The Lose of the Year

“It’s a stupid game, anyway.”

THERE are no shortage of worthy candidates for The Lose of the Year award. There will be no repeat winner this year, as 2013’s TLOTY recipients, the Detroit Lions, got their shit together and have finally started playing to their considerable potential.

Their in-town feline counterparts, the Tigers, certainly merited some consideration for the award in 2014 as they continued their act of squandering a collection of talent often referred to in soccer annals as a ‘golden generation.’ Plan A at Comerica Park has always been to have Miguel Cabrera et. al hit lots of home runs and have their seemingly endlessly deep starting pitching rotation strike everyone out, but even Plan A isn’t foolproof in a game like baseball, where the margins are so small between success and failure. They were swept out of the World Series in 2012 by a San Francisco Giants team which could shift shapes and adapt, which is what you have to do in baseball’s playoffs. You need Plan B. The Tigers didn’t have a plan B back then, and they still don’t have it. They don’t catch the ball, they have no speed, and their bullpen continues to be frightful. The solution to a 2013 playoff failure was to run Prince Fielder out of town, since his $214,000,000 contract and sub-Mendoza line playoff batting average made him an easy scapegoat, and while acquiring Tampa Bay ace David Price for the stretch drive was certainly a nice addition to the arsenal of arms taking the hill every fifth day, they negated this acquisition in 2014 with no viable defenders in the outfield and a revolving door at shortstop worthy of scorn. The Tigers still don’t catch the ball, they still can’t close out a game, and they still have no speed (although their solution to this last quandary was certainly amusing, as the Fielder trade to Texas netted them Ian Kinsler, who’s been picked off more times than any other player during the course of his career). Unsurprisingly, this club flopped yet again in the playoffs, and now the bills have started coming due. Free agency has come a-calling and it will be impossible to keep this team together.

So the Tigers earn TLOTY consideration for missing out on a golden opportunity yet again, which really is an unpardonable sin in sports. You have to make the most of your chances, because it’s so damn hard to ultimately be successful. Professional athletics are the single-most competitive endeavour on the planet, and as I’ve said before, failure is the default.

But unlike sporting endeavours in the rest of the world, where being awful will get you a one-way ticket to the 2nd Division, the North American system entitles clubs to simply continue being awful for decades or, in the case of the Cubs, for centuries. What’s more, with concepts like salary caps and luxury taxes and revenue sharing in place, it’s never been a better time to be terrible, as doing so appears to result in no significant sorts of financial losses. So long as the value of the franchises continue to rise, yearly profit-and-loss statements are immaterial. And forget what Forbes publishes every year in terms of value. There is no telling what the true market values of franchises are when the perpetually pathetic Sacramento Kings fetched $534,000,000 after this mess was finally figured out (the owners may change but the incompetence has apparently remained), while the L.A. Clippers – the Clippers! – went for $2,000,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes – zero being about all the Clippers have ever amounted to, being about the 7th-most relevant L.A. pro sports franchise during their existence and languishing far behind the Lakers and the Dodgers and the Angels and the Kings and the Ducks and USC football … sorry, couldn’t resist a shot at Troy there … but at least the NBA finally got rid of this troglodyte during the course of that Clippers sale, which counts as a win in any year.

Actual testimony by former Clippers owner Donald Sterling, under oath, in 2003

So, um, where were we … oh yes, right, we were talking about losing. Given that failure is the default setting, The Lose isn’t inclined to award the TLOTY Award to those perpetually lame and irrelevant franchises like the Cubs, the Edmonton Oilers or the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Any hack can be terrible, when you get right down to it. Nor am I particularly impressed by clubs that actively try to be terrible (but don’t call it tanking, whatever you do) for the purposes of trying to strike it rich in the draft. We’re also going to give some mulligans to teams that were ravaged by injuries, such as the Texas Rangers. They may have been trending downward talentwise at the start of the year, but the Rangers were reduced to running out retreads and guys barely adapted to playing for the Round Rock Express, their AAA affiliate, much less at the major league level. In general, The Lose considers health to be a skill – a guy who can’t stay healthy is not an asset to a team – and injuries hurt bad teams more, as their depth is lacking and they’re unable to compensate, but a run like the Rangers had last year was unprecedented. That one doesn’t count. And while the Philadelphia Eagles’ late-season collapse had definitely been inglourious, what were you expecting from Mark Sanchez?

“Not much, to be honest. He’s still the same dude.”
– Seahawks DT Michael Bennett, asked what the Seahawks were expecting from Mark Sanchez after Seattle’s 24:14 win in Philly

There are many worthy candidates across the wide spectrum of sports this year – and with the Olympics and the World Cup in 2014, we truly have a deep field from which to choose – but each of this year’s TLOTY nominees displayed incompetence, both on the field and off, that was both impressive and, at times, downright disturbing. For a few of the long-suffering, there has been some signs of life here in 2014. The Houston Astros are making some incremental steps towards respectability after a historically bad run in baseball. They still can’t pitch, but some of their young prospects should be ready to excel. On the football front, the Raiders are playing hard, have beaten three straight playoff contenders at home and appear to have actually found themselves a QB to build around, while there are some signs of hope for the Jacksonville Jaguars as well, who have also put some good pieces in place but need to work on some fundamental concepts like protecting the QB:

Eight guys blocking five. What could possibly go wrong?

OK, well, that’s a work in progress.

And by the way, I lump the NCAA in with the pros for the purposes of this discussion, since the NCAA is a professional, moneymaking organization and the whole notion of the student athlete is a sham. They should be paid, period and end of story. Having said that, Washington State is ineligible for this award, despite efforts both creative and inept to be included in the discussion. Their number has been retired.

On with the nominations!

Detroit Pistons
Since we already were hanging around Detroit, we may as well pop by the Palace of Auburn Hills for a moment. The Pistons didn’t actively tank last season, but they gave up halfway through the season when it was apparent that GM Joe Dumars’ ambitious series of free agent signings, once they took to the court, were as a good a match as two left shoes. The Pistons dogged it at the end of the year both to hope to strike it rich in the lottery and protect a provisional draft pick Dumars had foolishly traded away. Dumas was understandably fired at the end of the season, the Pistons have now turned to Stan Van Gundy to attempt to reverse their fortunes and, at 5-23, it’s not really going so well. The Pistons finally bit the bullet and released Josh Smith, one of those big free agents signings from a year ago, essentially paying him $26,000,000 to go away, and the Houston Rockets waited around until he cleared waivers and signed him for cheap. The Lose has no problems with teams overpaying players, by the way. When it comes to sports, I’m a Marxist who believes the labourers should get everything, since nobody pays to watch an owner. But it’s somewhat unavoidable talking about salaries in the NBA, where a guy’s contract is far more important than whether or not they can sink the 3-ball. Understanding Italian politics is easier than understanding the NBA salary cap. And one thing that’s true across the board in sports is that, when you overpay a player and you badly miss on him, no one else is going to solve your problems for you. The Pistons had to take the hit on this one, and this once-proud franchise continues to badly misfire.

Los Angeles Dodgers
We Giants fans have referred to now former Dodgers GM Ned Colletti as ‘Agent Ned’ ever since he left the Giants’ front office in 2005 to take the Dodgers gig, since clearly all of his bad payroll and personnel decisions were proof that he was a double agent secretly working on the Giants’ behalf. And there have been a lot of them, to be sure. Most everything that you can say about the Dodgers in 2014 can be prefaced with the phrase, “for a team with a $250 million payroll.” As in, “for a team with a $250 million payroll, the Dodgers sure were dependent upon Dee Gordon to jumpstart their offense,” and “for a team with a $250 million payroll, the Dodgers sure were dependent upon Clayton Kershaw to win every time out, since if you take their 94 wins and discount the fact that the Dodgers won 21 of Kershaw’s last 22 starts, you wind up with a team that really isn’t very good,” and “for a team with a $250 million payroll, their bullpen sure is six kinds of crap.”
Now, there is no salary cap in baseball, of course, and the Dodgers can certainly afford it, given that their new owners found the $2 billion to buy the club beneath the cushions of their couches, but like I said before with the Pistons, no one is going to solve your problems for you if you grossly overpay everybody. (Except for maybe the Dodgers, of course, who bought up all of Boston’s sludge at the end of 2012, which worked out pretty well for the Bosox, now didn’t it?) The Dodgers of 2014 would up with four starting outfielders for three starting spots – Puig, Crawford, Kemp, Ethier – all of whom are regressing as players, and three of whom have monstrous contracts that basically made them untradable. And you can’t just move one over to play first, since Adrian Gonzalez and his big contract is over there. Meanwhile, the Dodgers also have another outfielder – Van Slyke – on the bench whom they’d like to have playing, and their best minor league prospect is another outfielder. So now you have six guys for three spots, and understandably, none of the six guys are terribly happy about the prospects of sitting on the bench.
In order to go about solving this mess, the Dodgers had to agree to pick up $32.5 million of Kemp’s salary when they finally unloaded him to the Padres this off-season. During the course of their offseason, their whirling dervish of a new GM, Andrew Friedman, has spent $54.5 million to make four guys go away – $32.5 million to the Padres for Kemp, $12.5 million to the Marlins to cover the salaries of Gordon and Dan Haren, and then the Dodgers DFA’d Brian Wilson to the tune of a $9.5 million hit. Even if you have all the money in the world, that sort of inefficiency and sunk cost is bad for business. Remember, this is a zero-sum game, and whatever bad moves your team make will immediately help your competition.
The Dodgers won 94 games last season and won the NL West, but promptly bombed out in the playoffs, dependent entirely upon Kershaw to win for them on the hill and having Kershaw inexplicably turn into a pumpkin in October and live up to his snide nickname of “the best 6-month pitcher in baseball.” (Nah, we don’t call him that here in San Francisco, do we?) Ownership in L.A. has made it clear that winning championships is what matters, but after their flurry of offseason moves, which netted them SS Jimmy Rollins from the Phillies and 2B Howie Kendrick from the Angels, the Dodgers are certainly older but not necessarily any better. With such high expectations, this franchise is ripe for further failure.

