That Didn’t Take Long

The ex-journo in me is jealous for never getting to run a headline like this

IT TOOK all of three days for The Worst Call Ever in soccer to be replaced by The Even Worse Call Ever in soccer, but when I say “the worst call ever,” I should probably qualify that remark.

There is a difference between calls and non-calls. Four particularly awful non-calls which taint the history of soccer are The Hand of God, The Hand of Gaul, The U.S. getting jobbed in 2002, and the most vicious play in the history of the World Cup. In all four of those cases, the outcomes should have been bloody obvious to anyone who was actually paying attention. (In order: 1. No goal for Argentina; 2. No goal, and likely no World Cup, for France; 3. American penalty and German sent off; 4. Toni Schumacher sent off at the least, if not locked up for felonious assault, and I am genuinely surprised no French player just went and decked him.) Now, in all of those cases, the officials somehow didn’t see the plays. They were out of position, the angle was bad, what have you. Honest mistakes, all of them, although inexcusable in every case. Soccer, in recent years, has acknowledged that the referee has it tough and looked to give the referee on the field some help, by giving the linesmen more authority and also having a fourth official on the sidelines who can point out infractions to the headman on the pitch, but as we saw the other night in the CONCACAF Gold Cup quarterfinal, when the fourth official incorrectly called a foul in the penalty area and the referee foolishly went along with it, awarding an undeserved penalty to Mexico and essentially ending the match, the process still isn’t exactly foolproof.

The four Worst Calls Ever that I highlighted above are all errors of omission – guys missing stuff. That’s annoying and somewhat baffling when it occurs – there were only about 110,000 people in the building who saw Maradona handle the ball, so how could the guys in black somehow miss it? – but understandable. In general, it’s probably best to err on the side of calling nothing when you aren’t sure, and letting the game sort itself out on the pitch. As a referee, you look like something of a blind doofus when this happens, but as we’ve discovered this week with CONCACAF, it’s better to be thought of as a blind doofus than some of the terms being through around to describe first Walter López, the Guatemalan referee from Sunday’s game with Costa Rica, and now Mark Geiger, the American official at the center of controversy following last night’s semifinal at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

Two more infamous officiating decisions happened to involve the same countries – the Germans and the English – and the exact same situation – a English shot striking the lower side of the crossbar and landing/not landing over the goal line – some 44 years apart. In the 1966 World Cup Final, the goal was given in England’s 4:2 victory, despite many German protests. In 2010, the goal was not given, even though it had obviously crossed the line. England went on to lose and this decision is what has led to goal line technology being instituted by FIFA. Small consolation for the English, but as a Seahawks fan who saw his team lose out of a playoff spot thanks to a phantom TD by Vinny Testaverde, and saw the NFL adopt instant replay almost immediately thereafter as a result, I can say that the loss wasn’t entirely in vain. In both cases, the positioning of the officials at the moment of the strike made viewing the flight of the ball impossible. (To add to the intrigue of 1966, the Soviet linesman who ruled it a goal, when asked about it on his deathbed, reportedly responded by saying, “Stalingrad.”) So, again, these are understandable, if not entirely excusable.

The error on Sunday night in East Rutherford, however, was an error of commission, and those are often far, far worse. It was a case of a referee taking a wild guess, stepping in and awarding a penalty in extra time of a scoreless game and directly affecting the outcome. It was an awful call, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. But it pales in comparison to the nonsense which happened last night in Atlanta in the match between Mexico and Panama, a match which showed everything that is bad about the beautiful game, and showed everything that is especially bad about the game in this little confederation of the world called CONCACAF where I reside.

Geiger, by the way, is considered the best American referee. To his credit, his work during the 2014 World Cup was highly regarded – he became the first American official in history to work a match during the knockout stages of the competition. But saying he’s the best American referee is not necessarily a compliment. Geiger works MLS games, and last night the rest of the world got to see, firsthand, what everyone involved in MLS, and watching MLS, has been saying for years – the officiating sucks.

And I hate trashing referees, for pete sake. They work hard and they do the best that they can in whatever sport they are officiating. As a tournament director in scrabble, I’m called upon to officiate when there are rules disputes, and I’ve gotten it wrong in the past and made the wrong decision. It happens. The rules are complex and, at times, confusing. You mess up sometimes. You get it wrong. It happens. So I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of the officials. Furthermore, I generally believe that no matter how many errors referees and officials commit, the players commit far more of them. Whining about officials gets tiresome, as it’s often little more than a cheap cop-out on the part of players for a bad performance.

But when an official is as bad as Geiger was on Wednesday, and when his actions directly and grossly impact the game, it’s impossible to ignore.

He put his stamp on the game 25’ in when he tossed Panama’s Luis Tejada under rather iffy circumstances. Tejada was going for a ball on a header, his back to Mexico’s Francisco Rodriguez, and his elbow/forearm clipped Rodriguez on the side of the face. Rodriguez, of course, acted like he’d been shot, and Geiger pulled out the red card. This was one of those letter of the law/spirit of the law sorts of things. Sure, you need to be in control of your body out there, and getting the elbow up is definitely something they’re trying to crack down upon, but the contact on the play wasn’t any more than you see on quite a few air-to-air collisions which don’t even result in fouls being called. It is a dangerous play, although it is more clumsy than reckless, and there isn’t much intent to it. Yellow? Perhaps. Red? Well, like I say, this was iffy.

 
But what makes that worse was the fact that, earlier in the game, Mexico’s Carlos Vela had full-on slugged Panama’s Anibal Godoy with an elbow on a set piece, which also could have resulted in a sending off, and yet for this received only a yellow. Now, frankly, neither play deserved a red card, but what’s worse, in this situation, is that Geiger has, with those two calls, essentially established the boundaries for this game. Which is what you do when you’re an official – you have to let it be known, up front, what the parameters are going to be for a game, what’s going to be tolerated and what isn’t, etc. The official is there to make calls, but first and foremost, the official is there to keep the game moving. And what two calls by Geiger did, in terms of setting the ground rules, was make it clear in the Panamanians’ minds that the same rules didn’t apply to both sides.

Panama plays with a chip on its shoulder. They piss people off, they’re tough and scrappy and annoy a lot of opponents. Like most of their Central American brethren, they resent the favored-nation status afforded to the two big guns in the North American part of the confederation. In short, they’re not the sort of team you want to have thinking they’re being jobbed.

Even reduced to 10 men, they outplayed El Tri, deserved to be up 1-0 after a nice goal (and were subjected to some awful behavior from Mexican fans, being pelted with beer and garbage as they celebrated). They were mere minutes away from winning the game, from advancing to the final, and hopefully helping to rid themselves of the memory of one of the most heartbreaking defeats imaginable two years ago, when Mark Geiger decided to pretty much lose his mind, and a near-riot ensues:

OK, first off, the play in question that starts this mess: Mexican player trips a Panamanian defender, he loses his balance and falls on the ball. There has to be some intent here. Without intent, you can’t call a penalty on that play. I’m not sure how any guy who is falling on his ass has any intent other than breaking his fall. If anything, there should be a foul on Mexico for the trip. The Mexican players appeal for a hand ball, because that’s what players do, but even that’s half-hearted. That isn’t a penalty.

So that’s bad enough, now think about the situation: it’s 89’ into the game, Mexico is losing. They just got bailed out, three days earlier, by a phantom call against Costa Rica which was the source of ire and scorn across the footballing world, and called into question the entire ethics and credibility of the tournament in the process, as at-the-death penalties are wont to do. And you’ve also got a team that’s already feeling slighted, having had to play the game with 10 men, and who’ve also been subjected to the opposition’s fans throwing shit at them, which the security in the stadium has done nothing about, and then you call that penalty? Are you serious? And you’re going to make that call on top of what happened the other night: the bogus penalty awarded to the big team with the big fan base which helps prop up this tournament, a bogus penalty that was regarded as a disgrace and the act of scoundrels and crooks and thieves, and in repeating that process, you’re going to make yourself look like a scoundrel and a crook and a thief in the process and damage your credibility and damage the entire credibility of the tournament even more? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Kind of a lot to think about in an instant, I know. But if Geiger hadn’t been completely clueless in his approach to managing the game, it likely wouldn’t have come to that in the first place.

We like to think that games are played in a vacuum. We like to think that, somehow, outside stimuli and situations don’t dictate the actions on the court or the field once they begin. Guess what? They do. If you’re officiating this game, you have to be damn sure that, if you’re calling that penalty, at that time in the game, under those conditions, that’s it’s absolutely, positively the right call. Quite honestly, anything short of a Panamanian player catching the ball with both hands or making a form tackle straight out of the NFL shouldn’t be a penalty in that situation.

