Curses! Foiled Again!

The Tangerine Dream

Injuries on the offensive line may have stymied the Seattle Seahawks offense, yet they continue to win. Monday’s 14:9 win St. Louis over the Rams may have been one of the ugliest wins in history, but wins are a precious commodity worth cherishing in the NFL, and the Seahawks now stand 7-1 and atop the NFC standings. And now comes the most important game of the season. A win this coming Sunday is vital for the Seahawks and their Super Bowl aspirations. It’s the game they circled on the schedule and say amongst themselves “we simply cannot lose this game!”

Their opponent? The Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The 0-7 Buccaneers. Laugh at my hyperbolical opening paragraph at your own peril.

Unlike the Buccaneers of old, who wore the league’s most flamboyant jerseys and put the fun in dysfunctional, this lot of Bucs is deader than the skull on their pewter helmets. The Buccaneers actually won a Super Bowl on Jan. 27, 2003, a 48:21 over the Los Angeles Tijuana Oakland Raiders (some of whom apparently thought the game was in Tijuana and not San Diego), but have now sunk into the abyss. The biggest reason for their success was the hiring first of Tony Dungy and then Jon Gruden as Head Coaches, but the Bucs have now reverted to one of their more normal behaviour patterns from the Tangerine Dream days, which was hiring guys who have no idea what they are doing. They plucked Greg Schiano out of the cesspool that is the Rutgers athletics department, and Schiano brought along with him the typical hardass, domineering college coach attitude that goes over well with professional athletes for about 20 minutes. Schiano has hit every wrong note possible, and then simply invented new scales so as to hit even more wrong notes. If ownership in Tampa weren’t essentially absentee – The Glazer family has some bigger sports franchises to devote their attentions to – Schiano likely would’ve been fired already. As it is, the Bucs are collectively walking the plank.

Now, how is it possible, you ask, that the halpless Bucs could pose a threat to Seattle’s title hopes? The Bucs are so bad that, in saying Seattle cannot lose this game, it may actually be physically impossible for Seattle to do so. And yet the Seahawks must be careful, and must be mindful of those Floridian evildoers, because they aren’t just playing a bad football team this Sunday, but the Seahawks are tempting fate. Because every game vs. the Bucs is tempting fate, because being defeated by the Bucs will lead to the worst possible outcome.

Being laughed at.

No no no! Being laughed at is only the 2nd worst fate a loss to the Pewter Pirates inflicts! An even worse fate awaits those who succumb to the Buccaneers on any given Sunday: disappointment at season’s end! And it’s appropriate, on the eve of the day on the calendar reserved for witches and ghosts and ghouls, that we bring up one of the greatest curses in all of sports, which is the Tampa Bay Curse. Since the Buccaneers franchise began play in 1976, no team has EVER won the Super Bowl during a season in which they lost to Tampa Bay.

Superstition runs deep and rampant in sports, of course. The mental aspect of performance cannot be understated, and the margins between success and failure are so minute that any single thing which you think gives you some sort of edge will be exploited – even if they don’t make any sense. If you’re a .500 team that suddenly wins 5 in a row after your starting QB starts eating Cheerios with chocolate milk for breakfast, then by god, give him another bowl of Cheerios with chocolate milk! As was well stated in the film Bull Durham, “never fuck with a winning streak.”

The stupidest superstition in all of sports is the charade 16 NHL teams undertake every year when the players vow not to shave until they are eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs. 16 teams do this every year, and 15 of them lose, so it doesn’t seem to help much. This superstition dates to the New York Islanders of 1980, who won the first of four consecutive Stanley Cup titles while collectively going scruffy. The LOSE suspects the Isles winning four Stanley Cups had more to do with having Mike Bossy and Brian Trottier and Denis Potvin and Billy Smith on their team than how hirsute they’d become over the course of four rounds of playoff games. (The LOSE also hopes this ludicrous tradition doesn’t carry over to baseball in light of the Red Sox winning this year's World Series. Those are some damn ugly beards the Bostons have been sprouting. The Red Sox seem to have benefitted this year in the same way the Giants did last year, which was to face an opponent in the World Series who seems to have suddenly forgotten how to play baseball.)

