Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2023 January 24

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January 24

Goalies without helmets

In the days before NHL goaltenders wore helmets, was it considered ungentlemanly to shoot toward or around their heads, or even torso with goalies' humble protection at the time? I'm aware that most goalies stood most of the time which would leave plenty of room for puck to find the net down low thus making it advantageous for skaters to shoot low instead of high, but in every crowd there's always that one lunatic—and I mean that in the best way possible—who for example tackles on concrete in neighborhood pick-up soccer games, or is named Glenn Hall and lowers his head virtually in the puck's path thus justifying high attempts at net. No wonder really that he vomited before most matches. I'm a futsal goalie and getting whacked into the head by a ball leaves mild bruising and moderate short-term swelling, but there's absolutely no way I'd ever butterfly in a hockey game without serious padding. Splićanin (talk) 05:17, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Keep in mind that the other players didn't wear face guards either. Presumably they respected the puck and its potential risks. Wearing protection kind of liberates you from having to fear being hit, which may be a foolish attitude, but it is what it is. True in baseball and football too. It's kind of amazing that in the 75-plus years before the introduction of batting helmets, only one player (Ray Chapman) died as a result of being hit by a pitched ball. And in football, you had guys like Bill Hewitt who played his entire career without a helmet. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:00, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

• There is a concept called the Safety paradox (sadly, Wikipedia doesn't have an article on the concept) that holds that if you increase a person's protection against something, you increase their risk-taking by a greater factor than you increase their protection resulting in more not less negative outcomes. You see this in everything from road design (designing long, straight roads with excellent sight lines, all of which should make people safer, leads to more and more deadly accidents as people will tend to drive at faster speeds. Roads are safer when drivers can't see very far in front of them, because they slow down and pay better attention!) to sports. The sports of rugby and American football take opposite tacks when it comes to safety. In Rugby, padding, helmets and other safety equipment is illegal, while in American football, they are required. What that has led to is more severe injuries in American football than in rugby: "The data would suggest that rugby is indeed a more dangerous sport in the sense that a player is more likely to get hurt while playing. However, the severity of injury is likely higher in football, considering the nature of the collisions to be at a greater speed and with less control." In other words, a player is more likely to receive a minor injury in rugby, and a more severe injury in American football. Padding makes players reckless, and they are thus more likely to hurt themselves and others in a more serious way. Rugby players, without padding, protect themselves by the way they tackle others, resulting in less serious injuries when they do. --Jayron32 15:27, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Small correction: some rugby players do wear (soft) head protection - see Scrum cap. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 19:05, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes. They do. It still doesn't invalidate the general point vis-a-vis protective equipment and risk of serious injury in contact sports. --Jayron32 19:17, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Note that the claim about "negative outcomes" is expressed only from a safety point of view. The objective of building roads is for people to get places faster, so if they do, that's a positive outcome. It could similarly be argued the highly energetic contact in American football produces the positive outcome that the game is more entertaining for spectators. Not to say that it's not appropriate to think about risks, but they aren't necessarily the only thing to think about. --142.112.220.65 (talk) 21:43, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

They might make the same arguments about seatbelts and motorcycle helmets. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:23, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

I'd argue that you've not completed a successfully timely trip to your destination if you killed someone along the way, but then again, I don't always understand American priorities, so... --Jayron32 12:02, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

It is a mess of statistics. Wide straight roads result in more deaths. But, wide straight roads allow for far more traffic. So, it should be expected that if you double the traffic, you double the accidents. If you claim that doubling the accidents is terrible and we must go back to small winding roads, you cut the total traffic down to reduce accidents. Why not reduce it down to one car at a time on the road? If only one car is allowed on an entire road at a time, you really reduce the accidents. In the end, the goal is to increase speed and efficiency, knowing that there will be an accident increase. If the accident increase exceeds expectations, there is a problem. That happened here. The interstate speed limit was 65. Most people drive at 75. So, the speed limit was increased to 75. Most people drove at 85. Accidents didn't just double. They almost quadrupled. So, the speed limit was reduced back to 65. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 19:56, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Cars are a mess anyways. If you want to design a system to get people around their day in the most efficient way possible, and maximize Passengers per hour per direction, you don't put them in cars. Speed limits and road designs are irrelevant to the matter as an urban planning issue. If moving people efficiently around where they live is a goal, you design for rail. You can get a small-number-of-thousands, say 2000 people per hour on a freeway. You can get 40000-60000 per hour on a grade-separated heavy-rail system. It's no contest. --Jayron32 12:19, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