Now, a common complaint you hear in other sports is that, with the game on the line, the officials swallow their whistles. You see it in the NBA and the NHL all the time, in fact – what was a foul early in the game isn’t with 2:00 left on the clock. This can drive you crazy sometimes (particularly watching the NHL, where it seems at times that only a two-handed Paul Bunyan impersonation with the stick is going to draw a whistle). Studies have been done in baseball which show how umpires behind the plate tend to widen and shrink the strike zone depending on situations. For example, the strike zone gets really wide in a 10-0 blowout, because common sense dictates to move the game along and get it over with. There is nothing in the rule book about this, and no umpire is taught this. It’s simply a normal reaction by human beings whose main job, as I said before, is to keep the game moving. We’ve all come to expect this. Players and fans adjust. They play within the parameters and the boundaries established by the officials.

So does that mean Mark Geiger should swallow his whistle in the 89th minute of a CONCACAF semifinal? Not necessarily. But to make a call like that shows him to be so out of touch with the situation as to verge on being obtuse. Someone who is that out of touch has no ability to control a game.

And players figure that stuff out and act accordingly. One of the ugliests moment of last summer’s World Cup – the injury to Neymar in the Brazil-Colombia match – was the result of about 80 minutes of tension built-up, in part, because the Brazilians had correctly deduced that the referee wouldn’t dare throw one of them out of the game and went about systematically chopping down James Rodriguez every time he touched the ball. It was a cynical approach, but it was working – Brazil won the match, after all – and it was all fun and games until the frustrations started to boil over, the game got far too physical and Brazil’s best player got hurt. The referee in that particular game had lost control the match, in some ways, before it had even begun – he was somewhat understandably intimidated, of course, since you’re in Brazil and you’ve got 200,000,000 Brazilians who will potentially be angry at you.

And in some ways, Geiger is cursed from the start of this particular game. For that, he can thank Walter López, the Guatemalan referee who made a mess the other night. If López makes the call that he did in favor of Costa Rica, he looks dumb. If he makes it in favor of Mexico, he looks corrupt, given all of the financial implications of Mexico making the final. So not only does López look corrupt, but he paints widely with that brush and, after that, if Geiger makes any sort of a last-gasp penalty call, it will inevitably be called into question. In Mexico’s favor? He’s corrupt. In Panama’s favor? It’s retribution for the other night. You can’t win. So don’t play! Just swallow the damn whistle. Any sort of guff you get for not blowing the whistle there was going to be minimal, at best.

And instead, now you have this:

 
Charming.

Geiger makes a terrible call and all hell breaks loose, and pretty much every bad cliché and everything ugly about the beautiful game results. You’ve got Panamanian players losing their minds and shoving the referee, which is not OK. You’ve got fans throwing more crap on the field, which is not OK either and we’ve put up with too much of it already, which makes me wonder why CONCACAF so desperately wants those kind of people going to the games. You’ve got an altercation on the pitch as the benches empty. You’ve got the players chasing the referee off the pitch at the end as he’s surrounded by security. Everyone looks bad, in the end. It’s all a farcical spectacle of a game in a scandal-ridden part of the world where no one seems to know how to run the game properly.

When the match finally resumed, Mexico’s captain Andrés Guardado converted the penalty to tie the score at 1-1, leading to one of the stranger goal calls ever on Univision – “GOOOOOOOL Mark Geiger” – and also creating one of the strangest scorelines that I’ve ever seen in football: ‘90+10 Guardado (pen)’ And in a surprising bit of candor, Guardado admitted after the match that he thought, for a moment, about deliberately missing that penalty in the 90-10th minute:

“It was painful. Yes, for a minute, yes [I considered kicking it wide] but in the end, we are professionals and you think about the times you have been on the other side and the hearts of the other team’s players aren’t moved. This is football, sometimes you are given and sometimes it is taken away. Whether it should have been a penalty or not, that is not our fault.”

Normally charasmatic Mexican coach Miguel Herrera echoed that sentiment in his subdued post-game comments:

We didn’t play at all well. The first penalty wasn’t a penalty, but it had nothing to do with me … I am worried about how the team played. We didn't create anything … No era penal … Not the team’s fault. Sometimes you have to take advantage of circumstances in your favor. That is football … FIFA referee told me that penalty against the Netherlands wasn’t a penalty. What am I going to do? … We didn’t deserve to win, we didn’t play well …

Oh yes, the second penalty, the one that in stoppage time, the one that gave Mexico a 2:1 win. That was sort of soft and there may have been some offsides on the play, but it was probably the correct call – but at that point, the game had been so compromised that it didn’t really matter whether it was the right call or not.

And anyone who suggests Guardado should’ve missed the first penalty on purpose is kidding themselves – he’s a pro and you have to play the game to win – but, at the same time, if he had chosen to do so, no one would’ve thought the worse of him for it. Mexico won the game, but didn’t feel particularly good about winning this way.

And El Tri are in an impossible position come Sunday’s final vs. the Jamaicans. Given all that’s gone on in this tournament, a win on Sunday will be tainted. Not even their own press is giving them much support after Wednesday’s debacle. But given all that’s gone on in the past week, there is sure to be more interest and better TV ratings than you’d have thought a Mexico-Jamaica final would garner, and a possible Mexico-U.S. playoff in October for the Confed Cup spot promises to be some mighty interesting viewing. What is it they say about all P.R. being good P.R.?

As for the Panamanians, their coach has said he is thinking about getting out of the sport entirely, and there’ve been rumblings that the team doesn’t want to go to Philadelphia for the 3rd place game against the U.S. They’ll show, I suspect, but I doubt their hearts will be in it.

And as for the U.S., well, the American contributions to the game of soccer have looked awfully bad here of late (not the least of which being that lame effort against Jamaica in Wednesday’s other semifinal). We like to look down our noses at all of these pesky little countries in CONCACAF and their corrupt little schemers, but the fact is that there are American soccer officials sitting in American jails implicated as key figures in all of CONCACAF’s scandals, and it was American officials – not just Geiger, but the fourth official from the Mexico-Costa Rica game the other night – who showed themselves to be woefully incompetent this past week, and a tournament on American soil has gotten completely out of hand. I doubt anyone was on the take here, and really do chalk this up to sheer incompetence, but it doesn’t matter. Perception is everything, and the perception right now is that soccer in this part of the world is a joke. We’re as much a part of this mess as all of those supposed banana republics and tropical tax havens we sneer at. The U.S. Justice Department is looking into the ways the game is being administered and developed across the globe, but obviously the ways it’s being administered and developed here at home leave a lot to be desired.

The Treachery of Penalties

Ceci n’est pas une pénalité

 
FOOTBALL is life. Fans around the world live and die alongside the clubs and the teams that they support. (Sadly, this has far been too often literally the case.) If you want to better understand the world that we live in, and you want to do so through the games that we play, there really is no other sport than soccer that really matters. Baseball and cricket? Sure, those are in the same vague realm of discussion. But soccer is king. It is endlessly fascinating, and also endlessly infuriating.

Soccer has always been a game of the masses, the poor and the working class. Indeed, when you hear complaints nowadays about the wildly popular, multi-billion entity that the English Premiere League has become, the majority of the complaints you hear center on the idea that the EPL has lost its connection to the fans. As the prestige of the league has grown since the EPL was formed in the early 1990s, the players have become even higher-priced, facilities been upgraded, the English game has been beamed on satellite TV around the globe, the pounds and the dollars and the euros flowed in, and the potential for more pounds and dollars and euros been monetized. In the process, some would argue, the game has gone about pricing out the average Joes who helped make the game what it was in the first place. These were originally clubs, first and foremost, they were representations of unique groups of people. (Never forget that Manchester United began as a sports club for railroad workers.)