There are lots of goofy little traditions in sports which you do so as not to bring bad luck or jinx it: in baseball, that includes axioms like “don’t talk to a pitcher throwing a no-hitter when he’s in the dugout,” and “never step on the foul lines when taking or leaving the field.” Every goalkeeper and goaltender alive makes sure to talk to his or her goalposts before the game, making sure the keeper's best friends know their help is appreciated come game time. And it’s all nonsense. What your QB eats for breakfast doesn’t have anything to do with his performance come Sunday … or does it? …

Hmm, well, the Seahawks franchise already feels somewhat cursed to begin with, so it’s best they not try to cheat the odds. Lots of team’s fan bases feel like their club is cursed, of course, when they fail to taste success. Cubs fans want to believe in the Billy Goat curse; across town, more than a few White Sox fans attributed 86 years of futility being the result of Bad Karma in the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal of 1919. The Red Sox had the Curse of the Bambino, supposedly invoked by Babe Ruth after he was traded to the Yankees. The cities of Cleveland and Buffalo have enough assorted sports curses attached to them to keep exorcists busy for decades. And I’ve even heard a few otherwise right-minded Tampans attribute their football teams woes to former star QB Doug Williams putting a voodoo curse on the franchise after he left.

The Bucs have always been a franchise with a case of the weirds. They lost the first 26 games in their existence. It took until the NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia in Jan. 2003 for the warm-weather Bucs to ever win a game when the temperature was below 32° F. It took 31 years for the Bucs to run a kickoff back for a TD. (For comparison’s sake, the New Orleans Saints – who have often been just as bad as the Bucs – ran the opening kickoff of their first game back for a TD. But after John Gilliam’s 94-yd return in 1967 vs. the Rams, the Saints proceeded to lose the game 27:13 and then continued to lose for about the next 25 years straight.)

Even when they succeed, the Bucs do it strangely:

“With four games left in the (1979) season, the Bucs needed to win only one of them to make the playoffs. In the first, STP was put all over the goal posts in Tampa to prevent the goalposts from being ripped down in the event of a celebration. Four blocked kicks later, the Bucs wasted the oily substance, falling to the Minnesota Vikings 23–22. STP was wasted again the following week as the Bucs were shut out 14–0 by the Chicago Bears, and in O. J. Simpson's final home game in San Francisco, Tampa Bay lost its third straight attempt to clinch a division title against a 49ers team which came in with a 1–13 record.”
– Wikipedia

In order to clinch a playoff spot that season, the Bucs beat the Chiefs 3:0 in the worst weather for a football game I have ever seen. The Bucs have always kept it zany, win or lose – and usually lose.

And then there is the Tampa Bay Curse, which is admittedly pretty bizarre. There is some logical explanation for the curse, of course. Given that the Buccaneers have generally been inept, so if the Bucs beat your team, it’s a good bet your team sucks. But as the Bucs’ fortunes improved, good and sometimes even great teams with visions of Super Bowl glory have seen the Curse rise up and destroy their fortunes. The 1998 Minnesota Vikings went 15-1. Guess who they lost to? And then what happened? Their kicker, Gary Anderson, who hadn’t missed a kick all season, flubbed his lines with the NFC Championship game hanging in the balance. He missed a 38 yd. FG that would’ve put the game out of reach, and the Atlanta Falcons rallied to win 30:27 in OT and go to the Super Bowl.

More recently, I recall this conversation which may or may not have happened back in Jan. 2002 between myself and Tim Williams – loyal Rams fan, Friend of the LOSE, and co-founder and senior partner of the law firm of Williams Morgan & Williams – on the eve of Super Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans:

Tim: I can’t believe our dumbass boss is going to the Super Bowl.
xp: Yeah, Barnes sucks. Screw him.
Tim: Rams are gonna win by 21 pts. Greatest Show on Turf, baby.
xp: Didn’t the Rams lose to Tampa Bay this season?
Tim: Uhh …
xp: You guys are screwed.
Tim: We’re so screwed.