California Los Angeles Angels of Lawndale Anaheim
Anyone want Josh Hamilton? He’s only owed $83 million? Any takers? Anyone?

Oakland A’s
We’ve been over this already. The oddity of the winter meetings this year was that the Mariners came out of it looking like the team to beat in the AL West simply by doing nothing while the A’s and Angels went about making themselves worse. Just saying the Mariners are the team to beat sounds weird in and of itself.

Colorado Rockies
It’s always 2001 at Safeco Field in Seattle, and it’s always 2007 at Coors Field, that being the year when the Rockies caught fire and won 21 of their last 22 games at the end of the season, a hot streak which catapulted them all the way to an appearance in the World Series. And like most franchises who achieve little to nothing, 2007 nostalgia is the Rockies’ biggest selling point to their fans, and there is enough love of that nostalgia within the organization to fool themselves into thinking they know what they are doing. Take out that one good month, and the Rockies have basically been awful for the duration of their existence, but have made few changes over the years to the core staff which has permitted this club to veer so badly off-course. The Rockies completely flatlined in 2014, going 66-96 and playing about .250 ball for long stretches of the season. Seemingly unfireable GM Dan O’Dowd resigned after after the season, walking away with very little to show for 15 years on the job, so at least the club may have rid themselves of the idea that everything is copacetic, but new Jeff Bridich is going to have his hands full. The sad truth is that they’re going to continue to be awful, because they play in Denver, which has been, and always will be, where pitching careers go to die. I’m not sure how you ever overcome that disadvantage, but especially so in a deadball era of a game. And one of the many problems in Colorado is that their two best players – Carlos Gonzalez and Troy Tulowitzki – haven’t shown an ability to stay healthy, which means even if the Rockies wanted to trade them, they aren’t going to get full value on the dollar for damaged goods.

Vancouver Canucks
Sigh. My beloved hockey team deserves a post all unto themselves, as they’ve seen every sort of failure in their 44-year history. They’ve gone from the doghouse to standing outside the penthouse and being unable to find their keys. A franchise that once had 17 straight losing seasons and one which has also lost three Stanley Cup finals – one of which (1994 v. the N.Y. Rangers) is considered one of the game’s greatest moments; one of which (2011 v. Boston) ranks among the nastiest Stanley Cup Finals in history (and then there was this ... ugh ...); and one of which (1982 v. the Islanders) was the unlikeliest, nuttiest, most wonderful adventure a professional sports franchise has ever had.
Canucks GM Mike Gillis decided a change was in order after the Canucks were beaten by the Sharks in the 2013 playoffs, firing head coach Alain Vigneault, whose 7-year track record in Vancouver – 6 division titles, 2 President’s Trophies, a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals – clearly indicated that he didn’t know what he was doing. At the same time, the New York Rangers fired head coach John Tortorella, at which point the two franchises swapped coaches. Vigneault promptly took the Rangers to the Stanley Cup finals in 2014, while about the only thing Tortorella achieved in Vancouver was this bit of infamy. Egads.
Torts was always good for a soundbite in Vancouver, of course, as was his way during his regular and wildly entertaining jousts with the media, but he brought a tight, defense-first system to Vancouver and tried to apply it to a club which had been thriving for years on speed and finesse. “Hmm … so, I’ve got the Sedin brothers, who are only two of the most dynamic offensive players in the game for the past decade. I know what I’ll do! I’ll have them kill penalties and block shots!” Suffice to say, that idea caught on about as well as New Coke. The Canucks found themselves out of the playoffs this past season, at which point Torts was gone, along with Gillis for good measure – and rightfully so, as he’d overseen an ongoing soap opera with his team’s goaltenders, wound up trading both Luongo and Schneider for pennies on the Canadian loony, and given out so many no-trade clauses to other players so as to make adjusting his roster almost impossible.
But the Torts caper was a disaster from the getgo. The #1 rule of professional coaching is that you have to know what your players can do and you have to adjust, not them. I had numerous discussions on Canucks message boards about this, as commentators were blaming the players for not adapting – or not being willing to adapt – to the system. That’s not how it works in professional sports. It’s a players game. Put the players in a position to fail, and they will – and, even worse, they’ll also get you fired. Now, to the Canucks credit, they’ve regrouped rather quickly and are a pretty decent team again, but Lord’s Stanley Cup, which hasn’t resided in Vancouver in a century, continues to be elusive – and annoyingly so, given that the L.A. Kings have now won two of them in short order while seemingly doing as little as possible in the regular season, eking their way into the playoffs and then collectively channeling their inner Gretzkys come the spring.

New York Jets

Geno Smith. Need I say more?

New York Knicks
Taking the top job at Madison Square Garden is apparently Phil Jackson’s attempt at proving the naysayers wrong who insist his success as a coach was entirely due to having Jordan and Pippen and Shaq and Kobe. The Knicks are currently 5-26. The naysayers are chortling.

Los Angeles Lakers
“As far as the Lakers ... personally, I just hope they suck forever.”
– Mark Cuban
Speaking of Kobe, the Lakers are must-see TV this year if you like reveling in schadenfreude and also liked smashing your toy trains together when you were a child. The Lakers have been the most dominant, most iconic sports franchise of my lifetime. They were the franchise which everyone always wanted to play for, and thus always had its pick of the greatest players on the planet. But now they’ve completely disintegrated, and, as a Laker hater, I absolutely love it.
This less-than-flattering article painted a grim picture in Los Angeles and pointed the finger directly at Kobe Bryant, the crux of the article being that the Lakers gave him a massive contract extension, in part, because no other marquee player could stand to play with him. Kobe certainly has been an élite player and a warrior during his career, but the key to that last statement are the words ‘has been.’
In the present day, Kobe is a vortex on the floor, a swirling and sucking eddy of despair from which the ball never returns. He shoots and he shoots and he shoots some more. He is currently missing more shots per game than all but 35 players in the league are attempting. Clearly, his best days are behind him – not that he doesn’t keep trying to lead way, and not that the organization doesn’t kowtow to him when he does. When asked why they ran a play at the end of a game for Kobe down a point to OKC, even though Kobe was 3-for-14 from the field, coach Byron Scott’s answer was “32,000 points in his career.”
To which point guard Jeremy Lin responded, “I like gamewinners, too.”
Lin has been one of the guys to conveniently be fingered and take the fall for the Lakers failings, losing his starting job. Not that you can blame anyone on this team for being frustrated, given that the offense is a vortex. Kobe Bryant literally shoots his team out of games. His teammates know it and resent it. Just watch one of their games and note the Laker players’ body language. They all seem exasperated.
The Lakers’ followed up the aforementioned 1-pt. loss to OKC by traveling to Sacramento, where Kobe shot 8-for-30 in a 108:101 loss. He’s taken a few days off since then, needing to rest and recover … and lo and behold, in his absence the Lakers have seven guys hit double figures, play a creative and active offensive game and upset the Warriors, the best team in the league.
Coincidence?
It’s telling that the two best games the Lakers played this year are the game with the Warriors which I just mentioned and an OT win in San Antonio where Nick Young scored 29 off the bench and took the game winning trey in OT instead of Kobe. Otherwise, the Lakers have been awful, posting a 9-20 record and sporting a defense which is verging on being historically bad.
The Lakers got a bad break, of course, when lottery pick Julius Randle suffered a season-ending injury in the very first game of the season. But the entire Lakers apparatus seems broken at the moment. You cannot blame any player worth their salt for wanting to stay away from that mess. But as is usually the case with the Lakers, you have to enjoy them being down while it lasts, because it’s not likely to last that long.

The entire sport of college basketball
Seriously. Watch the games sometime. The games are awful. With the changes in the rules and the more systematic, mathematical approaches on the offensive end, the NBA has become interesting again. There is movement on the floor, there is motion and passing and spreading the court. The college game, meanwhile, is no longer the bastion of imagination and innovation that it used to be. All you have now is overly physical, overly defensive teams who do no phases of the game particularly well.
The simple solution to this is to fire all the coaches. Given the lack of skill on display, it’s debatable whether or not any of them are particularly good at their trade. In truth, it’s far easier to coach defense, to be conservative and risk-averse. It’s somewhat self-preservationist by nature, and college coaches are nothing if not that.
Suffice to say, The Lose is not a disciple of the Cult of the Coach that engulfs the NCAA’s two primary sports. The Lose also holds the entire collection of apologists who report upon those sports in a certain amount of contempt – many of whom were formerly coaches, of course, and who find convenient excuses like one-and-done players (a result of the age limitations imposed by the NBA) to explain why the game has deteriorated. Considering the number of one-and-dones every year is minute compared to the 4500 or so players playing Div. I NCAA basketball, you can see where the idea that it makes a huge impact on the game as a whole is nonsense. They make an impact because the most successful current program – Kentucky – takes full advantage of one-and-dones and recruits them en masse for a single-season shot of glory. I’ve never much cared for John Calipari, but he is right in doing that. The entire system is a cesspool, so why claim otherwise?
The whole game sucks at the moment. It verges on unwatchable. The NCAA tournament, long a staple of great competition and great theatre, was reduced to a dreadful snoozer this past spring. If there was ever a time when college basketball needed another Loyola Marymount to come along, it’s now.