As you stated, that is urban planning. The United States is mostly rural. Most people are not beginning and ending anywhere near one another. For those not native to the U.S., the vast expanses of low-density housing are mind-blowing. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 17:29, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

80.1 % of the population of the U.S. lives in urban areas, which means only 19.9% lives in rural areas. So no, the U.S. isn't "mostly rural". I mean, the land is mostly rural, but that's unsurprisingly true of almost every country except for places like Singapore. When planning where to house the people in the U.S., one needs to treat that 80.1% as living in urban areas. Because they do. --Jayron32 13:10, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

That comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, which classifies suburban low density housing (the suburbs) as urban. I was making a distinction between high density urban where mass transoporation makes sense because everyone lives and works close to a mass transit stop and suburban areas where mass transit does not make sense because most people live far away from a transit stop, which would require either driving to the transit stop (which is done in places like Chicago) or hundreads of stops that pick up or drop off a few people. But, this is not a discussion of the benefits of mass transit. It is a discussion about sports padding and I don't know to pull a discussion about the viability of mass transit in suburbia back into a discussion about the well-observed phenomenon of injuries in the NFL that are only made possible by the percieved invulnerability of being encased in hard padding. There is an episode of "Dhani Tackles the Globe" in which he plays football in Australia without padding and the players there comment that he tackles too hard, mainly because he is used to tackling with full gear. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 15:25, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Most places define Urban area in similar ways: it refers to continuity of development; the idea that urban areas are altered and maintained by humans for their use; whereas rural areas are either farms or undeveloped land. Low-density suburban development is still urban in the sense that the land is under continuous human maintenance. --Jayron32 16:00, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

It is worth noting that all aspects of hockey equipment changed over the years. In Saving Face: The Art and History of the Goalie Mask the authors point out that in the early years "the puck rarely left the ice" because it was harder to get the puck into the air with the sticks they were using at the time. Because of the differences in equipment, it was less an issue that it was ungentlemanly to shoot a puck at someone's head and more an issue that it was just very challenging. Also, part of the culture of the game was that violence was expected. Kathleen E Bachynski has written that "Media coverage framed violence as central to hockey and cultivated expectations that players withstand pain and injury without complaint." In the same article ("Too Rough for Bare Heads: The Adoption of Helmets and Masks in North American Ice Hockey, 1959–79") she presents advertisements from the era of greater protection that ask "Has hockey turned into a sissy's game?" The point of the advertisement is to sell protective equipment, but the violence and danger were so culturally normal that the advertisers felt the need to preemptively respond to criticism that they were ruining hockey. 2607:FEA8:2CDF:E230:497C:2F0E:6395:B6E (talk) 02:51, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Immensely helpful from both, as always. Splićanin (talk) 15:42, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Soccer team

Which soccer/football team have largest number of players? 2001:B07:6442:8903:CDB7:8323:47D1:6B32 (talk) 11:56, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

If you want to talk historical, mob football could feature dozens or hundreds of players. Among modern, organized sports generally regarded as falling under the umbrella term football, the number of players to a side varies from code to code, but the largest number of players per side on the pitch/field at any one time belongs to Australian rules football, with 18 to a side. In terms of number of players on the roster, the code with the largest in that regard is usually American College football, the NCAA allows for up to 82 players to be "suited up" for each game; and teams can have well over 100 players "on the roster", which is to say available during the season. Some college leagues, such as the Southeastern Conference, have more restrictive rules, only allowing 60 players to suit up.[1]. --Jayron32 13:41, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Manchester City have an immense number of players on the cards, most of whom will likely never play for first team such as Ante Palaversa. Chelsea used to too with likes of Matej Delač. I tried looking for this online but it's a difficult search, so I only provide answers atop of my head. Also, when I started a season with Hajduk in Football Manager 2012, I had to scroll through my first team which is extremely rare so it also stands out. 2011–12 HNK Hajduk Split season doesn't reflect it, but take my word for it: there was no reserve squad until 2014, only collaboration with local lower division clubs to whom a number of players were loaned. Splićanin (talk) 15:33, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Don't European soccer (association football) teams have the equivalent of the farm system in North American sports like Baseball and Hockey, where there are lower-tier teams that are owned/associated with the top-flight team? I would assume that a player that plays for a lower-division "feeder team" for Manchester City wouldn't count as a rostered player on the Manchester City team, under normal definitions, do they? --Jayron32 15:47, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