The Patriots, of course, pulled the 20:17 upset in the Super bowl.

So listen up, Seahawks: you must not lose to Tampa Bay. YOU MUST NOT LOSE TO TAMPA BAY!! It is a DISASTER of EPIC PROPORTIONS if you lose to Tampa at-Bay …

Wait, hold on a second here. I'm being told by a member of my crack research team (emphasis on crack) here at IN PLAY LOSE World HQ that, in fact, the curse was broken four years ago. Hmm, let me check this for myself … Dec., 27, 2009, Tampa Bay 20:17 New Orleans in O.T. … Super Bowl XLIV, Feb. 7, 2010, New Orleans 31:17 Indianapolis … hmm …

Damn, this blog entry was going really well, too. Well screw it then. Tampa sucks. Just beat the hell out of them. Everyone else is doing it these days.

Quack Kills

Connor Halliday threw 89 passes on Saturday, while the starting pitcher
for the Red Sox threw 85 pitches. Hmm, it might be amusing if
 pitchers had to throw strikes while being blitzed by linebackers ...

“That’s total bullshit that he threw the ball at the end of the game like he did. And you can print that and you can send it to him, and he can comment, too. I think it’s low class and it’s bullshit to throw the ball when the game is completely over against our kids that are basically our scout team. Make sure he knows that, because I don’t really care.”

This sort of comment is not particularly unusual in the bizarro world of college football, where blowouts and running up the score is commonplace. As I’ve mentioned before, there is sort of a grey area as to what constitutes running up the score and humiliating opponents. College football is a strange entity in that the entire construct is that of being an exhibition – without any legit playoff system to determine who is the best – and so the game uses all sorts of apples-to-oranges ways of comparing teams in an attempt to decide it. Yes, style points matter in college football. And one of the ways to make yourself look good is to post lopsided wins. Hence the need to score 62 pts. and win by a massive score.

Which is precisely what happened in the game that quote refers to. The winning team in that game scored 62 pts. So clearly, that comment came from a frustrated coach whose team got crushed, right?

Actually, no.

Those were the words of Oregon defensive coordinator Nick Aliotti after the Ducks 62:38 win over Washington State in Eugene – a game in which W.S.U. QB Connor Halliday completed 58 passes (tying an NCAA record), attempted 89 (setting an NCAA record) and amassed 557 passing yards (a W.S.U. school record). It’s a pretty amazing performance, actually, one born from desperation, as the Cougars were down 14 pts. after about 5:00 of the game and were playing catchup throughout. Evidently, Oregon wasn’t really happy that W.S.U. coach Mike Leach left his starters in the game long after the outcome was decided. Such a sour graping statement would be understandable if you lost by 24 pts., but in the actual context of this game, it’s one of the more bizarre statements from a coach that I have ever heard.

The Good Guys are a young team which has shown considerable improvement after enduring a 5-year death march during which they compiled a 12-49 record. W.S.U. had no realistic chance to win this game, but their best chance involved letting their good young QB Halliday throw the ball all over the place.

Oregon, meanwhile, was a 39½ pt. favourite in the game, according to the oddsmakers in Las Vegas. The Ducks are one of the best teams in the country, if not the best. The Ducks average 57 pts. a game – as much as some NCAA basketball teams – and win by an average of around 40. They’ve became a national powerhouse in the past decade employing a cutting-edge offense that runs up numbers and stats you normally see in videogames. They’ve also become the 2nd-most loathed team in the Pac-12 in doing so, as the sentiment among the other schools is that their success has been bought.

Pac-12 foes deride Oregon as the University of Nike, since their athletic department has been bankrolled by sneaker king and billionaire benefactor Phil Knight. The Ducks now have a seemingly inexhaustible budget at their backs. Pretty much anything the school wants, rich Uncle Phil will get for them. (Including the endless array of groovy uniforms they trot out week after week, although the LOSE gives them props for the pink helmets as part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which will be auctioned to raise money). The Ducks success and their deep pockets have also created something of a sense of entitlement in Eugene – which apparently also means that they should get to dictate how their opponents play at the end of the game, if this statement is to believed.