New Orleans Saints
After doing everything right as an organization in their climb towards winning a Super Bowl, the Saints have done almost everything wrong since. There was the bounty scandal and the suspensions, there were earth-shaking upset losses in the playoffs, there was bad defense and a lot of it, there were bad drafts and bad free agent signings, and now there is salary cap armageddon looming on the horizon, as the Saints are already way, way, way over next year’s salary cap in the NFL. The Saints were thought by some to be Super Bowl contenders at the start of this season, but have completely collapsed and are going to miss the playoffs entirely – which is somewhat hard to believe, given that they play in the NFC South, which this is year is one of the worst divisions in the history of professional sports. (But not the worst.) It’s been sad to see, as the Saints have been one of the most entertaining teams in football for a decade now, but a closer look reveals that other than Drew Brees, the Saints just aren’t any good any more.

FIFA and the IOC
These two organizations lost whatever credibility they had left in 2014, which wasn’t much to begin with. These two corrupt bunches of bombasts are doing a fine job of trying to kill off all the good that their sports have accomplished over decades.
Unsurprisingly, cities across the globe are having second thoughts about hosting the Olympics after the bill for Sochi’s Games totaled over $50 billion, and with the continued problems in Rio de Janeiro’s preparations to host the Summer Games in 2016. The only bidders left for the 2022 Winter Games are Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Pretty much no democratic nation on earth wants anything to do with the Olympics at the moment. The costs have gotten too high, and the benefits of hosting are no longer worth that sort of investment.
FIFA, meanwhile, has been halfheartedly going through the motions of investigating itself amid accusations that there was widespread corruption and vote fraud amid the process for awarding the World Cups to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. Saying the investigation has lacked transparency would be an understatement. Black holes are less opaque.
The irony of this, of course, is that both the IOC and FIFA are likely going to have to turn to the United States to save them – a nation for which the two organizations hold varying degrees of contempt. The IOC has actively encouraged an American bid for the 2024 summer game – and by ‘actively encouraged,’ what I mean is that any American city that wants it bad enough can pretty much have it, at this point. As for FIFA, well, I’ve always thought the Russian bid for 2018 was with merit and attribute a lot of guffawing about the bid to English sour grapes. As for 2022, well, it was interesting that FIFA awarded the World Cup to an oil-rich nation like Qatar, because I’ve thought ever since that an oil-rich city is going to host the World Cup final that year.
Dallas. 

The Philadelphia 76ers
I know that I said before that teams who are actively trying to lose don’t impress me, but the 76ers are impossible to ignore. Haven’t I used up enough cyberink already on this lot? The Sixers followed up their misery from a season ago by starting 0-17 this year. It wasn’t clear if/when the Sixers would ever win a game, and it took a trip to Minnesota to play the beat-up and downtrodden Timberwolves in the worst game played in the NBA this season to finally notch a victory: 104 missed shots, 19% shooting from the 3-point line, and the game having to be restarted when it was realized the teams were going in the wrong direction, which the NBA has a very specific protocol about. That was definitely an appropriate opening to this game, given that it’s easy to question the direction both those clubs are headed. The Wolves continue to be one of the most useless franchises in all of professional sports, and nothing the 76ers have done the past couple of years has implied there is the slighest bit of competence involved. But 48 minutes and 100+ bricks tossed later, the 76ers had their first win. I know that I am fond of saying there are no ugly wins, but …
Philly’s now scrambled their way to mark of 4-24 (and to the 76ers’ credit, they scrambled back from 23 down to beat Miami the other night), thus making it unlikely they’ll live up to their moniker(s) by posting a 6-76 season record. That may be the only thing the 76ers manage to accomplish this season.
Gads, this team is horrible. They rank near the bottom of nearly every offensive category. The coaching staff has been employing a volume-discount sort of approach to the offensive end of the floor, and the 76ers play at one of the fastest tempos in the league, which means that they shoot a lot, they miss a lot, and they commit a lot of turnovers. The defense isn’t much to write home about either, but as you can see, they’ve been working hard on defending the pick and roll:

Uh, yeah.
The 76ers are built to be terrible. Other than Michael Carter-Williams and maybe Tony Wroten, there isn’t a single player on this team with much of an NBA future. They were built to be terrible last year, as well, but it didn’t net them the #1 pick they were coveting, and since they had so much fun having Nerlens Noel on their roster, who was hurt and couldn’t play, they decided to draft Joel Embiid, who is hurt and can’t play. Their latest soiree has been to trade with the Nets for the $11 rotting corpse of a contract belonging to Andrei Kirilenko, not because they want him to play but because they need the $11 million on the books to reach the salary floor required by the CBA. AK-47 is, understandably, unamused by this and has failed to report, thus making the situation in Philadelphia even weirder, if that was possible.
The 76ers ship is presently being helmed by GM Sam Hinkie, who learned his craft from the San Antonio Spurs. While the Spurs are certainly a model organization, it should also be pointed out that the #1 reason for the Spurs success over the years is that they got stupid dumb lucky in the lottery not once but twice. It’s a whole lot easier to make moves to improve your club when you have first David Robinson, and then Tim Duncan, to build around. Former Spurs assistant GM Sam Presti obviously learned from the best, having followed a similar course of getting stupid dumb lucky in OKC. He didn’t get the #1 pick, but had the good fortune of having Kevin Durant fall their way with the #2 when the idiot Trail Blazers, picking ahead of them, ignored all of the red flags surrounding Greg Oden. This idea of being as bad as you possibly can for a prolonged period of time, so that you can amass enough players to be good again, is an iffy notion, at best. A few teams have pulled it off in sports (the Tampa Bay Rays and the Kansas City Royals come to mind), but what’s far more likely to occur is that you’re going to continue to be terrible (how many high draft choices have been squandered by the likes of the Browns and the Cubs and the Edmonton Oilers?) It seems like wishful thinking to me, counting on the guys whose decisions lead your franchise to being awful to somehow lead you back to being good.

So many worthy nominees, so little time. But really, there is only one team which TLOTY could go to this year. There was only choice, and this team set itself apart from the competition during one particularly disgraceful evening in Belo Horizonte:

I give you Brazil. Words fail.

On a personal note, I apologize to my many loyal readers for not blogging as much as I have done in the past. I’ve been somewhat busy and, in an act decidedly out of character, I’ve been doing a lot of winning in 2014, what with the publishing of the novel and the wedding and the like. I do intend to do quite a bit more blogging here in 2015, as there is never a shortage of good material (and given that the 49ers are about to do something as stupid as firing Jim Harbaugh, I may be busier sooner than later). But I’ll just say right upfront that you shouldn’t expect much new material from me in the springtime, as myself and The Official Wife of In Play Lose are planning to be venturing to the land of some heroes of this blog’s past for a few weeks:

Have I mentioned that we win at life?

Go Bad or Go Home

Carolina Panthers special teams, brought to you by Maalox

MY LOVE of bad football is well-documented, but the Thanksgiving weekend slate in the NFL was a veritable smorgasbord of indifference and incompetence that was almost too much for even me to eat.

There are always going to be bad teams, of course, but I cannot remember a year in the NFL when so many teams seemed to be so bad. We’re three-fourths of the way through the season now, and a full one-fourth of the league – eight teams – have only managed to win one-fourth of the time they take the field. If this were the NBA, I would just assume these franchises were all tanking to try and strike it rich in the draft lottery. Given some the utter incompetence on display last weekend, you might think that anyway:

• I said not too long ago that the blocked punt returned for a touchdown was just about the worst play in football. The Carolina Panthers allowed Minnesota to do this not once, but twice in their 31:13 defeat last weekend. It’s been a lost season for Carolina, who overachieved a year ago and earned a first-round playoff bye by winning the always humorous NFC South. Remarkably, Carolina still has a playoff shot with a 3-8-1 record, because their division is so bad that the 5-7 Atlanta Falcons currently have the lead. And given the fact that Cam Newton’s been a piñata all season – the Eagles sacked him nine times a few weeks ago, and he was sacked four more times by the Vikings – the fact he’s still standing at all is somewhat remarkable.

• Also somewhat amazingly still alive in the chase for the title in the humorous NFC South are the 2-10 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, though the Pewter Pirates did themselves no favours in squandering a winnable game at home to Cincinnati. Trailing 14-13 late in the game, with no timeouts remaining as they attempted a last-ditch rally, Tampa Bay completed a long pass deep into Cincy territory which would have surely set up a game-winning FG – only to have the play called back because of a penalty. The Bucs had 12 men on the field. 12 men on the field! How does that happen? The play having been called back, the Bucs then did the classic dumb thing to do at the end of a game, which was to complete a pass in the middle of the field and allow the time to expire.

 
“This is why we’re 2-10.”
 