A good number of these complaints which are the loudest from longstanding Chelsea faithful – they’re certainly glad to see their Chelsea Blues winning EPL crowns and Champions Leagues, of course, after the London club dabbled in mediocrity for most of its existence, but the games at Stamford Bridge are no longer catered to them, instead targeting the middle and upper classes, the ‘fair weather’ fans if you will you go to Stamford Bridge less to see than to be seen – the sorts of people who don’t, in fact, live and die with the fates and fortunes of the club. Chelsea’s fortunes changed dramatically, of course, when Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich decided to poor a large amount of his fortune into the club after purchasing it in 2003. Abramovich has spent untold millions of his own over the past decade for players – the club itself didn’t post an operating profit until a modest, £1.4 million showing in 2012 – and the result is one of the best and most popular clubs on earth. But that definition of ‘popular’ is a curious one, of course – the Chelsea F.C. brand maybe worth up to £200 million worldwide, but the general narrative thread pervasive in England is that they and another recent darling, Manchester City, owe their success entirely to deep-pocketed, Johnny-come-lately ownership, whereas the real clubs in England – Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur – have built more than a century of tradition and success through their hard work and good old fashioned English ingenuity. A narrative which was probably rubbish to begin with, and is even more so now that Man U and Liverpool have American owners while Arsenal’s fate continues to be in the hands of a Frenchman, but we are all susceptible to our own mythology. But the argument put forth frequently and repeatedly is about how, in the process of making billions and transforming middling mid-table clubs like Chelsea and Man City into global brands, they know longer identify with the supporters who have backed them for generations, and there is some merit to that. Identity is crucial in understanding football, understanding those who fervently follow it ... and understanding those who have put up with the kind of bullshit that we saw on the pitch on Sunday night in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Part of why the supposed homogenization of the EPL Football is troubling to many is that soccer is, and always has been, a game of the working class. Games should, in theory, be diversions from real life, they should be escapes and pastimes. But that’s not true and it’s never been true. It wasn’t true a decade ago, a century ago, it wasn’t true 2,000 years ago when 200,000 Romans used to go to the hippodrome and root on their favourite team in the chariot races, an event which usually involved drinking too much, gambling too much, rioting after their team lost, rioting after their team won, keeping detailed statistics about which riders were good and which horses were good, etc., etc. (Hell, for all we know, there was a Roman Natus Silvicus doing his DMMMVIII analysis.) Not much has changed, really. And as we’ve said before about soccer, the game’s origins, when traced back to its ancestors in Latin America, have always shown it to be a game with massive popular appeal – but also a game bankrolled by enormous sums of money and power. That unstated power struggle and tension between the classes is innate to the game, and always has been.

Soccer is not an escape from life at all. In fact, it’s more of a microcosm of life than any other sport. It’s part of why it’s endlessly fascinating. Soccer is not fair, and the results are often not just – much like life, in fact. Soccer is a game where getting a draw – simply breaking even and getting by – is an acceptable result. Both of these notions I just put forth run counter to the fundamental optimistic ethos of America, which is why, I suspect, the game hasn’t fully caught on here (at least not yet, anyway, but that’s a further discussion we can have at a later time). And when Guatemalan referee Walter López decided to award a nonsensical, nonexistent penalty to Mexico in the 123rd minute of its scoreless CONCACAF Gold Cup quarterfinal with Costa Rica, it tapped into another value that working class football fans can relate to both on the field and of: being screwed over by The Man.

No official in any sport has more power to influence the outcome of a match than the referee does in soccer, simply through his ability to award a penalty – the success rate of which is upwards of 80% – in a game where scoring is otherwise so damn hard. There is but one of them on the pitch and he is judge and jury, his word the rule of law – and to the rank-and-file, worker bees making up the soccer-following faithful, many of whom live in nations where judge-and-jury types declare themselves presidents for life, that authority figure is deemed to necessarily be corrupt. He is a crook! He is a cheat! The other team has him in their pocket, which is why he gifted them that penalty. He won that game for them, the blasted ref! He is as crooked and dishonest as our opponents!

Now, The Lose is fundamentally opposed to conspiracy theories. I don’t believe there are grand master plans being orchestrated behind the scenes to deny certain teams – in this case, the team from Costa Rica – advancement in certain tournaments – in this case, the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the regional championship. I don’t really want to go down that road, and so I’m going to be objective here and look at this particular play once more.

Upon further review, that call sucks. That’s not a penalty. That’s a terrible call. Given the situation – a scoreless game in extra time – and given the consequences – giving Mexico the opportunity to win on what is essentially the last kick of the match – it just might be the worst call I’ve ever seen. Why Walter López and his team of apparently blind as bats sideline officials felt such a sudden urge to exert such profound influence over this match (especially when they didn’t do it 10 minutes earlier, but we’ll get to that) is something that conspiracy theorists can only dream about.

I mean, come on here. That’s not a penalty. Look at that play again. The ball is a foot above Mexican striker Oribe Peralta’s head as he goes flying and flailing through the air. He cannot reach that ball. Whatever contact came between he and Costa Rica’s Roger Miller looks incidental at best, and the ball is as good as past him when he starts with his “I can fly” routine. You can’t call a foul on that play. You just can’t, unless there is some little known statute in the rules by which Miller impeded Peralta’s ability to spontaneously grow 12” taller. It’s not impeding progress to the ball when the ball can’t be played. That’s just dumb and stupid. Peralta only half-heartedly tries to influence the call, and watch the video again. He and his El Tri teammates are surprised and bemused by the spot kick being given.

Saying this is a bad call is an affront to other bad calls. If you’re going to be awarding a penalty in the 123rd minute of a game, and as much as handing the game to one team in the process, you’d better be 100% certain you got it right. López had no idea what was going on here. It was the 4th official who ‘spotted’ the infraction, but he’s not in any better position to see this play unfurl, either, and let’s not pass this off on some sideline guy. It’s the referee on the field’s decision, and he blew it. He flat blew the call. There is no other way to say it.

And referees do that sometimes. They make mistakes. Unfortunately, moments decide matches, since the moments when the ball does actually go in the net are so few and far between. I maintain that a pivotal moment in the transformation of the U.S. as a nation into USA FC came in South Africa in 2010 – not in the moment where they won, but in the moment where they should’ve won but got screwed over by a clueless referee, because a lot of sports fans in this country got justifiably outraged by it – although defacing the guy’s Wikipedia page was probably not cool. When have Americans ever been up in arms about soccer? And that was a classic officiating mistake, one which budding American soccer fans didn’t understand but all of them should’ve, since it involved a concept – the make-up call – which runs rampant in the American sport of basketball. And if you don’t remember the play I’m talking about off-hand, it occurred late in a 2:2 game against Slovenia and the referee, Koman Coulibaly from Mali, made sort of an iffy call which gave the Americans a free kick. Now, this sort of scenario plays out a lot in soccer. A referee makes an iffy call, realizes it’s an iffy call and then, on the ensuing free kick, immediately blows his whistle and points the other way, indicating that some sort of a foul has been committed. You don’t have to explain the foul, you just point the other way. And you can get away this is in soccer, because nothing ever happens, anyway. It’s not like the free kick you iffily awarded resulted in a goal or anything, because no one ever scores in soccer.

Except, of course, that the U.S. did score.

But the whistle had blown and the goal was disallowed. There wasn’t anything even remotely close to a foul committed by an American player. In fact, there were about three Slovenians grabbing ahold of American players. (Not that it did much good. That play looks like a jail break.) There was no foul. It was a phantom call. A make-up call. Coulibaly got outed, and you could tell that he knew it. How could you tell? Because after the game was over, Coulibaly was understandably subjected to a verbal barrage from American players, and rather than flee the scene, or just start flashing red cards about, Coulibaly just stood there and took it.

Welcome to the footballing world, America. You’ve now been jobbed at the game’s highest level. Congratulations, you’ve arrived.

And speaking of being screwed, one of the first narratives which arose from the El Tri faithful was to resurrect that no era penal bullshit from last summer, when they were knocked out of the World Cup in a 2:1 loss to the Dutch thanks to a somewhat marginal penalty being called late in the game – never mind, of course, that the Mexicans blew the lead, and never mind the fact that the official missed an even more egregious foul in the first half which should’ve given the Oranje a spot kick. And another narrative which arose was that Mexico was the better team in the game and had created the better chances, so they deserved to win. Well, if you’re supposedly the better team and supposedly create the better chances, but the score is still nil-nil, you probably don’t deserve to win since your finishing is so poor. I don’t really care who ‘deserved’ to win the game, and I don’t really care what happened in Brazil in 2014 or South Africa in 2010 or what have you. On the night of the 19th of July in the New Jersey swamplands in a game between Mexico and Costa Rica, that call by Walter López decided the game and THAT WAS A TERRIBLE CALL.

What’s all the more galling from the Costa Rican point of view is that the play involved Peralta, who shouldn’t have even been on the field. At 113’ Peralta committed this nasty, scissored, prison rules sort of challenge and should’ve seen red:

That sort of a play breaks people’s legs. It also gets you punched out by the opposition. That was a cheap and dirty play which fortunately resulted in no injuries, but Peralta only saw yellow from Walter López. And in attempting to look at this play from the most honorable and noble point of view, what I can deduce is that López only showed yellow because, in sending Mexico down to 10 men at this point, he would be unduly wielding his influence over the game. But then, of course, he turns around and awards a dubious penalty three minutes into stoppage time, giving Mexico a near certain win on the game’s last kick (I say near-certain for a reason), so that notion I suggested just went out the window. Hey, I’m trying here. I’m trying to give the referee at least a little benefit of the doubt.