Sure, Oregon had their scout teamers out there when W.S.U. scored 2 TDs in the last 3:00 of the game – but they also had their 1st team, Heisman-candidate QB throwing a TD pass with 12:00 left in the game, when the outcome wasn’t any less in doubt than it was the end. The Ducks generally roll up huge numbers in the first half and then sit a whole bunch of players on the bench in the 2nd half – but they also make a point of scheduling teams like Nicholls St. every year, who they beat 66:3 to start the season, which gives them ample opportunity to run up the score in the first half.

The Cougars, who were down 48:24 in the 4th Quarter, had no reason to stop throwing. They were getting beat, and they were trying to make plays. They’re also building for the future, and any accomplishments and achievements matter in that context. Their QB setting records is something to be proud of when the season is over. And as for Oregon having 3rd and 4th string defenders in the game, what better way to get experience than to play a top calibre Pac-12 QB? Good for The Good Guys. They didn’t necessarily play well – the Cougars committed 5 turnovers, while Oregon ran up 720 yards of offense in only 24:00 of possession time, which is absurd – but they played hard and competed and ultimately made a mockery of that 40-pt line in Vegas.

How this all comes off, in the end, is that Oregon was mad that the Cougars didn’t quit. And a 62:38 win looks less impressive as 62:24 when it comes down to polls and computer rankings – and, sure enough, Oregon is #3 in the BCS right now, the looney tunes system used to determine national champions in the sport. Then again, a pretty good way to win 62:24 would’ve been to, oh, play some defense! He should be more concerned about the fact that his defense gave up 557 yards, for goodness sake.

This was, in the end, one of the stupider things I’ve ever heard a coach say. Being addicted to Quack apparently can lead to delusions.

The funny thing about stuff like this is that players, coaches, and fans have LONG memories. Oregon is great right now, and W.S.U. is not. It was only a decade ago that the roles were reversed. It goes in cycles, and when you do something obnoxious, is almost always comes back around to get you later on. Given Mike Leach’s pedigree as a coach, and seeing the progress he’s already making, I suspect it won’t be that much longer before W.S.U. is competitive with the Ducks again. And I suspect that, should that happen, and should the Cougars get the lead, they’ll remember 2013 and throw the ball another 80 or 90 times and run up 62 on the Ducks just for old time sake, at which point some grumpy defensive coordinator will probably about the Cougars running up the score. Good. Let him quack all he wants, and let him eat some crow while he’s at it.

OK, Who Saw That Coming?

Tuesday was the final day of regular World Cup Qualifying, which always produces some stirring and stunning results, but they saved the best for last in the CONCACAF, where Mexico was on the verge of going home empty handed. El Tri have played absolutely terrible during this cycle. Nonetheless, the idea that they wouldn't be able so secure one of the 3½ CONCACAF spots seems unthinkable. (And the reason it's 3½ is that the team which finishes fourth has to play a home-and-home playoff with New Zealand.)

But there was El Tri clinging to 4th place in "The Hex," leading by 3 pts. over Panama after this miracle gave them a 2:1 win over Panama last Friday at Azteca. But a Mexican loss coupled with a Panamanian win would bounce El Tri out of the World Cup. The Mexicans had a game with Costa Rica in San José, and the Ticos were sure to play hard even though they'd already qualified for Brazil, simply because they cannot stand El Tri and would love to play their part in snuffing out the hopes of their fiercest rivals.

Panama, meanwhile, played the U.S. in Panama City. Now, the LOSE theorized not long ago that, given the chance to bounce their rivals from the competition by tanking one at the end of the cycle, the U.S. just might do so. The problem is that such shenanigans, while generally the norm in football, are decidedly un-American. And Jürgen Klinsmann has let it be known that he is still in search of a final XXIII for Brazil next summer. The Panama game, thus, was yet another audition. A chance for some players to make an impression. So no, the U.S. didn't dog it, even though they could have.

But nonetheless, Panama had so much more to play for. And while El Tri were making a mess of things in San José, on their way to getting beat 2:1 by the Ticos in the latest in a string of sluggish and unimaginative performances, Panama scored a goal at 83' to go ahead of the Americans 2:1. All of a sudden, the Mexicans were on the outside looking in.