In the UK, at any rate, not in the full-blown sense you describe. There is a loan system whereby (usually) a higher-tier club can loan a player to a lower-tier club (thus, not a rival) for up to a season at a time (I think). These are usually players at the beginning of their career who are not yet good enough to make their first team, and the idea is to give them first-team match experience. This is often (though not always), done between clubs in the same geographical region to minimise the players' travelling: friendly relations are thus built up between some higher and lower clubs, but no ownership is usually involved. Sometimes the higher club will loan a player short-term to a lower-tier club who, because of injuries or other factors, find themselves temporarily with too few fit and eligible players. Sometimes a higher-tier club, because of similar circumstances, will have to recall one of their loaned players earlier than intended. A club can have several players on loan at a time, and may also have some of their players on loan to yet-lower clubs. Note that most professional clubs have multiple teams; First, Reserves, Under 18s, Youth at various age levels, and players may move from one to another as appropriate.) Most clubs below the Premier league have one or more players on loan to them more often than not.

One example (of very many) of such loan arrangements is Tottenham Hotspur and Leyton Orient in North and North-East London. At the beginning of his career, Spurs loaned Harry Kane to The O's, where he played his first full professional first team matches. Now Kane sponsors the adverts on the O's shirts (3 strips, each promoting a different charity). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.199.212.198 (talk) 16:58, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Would a player on loan be considered to be part of the team; i.e. counting as one of their rostered players or do they count as a player on the team to which they are loaned? For my thinking, I would count them as being a member of the team they are actually playing on at that time. But I don't know how this is conventionally done; it may help to explain how the OP's question can be answered. --Jayron32 18:45, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

@Jayron32:: Farm team links to Cantera, which explains the system in Spanish football (without references). The most cantera-oriented club is Athletic Club Bilbao, but some of the stars of Barcelona and Real Madrid come from the cantera. Error (talk) 13:56, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Prohibition censorship

Was there some kind of Hays Code operating in 1920s America against films glorifying wine? The film Omar Khayyam played in Australia in 1923 to good houses and glowing reviews, yet what appears to have been its original, titled A Lover's Oath, was not released in the US until 1925. As in Fitzgerald's quatrains, many of which were were quoted in the intertitles, the film shown in the antipodes was replete with clamoring crowds at the tavern door and flasks of wine beneath the bough. Doug butler (talk) 20:27, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Well, it was the Prohibition era. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 03:41, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Prior to the Hays Code, each film was subject to the proprieties of local review boards (see Banned in Boston for a specific version of that). So, although the Code in retrospect is seen as a Bad Thing, it at least provided a single set of standards film-makers could operate in. I know nothing about your specific film, but my understanding of Pre-Code Hollywood is that it was normal to produce multiple cuts of films to suit different review boards, similar to how current Hollywood productions may choose to tailor their films for places like China or risk losing access to the market. And, like the current-day version, there's the by-the-book interpretation of the rules and the Realpolitik version producers have to contend with. Matt Deres (talk) 16:32, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

By the time the Hays Code came along, Prohibition had already been repealed. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:59, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Summarized from "American Cinema of the 1920s" by Fischer: Every state had a censorship board that could demand edits to a movie. Movie producers were not overly concerned with demands for changes from state to state and would tease that viewers should go in large groups to a neighboring state to see the censored part of the movie. Then, there was the stock market crash. The producers were in debt. Hays was hired as a public relations person to come up with a way to ward off growing complaints about the sins of Hollywood (Fatty Arbunkle, William Taylor, Wallace Reid, Mary Pickford...). He sold it to the producers as a way to save money by meeting all state censorship board demands in one movie and avoiding future movie edits. Hays code was adopted in 1930 (before the end of Prohibition). So, I believe that the answer you are looking for is the state censorhip boards. While it was likely not a clear code, it was a panel that censored movies. This is similar to MPAA ratings now. They don't have a clear list of criteria. They watch a movie and give it a rating that they feel is appropriate, and their opinions likely change over time. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 19:49, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

I set a cat loose by mentioning Hays Code. Sorry. I just couldn't figure why a film would be released in Australia and do well, but not anywhere in America. Doug butler (talk) 21:06, 26 January 2023 (UTC)