And the Ticos handled this with a surprising amount of class and restraint. They said their piece to the referee and they were done with it. They opted to take the high road when, clearly, it would’ve been easy for them to fly into a collective rage. Reaction was a little stronger within the country of Costa Rica, meanwhile, with everything up to the current and former presidents weighing in on the injustice. (To be fair here, a good number of members of the Mexican media were also rather skeptical.) But there was no comment on the matter from the head of the Costa Rican FA, Eduardo Li, primarily because he’s in jail in Switzerland, awaiting extradition to the U.S. as part of the Justice Department’s wide spread probe of CONCACAF’s corruption and misdoings, some of the allegations of which center on this very tournament.

And this is where Walter López has really dug a deep hole for himself. He’s also dug a deep hole for the Mexicans, who can’t win – they did win the game, after all, yet the legitimacy of their win is called into question. It also checkers the entire tournament, because not only does this call look like an act of complete incompetence, but it also looks like the work of corruption in a region of the footballing world where corruption has clearly run amok.

For those of you who have no idea who Peter Prendergast is, he’s the Jamaican referee who made this awful call which cost the Belgians dearly against Brazil in 2002. CONCACAF has a decidedly unfavourable reputation in the footballing world, in spite of the fact that confederation, as a whole, has had far more international success than its African and Asian counterparts. CONCACAF are perceived as jokers and fools. It’s viewed as a confederation having three big countries – only two of which matter and neither of which they particulary like – a bunch of Central American countries no one can name, and a merry band of corrupt Caribbean would-be kingfish looking to use the game to line their pockets. Uncle Sepp and his FIFA cronies were quick to say the Justice Dept. probe wasn’t their problem at all, it was obviously a CONCACAF problem and that the confederation was obviously full of sleaze and graft and shysters. And sadly, they weren’t totally wrong in saying that. And yet it’s also grossly unfair – ridiculing a country’s FA, or a wider confederation, as being incompetent and corrupt also often implies that somehow they want it that way. But so long as you have Jack Warner lining his pockets with contributions to nonexistent football foundations, and Geoffrey Webb using his 10 Rolexes as collateral to post bond and get out of American jail, the notion of corruption and cronyism in North American football is hard to deny.

The CONCACAF Gold Cup is already something of a strange tournament, given that it always happens in the same country – the United States. There simply aren’t the resources to hold it in most CONCACAF countries. As cool as it would be to hold a joint Carribbean Gold Cup in Jamaica and T&T et. al, it’s not really viable. This year, they deviated from the norm in having the Canadians ‘jointly’ hosting – they played two games in Toronto, which begs the question as to why the Canadian home football grounds were available for this tourney but somehow not for the Women’s World Cup. You could hold it in Mexico, of course, but Mexico prefers the tourney being held in the U.S., since the short distance is enough to insulate them from the media and their zealous domestic fan base, while they can bask in the adoration of the enormous throngs of Mexican fans who live in this country and attend any El Tri match in America en masse. Which is cool by me. I live in a primarily Hispanic neighbourhood where Mexican expats and immigrants are my neighbours and I respect them tremendously, knowing that they are a part of this nation and have been a part of this nation for generations. They are vocal and enthusiastic supporters of El Tri and I have no problem with them showing their support for their side here in their home-away-from-home. I’ve always had a problem with the nonsense the USSF used to do pre-1990, when they would do things like schedule critical World Cup qualifiers against Mexico in the L.A. Coliseum and 60,000 Mexican fans would show up and it would be virtually an away game for the U.S., the USSF caring far more about the gate receipts than they did about the fortunes of its national team. Quite a few former American players have talked about how they felt they were betrayed by their own federation, and rightfully so. And in the case of the CONCACAF Gold Cup, it ends up being this weird sort of hybrid tourney where the Mexicans are essentially second hosts (and, this year, the third hosts), but Mexico’s fans always turn out in droves, often outnumbering American fans in the final attendance numbers for the event.

And to CONCACAF officials, those attendance numbers are all that really matter. Only 37,000 turned out in Baltimore for the Yanks’ laughable 6:0 quarterfinal win over Cuba on Saturday. For the Mexico-Costa Rica game in Jersey on Sunday, the attendance was probably double. Mexico’s presence in the semifinals is likely to guarantee a sellout for the semifinals at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, whereas a Costa Rica-Panama matchup was likely to be sparsely attended. The great complaint within CONCACAF, of course, has always been that decisions are made solely to try to maximize the number of Mexican fans in the seats. The Mexicans counter this by saying that their numbers of fans are important to the confederation, but yet all of those guys from small Caribbean countries vote in a bloc so as to negate Mexico’s greater influence over the game. In any case, the presence of the two big guys on the block in the semis, with the chance alive for them to meet in the final next weekend in Philadelphia, is in CONCACAF’s best interests all-around.

Cue the conspiracy theories.

If you’re a referee, nothing makes you look more like a lackey or a stooge than awarding dubious, late-game penalties. As I said before, soccer is a game loved by the poor and huddled masses and yet controlled by the rich and the powerful, and The Man on the field is perceived to be doing the rich and the powerful’s business. Scores of Italian soccer fans have decried and documented in dossiers for decades the number of times Juventus has been awarded curious 90th minute penalties on their way to Serie A championships – Juventus being owned by the richest industrialists in Italy, of course, who’ve been thought to be bribing referees much like they’ve been thought to be bribing corrupt Christian Democrat politicians all these years. This interesting Grantland article about the disgraced Dynamo brand – Dynamo having always a name attached to clubs run by the secret police in Eastern Europe – comes complete with an appropriate 90th minute penalty enabling Dynamo Berlin to clinch an East German title. (It’s strange that Houston chose Dynamo as a nickname, but having worked for a company owned by the owner of Houston Dynamo, I can say with great authority that yes, he really is that out of touch.) Those sorts of curious coincidences have been plaguing the game for decades. Far too many critical matches, in far too many places, have wound up being decided by referees picking strangely convenient times to influence the outcomes. It happened far too frequently for people not to suspect foul play, and a fair number of those times, those suspicions have been shown to have been with merit. Just earlier this year, in fact, the African Cup of Nations in Equatorial Guinea descended into farce, and the spark for that tire fire was a last gasp penalty awarded to the hosts for a flop in the box against Tunisia, with the Tunisians incensed and feeling cheated as a result and chasing the referee off the field. Let the chaos and the confusion begin.

And don’t kid yourself – Mexico reaching the CONCACAF Gold Cup Final is in the confederation’s best interests, whereas the Ticos were a great story in Brazil in 2014 and have a hell of a good team but are still a small country that no one has ever heard of. Had Walter López decided to lose his mind and make that terrible at 123’ against Mexico, giving the Ticos a penalty kick, it would’ve been looked at as being gross incompetence. But since it happened the way it did – given what was at stake, given what it means in terms of attendance and TV ratings, and given the backdrop of rampant corruption throughout the confederation’s administration – and Walter López’s call looks far, far worse. It looks crooked and corrupt in a region of the world where flying right and playing it straight on the football pitch is probably a good idea right now.

I’m someone who is always going to assume that incompetence until there is conclusive proof otherwise, but even this one had me wondering. My hope is that you can ultimately chalk this up simply to stupidity and no other outside influences. I don’t have any earthly idea what Walter López did or didn’t see – and contrary to the Sports Illustrated joke tweet from before, I suspect we won’t be seeing him officiating at this level again. In general, if you screw up that badly as an official, and you bring the game into disrepute in the process, you aren’t ever officiating at that level again. That’s not to say soccer officials are expected to be perfect, of course, but mess up so badly as to overly influence a game to its detriment, and that’s likely the last time you’re going to be seen on that stage. (People in Seattle, Portland, and all of American soccer will rejoice if that’s the case after this 11-on-7 nonsense from the U.S. Open Cup, some of the worst officiating ever seen on an American soccer pitch which I would give more time to if the competition wasn’t so small-time and amateurish by nature.)

In the end, this was a shitty way for Costa Rica to lose a game, maybe the shittiest way to lose imaginable – one which reminds that, for all the good you do on the football pitch, it’s easy to be undone by one particular individual who is entrusted with ensuring fair play and yet who may or may not have an agenda, may or may not have a fat wallet, and who may or may not have a clue. The soccer official has a tough and thankless job, but a good rule of thumb in the business, across all sports, is that if you’re officiating a game and we come to know your name as a result, you really kind of fucked that one up.

Money Can't Buy Me Love

“I don't know the precise number and don't want to get into it, but a significant number of teams are continuing to lose money and they continue to lose money because their expenses exceed their revenue even with revenue sharing, and fairly robust revenue sharing, when some teams are receiving over $20 million checks from their partners.”