And then this happens. This is Mexican television keeping tabs on the game in Panama City as the game goes into injury time, the Americans trailing by a goal and Mexico's World Cup hopes slipping away.

OK, so who saw that coming? Show of hands. Anybody? Anybody? Didn't think so. That's one of the zanier finishes I've seen.

Here is a rough translation of the Mexican commentary during the final minutes, as provided by César 'Señor Salad' del Solar, the South American correspondent for IN PLAY LOSE:

Announcer 1: long ball to Saborio, costa rica recedes, USA's ball, 3/4 of the way to the endline, attention to the US's center -- GOAL! GOAL! GOAAAAAAAAAL! USA's goal! We love you! We love you forever and ever! Aaah! God Bless America, doctor, the USA gets us back in the run for qualifying. The USA! Not you! You who are dressed in green don't! But they do! You don't! Let it remain clear all your lives, you do nothing for the uniform! You do not push the team forward! You don't put us in the World Cup! You don't keep us alive! It is the United States, not you! Not you and your arrogance! Not you and your infamy! Not you and your fireworks! 

Announcer 2: It's a failure, and besides it is undeserved, because you didn't even have the arguments to get us to at least the playoffs. The USA, with several substitutes, look, with many substitutes, went there, was dignified, shows us who is the United States, how they understand this sport - and the Mexican team is truly Dantesque, horrific, terrible, a failure of futbol ...

Announcer 1: GOAL!! GOAL!! USA! We are in the playoff USA! So we can keep criticizing ourselves eh, so we can say that USA already surpassed us! The USA is more than us in futbol, the USA today has the luxury of playing with substitutes and keeps us alive! Hopefully Vucetich puts on his pants, or tenders his resignation today! He is a failure as a coach! He is not functioning as the coach of the team! We need someone with pants who can play the Europeans (?). There exist no Europeans in this team (?) at this moment, doctor.  [César: I don't know what this refers to or if I'm hearing it right, someone help :)]

Announcer 2: No they don't exist. The game in Panama is over and Mexico will play against New Zealand dragging its legs, its dignity ...

Can you ever imagine an announcer saying that in the States? That mix of jubilation, gratitude and stunningly blunt admonishment of their own team that spews from the announcers is phenomenal.

And what a crushing loss for Panama. They've been building this team for about six years now, but that's twice this year that the U.S. has denied them – first in the Gold Cup final, and now this. They're not the most exciting team to watch, but they are resourceful and seem to find ways to get positive results. I wanted the best for them – and I suspect I'm not alone in that.

"This is just how football writes these crazy, emotional stories, and you're in the middle of it, because we all felt all of a sudden when Graham (Zusi) scored that header that it was all quiet, silence, and you feel for them. Maybe it's a little bit in my culture, in the German culture you never stop before the referee blows the whistle, because I have won many, many games in the last minute. And hopefully, we keep on winning more. But it was a very sad moment for all here in Panama. We understand that.''
– Jürgen Klinsmann

Considering that they just scored the tying and winning goals in stoppage time, those are about the two most subdued goal celebrations that I've ever seen. The Americans look downright apologetic after the game-winner. Even the American players seem to have realized what they had just done: they had aided and abetted the enemy! And yet both Zusi and Johannsson were simply making plays that were available to them. It was all in the moment and in the flow of the game. You cannot really blame them for scoring goals, especially when Panama's defense was so bad there at the end that it made it almost impossible for the U.S. not to score.

It's stuff like this which makes these games some of the greatest pieces of theatre in all of sports. In nations like Panama and Jordan, Burkina Faso and Iceland and Uzbekistan, these late-stage World Cup qualifiers are some of the biggest events – not just sporting events – in these countries' histories. (The Stade de 4 Aôut in Ouagadougou was packed so full on Saturday for the Burkinabé match with Algeria that fans were climbing the light stanchions just to get a better view.) The tension and the drama is unparalleled in sports, and some remarkable things happen. Stuff you'd never think you would see – nor hear, for that matter.