– Tampa Bay coach Lovie Smith


No argument here.

• The Redskin Potatoes have been quick to blame all of their woes on QB Robert Griffin III. RG3 had the look of a transcendent talent when he arrived at New Jack City FedEx Field, but injuries have slowed him and taken away much of his running ability, while a revolving door of coaches, a collection of lettuce-handed receivers and a general disdain for blocking by the O-line have contributed to the hindering of his development as a passer. And it certainly wasn’t the benched RG3’s fault that the Potatoes yielded six TDs of 30 yards or longer in their 49:27 debacle of a loss in Indianapolis, letting the Colts run up and down the field on them and playing like a group bound and determined to get (yet) another coach fired. Jay Gruden surely had an inkling of was he getting into when he took the head job there, but the extent of the dysfunctionality in the D.C. organization has probably got him wondering about his career choices right about now.

• Speaking of poor career choices, Ken Whisenhunt was the finalist for two head coaching jobs in the offseason – Detroit and Tennessee – after a successful stint running the offense in San Diego. The Lions, in fact, had a jet juiced up and sitting on the tarmac ready to fly to San Diego to pick him up. But for some inexplicable reason, Whisenhunt chose the Tennessee gig. Now, Detroit has a justly-deserved reputation as being a coaching graveyard, of course, but the Lions also have a roster which includes a 5,000-yd QB, the best WR in football, and a whoopass defensive line – which is six more good players than can be found in Nashville. The Lions may be a mess, but at least there is some talent there, which can’t be said of the Titans, who got blasted 45:21 by Houston on Sunday and who allowed journeyman Houston QB Ryan Fitzpatrick to throw six TD passes, including one to a defensive end.

• With all of these bad teams in the NFL this season, having two square off on a weekly basis seems almost inevitable. The Jacksonville Jaguars are awful and have been awful for several years now, but if you squint enough, you just might be able to see some light at the end of the tunnel. The Jags play hard and have a few pieces to build around. Their opponent last Sunday, the New York Giants, are old, slow, can’t run the ball, have 11 matadors masquerading as a defensive unit, and QB Eli Manning has regressed to being the turnover machine he was when he first came into the league. For the Jints, no lead is safe, not even their 21-0 margin at the half in Jacksonville. New York promptly conceded two TD’s on fumble returns in the second half on their way to squandering the lead and the game. Now, if you’re as bad as Jacksonville is – the 25:24 win over the Giants raised their record to 2-10 – it could be argued that you’re better off tanking and trying to get the first pick in the draft, but that logic doesn’t really hold in the NFL, where you need so many players to fill out your roster. Unless he’s a franchise QB, one position in the draft isn’t going to make much difference, and as we’ve seen with Cam Newton and RG3, even if he might turn out to be a franchise QB, you still have to keep him upright.

• Or you could just decide to go without a QB entirely, which is essentially what Rex Ryan did on Monday night vs. Miami. Give the beleaguered Jets head coach credit for realizing that his best chance to win a game with Geno Double Donut Smith at the helm was to abandon the forward pass entirely. The Jets channeled their inner Nebraska and ground out 277 rushing yards in the game, thus becoming the first team in recent memory to tally up that many rushing yards in an NFL game and lose, because the Jets always screw it up somehow, and this game was no exception. Their attempts at boring the Dolphins into submission almost worked, but the Dolphins rousted themselves out of heavy slumber to take a 16-13 lead in the last 90 seconds of game, meaning the Jets then had to pass – at which point Geno Smith was promptly intercepted, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.

• Oh yeah, and the Raiders lost 52:0 in St. Louis. Yeech.

That right there is a lot of bad football. (And I didn’t even get into the Cardinals’ tackling shadows in Atlanta, the lousy defensive efforts put forth by Chicago and Pittsburgh, or the heap of hot garbage which is the current 49ers offense.) So much lose, so little time. The standings are now getting wackily stratified – in the AFC, 12 teams are .500 or better, and the other four are 2-10 or worse – which should make for an interesting playoff chase. I’m not sure, however, if these NFL back markers are necessarily worse than bad teams of games gone by. Being someone who contemplates relative awfulness, this is an idea which intrigues me. I’m not sure teams are worse than before so much as the game has changed to the point where bad teams appear to be worse. It’s getting harder and harder to hide your weaknesses in football. Whereas, in the past, a bad team might be able to go about eking out a few 13:10 games here and there, and win a few more games than should be expected, in the modern day they’re not only less likely to win, but you’re more likely to wind up getting annihilated.

The blowouts have been everywhere in the NFL this season. The Rams putting up a half-century on Oakland was the 6th time a team has scored at least 50 this season. The Packers did it twice in a row, v. the Bears and then the Eagles. Team Cheese’s 55:14 win over Chicago came on the heels of the Bears giving up 51 in New England in their previous game, which marked the first time in the NFL since the Rochester Jeffersons of 1923 that a team gave up more than 50 in back-to-back games. It wasn’t that long ago that 40 points constituted a monstrous offensive outpouring in the NFL, but along with six 50-pt. games this year, teams have broken 40 another 21 times. NFL offenses are going crazy this year.

And this was bound to happen, at some point, since the offenses have been going crazy in football at pretty much every other level for most of the past decade. It’s most apparent at the NCAA level, where the numbers being run up are straight out of a video game. Western Kentucky and Marshall tried to break football last week. Had WKU not gone for 2 in OT (a gutsy and awesome move on the part of the Hilltoppers), there’s no telling what the final score would’ve been. As it stands, I’d be willing to wager the 67:66 final score of that football game will be higher than when then two schools square off on the basketball court. Games in the Big 12 and Pac-10 are track meets on grass. Everyone has a QB and a fleet of receivers, the ball is flying all over the place, teams are scoring tonnes of points and rendering the defenses as good as helpless.

Which is a revolution in the game that, quite honestly, should’ve happened about a century ago. It never made any rational sense to run the ball straight ahead into a pile of 14 guys, seven of which are your own. It always seemed to make more sense to run away from the defense entirely, or at least try to run around them. And no kids grow up playing sandlot football run the fullback dive. You spread everyone out and go out for a pass (except for the slow fat kid who stays in and blocks, of course). It’s obvious. Part of why it’s easy to teach, on a high school and collegiate level, is that it’s the natural way that kids grow up playing the game. It also negates size advantages and emphasizes speed, and fewer collisions around the line of scrimmage mean fewer injuries. It’s really the way the game seems like it should be played.

As is the idea of playing hurry-up and doing away entirely with the huddle. Keep the tempo up, keep the pressure on the defense, don’t let them substitute or get set. It’s an obvious idea, and one which should’ve been done decades ago. It’s sort of a no-brainer.

Throw in some sophisticated scheming and play design, and now you’ve got seemingly unstoppable offenses – spread out formations, 1-on-1 matchups against defenders and the like. The short pass becomes just as effective a tool for ball and clock possession as the run, even more so since you’ve got 1-on-1 matchups and the 7-yd pass can become a 15-yd or 20-yd gain with a single broken tackle. It’s all very logical. The revolution in the way football is played has been cerebral, first and foremost.

Now I personally don’t mind this trend in football, having found far too many sports becoming far too defensive in recent years. It’s a dead ball era in baseball with far too many strikeouts. Basketball went through about a 15-year period where nobody could shoot (and college basketball still sucks because the control-freaky coaches won’t let anybody shoot). Fewer teams are parking the bus in soccer, but everyone’s been parking the zamboni in hockey. The fact is that, in most sports, it’s easy to play defense. Overly defensive sport is a dumbing down of the game. Football has shown itself to be the most creative and imaginative of sports in recent years (although, to give it some credit, the NBA is pretty cool these days when teams, you know, aren’t trying to purposely stink).

But with all of these changes in the game of football, defenses are now under siege. At the high school and collegiate levels, the entire concept of what ‘good defense’ is has necessarily had to change. Given that your team is spread out all over the place, the offense is going to find seams and move the ball. It’s inevitable. So on the defensive side, your best bet is to play for big plays – sacks, turnovers and the like – and also try to minimize the damage along the way. Auburn gashed Alabama on Saturday for 44 pts. and over 600 yards of offense, but the Tide turned back the War Eagles repeatedly in the red zone, forcing Auburn to kick five field goals. In the modern age of football, this constituted good defense. Alabama wound up winning the game 55:44 – nothing Auburn did constituted good defense in the slightest – and Alabama head coach Darth Vader Nick Saban, long a proponent of solid defensive play, was surprisingly calm and pragmatic after the game when a reporter pussy-footed around and stated that Alabama’s defense ‘seemed’ to struggle:

“There wasn’t any ‘seemed like it.’ You’re not going to hurt my feelings. They passed for 465 yards. I’ve got it right here on paper. The way we’re headed in college football, there’s going to be games like this, and you’re going to have to be able to win games like this. There’s a lot more points being scored in this day and age of college football than ever before. I think the hurry-up offense, the advent of the zone read and the option passes that come off it that people throw make it very difficult to defend.”