THESE were the comments from commissioner Adam Silver this past week about the economic realities of the NBA – or, at least, the way that he wants to spin those economic realities. Remember, Silver is fundamentally a mouthpiece for the owners, and now that the NBA is on the verge of unprecedented revenue growth, after one of it’s most successful seasons ever, the owners immediately start to play coy and try to cry poor mouth. It’s an act which seems somewhat ridiculous, given that the NBA made $4.8 billion in revenues in its recently concluded fiscal year, and a new TV deal is about to kick in which offers up $24 billion in broadcast rights over nine years.

Sadly, Silver taking this tact isn’t really all that surprising, given that labor relations between the league and the players union have generally been terrible – there have been three work stoppages in 20 years for a reason. Given that revenues are going to soar, it also means the players’ share of the pot are going to soar as well. The NBA’s salary cap already jumped 10% this offseason, to $70 million, and as per the terms of the CBA, where the players get half the basketball-related income, the salary cap is only going to get bigger and bigger from hereon.

Which it should. As I’ve said before, when it comes to professional sports, I am purely a Marxist. I think the players should get everything, frankly, because no one goes to an NBA arena to watch an owner. Not even Mark Cuban. (Sorry, Mark.) And I agree with the general premise put forth in this 538 piece that the élite in the NBA are, in fact, underpaid relative to their importance – not just in terms of their on-court value, but in terms of their overall importance to the continued growth and popularity of the league as a whole. The NBA is a star-driven enterprise, and has been for decades. Even in this era, when we’ve seen the emergence of the Spurs and the Warriors as champions through an emphasis on sophisticated tactics and great team play, those principles are still centered on transcendent talents like Tim Duncan and Steph Curry making it possible. First and foremost, professional athletes are entertainers. They are artisans and thespians performing on society’s favorite stage. And as has pretty much always been true in the entertainment business, for every popular entertainer who makes a large sum of money for their performance, there is someone who isn’t performing at all who stands to make even more through riding their coattails.

And in the NBA, that would be the owners, all of whom are now sitting on a gold mine. Forbes recently pegged the average value of an NBA franchise at $1.1 billion. You can primarily blame Los Angeles for this sudden and ridiculous escalation, just as you can blame Los Angeles for pretty much every shift in the business of sport since the Dodgers left Brooklyn, as Steve Ballmer ponying up $2 billion to buy the historically- and comically-awful Clippers, thus taking Donald Sterling off the NBA’s hands, has led to a domino effect sending values of other franchises skyrocketing. Ballmer, of course, also played a large part in the $500 million bidding war over the Sacramento Kings, another event jacking up the NBA’s collective value: if the league is only as good as its worst franchise (which the Kings most certainly are, but more on those idiots in a moment), and its worst franchise can pull half a bil when it crosses the block, then the league’s not really doing too badly, now is it?

Notice how I am throwing the word ‘billion’ around a lot in this post. Well, you can bet the players union notices how often you use the words ‘NBA’ and ‘billion’ together in a sentence. The league and its players formed something of a unique partnership in the early 1980s, when the league truly was verging on collapse. Implicit in the agreement with David Stern to cap salaries and tie them to a percentage of a basketball revenues was the idea that, as the revenues for the league increased, the salaries would inherently increase as well. This was smart business at the time, to be sure, but time and again the crux of hostile labor negotiations has been that owners want to somehow welch on that promise. In the last labor dispute, a lockout which cost 16 games of the regular season, the NBA extracted a concession from the union whereby the players’ share of the revenues dropped from around 57% to the 49-51% range it is now. This was, in fact, a huge concession on the players’ part, one which ultimately stemmed from the fact that it didn’t matter what percentage of the revenues you were getting when you weren’t getting any at all, which is what was happening with no games go on.

It sucks that the union capulated at the time, but you can see why they did, and it’s hard not to be incredulous. The players were simply doing their jobs, showing up and playing and putting on a good show and doing their part to make the league successful, but the league was struggling, in part because of the economic downturn and, in part, because of bad business decisions made far over the players’ heads. The owners were essentially asking to be saved from themselves and asking the players to do it for them – and ‘asking’ is putting it kindly.

So now the NBA stands on the verge of spectacular growth and prosperity, and you already have the owners and their mouthpiece Adam Silver talking about franchises losing money and the league having to write big cheques to cover expenses. This is all preemptive posturing for a CBA which isn’t going to expire for another few years. The players, of course, aren’t buying it.

“All of the data we have access to indicates that our business is thriving and will continue to do so in the near future. We agreed not to debate some of the finer points of negotiation in public, and aren’t going to change that approach now in response to some remarks from the Commissioner on Tuesday. We are, however, going to take him up on his offer to share the audited financials with the union. We also want to ensure that everyone understands the facts of this business: Under the CBA, we do not have a gross compensation system. The players’ 50% share is calculated net of a substantial amount of expenses and deductions. New and renovated arenas around the league have proven to be revenue drivers, profit centers, and franchise valuation boosters. That has been the case over the past few years in Orlando, Brooklyn, and New York, to name a few. In some instances, owners receive arena revenues that are not included in BRI. Many teams also receive generous arena subsidies, loans and other incentives from state and local governments as part of their arena deals. Virtually every business metric demonstrates that our business is healthy. Gate receipts, merchandise sales and TV ratings are all at an all-time high. Franchise values have risen exponentially in recent years, and the NBA has enjoyed high single digit revenue growth since 2010-11.” – Michelle Roberts, NBPA chief

And they shouldn’t buy it, because while half of the basketball related revenues are going to the players, it’s pretty apparent that there is a good amount of tangential revenue which is not going to the players. There is a fundamental dishonesty to all of this posturing going on by the league. Silver, meanwhile, pretty much directly contradicted himself in further statements about the state of the business of the game:

“The goal, of course, is to have a robust 30-team league, not just a league where teams … in large markets or owners who are willing to lose lots of money can have top-notch payrolls. So I think it’s very positive. The league is very healthy. I think owners recognize that are our owners are extremely competitive.”

So, it’s a healthy league with ‘signficant’ numbers of teams losing money? Hmm, those two notions don’t seem to jibe.

Now, I will freely admit that I am an NBA skeptic, and have done so countless times before. Being a former Sonics season-ticket holder will make you one. Emotions aside, however, the NBA made what were, in my opinion, two horrible long-term business decisions in a) permitting the Sonics to be stolen – yes, stolen – from Seattle and moved to Oklahoma City by Clay Bennett and his merry band of robber barons; and b) going above and beyond to prevent the acquisition and relocation of the Sacramento Kings to Seattle and going so far as to allow them to be sold to a guy who so far has proven to be an incompetent nutjob. The main reason for David Stern’s distaste for Seattle, of course, is that the little Napoleon and some of his enterprise’s dubious business practices got called out onto the carpet by a good number of political officials in the city of Seattle and the state of Washington – most notably, the need to extort municipalities for sweet arena deals financed with taxpayer money. Without going into great detail the economics and ethics of spending taxpayer money in such a fashion – I personally don’t mind it, but can understand why others do – posturing for what amounts to public subsidies is a hard-sell during times of greater fiscal austerity, and it’s even more of a hard-sell when it comes from an enterprise that it literally making billions and billions of dollars.

But that’s precisely what’s going on in the state of Wisconsin, where amid all of his efforts to gut the state budget, the would-be presidential candidate governor hasn’t seen fit to prevent the Milwaukee Bucks from further bleeding the public coffers. These should be the salad days for the NBA, yet this continual asking for public handouts would suggest that some of the franchises are as droopy as wilted lettuce.

The Bucks say they need a new deal, they need a new building, they need more revenue sources so that they can compete – and by ‘compete,’ of course, they mean competing in terms of profit margins and franchise values. And there is, in fact, some merit to this idea. It’s not complete nonsense. As I’ve explained previously, a great misunderstanding about salary caps is that a cap number is applied across the board – every team will have up to $70 million to spend next year – but the amount of revenue is vastly different from team to team. The Lakers’ newest broadcast deal, for example, is worth 10 times that of the Miami Heat’s. The operating costs of doing business in Milwaukee are therefore necessarily going to take up a larger percentage of your revenues than they are in a place like L.A. or New York.

But see, that fact alone is why emptying the Seattle market was, in the long term, a stupid move. Seattle is the 13th-largest television market in the country, and also one of the richest cities in the nation. By moving that franchise to Oklahoma City, and then keeping another franchise in Sacramento, you’re essentially stubbing your toes, since sheer demographics tell you that a healthy franchise in either of those two cities can never ultimately generate the sorts of revenues that one could in Seattle. Instead, Seattle is now the perfect talking point whenever an owner of an NBA franchise wants to posture for a new building. The Bucks’ brass made a point of saying that if they didn’t get a new deal, they’d look to move to Seattle in a couple of years – which was news to everyone in Seattle, of course, since no one there took the idea of the Bucks relocating there with more than a grain of salt. The fact is that arena deals grow stale, and building go out of date, remarkably quickly. They are little more than smash-and-grab jobs, quick infusions of cash for enterprises which often then go about squandering that cash rather quickly.