So the two injury time goals give the U.S. a 3:2 win over Panama and saves Mexico's bacon in the process. And the U.S. Soccer Federation couldn't resist the chance to troll their southern neighbours after this was over:

There was some begrudging acknowledgement from the head coach of El Tri after the fact:

"We have to praise ethical and professional behavior, in this case by the United States.”
– Victor Manuel Vucetich

And some of the Mexican fans have shown their gratitude in creative ways ...

... while also being rather skeptical of their own side, who now has a somewhat tricky playoff with New Zealand ahead of them:

Like I say, beating the Kiwis is no sure thing. The home advantage of Azteca will possibly be overwhelming, as it will be nothing like anything the Kiwis have ever faced, but the return trip to Wellington won't be a picnic. And the U.S. won't be around to rescue them from the dustbin a second time. The Mexicans have to play a helluva lot better than they have been, or all of that gratitude from earlier this evening may turn out to be for naught.

The Bucs Start Here

"It was like seeing a crystal vase fall out of someone's hands, and you're watching it in slow motion, and there's just no way you can stop it."
– Lanny Frattare, Pittsburgh Pirates play-by-play announcer

The best way to introduce you to this blog today is to have you watch the video first. This video is from Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Atlanta Braves. The Pirates are in their 3rd consecutive NLCS in 1992, and they've battled back from being down 3 games to 1 in the best-of-7 series in 1992 to even it at 3-3. They have a 2-0 lead going to the bottom of the 9th inning, with their ace Doug Drabek on the mound. So go ahead and fast forward to the 1:25:00 mark of the video – the Braves coming to bat in the bottom of the 9th – to see what unfolds:

I remember watching this game at the time and not believing what I saw. There are shock defeats in sports – 9th inning home runs, last-second shots, etc. But this game plays out like a sort of water torture in which victory drip, drip, drips away. Every confounding play leads then to another confounding play, culminating with a 3rd string catcher with 10 at bats all year driving in the winning run from 2nd base –  Sid Bream, a former Pirate and, quite possibly, the slowest player in MLB at the time:

"(Andy) Van Slyke told MLB Network that on the Francisco Cabrera game-winning hit, he motioned to Barry Bonds to move in. Bonds responded by giving him the finger, and the ball ended up landing exactly where Van Slyke said to play."
– Sports Illustrated

It could be argued that this game was the single most traumatic loss a North American professional sports franchise has ever suffered. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did a terrific story about this game 20 years later, as the 2012 season was about to begin – to this day, some of the former Pirates still won't watch the game. They have nightmares about it. The Pirates franchise sank into a deep depression after this game was over, one which took two decades to dig themselves out of.

The Pirates were a homegrown collection of talent who ran up against the economics of the game at the time. After the 1991 season, when the Mets grossly overpaid signed Pirates 3B Bobby Bonilla in free agency, it was clear that the Pirates weren't going to be able to keep the two soon-to-be high priced free agents on their roster: Barry Bonds and Doug Drabek. They played in Three Rivers Stadium, a cookie-cutter, multipurpose 1970s stadium with zero revenue sources to tap into. The Pirates simply could no longer afford to compete.

Or so the narrative goes.

It's easy to look at the 1990s at the rise of so-called "big money" in baseball, since the New York Yankees won three consecutive World Series. This is, in fact, a bit of a fallacy – many of the greatest of the Yankees' players were, in fact, homegrown talents: Jeter, Rivera, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettite, etc. But having big money at their backs allowed the Yankees far more margin for error, and always at least gave the impression that the Yankees could simply go out and sign a free agent or acquire someone's soon-to-be free agent at the trade deadline. It was easy to make the argument that all it took to be successful was to have deep pockets, and that the franchises such as the Pittsburgh Pirates were doomed to be screwed over forever.

And you can thank the Oakland A's for doing a fine job of blowing that notion up. The impact of the so-called Moneyball ethos of the A's is something that cannot be overstated. Over the course of 15 years, the A's have proven that you can, in fact, do more with less. Billy Beane et. al have taken creative approaches to the acquisition and development of talent. They've done things differently, simply because they had to, not possessing the sorts of financial resources in their midst to spend their way to pennants.