And a fair amount of the tactics and techniques which have proven so successful in the high school and college ranks have begun creeping into the NFL game. This isn’t the least bit surprising – not only do the professionals have the best talent, but they ultimately will also find the best ideas for utilizing that talent. Chip Kelley brought the University of Nike Oregon offense to Philadelphia, and the Eagles are now so effective that not even retread former Jet QB Mark Sanchez can screw it up. Russell Wilson has been flirting with 1,000 rushing yards this season, and already has several 100-yd rushing games. QBs now have feet to match their arms and their brains. Modern receivers are huge and graceful and catch everything. Tight ends are former basketball players with great feet who are used to maneuvering in tight spaces and who simply post up the defenders. Spread the defense out and there’s all sorts of spaces for your speedy, agile running backs to race through. Playing defense in football these days is damn near impossible. Sometimes it seems the best idea is to just let the other team score and do so as fast as possible, get the ball back and try to score yourself.

Which is easier said than done, of course, particularly if you’re a bad football team and make the assortment of mistakes which bad football teams generally make more of, most of which occur on the offensive side of the ball. Turnovers, in particular, are more of a killer than ever, since it’s an opportunity lost to keep pace. And modern defenses which go hunting turnovers will attack the ball and look to score, which means you see quite a few pick sixes and fumble returns for TDs, as well. The whole goal of modern defense is to make big plays, so the last thing you want to do is make it easy for them to do that.

In the end, every mistake gets magnified when stopping the other team is so difficult. A good rule of thumb in sports is that the higher the score, the harder it is to spring the upset. You can luck your way into a 1-0 win in some sports, but in football you have to make 120 plays with 22 players and so many moving parts, and in this day and age, it’s very likely that you can’t stop the other team to begin with. Even the most élite of defenses in the NFL, the Seahawks, got abused by San Diego and Dallas earlier this season. It happens to everyone. If the Seahawks can’t stop anyone, how is an error-prone team going to stay within 20 pts. of a competent opponent?

So I don’t necessarily think there are more bad teams, they are simply losing more spectacularly – and more entertainingly in the process. All eight of the offenders mentioned in the buzzard points above are among the bottom-feeders in statistical categories on both sides of the ball, being neither able to score or defend with any sort of effectiveness. The 3-9 team of the modern NFL is probably closer in skill to, say, a 5-7 team of the past. (This year’s crop of 5-7’s include the Falcons, Saints, and Bears, three teams allergic to defense who have enough firepower to win from time to time.) But 5-7 is pretty boring, when you get right down to it. Mediocrity sucks. Go big or go home. If you’re going to be bad, be really bad!

And on that note, I think I’m going to check in on this 76ers game …

What the?

YOU know, it’s already hard enough to beat those pesky, annoying, green-and-yellow wearing fashionistas from the University of Nike Oregon. The Quack Attack have been consistently one of the best teams in the nation for the part of two decades now, and are perennial contenders for the national title. (They also tend to choke once they reach the big stage, but we can save that for another post.)

Oregon’s at #4 right now in the polls, and a good bet to reach the 1st ever national playoff if they can keep winning, but they were in some trouble last night in Salt Lake City against a pretty good Utah team. The Runnin’ Utes were up 7-0 after the 1st Quarter and then speed daemon Kaelin Clay got behind the Oregon defense to catch a 79-yard TD pass:

Wait, did he just, like, drop the ball in the field of play?

He did! About the only person who noticed this was the Side Judge, who didn’t rule a TD, but instead threw the bean bag, meaning it’s a fumble.

So now you’ve got three Runnin’ Utes celebrating in the back of the end zone, the band playing, the fans going nuts, 6 points going up on the scoreboard … and a live ball rolling around on the field which an Oregon DB then just sort of picks up, thinking it’s a dead ball, and then he sees the bean bag and suddenly realizes that it isn’t a dead ball at all. He promptly runs into a Utah guy and fumbles, at which point Oregon LB Joe Walker scoops up the loose ball at the Oregon 1-yard line and this happens:

99 yards later, after being escorted down the sidelines by a convoy of teammates, Walker and the Ducks have a tying TD.

What the?

So to recap, we have a play that covers 178 yards, includes two fumbles, leaves everyone confused including the broadcasters (the best part of the video is the band quitting in the middle of the fight song), takes a TD off one side of the scoreboard and hangs it on the other, and results in a lot of very tired Oregon defenders who just ran about as far as you can possibly run on a single play in a game of football.

We would do well, at this point, to remember the origins of the word touchdown, which come from rugby. The Lose is a big rugby fan, and to score the try in rugby, you not only have to cross the goal line but you have to touch the ball down on the ground. In American football, of course, it’s changed over the years and now the ball simply needs to break the plane of the goal line, but the point is that scoring points is all about what happens to the ball and not to the player. You have to complete the play. Since scoring a TD is the ultimate goal of the game of football, you would think that what actually constitutes a TD would be so ingrained in players that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to forget.

I’ve seen the exact same thing Clay did from players on several occasions over the years. People are always quick to assign dubious motives to players who make such a boneheaded mistake – guys being hot dogs who want to show off and the like – but it’s really just an honest mistake where guys are excited and get caught up in the moment. But I’ve always wanted to know why guys are in such a hurry to give up the ball. I mean, the ball is precious. You want the ball in your hands whenever possible. Damn, if I catch a 79-yard TD pass against Oregon, I’m never letting go of that ball. I’ll run with it over to the sidelines and make them pry it out of my hands. I’ll run with it all the way to Provo.

This play would be bad enough if it just resulted in a TD coming off the board, but to have the Ducks run it all the way back for a score of their own is disastrous. This sort of transition play is an absolute killer in the game of football if it goes against you, because it so quickly undoes everything positive you’ve set out to accomplish. (The single-worst play that can happen to your team in football is the blocked punt returned for a TD. I forget the exact stats, but if your team gives up a TD on a blocked punt in the NFL, you almost never win the game.) In this particular case, being down 14 pts. in a hostile environment could’ve spelled doom for the Ducks. Instead, the Ducks tie the score with what just might be a season-saving TD for them. They then do what good teams do when given a break, which is get their shit together.

Oregon goes on to win the game 51-27, although some of that margin was garbage time scoring when the Utah defense was out of gas. Quite simply, the Utes let Oregon off the hook. This right here constitutes the worst play of the season, and maybe any season. And I should just give up saying the phrase, “I thought I’d seen everything.” This year in baseball we had three Milwaukee Brewers runners score on a wild pitch and the Pittsburgh Pirates walk into a double play. I’m not even going to guess what I’ll see next on a football field. I’ll just sit back and watch and be confounded like everyone else.

Z-E-R-O Jets Jets Jets!

THE SPORTING landscape in New York generally consists of one team in a sport that actually knows what it's doing, and another that constantly craves attention, makes all sorts of flashy signings which are utterly nonsensical, and lives off its few great moments. It's always 1986 when you go to Citi Field for a Mets game. The Jets, meanwhile, have been living off Broadway Joe 1969 nostalgia for decades, and have scarcely put a competent product on the field since while their crosstown foes, the Giants, have won 4 Super Bowls and shown themselves to be one of the model franchises in the NFL.

Part of why the Jets love harkening back to Joe Namath's heyday is that they haven't had a QB since then who was any good. Their latest excuse for a starting QB, Geno Smith, put up a truly dreadful line during yesterday's 43:23 loss to the Buffalo Bills, as he completed 2 of 8 passes for 5 yards while throwing 3 interceptions. This earned him a QB Rating of 0.0 for the game. In essence, the Jets were playing without a QB yesterday, and would've been better off just direct snapping it to the fullback than attempting to throw a forward pass. On a day where Big Ben threw for 522 and threatened the all-time NFL passing record, Geno's zip-zip may be the most noteworthy of QB achievements.

With this performance, Smith joins this rather dubious list of the worst QB performances in NFL history. It's something of an amazing list, if you look at it. There are actually some Hall of Famers on that list, and some otherwise good players who had a really bad day at the office. And almost certainly some of those games were played in wretched weather where passing the football didn't work so well. What's really remarkable is the number of times a team actually won with a 0.0 QB (more often that you would think). Seriously, how bad does your team have to play to lose to a team whose QB was essentially for display purposes only? My favourite on that list is the Dec. 9, 1973 game where both starting QBs turned in a 0.0 – and clearly buoyed by their 32-10 win of the Falcons that day, the Cardinals started Gary Keithly under center the following week and he promptly put up another 0.0 rating. And I remember watching the Ryan Leaf game. Oy. That was basically the beginning of the end of his rather sad career, and very unbecoming of a Washington State QB. (As was proven again earlier this season, W.S.U. can throw throw the hell out of the football but can do nothing else right.)

Now, Geno Smith is a young player, and one would like to think there is some upside here. If you squint hard enough, you might be able to see it. But it's hard to tell when you're surrounded with as sorry a supporting cast as the Jets have assembled this season. The worst thing to do to a young QB is surround him with awful talent and somehow expect him to rise above the mess. (And the defense gave up 85- and 60-yard completions to the rather pedestrian Bills passing game, so it's not like they're any great shakes, either.) At 1-7, the Jets can thank only the woful Jaguars and the fighting Oakland Davises for keeping them out of the NFL's cellar. Blustery head coach Rex Ryan and his staff seem certain to get fired after this debacle, but probably the only thing worse than getting fired by the Jets is getting hired by the Jets, and they can use that high draft pick next spring to draft another franchise QB, or maybe just draft a potted plant instead, since a potted plant can put up a 0.0 and wouldn't be as big of a hit against the salary cap.

