lose a third of its games, and the worst will win a third. So talent alone can’t explain the Twins have lost nine straight playoff games to the Yanks. For this, we have to look at intangibles. One, confidence is key in any sport. How can the Twins have it when they know they always lose to New York, not only in the playoffs, but in the regular season? Two, experience adds to that confidence. The Yankees are veterans who have been in pressure games so often before. Rivera, Pettite, Jeter, et al.? You know they won’t feel intimidated. Even newcomers like Lance Berkman and Curtis Granderson bring experience. Can we say the same about Brian Duensing, Jesse Crain, J.J. Hardy, Danny Valencia? Conversely, Jason Kubel does have playoff experience with the Twins, but his experience consists of hitting 2-for-29. Third, team makeup. The Twins are a solid, unspectacular team, built for the long haul of a 162-game season, not prone to beating themselves or going into prolonged slumps. Without Morneau, there is no one who can carry the team, like A-Rod or Texeira can. There is no dominant pitcher, like Halladay or Lincecum or Lee. They need several players to be hot at the same time.
Which leads us to Four, the final ingredient of momentum. If the Twins had ended the season on a hot streak, they might have carried more confidence, some mojo, into the playoffs. Instead, they sputtered the last two weeks of the season, playing by far their worst ball, losing eight out of ten. Every one of the starting pitchers had a bad outing. Mauer, their best player, was hurt, and never returned to form.
When Cuddyer opened the series with a two-run homer and Hudson scored another run on hustle, it seemed that the Twins might overcome both the immediate and the recent past and make a real run at the Yankees. But once the New Yorkers came back and eliminated this early lead, all spark and all hope seemed to drain from the Twins, from their fans, and from Yankee-haters around the country.

*while the other categories are supported by obvious statistics, the judgment of managing is more subjective. Using hindsight as my guide, however, I can’t help but criticize Gardenhire’s batting Kubel cleanup in Game 3, pitching Crain in relief in Game 1, leaving Liriano in to face Granderson in Game 1 and failing to be aggressive in the two games Span led off with a single. There was nothing illogical about any of his moves; it’s just that all his hunches proved wrong.

Every four years I avidly follow international soccer, a/k/a the World Cup, and conclude with a desire to watch the sport again…in four more years. While I am watching I pick a team to root for – generally based on hairstyles and uniform colors, thus putting Germany at the bottom of the pack – and spend the rest of my time counting the faults of the game itself, which were on full display this year.
Let’s start, and in a way end, with the refereeing. To my mind, the smaller the role played by the referee, the better the sport. This is the cardinal problem with basketball. With physical contact on every play, what is or is not a foul is totally in the domain of the referee, who can, and often does, decide a close game by either blowing his whistle or swallowing it. Was it a charge or a blocking foul? Was the shot cleanly blocked, or did the defender hit the shooter’s hand, or body? What is traveling? Carrying the ball? Is the game called the same for the star and the rookie? For the home team and the visitors? The role of the referee in making all these subjective calls is simply too great.
At least, however, the court is small and the three refs used in the NBA can see everything. The soccer field is much bigger, and one referee covers the entire pitch and 22 players, not 10. Yes, he has two assistants, but they are on the sidelines and don’t seem to have equal authority or voice. So the chances of a missed call, as with England’s non-goal and the U.S.’s phantom foul, are greater.
The bigger problem, though, is the relative importance of the referee’s decisions. A foul call in basketball can result in two, or on rare occasions three points; and in maybe half those situations two points would have been scored anyway, absent the foul. So one referee’s decision will affect approximately one percent of a team’s scoring. In soccer, in contrast, a foul call in the penalty area may result in 100% of the scoring for the entire game! A foul outside the penalty area will still result in a “set piece,” and an inordinate number of goals in the World Cup came from such set pieces.
With the stakes involved in creating a foul so high – and this is not even counting the unrelated value of getting an opponent yellow-carded or red-carded – players uniformly resort to the most extreme play-acting whenever a potential foul occurs. The sight of a player writhing on the ground in agony, only to continue running full speed a moment later is a universally recognized blot on the game; but again it is caused by the undue impact a referee’s foul call can have.
Hockey, the clearest comparative sport, has a penalty shot, too; but it is awarded only when an offensive player has a clean breakaway and is unfairly deprived of a good opportunity to score. This is occasionally the case with a soccer penalty kick, but more often the player fouled was not about to score. Moreover, a penalty kick is far easier to convert than a penalty shot in hockey and almost always far easier than the chance the fouled player would have had without the foul.
A goal that is scored off the “run-of-play” – i.e., after a series of passes such as the Argentines and the Spaniards excelled at – is indeed a beautiful affair, worth celebrating. But it is worth no more in determining the victor than a goal off a corner kick, a set piece or a penalty kick, and those goals require no more than one lucky strike or a head in the right place. I don’t know the statistics, but it seemed, especiallly in the opening round, that as many goals were scored off set pieces as in the run of play; and whenever that happened you had little confidence that the better team was being rewarded.
The foregoing issues all come down to the difficulty of scoring through regular play in soccer. This is also a problem in itself: a 0-0 or 1-0 game may have moments of tension, but Americans in general and myself in particular prefer to see more beautiful plays, more celebrations, more scores, even more great saves. There is also the problem that once a team gets ahead, it can simply play defense the rest of the way, which takes the flow out of the game. Worse, if a team goes ahead by two goals, the game is basically over. The great comebacks that occasionally enliven a baseball, basketball or football game are exceedingly rare in soccer.
None of these problems seem to matter to the international soccer fan. Referees’ bad calls are considered an integral part of the game. Ditto for the fact that the better team may lose on a penalty kick or set piece (Switzerland beat eventual champion Spain in the opening game, despite being outshot about 20-1, and the world didn’t end). And a nil-nil draw is perfectly acceptable.
If someone were to ask for my suggestion, however, I would improve the game simultaneously in two ways by modifying (not eliminating) the offsides rule. First, the offsides call stops the game dead in its tracks. Second, it encourages defenses to stop attacks not by defending the opponent but by tricking him into being offsides. But most significantly, it interferes with many of the best scoring opportunities, exciting plays that would make the game more vibrant. And more goals, in addition to being more fun to watch, would diminish the exaggerated importance of the referee’s whistle and, one hopes, the players’ whining and acting.
One last related complaint: removing a player from the game for two yellow-card infractions also sets soccer apart from American sports. Given the dubiousness of many yellow-card calls (see referee’s problem, above), it can be a wholly undeserved penalty. But in no case is there justification for changing the entire nature of the contest as a result, which is what happens if one team has fewer players the rest of the match. In basketball a player is ejected for accumulating excessive fouls, and in baseball a player may be thrown out of the game for arguing,but in both cases he is replaced by a substitute. In hockey, again the closest comparison, a penalized team must play shorthanded, but in general for only two minutes.
In short, someone versed in the experience of American sport (and I haven’t even gotten into instant replay), could make some tweaks to the rules of soccer and turn it into a truly beautiful game. But I don’t think the world is looking to America for leadership in this field, alas.