As I say, the notion that big money = big success is really sort of a fallacy. Since the millennium turned, the big money Yankees and Red Sox have won World Series – but the economy model St. Louis Cardinals have also won two, as have the San Francisco Giants, who learned from their big-spending mistakes and adopted more creative approaches to roster building which served them extremely well. And there are plenty of big spenders who spend very badly and waste their resources: the Mets and the Cubs come to mind, as do the Dodgers and the California Los Angeles Angels of Yucaipa Anaheim. Talent development is still the greatest way to success. It always has been that way in baseball, and always will be. If nothing else, the A's constantly overachieving has eliminated the "small market" excuse for poor performance. If you're bad for decades on end, it's most likely due to incompetence and ineptitude on your own part.

And the Pirates have been incompetent and inept. After the 1992 loss, and the ensuing departures of Bonds and Drabek, the proud and storied franchise went off a cliff. 21 consecutive losing seasons. 21! I thought enduring 14 straight sub-.500 Mariner seasons in the Pacific Northwest was bad, but 21? And they've not really been close to being good, either – save for a 2nd place finish in their division in 1997, the Pirates have been anchoring the bottom of the standings for most of the past two decades. And the opening of PNC Park in 2001, a jewel of a facility and a centerpiece for the revitalized city, eliminated the excuse of not having any money to spend. The last two decades' worth of losing could be chalked up to needlessly stingy ownership, poor scouting and development, misused draft selections, and sloppy play on the field. Incompetence, plain and simple.

But now the Pirates are back in the playoffs, possessing some outstanding pitching and one of the game's bright young stars in Andrew McCutchen. After a late season collapse led to a 79-83 season in 2012, the Pirates have broken through this year with 94 wins. They finished 2nd in the NL Central and hosted the Wild Card playoff game against Cincinnati. The atmosphere in Pittsburgh was insane and jubilant – going 21 straight losing seasons will do that to you – and now the Pirates have a 2-1 lead in their NLDS series with the St. Louis Cardinals.

And you should root for the Pittsburgh Pirates, because they are enthusiastic and likable and have endured a generation of absolute misery. And maybe finding some joy in the game again in Pittsburgh will make some of those ghosts from 1992 start to finally fade away.

O Fortuna!

"Chance favors the prepared mind."
– Louis Pasteur

There are two lines of commentary in sports which piss me off. The first is the whole excuse of “we have to work harder.” This is usually bullshit. Everyone in sports works hard. The worst offenders along this front are in the game of hockey, but every sport goes has similar declarations of the need to work harder. There are occasionally exceptions, but for the most part, talent prevails. You don’t need to “work harder.” You usually need to play better, which often also means that you need to play smarter.

Now, I understand that there is some politics involved when you’re a coach and you’re answering questions from the media, particularly after a bad loss. You don’t want to just come out and say your team is dumb.

 
That didn't end so well for Coach Callahan, who was fired from the Raiders after a 4-12 season.

Winners tend to use lame explanations like "we worked harder than them" to explain their success, but particularly frequent winners start using the most annoying cliché in sports, which is talking about how they are a "team of destiny." The idea being that somehow fate or chance is on your side, and that you're being somehow spirited by Fortuna or Divine Providence or (pick any deistic system of choice) towards the promised land that is a championship. What utter rubbish. The outcome is not scripted ahead of time. Attempting to do so is, in fact, considered the biggest sin in sports.

That being said, winners do tend to get the breaks. In part, this is due to the fact that they are in position to capitalize when opportunities present themselves. Consider what happened last Sunday in Houston, for example. The Seahawks are one of the favourites to be in the Super Bowl this year. They look like one of the 2-3 best teams in the NFL. They had a tough road game against a good Texans team and were struggling on the road, trailing 20-13 late in the game. Now consider the quote at the top of this entry from Pasteur – "chance favours the prepared mind." Through film study, the Seahawks had come to suspect that a particular formation would result in a favourite play of the Texans – faking a run to their left, the QB keeping the ball on the fake and then throwing back to their right. When they saw that particular formation with 2:51 left in the game, the Seahawks defense knew exactly what to do – a safety sneaks up and blitzes from the left edge, with the left CB expecting the short pass and jumping the route. When you are prepared, good things can happen.