Grand Entry

She danced
this way, through all
my doors
this nomadic woman

who has danced away
from so much before
then changed her dance
and now she calls me

Home. She leaned into me
with all of her stories
and trusted gravity
trusted her sense

of balance, trusted mine
She leaned into me
with all of her hair
that would not be braided

She leaned into me
with all of her faith
that would not be traded
She leaned into me

and asked me to owl dance
and I could not refuse
She asked me to owl dance
and I remembered how

to dance that way, how
to move my body
with her body, dancing
about a specific fire

She danced
this way, inside all
my rooms
and changed their shape

this nomadic woman
who is the last curve
completing
the circle of my life

– Sherman Alexie

Now Available in Paperback

MY new novel, Juste un peu d’amour, is now available as a paperback. It is published by Orange Square Books and printed by createspace, the print-on-demand service from amazon.com. The cost is $11.95.

As I said in another corner of cyberspace, it is appropriate that the novel is 365 pages in length, because that number is representative of the year of my life it took to create that book. I think I am too tired to truly savour this moment, however. I may need some of this to help let this moment sink in. Seeing this through project all the way through to the end like this is probably my greatest accomplishment. I hope that you like it, and that you find it as fun and rewarding to read as it was for me to write.

There is No A in World Series

THE ALWAYS cheeky and clever marketing department for the Oakland Athletics came up with a particularly catchy ad slogan right around the turn of the millennium: “There is No A in …” You can catch the drift here pretty quickly: “There is No A in Quit,” “There is No A in Lose,” etc., etc. Like I say, it’s a pretty catchy hook. But in the hands of A’s haters, of course, this is the sort of hook which is perfect to revel in a brief soundbite of schadenfreude whenever the club comes up short:

There is No A in Slide.

(And, as an aside here, I fully expect Derek Jeter to be back and playing shortstop for the New York Yankees next season, if only because his insufferable grand farewell tour was the only thing relevant about the Yankees all season, and the Yankees aren’t one to miss a marketing opportunity as great as the Derek Jeter Reunion Tour.)

And I’ll start this entry by admitting, right from the get-go, that I pretty much can’t stand the Oakland A’s. You cannot grow up in the Pacific Northwest, following the Seattle Mariners, and like the A’s. You cannot spend a lifetime following the San Francisco Giants and have any respect for their cross-bay neighbours. You just can’t do it. I’ve been loathing the Oakland A’s for decades, and the only time I ever actually wanted them to win was in the 1988 World Series, as I was in college in Southern California at the time, which meant I was surrounded by the enemy:

Apparently there was no A in Save that night. The A’s really are useless.

But just because I may loathe a team, it doesn’t mean that I’m averse to giving them credit when credit is due. I despise Duke’s basketball team, yet if I could spend any amount of money to hire a basketball coach, I’d drive up to Coach K’s house and spill a dump truck full of money in his driveway. Likewise, I have a true sense of admiration for the way that Billy Beane has run the Oakland A’s. His use of advanced statistical analysis and modeling, and then the systematic approach to implementing such models throughout the entire organization, has helped lead to results which exceed the expectations of a club which is saddled with a low payroll. As such, he has revolutionized the way the game is managed on an administrative level. He’s also been ahead of the curve when it comes to recognizing trends and predicting how the game will change over time. This approach was born out of necessity, as the A’s have always found themselves struggling to compete with bigger, richer clubs in the world of Wild West capitalism that is Major League Baseball. Beane had to think differently. Franchises in other sports have then copied his approach – examine the success of clubs such as the San Antonio Spurs of the NBA and Olympique Lyon in European football and you can see a similarity in approach.

And for all of that, the Oakland Athletics have won exactly zero World Series titles during Billy Beane’s tenure as General Manager.

And there was no A in World Series this year. There is also no A in Choke, but there probably should be. And there is certainly an A in Atrocious, which is precisely what the Oakland A’s were in the last two months of the season. Their 9-8 loss in 12 innings to the Kansas City Royals in the AL Wild Card game this past week – in which the A’s blew a 4-run lead and then blew an 8-7 lead in extras – capped off one of the more stunning collapses in the history of Major League Baseball. The A’s had the best record in baseball as recently as late July, only to go into a full-on meltdown, watching the California Los Angeles Angels of Pacific Palisades Anaheim go racing past them for a division titles and barely squeaking out a Wild Card by a single game, on the last day of the season, over a Seattle Mariners team which trailed the A’s by as many as 11½ games in the AL West.

To understand just how awful the A’s were, consider that the Mariners made up all but a game of that deficit without even playing well – the M’s went 13-13 in September and had a 5-game losing streak in their last road trip of the year, and they still almost caught the A’s. Oakland were downright wretched, going  15-30 in their last 45 games. During this tailspin, the A’s previously potent offense, which had been leading the league in runs scored, completely disintegrated – which, as it happened, coincided with the boldest trade Billy Beane has ever made in Oakland, in which he swapped all-star left fielder Yoenis Céspedes to Boston for Red Sox ace Jon Lester. A move which was subject to a fair amount of scrutiny at the time, and which failed about as spectacularly as any deadline deal in history.

What’s been somewhat amusing to me, however, is to peruse a variety of online spaces in which baseball bloggers act as apologists and defend what was, in hindsight, a pretty stupid trade. This speaks more to the nature of the modern baseball pundit than it does to anything that takes place on the field. For the stat geek set, Billy Beane sprouts wings and shits marble. He is the hero of the sabermetric world. There is an annoying subset of baseball fans who seem to think that you play the game with a laptop instead of a bat and a glove. It is unthinkable that the great mastermind of saber-cyber baseball could possibly – gasp! – make a terrible trade. Which he did, and which likely contributed far more to the A’s failings than any other single factor. And it’s fair to point the finger squarely at the GM in this case, he being one who exudes far more influence over the day-to-day lineup of his club than any GM does or probably should, and he being one who as much as said, in Michael Lewis’ what-a-fawning-kissass-but-it’s-definitely-worth-reading book Moneyball, that the field manager was a step above irrelevant. This was his baby. It was his and his alone.

The greatest column I will never get to write in this blog of mine is the idea of being “critically acclaimed” in sports. (Grantland beat me to it.) There is no more critically acclaimed club going right now than the Oakland A’s. The A’s are so critically acclaimed, there was a Moneyball movie about the A’s which was nominated for Best Picture. (And, naturally, didn’t win.) The A’s are always the feel good hit of the summer, the quirky bunch of plucky outsiders who band together and rally against extreme odds to triumph, often putting together incomprehensible late season runs to pass bigger, better financed foes and capture AL West division titles. The script practically writes itself. And if I sound cynical, well, the A’s have done little to dispel that narrative. The franchise has been pretty quick to play it up so as to garner some hipster, indie cred while simultaneously crying poor mouth in their attempts to relocate to San Jose, a move routinely blocked by their big, bad neighbours across the Bay in San Francisco who claim the South Bay as part of their territory.

The A’s have now abandoned the San Jose plans, re-upping a short-term lease at the Oakland Coliseum while pursuing new avenues for securing a new ballpark, and one of the best ways to garner the needed public support for such projects – if not the best way – is to win a championship. Everyone wants to be a part of a winner, including a local politician. I witnessed this dynamic first-hand in 1995 in Seattle. The vote in King County on a financing plan failed. It happened to fail on a night when the Mariners rallied in the 9th inning against the Texas Rangers on a 2-run HR by the appropriately named Doug Strange, yet another step on a long strange trip from 13½ GB in mid-August to forcing a 1-game playoff, winning that playoff over the Angels, beating the Yankees in a best-of-5 that’s probably the greatest playoff series in history, and making the entire state of Washington fall in love with that ugly duckling of a franchise along the way. The momentum, at that point, was so great that the State Legislature stepped in and championed the cause of building a new ballpark in Seattle for the Mariners. (Thanks guys. Try building one next time that isn’t a hitters’ graveyard.) And lest you think there wasn’t at least some of that motivation beyond the A’s sudden need to make seismic shifts in their roster at the trade deadline this year, consider that the GM is also a part owner of the franchise.

Now, statheads in sports are quick to dismiss the nature of the short playoff series as being something akin to static. They use the term “small sample size” to describe it – particularly when their team loses, at which point it sounds suspiciously like sour grapes. The A’s have made the playoffs many times over in recent years, only to come up short. The company line in Oakland has always been something along the lines of that the club is set up for sustainable success which provides them the opportunity to possibly compete for championships – a notion which flies in the face of what they did in 2014, when the A’s went all-in at the end of July with their aspirations of winning a World Series, first making an understandable deal in trading one of their better minor league prospects to the Cubs for Jeff Samardzija, and then making the Céspedes for Lester deal after that – a deal which made less sense when it happened, and continues making less and less sense over time.

One of the excuses I’ve heard from Billy Beane apologists is that Céspedes really isn’t that good and that, as proof, he only amassed (fill in the number) WAR in Boston after the deal. Well, considering how badly the A’s offense cratered once the lynchpin in the lineup was removed, I would submit that his true value was considerably higher. WAR is a rather clumsy stat creation that reduces a baseball team to a collection of nine individuals to begin with. But baseball is, and has always been, a symbiotic game. Save for the leadoff batter in the top of the 1st, every single action in the game is based upon what has come before it and what could come after. This isn’t to dismiss the notion of WAR – it’s a useful tool. But it’s only one among many. Too many people seem to think that statistics are foretelling of what’s to come when, in fact, they are simply a record of what’s come before.

Quite honestly, there is no better example in the game than the A’s of the whole being more than the sum of the parts. Take a look at that roster, as constructed, and honestly tell me there is a guy that, were you starting a baseball team and had your pick, that you would pick for your team. The team, year-in and year-out, seems to be a collection of spare parts and also-rans which exceed expectations, and any A’s player who goes elsewhere seems to turn into a pumpkin. Name me a former Athletic who was a significant contributor in the game once they left Oakland. Tim Hudson? Two months of Barry Zito in 2012? Now, in fairness, a part of that has to do with the way the A’s are managed – they are the ultimate club when it comes to platoon splits and specialist relievers, thus doing what they can to hide their players’ weaknesses. Some key injuries to A’s hitters, particularly a spate of them at the catching position, exposed a few players’ liabilities down the stretch – most awfully those of Derek Norris as a defensive catcher, as the Royals ran wild on him and stole seven bases in the AL wild card game.

The trade for Samardzija certainly made some sense, and the price of a prospect wasn’t necessarily all that great while adding someone who was a #1 calibre starter to their pitching staff. Having done that, the Lester trade then made no sense whatsoever, because because they traded for something they no longer needed. The A’s were winning so many games, in this somewhat dead ball era of pitching-dominated baseball, because they had the best offense in the game. Why you would go about deadening your offense, at a time when offense is at a premium, is beyond me. And I’ve also read a few comments along the lines of “there were signs the offense was already starting to slip,” but that’s even more of a reason not to damage your offense. Taking Céspedes out of their lineup, with his assortment of raw talents, seemed to eliminate the only player in the lineup who was truly considered a threat by opponents. The A’s have guys with power, of course, but they’re one-dimensional guys who also tend to hit about .260 and strike out a lot of the time. Ultimately, those guys really don’t strike much fear in opposing pitchers. Sure, they’ll launch one every so often, but they’re far more likely to whiff (and adding another one-note guy in Adam Dunn was a rather curious, if not laughable, idea). And no, there is no way to quantity that sort of effect in a statistic. I don’t need a statistic. I watched it with my own eyes.

And this is not to diminish the value of Lester in any way – he is a legit #1 starter and he pitched like it in Oakland, winning a whole lot of games and probably singlehandedly saving the A’s from the ignoble end to a season in baseball history. It was something of a cruel irony that the hired gun and short-term rental, a #1 starter and playoff ace who will be a free agent in the offseason and command a price far above Oakland’s budget, floundered in the very game – the AL Wild Card – that he was brought in to win. I can certainly applaud the thinking of trying to win in the here and now. Flags do fly forever. Don’t think for a second that the folks in Oakland didn’t watch those downtown parades in San Francisco in 2010 and 2012. The A’s relevance as an organization diminishes drastically any time the club that shares their market wins another championship. I just think Billy Beane miscalculated this year. He considered the A’s biggest threat to be the Detroit Tigers, a logical assumption given the standings in July and given that Detroit has knocked them out the past two years, and he tried to line up a starting staff which could trump theirs – only to be trumped by the Tigers, anyway, when the Motor City Kitties made the David Price trade, acquiring another #1 calibre starter for a laughably small price. (And, as it turned out, the Tigers weren’t much of a threat, but we’ll get to them later in what’s shaping up to be MLB Choking Dog Week here at IN PLAY LOSE.) I think he outsmarted himself, in the end. There is an A in Smart, but the smartest guy in baseball acted far too much instead like the smartest guy in the room.

And The LOSE also wonders if this is a case of regression to the mean. Remember, this team was almost universally picked to finish dead last in the AL West in 2012. The team hadn’t been very good the two years prior, and then the payroll was gutted in what many considered a cynical ploy to make the team purposely terrible and try to force the MLB to permit that pipe dream idea of theirs to move to San Jose. For the first few months of that season, the team looked like a cellar dwellar, only to catch some of that magic mojo the A’s always seem to catch and ascend to a lofty height by the end of the year. Some would look at their results in the playoffs the last three years and say they underachieved. I look at the talent on that team and cannot conclude anything but that they overachieved, which is a compliment and testament to their ability to punch above their own weight. I’ve seen them win a lot of games over the last three years, and wondered how it is that they do it. Well, they stopped doing it, and given the way the AL West is shaping up for the near future, I’m not sure they’re going to continue to do it. Honestly, I think they’re more likely to finish last in 2015 than finish first. It would be a long, hard fall were that to happen, and the A’s would be right back where they were just a few years ago – a team playing in a cesspool of a park, the worst stadium in all of American sports, trying to do more with less and not being very good at it. Take the A’s methodology and add some money, and you have the Boston Red Sox winning three world titles in a decade. Take the A’s clubhouse ethos and sense of collective and add some money, and you have the Giants winning two titles in the past four years. They are definitely a model franchise, in the end – a model for others’ success. The subhed for Moneyball reads “The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” and it’s still a big money game, to be sure, but it’s also not unfair when you lose because you go about beating yourself.

With the 1st pick in the NFL dead pool ...

THE LOSE selects ...

Commitment to idiocy

I give you the 2014 Oakland Raiders. If there is a dumber play this season in the NFL than this one, I will be impressed. There are some other contenders, to be sure – the Rams look bad, the Cowboys look bad, and the Jaguars look like the Jaguars – but if the Raiders aren't drafting #1 come next April, I will be surprised.

Suffice to say, summer break is over for The Lose.

My Hero for the Week

Local boy did good

“It’s a very large asylum. I can walk down the streets of San Francisco, and here I am normal.”
– Robin Williams, 2007

THIS is a space reserved primarily for fun and games – which is a little strange, if you think about it, since this blog generally focuses on failing at games, which isn’t fun at all. Losing sucks. It’s the default setting in all competitions. If you don’t do anything, you lose.

The reasons for failure are numerous, of course, but often they come down to a lack of talent, a lack of execution, or a moment of downright, out-and-out stupidity which decides the outcome. And in the moment, of course, losing sucks ass, but in hindsight, it’s the source of what’s the funniest. The greatest stories in sports are told by those who survived the most miserable of seasons – be it the 1916 Philadelphia A’s, the 9-73 Philadelphia 76ers, or the 0-and-seemingly-forever Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whose coach, John McKay, when asked after a loss about his team’s execution, said “I’m in favour of it.” Casey Stengel never had to ask, “can’t anyone here play this game?” when his Yankees clubs were winning five consecutive World Series from 1949-53. His attempts at skippering the rudderless ship that was the 1962 Mets of 40-120 lore and infamy, however, has become far more memorable than any of his earlier managerial triumphs, achieving a folk hero status that success never could have brought. Hell, if you didn’t laugh when your team did dumb stuff like this, you would probably go insane.

Failure is funny, in the end. Failure shows weakness, vulnerability, and inability. It should therefore not be a surprise that the funniest persons we know are also often the most vulnerable and most susceptible. And no one has ever seemed more innately, inherently vulnerable to me than Robin Williams, who died at his San Francisco area home on Monday at the age of 63.

Robin Williams has always been a hero of mine, because Robin Williams taught me how to laugh. He taught everyone in my generation how to laugh, for that matter. He was an A-list star for three decades. Seeing that he was listed in the credits of a film immediately got your attention – even when he was a cold streak, which happens in moviemaking. Even in his bad films, there were still a few moments of genius. And even when he played a lesser role – or, in the case of Dead Again, an uncredited role – he threatened to steal the film with his mere presence. (And in the case of Dead Again, it wasn’t even a comedic role, but we will get Williams’ dramatic skills here in a moment.)

Robin Williams was a hero to all of us who strive to be funny at all times. Robin Williams was both a hero and the enemy in that arena – a hero because no one could do it better than he, and the enemy because no one could do it ever even hope to do better than he. No one was quicker with a quip than Robin Williams, a quip which would inevitably resonate on some sort of deeper, more cerebral level the more you thought about it. Not that you would have much time to think about it, since he was so quick that you’d be laughing about something entirely different in a matter of seconds. His sheer ability to generate one joke after another in quick succession was utterly amazing, and it all seemed to flow out of him almost naturally. Countless times as a guest on a late night talk show like Letterman or The Tonight Show, Robin Williams would upstage the other guests. It was never a selfish act, either – he simply couldn’t help himself. He seemingly had no off switch.

That he found the off switch himself is something that is deeply saddening, but not that surprising. Robin Williams took his own life on Monday. The sheriff’s reports on the scene are unsettling and disquieting, the details of which need not be repeated here. Robin Williams’ struggles with alcoholism, substance abuse, and mental illness have been well-documented over the course of 30 years in entertainment. One of his classic lines, culled from personal experience, was “cocaine is nature’s way of telling you that you have too much money.”

Robin Williams was a comedic talent like no one has known, nor is likely to ever know, but that talent sprung from a dark, dark place in his soul. He was the embodiment of the notion of a tormented artist. Many of his greatest roles in cinema, in fact, were characters in which his usual quick persona was coloured by that darkness. His villain in Insomnia was so creepy, and so effective, precisely because we knew him as a funny man from so many films before, and Robin Williams knew that and played upon that fact. He delivered every line in that film with the same aplomb as he would deliver a joke in a stand-up routine, only to repeatedly give the audience the back side of the hand.

As you have no doubt come to realize from reading this blog, will come to discover if you follow this shameless plug of a link, or this one, and buy one of those novels, I am someone who believes entirely, and wholeheartedly, in the value of humour. I find life and the world around me to be inherently funny. It is ridiculous and absurd and worthy of mockery. Laughter may seem  to be an impulsive and emotional behaviour, but humour is, in fact, extraordinarily rational. It is an attempt at making sense, albeit one with which you draw a different sort of conclusion.

Even though I use the terms ‘black comedy’ and ‘dark comedy’ fairly frequently, I’ve always believed those terms to be redundant. We’ve come to define the word ‘comedy’ to simply mean something that which is humourous, At the root, a large part of what’s funny is black, dark, or borderline cruel.

I remember a moment many thousands of years ago, while heading to a Shakespeare class at Washington State University. It was December, there was snow and ice on the ground, students were scrambling about, and in among all of us traipsing through one of the plazas, a woman slipped on the ice, lost her balance, fell and splayed her cup of coffee everywhere, which caused the 10 or so people surrounding her, including myself, to immediately stop and see to it that she was alright. Well, seeing to her being alright was the 2nd thing that everyone did, the 1st thing being to laugh at her. And once she proved to actually be alright, she laughed right along.

It wasn’t mean-spirited, it wasn’t cruel, it wasn’t some act of reveling in schadenfreude. It was an instinctive response, because it’s not normal for someone to have their feet in the air and their ass over their head while walking through a plaza. Was it ‘funny,’ per se? Well, yeah, to be honest, it was. Would it have been ‘funny’ had I been the person doing the falling? Well, in grander schemes and greater contexts and over the course of time, yes, it would’ve been. In the moment, of course, I would’ve been embarrassed as hell – but one of the most fundamental emotions in comedy is embarrassment. It was Eric Idle who theorized that the appeal of Monty Python stemmed from there being something extremely appealing about watching such incredibly intelligent people behaving like idiots. He was onto something there.

Laughter is life’s best medicine. Laughter is life’s greatest coping mechanism. It is often the best way to respond to the horror that the world can present. I’ve always admired the work of Roberto Benigni, simply because he has made one comedic film after another in his career about subjects which are so horrible as to be almost considered ‘off limits’ to comedy. He makes comedies about mass murderers, about murderous mafiosos. His magnum opus, Life is Beautiful, proved that humour could even trump the Holocaust. Countless books (Catch-22) and films and television programs (M*A*S*H, Hogan’s Heroes) have attempted to portray and explain the darkest periods of human history in terms of how far they can move the needle on the Laugh-o-Meter. The reason the cliché of I Pagliacci – the clown who paints a smile on his face and is so sad beneath it – exists in the first place is that those were the only sorts of people who were any good at it. Wherever there is darkness, cruelty, and evil in the world, comedy is never far away. Les extrêmes se touchent, as the French say. The extremes come together.

And for comedians, there is often no difference between the good and the evil at all. Humour is inherently a performance. It is artificial. In order to make you laugh, I usually have to do something outside what is my normal way of being. I am, thus, pretending to be someone I am not. And for those of us who strive to make others laugh, it becomes all that we do after awhile. This explains, to some extent, why so many of the funniest people we know turn out to be so ‘troubled,’ which is a word often used in the media to explain it. It is a constant state of release and relief, going about pretending to be someone you are not.

For those of us who struggle with mental illness, Robin Williams’ succumbing to his own is, inevitably, a reason for reflection. For those of you who do not know me all that well, I have struggled with mental illness my entire life. I was born with it, it is a part of me, it has played a predominant role in my existence and, often, proven to be debilitating and nearly fatal. I’ve been hospitalized for it, medicated for it, and very nearly succumbed to it. It’s taken an entire lifetime to learn to live with it, and even then, I know that there will never be a cure. My existence is a day-by-day, moment-by-moment act of case management.

I’m somewhat impressed, in fact, that Robin Williams even made it to the age of 63. Living with a memory such as this, in and of itself, seems like it eat away at even the healthiest of psyches. And a good number of depressives meet untimely, and early ends – perhaps it is suicide, perhaps an overdose, or perhaps through an accident where a lifetime spent struggling with the pains one feels makes self-care difficult. Depressives become reckless, they takes risks, they can come to lose that self-preservation instinct. Why save yourself, when it’s so readily apparent that your own body is attempting to kill you? It can seem miraculous, at times, that you’re even alive at all.

And see, it’s that sense which builds up within that is difficult, if not impossible, for a good number of people to comprehend. Asking the question, “why did Robin Williams kill himself now?” completely misses the point. When you struggle mightily with depression and other mental illness, the cumulative effects of a lifetime of oneself generating negative thoughts, emotions and feelings makes it such that any time could be the time. There is a threshold of misery there, a line you cross which renders each passing day to be nothing more than another day borrowed. So Robin Williams committed suicide on August 11, 2014. It could have happened on any day, most likely, in the past 40 years, if not longer. Once you cross that threshold, and touch the void on the other side, it’s no certainty that you’ll ever truly come back. There comes a point where you feel like you’re simply holding back what’s inevitable, and that day just may come when you feel as if you no longer have the strength to fight back.

And not all depressives wear black and listen to The Smiths. Some of the most loving, ebullient, beautiful people I know suffer from mental illnesses of one sort of another. Some learn to manage it, while others learn to hide it really well. You do a lot of hiding, a lot of pretending. The most difficult thing to do, after a while, is to stop doing that.

Robin Williams is my hero because he did something, in his work, which was far, far harder than I could ever do, nor most comedic actors could ever do, which was to allow that dark side of him to be more than just a well-spring for his work. His best work had that depth and texture to it, something which many comic actors fail to adjust to. It’s one thing to show up at the set or on the stage and put on your usual routine in your usual persona. It’s another thing entirely to truly be angry, be bitter, be petty and cruel and sometimes evil and create that experience for others. It’s somewhat paradoxical – in order to be a solid dramatic actor, the comedian often has to stop acting.

And I know I could never do that. It makes me a half-assed artisan, I suppose. I’ve spent 10 years – 10 fucking years – working on a novel. It is a very complex piece, and I’ve probably written about 500 pages’ worth of material during that time. Some of the best work I’ve ever done, in fact. And it was dark. Very dark. It dealt with some issues and subject matter that I’d never imaginged writing about. And it was good, too. It was really fucking good. It verged on being scary, that’s how good it was.

And then I threw it away. I threw it away because I realized that, while the story was entirely fictional and the characters conjured up from scratch, I couldn’t even bring myself to subject even a fictitious person to that. And so I junked it and wrote a comedy, instead. Why fill the world with any more misery and sadness? We already have enough of that. I already carry around enough of that sludge to begin with.

And, see, that’s the mindset of the comedic if you put a pen in their hands or a mic in front of them. They will attempt to make you laugh, rather than wish to directly spread the unhappiness and the suffering within them. That unhappiness is innate, and no amount of external stimuli will necessarily change that. You’re still walking around, carrying around all of this sludge about with you. That burden is still there. That pressure is still there. It doesn’t ever truly go away. And that’s not ‘normal.’ The ‘normal’ people that you know do not feel that way. They are often incapable of even comprehending what that feels like.

You feel, in short, like a loser.

I remember reading a profile of Robin Williams some years past – maybe a decade, maybe a longer – in which he and the writer go mountain biking in Marin County, and Robin Williams constantly races away from the reporter, leaving them far behind. It was as if it were a race, a competition that he had to win. Keep in mind that he is one of the most successful entertainers of his generation, maker of multimillions and winner of an Oscar, etc. Robin Williams should be considered an unqualified success. He shouldn’t have anything to prove at all. What difference would some recreational bike ride ultimately make?

But in the realm of a game, however, I’ve known quite a few depressives over the years who were absolutely vicious competitors. You focus entirely, you target that moment and put every ounce of your effort into it, augmented by a healthy amount of pent-up aggression. And it doesn’t matter if you’re ill-prepared or don’t know how to play or what have you. In that moment, you absolutely, positively have to win. Sports and games constitute another form of escape, a chance to disprove the idea that you are flawed. Winning disproves that notion, losing simply cements it.

But losing is also funny. And, as I say, losing provides a wealth of source material. Failure, and the fear of it, is good for business. It provides steady work. And no honours nor plaudits nor successes were ever going to permanently dam that flow.

The internal world Robin Williams personally inhabited was clearly not a funny one. That other world, the one he shares with the rest of us mere mortals, is now a whole lot less funny that is was just a few days ago. Maybe what needed to happen is that, instead of laughing with him once again, we all had a good cry together, instead. I once laughed until I cried while I was institutionalized. I laughed so hard that the tears began to flow, and then I felt bad for laughing so hard.

“Shouldn’t being crazy suck?” I said. “Being crazy isn’t supposed to feel so good.”

Robin Williams is my hero of the week for constantly reminding me, in the past three decades, that being crazy doesn’t have to suck. If nothing else, you have a gift in that you have a unique perception and insight, a way of seeing things which others cannot when, shaped correctly, can create art and literature and that which is beautiful and timeless. If nothing else, you can bring some joy and lightness to everyone around you. If you cannot find that joy within, spread it elsewhere. There is a value in that act which you cannot put a price tag on. A depressive life is often one filled with drugs of every sort, but if nothing else, maybe you can make a few people laugh – laughter being the most precious drug of all, a drug that always seems to be in the shortest of supplies.