And the NBA, as an entity, stands to make untold billions over the next decade – and also stands to squander enormous amounts of it. The salary cap is, first and foremost, a method at cost-control – an effort on the part of the league to prevent itself from letting its own bad business practices run amok. Even within that salary cap, which is essentially a glorified series of accounting tricks, there are all sorts of provisions which essentially give franchises relief when they make bad decisions: the amnesty clause lets you essentially pay players to go away and free up the same sum to sign someone else; the stretch provision lets you pay a player to go away over twice the length of their contract plus one year (i.e., instead of paying them $10 million over two years, paying them $4 million over five). The league has also invented revenue-sharing measures for teams in supposedly smaller markets (which freeloaders have OKC have made a point of taking advantage of) and a luxury tax system which is actually quite steep, whereby violating the salary cap leads to enormous financial penalties – but teams that want to win, and have the financial resources to do so, really don’t care much about that. The Warriors payroll for next season was verging on $100 million before they traded David Lee. Given that they just won the NBA championship, and are working on a new arena in San Francisco which, when if it eventually comes to pass, will make the franchise worth even more than the billion-plus it already is, going that far over the cap makes sense for the Dubs. But that drives the costs up for everyone else – in their need to win a championship and legitimize themselves before Durant and Westbrook leave and gut the franchise forever, even cheap and stingy OKC is biting the bullet next season and going over the salary cap. And consider a truly badly-run franchise like the Nets, who were saddled with what amounted to $180 million in wage bills and luxury taxes in 2014 while putting out on the floor a woefully old and mismatched club that could scarcely make the playoffs. All the money in the world didn’t make the Nets any better. If anything, it made them worse.

I haven’t seen an entity more infatuated with its own accounting than the NBA since I stopped working for nonprofits. There isn’t a single discussion about a player that doesn’t ultimately devolve into a discussion about that player’s contract. But the league has gone about doing this to itself over the past 30 years. The fact is that there is plenty of money to be had in the NBA, but money can’t buy you love and it also can’t buy you a clue. A great deal of the stories and the articles about the NBA over the past year make reference to how the business of the league is going to change once the new TV money kicks in. Why anyone thinks it’s going to actually change is beyond me. Just having more money at your disposal affords a franchise that doesn’t know what it’s doing even more opportunities to misuse it. Bad franchises are going to continue to be bad and, if anything, the amount of dollars being squandered will make those mistakes seem even larger than they actually are – which, in a P.R.-driven entity like the NBA, is actually the worst sort of mistake to make.

No amount of money from a tricked-out new arena or a new broadcast deal is suddenly going to make the Sacramento Kings less stupid. The Kings recently made one of the worst trades imaginable, shifting three players they didn’t want to the 76ers, who also got a first round pick and the right to swap draft positions with the Kings twice. The Kings did this so as to free up some cap space to pursue some free agents – most of whom, of course, had no interest in playing for the Kings. Remember the principles of Edmonton Disease here – if dollars are essentially equal (and a salary cap makes that the case) then why would a player willingly go to a franchise that sucks? (Monta Ellis actually took less money to go to Indiana.) After all that, the Kings signed a couple of bit players and then signed Rajon Rondo to a 1-year deal, in the hopes he will magically resurrect his career, but if Rondo does, in fact, do that, then a year from now, he will almost certainly try to go elsewhere, given that the Kings are likely to be terrible for the foreseeable future – a fact which the 76ers are banking on in obtaining the rights to swap draft positions. Of course, cashing in on that would also necessitate the 76ers improving. They’ve been a joke of a team on the court and given precisely zero fucks about it, made a million deals and have positioned themselves to have as many as four 1st-round picks in next year’s draft, but given Sam Hinkie’s track record with the draft in Philly – willingly taking on two guys who were hurt and couldn’t play, one of which, Joel Embiid, still isn’t playing, and also drafting Michael Carter-Williams whom they promptly traded a season after they picked him – I’m not sure the 76ers having four 1st-round picks is necessarily a good thing.They’ve shown an aptitude for being bad, but it’s easy to be bad. Actually being good is another question entirely.

What the Kings and the 76ers have in common is that they’ve sunken to the bottom of the heap in the NBA through being incompetent. Whereas Edmonton Disease speaks to the nature that some markets are more attractive than others, it also speaks to the idea that, as attractive as the idea is to want to ply your wares in New York or Los Angeles, being on a terrible team in a great place to live still constituted less-than-ideal working conditions. No legit free agent wants any part of the Lakers until Kobe is gone, nor the Knicks until the Zen master gets hold of how to actually run a professional basketball franchise in this day and age. You’ve seen free agents of some quality signing this offseason with places like Milwaukee and San Antonio, and also with the Lakers’ crosstown rivals the Clippers, because players know they’re going to get paid regardless and they want to win. No one wants to be second-fiddle to Kobe for a year with a Lakers club that looks to be a 55-60 loss team.

It shouldn’t be lost on people that two of the Warriors’ highest-paid players this past season – David Lee and Andre Iguodala – were rendered bench players and didn’t bitch about it. The weren’t happy about it, of course, but the Warriors went nuts and they went along for the ride – and, in the case of NBA Finals MVP Iguodala, he stepped up when needed. They wanted to win. Along with being quick to cast the players as superstar entertainers, the league has never done anything to disparage the perception that players are greedy and selfish and care only themselves. In fact, it’s often the opposite that’s true. In this labor-management dynamic, it really isn’t the labor that are the greedy ones.

Silver’s posturing in the press this past week should serve to remind us that, even with money raining down from the sky and growing on trees, it’s still business as usual in the NBA – which is too bad, really, since great commercial success over the years has afforded cover to an entity whose business often makes no sense and whose missteps are almost entirely self-created along the way. This is a league where teams routinely and willingly makes trades for guys they don’t want, knowing it will make them worse; where three head coaches got fired from playoff teams after the season, yet somehow Byron Scott and Derek Fischer still have a gig; and where franchises willingly tank entire seasons, and sometimes two seasons, in preparation for some sort of possible talent bonanza that rarely, if ever, comes to fruition. It’s all nuts, and it’s a testament to the quality on the court that this mad circus carries on.

Whereas you can argue about whether the EPL or La Liga or Bundesliga reigns supreme in the soccer world, there is no debate in basketball. The NBA has the best players and the best clubs, and the massive revenues to back that up. It would do well not to go about killing the golden goose. You’d like to think that labor troubles can be averted in the future. It’s an awfully big pie where talking about here, and as much as the two sides want to squabble about the pieces they get, they should at least all agree that they’re all going to eat the damn pie and go from there.

Mmm, pie … I haven’t had lunch yet … now I’m hungry …

So Much Bad Baseball, So Little Time ...

My Hero for the Week

GENERALLY, I don’t write that much about baseball on a day-to-day basis here on the blog just because there is so much losing going on that it’s hard to keep track. But now that we’re at the halfway point of the baseball season (and yes, I know that’s it not technically the halfway point, but it’s close enough so don’t get smart), I thought we would go back, revisit my preseason thoughts and further comment and pontificate:

• As pointed out by Friend of the Lose Jeff Sullivan (a long-suffering Mariners fan whose work I’m a big fan of), the team WAR of Chicago White Sox position players in July is 0.0 – and that’s the best month they’ve had all season. The Lose was quite skeptical of the offseason spending sprees by both the White Sox and the San Diego Padres, both of whom chased after every bright and shiny object available and wound up with veritable Islands of Misfit Toys for ballclubs. The White Sox offense has been so bad that, again using the WAR metric, their 5th-most valuable hitter so far is Jeff Samardzija – who’s a starting pitcher. In San Diego, meanwhile, almost everyone they acquired in the offseason – Matt Kemp, Will Middlebrooks, Wil Myers, James Shields – hasn’t been very good and now the Padres will look to be sellers at the trading deadline, but probably the only guy the Padres can actually move – Justin Upton – is the only guy on the whole team they might actually want to keep. Kemp, in particular, has been horrible, and even though the Dodgers paid $30 million to San Diego to have them take Kemp off their hands, it’s looking like money well-spent.

• Nothing cures your ailing club quite like the Phillies coming to town. They were in San Francisco this past weekend and got swept, outscored 27-7, and at no point in any of the three games did I think the Phillies had even the remotest chance of winning, not even when they were up three runs in the 6th on Saturday. And this is against a Giants team who’ve had so many injuries this year that guys keep showing on the roster that I’ve never heard of. The Phillies had so many balls bounce off fielder’s gloves today that I wondered why were even bothering to bring them with them on the field. The Phillies are now on a Houston Astros sort of pace for losses and desperately need upgrades at pretty much every position, but with Ruben Amaro still vastly overvaluing his own players and holding out for dumb trades like this, don’t hold your breath.

How have I not used this gif all season?

• Speaking of the Astros, they’ve been one of the more bizarro teams I’ve ever seen in the first half of the season (and are probably personified best by the weird season of Luis Valbuena). The Astros have been wildly entertaining with their approach to the game, which is basically to swing from the heels and run like hell. The ’Stros, along with the Twins and the Rays, qualify as pleasant surprises in the first half of the season but I’m not really sold on any of those teams, and would attribute a fair amount of their success to the fact that, other than Real Ciudad Kansas, the American League kind of sucks. A good number of supposedly decent teams in the AL more or less took the first half of the season off, yet are still only a good week’s worth of games out of the playoff picture, which should make for an interesting last few months, since so few teams seem to be playing with any sort of consistency.

... aaand the Rockies are terrible, in part because they do stuff like this

• From the “lies, damn lies, and statistics” department: by advanced sabermetrics of baseball, both the Toronto Blue Jays and the Oakland Athletics should be murdering their opponents. Instead, the Jays are only a .500 club and the A’s have been mired in last place for most of the season. (And notice in that FanGraphs link where a lot of the mystery wins are going. The White Sox, with the worst lineup in baseball, have exceeded expectations by 7 wins in the first half of the season, making them by far the luckiest team in the majors.) I make fun of stat nerds on this blog quite a bit, even though I’m more like them than not. I find most of the “conventional wisdom” of sports to be tired, clichéd, and often not backed up by any empirical evidence. (Dear NFL, please stop punting so much.) But there is not one catch-all statistic you can cook up which will always work to explain why one team wins and another loses. Games are multifaceted and complex, composed of hundreds of pitches and hundreds of plays. The numbers are recordings of what happened. They are not necessarily predictors of what will happen next. (If the .106 hitting Kurt Nieuwenhuis can go yard thrice in a game, all bets are off.)
Now, some would make the argument that, with impressive numbers in the run differential and the Pythagenpat, the fact that the A’s and the Jays aren’t winning more may just come down to some bad luck. Baseball is a game where we split hairs, of course. The difference between a great team and a lousy one is more win a week over the course of a season. I would suggest instead that it’s less a case of bad luck and more a case of bad timing.

The anti-analytics crowd had a field day with the NHL this year when the stat-geek darlings, the L.A. Kings, missed the playoffs. The Kings had the best puck possession statistics in the NHL in 2015 in terms of time, and they took 733 shots more than their opponents, and they wound making tee times come April while two of the worst puck possession teams, the Vancouver Canucks and Calgary Flames, were playing one-another in the first round of the playoffs. The big bugaboo for the Kings in the 2014-15 season was extra time – the Kings were 1-7 in O.T. and 2-8 in shootouts. Even with all of the loser points they racked up (which kept them in the playoff race longer than a sub-.500 team deserved to be), giving away 15 possible points after three periods is probably what did them in – especially when you consider that the Calgary Flames, who nicked the Kings for the final playoff spot and who did quite a lot of things not particularly well on the ice (they were -847 in shots), did do one thing spectacularly well, which was handle “six attacker” situations at the end of games. The Flames were -1 for the season with a 6th attacker of their own (10 goals scored, 11 empty net goals allowed), and +11 for the season when opponents had 6th attackers (12 empty net goals scored, 1 allowed). Those 10 goals the Flames scored with 6 attackers translates to 10 games which went to OT that otherwise wouldn’t have, meaning 10 more points in the standings. Likewise, the 12 empty net goals scored likely sealed victories, meaning even more extra points in the standings. Those are all last-minute plays which cement results. And while being +10 in those situations is a little out of whack statistically, the fact is that, whereas the Flames were making plays at the end of the game to maximize points, the Kings were making plays to give points away. And in a sport where anywhere from 20-25% of the games are going into OT these days, if you suck in OT, you’re dead. Mistakes happen all the time in sports, but in a 3-2 league like the NHL, you can’t afford to make the last mistake.
Furthermore, so long as the NHL is going to keep settling games with cheap skills contests, it would behoove you to go out and find guys who are actually good in those situations.
 The Kings shot 5-for-35 in shootouts this past season, which is hideous. All of your ability carrying the puck into the zone in 5-a-side situations means nothing at that point. If it’s a skill required to be successful, then by god, go out and find someone who knows what the hell to do.
So let’s bring this idea back to baseball. The Jays and the A’s can both score runs in bunches. So why aren’t they winning games? Well, the obvious place to look would be on the mound, a perpetual source of migraines and malaise north of the border. And as is per usual, the Jays can’t pitch, so that makes things dicier than it should.
The A’s are even more curious, in that they have some good starters, if not excellent ones. But their bullpen has been terrible, and was particularly terrible at the start of the season when they dug themselves a hole they’re not likely to get out of. (More on that in a minute.) Baseball in the modern era is a game of specialists. Starters go six, you bring in set-up men and maybe LOOGYs or other specialists in the 7th and 8th, then you turn it over to your closer. Every team plays the game this way nowadays in the MLB. In the modern game, if your bullpen sucks, not much else really matters. You’re going to lose. Simple as that. You’re going to give away runs too late in the game to mount comebacks, you’re going to squander leads and turn wins into losses, and also go a long way towards killing the soul of your teammates in the process. (Look at any truly long stretch of bad baseball, and you’ll find a few blown saves mixed in there.) When it’s not going well – which happens a lot in baseball – the last thing you need to have happen is to have your bullpen constantly blowing games.
 As is the case in hockey, in baseball, you simply cannot afford to constantly make the last mistake.
To make matters worse, the A’s have a terrifyingly bad defense that gives away too many runs and too many extra bases. The end result is that a lot of good work done by the offense and starting staff is being undone by noodle arms in the bullpen and the Dr. Strangegloves in the field. In that light, I wouldn’t say the A’s are unlucky at all. In a dead ball, pitching-and-defense era, they are actually poorly equipped to compete.
And to be honest, I think they’ve been better than I expected, given that Billy Beane decided to hold a Smoke Damaged Furniture Sale in the offseason and unloaded the core of talent this team had a year ago. I’ve been ripping Billy Beane perpetually for the dumb Yoénis Céspedes trade at the deadline a year ago, after which the A’s went into a complete tailspin and went from being the best team in baseball to almost missing the playoffs. Apparently, he hasn’t learned from his mistakes. The returns for his off-season spree have been less than stellar, although not entirely awful. Marcus Semien certainly can hit, but he’s been terrible defensively at the shortstop position. Meanwhile, the swapping of 3Bs with the Jays – Josh Donaldson for Brett Lawrie – was one of those classically bad baseball trades where you deal a known commodity for someone who has the potential to be really good but you’re not quite sure he will be. Sure enough, Donaldson is playing at a near-MVP level yet again in Toronto, while Lawrie’s not produced at anywhere near that level. What made it even stupider was that Donaldson had four more years before he became a free agent, while Lawrie only has three. Giving up a superstar with such a team-controlled and friendly contract situation, when you’re a club without a lot of benjamins in the bank, strikes me as even more foolish. That trade struck me as one that was far too ego-driven, since apparently Donaldson and Beane had clashed. I’m sure Donaldson had something like this to say before he left:

And whereas you might suggest that the A’s have been somewhat unlucky this year, given that they seem to hit the ball extremely well and have not so much to show for it, and you might suspect that they are prime candidates for getting their shit together and figuring it out and turning their season around, this team as it’s constructed may not get that opportunity. The A’s are 8½ games behind the California Los Angeles Angels of Whittier Anaheim in the AL West with the trading deadline at the end of July. Billy Beane certainly has a few trade chips at his disposal, and there’s no doubt contending clubs will inquire about Kazmir and Zobrist, for starters, but given his history of trading everyone – he traded five All-Stars from the A’s roster a season ago – you’d assume that everyone’s available. We might not get to find out if the A’s weird first half is really an anomaly or not.