If you notice, Seahawks CB Richard Sherman runs 50 yards with only one shoe:

This is because Richard Sherman jumped out of his shoes when he saw this terrible pass from Texans QB Matt Schaub.

There is a difference between being lucky and your opponents being stupid. It was a terrible choice of plays to begin with – why would you call this play with a 7-point lead and 2:51 left in the game at all, but particularly against a team whose best players are their ball-hawking defensive backs who are looking to force turnovers? There hasn't been an interception returned to tie the score this late in a game in the history of the modern NFL, and with good reason – teams that are winning don't do stupid stuff like put the ball up for grabs!

The play call is horrible, but the execution is even worse. It's 3rd down for the Texans at this point. OK, so the play doesn't work. Take a sack or throw the ball into the stands, then punt the ball and let your defense finish off the game. You do basically anything other than what Schaub did. So no, that doesn't count as luck.

Now this, on the other hand, could probably be construed as luck:

WTF? I was at this game, up in Section 330 of Phone Co. Park. Game 7 of the NLCS between the Giants and the Cardinals. Giants RF/resident weirdo Hunter Pence's thrice hit ball had the weirdest spin I have ever seen and promptly did this:

That play made no sense, yet it scored 3 runs and the Giants went on to win 9-0 and go to the World Series.

Fast forward :45 in this video, which is probably the greatest case of luck in sports history. (For some reason I can't get the video to sit on this page right.) Boris Becker won the US Open that year, but he was dead to rights in this 2nd round match with Derek Rostagno. His shot isn't very good at all, but then it skips off the tape – probably the only way he could win the point. This was Match Point, mind you, and Becker then rallied from there.

But it's stuff like what I just showed above which gives rise to the whole 'team of destiny' idea. Weird stuff starts to happen. Unlikely heros step up. All the breaks and the bounces seem to go their way. And on the road to a championship, there is almost always a moment in time where the victors nearly fell from grace. If the Seahawks go on to win the Super Bowl this year, they will no doubt look back to the day when Matt Schaub lost his mind as a pivotal moment in their season: a moment when victory just sort of fell their way, and they won in spite of themselves.

The big European football leagues often seem like fait accompli from very early on, an inevitable procession to a coronation, but then something nuts like this will happen from time to time. You sometimes see a team in college football that is completely dominant and seems unstoppable, but the team I will begrudgingly admit is the best I have ever seen still almost lost at Cal. There is, almost always, a great escape along the way to a championship – a moment where luck seemed to go the winners' way.

And this is how we want it. What's the point of a good story without conflict? All endings have to be earned in literature and cinema – there is no happy ending without potential for sadness. (And, conversely, the most tragic endings in the arts are those in which hope and salvation are possible.) The winners always get the breaks. We're talking about minute differences here between winning and losing here. Some of the greatest teams in history didn't win championships (the 116-win Mariners and undefeated UNLV basketball team immediately come to mind). And since the winners are the one who end up writing history, they often like to gloss over the fact that they very nearly got beat. This is true in sports, in war, in just about everything. If you didn't nearly lose, you wouldn't appreciate winning quite as much.

Like I say, the key is to be in position to take advantage of luck when it happens – and there is no guarantee that it will, mind you. But it has nothing to do with destiny when luck goes your way. It just happens sometimes. God doesn't care if you cover the spread. God doesn't have a bet on the game.

This About Sums It Up

The LOSE tries to keep politics out of this blog, even though I generally view politics in the context of being part contact sport and part theatre piece. Here in this part of the world, we are in a government shutdown, having decided to undertake a quest to supplant Belgium's "World's Most Successful Failed State" status. We have only 586 more days to go.

I'm not interested in getting into the politics of it all, so don't ask me to go there. But this about sums up how I feel about the whole situation. Infer from it what you will: