Which Sports Is The Most Attractive For Writers

I'm a big fan of baseball, though, I would not mention it if visiting the UK. In the UK, I would pretend to like playing football. This comes from a result of the Books Ngram Viewers by Google. If you are wondering what Ngram Viewers is, see the following talk!



I tried several words in the Ngram, and then I found something interest by a combination of terms of sports. Here is my example:

English

I chose five sports for this analysis; (1) Baseball, (2) Football, (3) Tennis, (4) Golf, and (5) Cricket. At first, I picked several other sports like polo (I think this word is used not only for describing a sport but also for other meanings like polo shirts), wrestling, swimming, basketball, hockey and so on. But, I thought the five sports which I picked are interesting because of having well variations. At 2000, Baseball is the most frequently used in the above graph! Yeah! However, as you can guess, when this result falls into American and British English, ...

American English

British English

In the American English, Golf was the most popular for writers to mention during the early twentieth century. Also, before baseball was a popular sport in the US, cricket was in style in the late nineteenth century. It's surprising for me! Of course, cricket has been popular in the UK (+India) as shown in the British English, while baseball has been the worst attractive for writers who use British English.

One more thing I want to state here is the influence of wars on sports. Even my graphs show the evidence that  less frequent words regarding sports were mentioned during the wars such as WWI, WWII, and Vietnam War. In particular, compared the American to British graph at 1960, there is a big difference. For example, tennis indicates the opposite trend between the American and British. My explanation for it is that Vietnam War has something to do with the trend because US involvement to the war escalated in the early 1960s and also there was Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Anyway, I recommend you play the Ngram!

M's Won!!

The most amazing game by the Seattle Mariners in this two seasons it was!!

Photo: CosbySweaters.com

They came from behind, 7-0, and won at walk-off hit by Louis Rodriguez. During the almost entire game, I was nearly crying and the game made me crazy.

However, in the 8th inning, the situation was changing. The Seattle Mariners got five runs including by three straight based-loaded walks (actually, in the 7th inning, Bradley got solo home run.). So, at the finishing 8th inning, the Mariners was losing against the Toronto Blue Jays, 7-6.

Oh boy, boy. The drama was waiting in the bottom of 9th inning. First, Saunders doubled, and then Branden Ryan did a perfect sacrificed bunt to Saunders for the third. Adam Kennedy grounded out to short stop. And, Ichiro was given an intentional walk.

And, Louis Rodriguez, he got it!! Good for him!!

I did give up winning, because this year again the offence of Mariners had stunk, so far. But, we baseball fans are always waiting this kind of game and moment for a pretty long time. Anyway, I'm quite happy now.

Who is the Villain/Villainess?

My first blog is about a relationship between Revenge and Scapegoat, both terms are a sociological concept.

Recently I have read The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely. The story of vengeance is introduced the chapter 5 of the book. Especially, I was interested in an experiment of Agents and Principals in the chapter. For instance, when we go to a restaurant, our waitress give us a bad customer service such as spending a lot of time until serving a food. And then, we want to take revenge to her through tipping her a bit less or writing the complaint of the restaurant over the Internet. To decrease the size of tip is vengeance on her, while revenge by using Word-of-mouth is not only for her whom the agent is usually, but also for the restaurant whom the principal is. According to study by Ariely and co-researchers, we tend to seek revenge not to depend on whether the agent or the principal when we want the someone to feel the desire for revenge because they did something to make us get angry.

Next, I will talk about Scapegoat. Seattle Mariners dismissed Don Wakamatsu, manager, due to be miserable team performance, even though some researches show that changing manager during the season is negatively related or not correlated with improving the team performance. Such firing is called Scapegoating in the field of succession study, which deals with how manager or CEO takes over in an organization and a company, and how managerial succession influences on firms. Also, Scapegoating is more likely to be manegers or executives who have less power than more powerful them, according to Boeker (1992). In the case of Mariners, the General Manager who is the principal did not quit, despite a responsibility of the struggling as well as Wakamatsu who is the agent.

Introduced two topics share a common point. It is that we are bad at grasping a causal relationship, and also we prefer passing a blame on to the other people. Accordingly, we often take revenge and scapegoat, which are, I suspect, an instinctive behavior.

Finally, I am going to introduce an example that both revenge and scapegoat are related. Mr. Nozoe, former President of Fujitsu Limited (Fujitsu), was dismissed on September 25, 2009 because of connected with a third-party company that was said to have an unfavorable reputation. In this time, Mr. Nozoe agreed with accepting to be fired, according to a board member of Fujitsu. But, on March 6, 2010 Mr. Nozoe sent a letter about requesting his resignation be nullified to Fujitsu, and then a relationship between him and the company was very threatening. He was about to sue the company for libel, and so far he haven't had a regal fight to them. I think he was scapegoat for a responsibility of having a relationship to a unfavorable company and carrying out too drastic reforms. However, the reason for being dismissed is still unclear. Also, Mr. Nozoe took a revenge to the company by a big report. For this, Fujitsu received to decline a reputation and pay a cost to work out. I still don't know which Mr. Nozoe or Fujitsu said a true thing, and he needed to disclose the issue because of this revenge to the company who is the principal instead of the board members who are the agent. But, Mr. Nozoe seemed to me to be the villain through the series of reports. Which do you think that Mr. Nozoe or Fujitsu is the villain?