• And while we’re still on the subject of the A’s here, a note about “by-the-book” thinking in baseball. At what point here does someone actually figure out that the “by the book” way of building a pitching staff is no longer working and start doing something else? I mean, if you’re bullpen sucks, what good does it do to keep going to that well?
Think about a team like the Cincinnati Reds, for example. The Reds are 39-47 and 15½ games out of first place, so they’re obviously going nowhere. The Reds also have Aroldis Chapman on their roster, who throws 104 mph and is one of the most terrifying closers in all of baseball. Chapman has 18 saves this season in 19 opportunities. But the key there is that he’s only had 19 opportunities to close in 86 games, because the Reds are terrible and lose a lot. But he’s your best pitcher, for godsake. What good is he if you don’t put him in the game? Hell, why wait until the 9th inning? Put him on the mound in the 6th with two on in a 1-run game. 

The Lose wonders if, at some point, managers and pitching coaches start tinkering a little and trying to redevelop how they use bullpens. Certainly, the logic behind the development of bullpens into what they are now makes some sense. It’s well-documented that starters lose their effectiveness hugely which each pass they make through the lineup, so why not hit the opposition with a fresh live arm their third or fourth go-round? But if that ‘conventional wisdom’ isn’t working – and if you’re the Reds with Chapman or the Phillies with Papelbon, it clearly isn’t working because those guys aren’t getting into games at all – then why not try something else? More specifically, why send out bad relievers earlier in the game to render your closers moot?
One of the things you see in the playoffs from time to time are these strange sorts of hybrid relievers being developed on the fly who turn out to be just devastatingly effective. Many times, they are starters who do not fit into the short rotations you have in a playoff series. In 2012, Tim Lincecum was that way for the Giants – he would come into the game at any point from between the 4th and 7th innings and he just mowed people down. But also, it can simply be a case where you just want to get your best guy on the mound in any critical situation that arises. Alexei Ogando was the über reliever for the Rangers teams which made the World Series twice. He’d come in during the 7th or 6th or even the 5th inning and just wipe out the opposition. But I’ve yet to see anyone try to create a role such as this for an entire regular season. Certainly, there are concerns about overuse of such a guy during a season, but it seems to me that roles have become so clearly defined in baseball now that, if someone isn’t cutting it on a particular day, teams don’t really feel as if they have a Plan B. I’m not sure what a revisionist idea of a bullpen would exactly look like, but you’d think someone like the Oakland Moneyballs would consider it, given that they supposedly think differently over there on the other side of the Bay.

• So the case may be that, as pertaining to the A’s and the Jays, the statistics are lying. The same cannot be said in Seattle, where the statistics don’t lie at all. They are as bad as the numbers would indicate. There have been plenty of disappointments so far this season – the BoSox, Tribe, and the Fish have all grossly underachieved – but no team has been quite as truly, depressingly, agonizingly, miserably, terribly disheartening as the Mariners, who’ve taken the lofty expectations from pre-season and flushed them down the drain.

The Mariners won 87 games last season on the strength of their starting pitching and the best bullpen in baseball. They got something of a bad break in their rotation with injuries, rendering them with only about 1½ functioning starters at any given time. As for the bullpen, well, bullpens are notoriously fickle. Indeed, one of the more remarkable things about the Giants’ 3-in-5 World Series success has been that the core of their bullpen has been unchanged and continued to produce. In Seattle, the bullpen completely cratered early in the year and half the guys who made it up a season ago are no longer with the club.

But it’s the offense which is truly disgusting in Seattle. The Mariners rank near the bottom in runs scored, average, OBP, and RISP – and this comes even with the addition of Nelson Cruz, who’s been terrific. They hit quite a few home runs, but almost exclusively solo shots, since they never get anyone on base. They’ve already had 10 games where they struck out more than 13 times, which is a club record and we’re only halfway through the season.

Offense has been going to die in Seattle for years, of course, but the Mariners response has always been to constantly load up on these 1B/DH type of guys who have power but who don’t get on base, don’t make contact much, and also don’t really have a position. YOU CAN’T WIN THAT WAY! If anything, it should’ve been clear from watching the playoffs last year that, in this era of baseball, teams that don’t strike out much, and put the ball in play, are more likely to be successful. The M’s don’t even need to have a good offense to be successful. They won 87 games last year despite getting shut out 19 times. In that park, with their usual level of pitching, just being mediocre ought to do the trick.

The M’s came into this season with platoon situations set up at LF, RF, and SS, only to abandon all of those because five of those six guys didn’t hit, two got DFA’d and a third spent most of his time in Tacoma. In order to just get a decent lineup on the field, 30-somethings Seth Smith and Nelson Cruz have had to play far too many innings in the outfield, meaning they had to go trade for another DH/1B/OF type – Mark Trumbo, who is pretty much the prototypical power/no contact/can’t play anywhere in the field guy the Mariners have been fielding (and the fans hating) for a decade, and to get him they gave up a decent backup catcher, Wellington Castillo, they’d had on the roster for all of about a week, thus further burdening starting catcher Mike Zunino – and he’s already burdened enough, given that he’s hitting .161 and striking out 36.1% of his at-bats. 

I’d have to think this is the end of the line for Jack Zduriencik as the GM. He’s been there six seasons now and the club is more than 100 games under .500 during his tenure, and they’ve never been able to hit their way out of a paper bag. Not only are they bad, but they’re boring. And no matter what he does, it seems to blow up in his face. The Mariners have become somewhat notorious for botching top draft choices, and also for being terrible at player development – there are a stunning number of former Mariner draftees floating around in baseball, some of them quite successful, but none of them having had any success before they left Seattle. 

My rooting interest in baseball has always been divided. I was rooting for the Giants when I first got into baseball, but I like to watch Mariner games, having grown up with that team, but it was during the month of June, when they averaged 2.5 runs and went two weeks without scoring more than three runs in a game, that I finally gave up. I just couldn’t take it any more. The Giants have been, well, meh for the most part, lacking a functioning and healthy outfield and cursed with a mediocre starting rotation. But it’s an odd-numbered year. I’m sure next year will be fine. As for the Mariners, well, I’m sure next century will be fine. Maybe. Nah, probably not.

The Lost Pilot

Goodtime Jesus
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
– James Tate

JAMES TATE died on Wednesday, and if you aren’t into poetry, you’ll probably have no idea who he is. If you are into poetry, you realize what a loss this is for modern literature and the arts. James Tate won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Yale Young Poets Award. I was first introduced to his work when I began taking poetry classes in 1988 – Goodtime Jesus there was the first poem of his that I had read, and I wondered what the hell I’d just read, and then pretty much made a point of reading everything he’d ever written after that, and emulating it, if not just out-and-out stealing it – bad poets borrow, after all, and good poets steal. And it was his poetic voice that I wanted to have. James Tate was my poetic hero, and probably still is.

And what voice is that? For starters, it’s funny, goddamnit. I went to school with a whole bunch of narcissists who wanted to drown themselves in faux angst and malaise, having been inspired by the likes of Sylvia Plath. I wasn’t interested in confessional crap. Give me comedy, damnit, because poetry is all about lying, and the best way to get away with telling a lie is to make it funny. James Tate taught me that poetry could be funny – and, more importantly, that it should be funny. In the kingdom of literature, he was the court jester. I still remember sitting in the office of my professor, Jim Harms, with three of my poetry buddies after writing class, the five of us reading through Tate’s poems while drinking beer and literally laughing until we cried.

But the comedian is always sad behind the masque. Tate’s genius was his ability to take the absurd and make it poignant, to verge on abstraction and yet make that abstraction seem somehow tangible – and he could do it in the same verse. His personae in his work were often losers, fringe characters, dumb guys next door happening upon a situation that suddenly became profound. He’d write poems about going to visit doctors, about wild rounds of cheese roaming the countryside, about Galapagos birds which had grown duller over time, about listening to the nondescript neighbour having awkward sex. There was something amazing about his ability to turn the mundane into the meaningful. The world according to Tate was mad as hatters. His work is often described as ‘dreamy’ because it was only in the dream world where the world seemed sane.

One of my great triumphs from the days of Serendipity, Berkeley’s world’s greatest bookstore, was unearthing a copy of Row With Your Hair from somewhere deep in the bowels of the 1,000,000 volume store. Peter Howard, the store’s owner, was notorious for being unwilling to part with a book if he didn’t think the buyer deserved it. He and I had clashed several times, as he disapproved of me making off with some of his finest books of poetry, and he was particularly displeased to see someone approach with Row With Your Hair in hand. Row With Your Hair is a hand printed, hand illustrated, limited edition (1,000 copies) of James Tate’s work published in San Francisco in 1969. It may say $1.50 on the cover – the original cost – but penciled inside the front cover was Peter Howard’s asking price: $90. Much as he had done with another 1960s book I’d made off with  – Jack Gilbert’s Views of Jeopardy – Howard quizzed me on the contents of Tate’s book. 

“What’s your favorite passage?” he asked. Not poem, mind you, but passage.

“Yes, Sister Michele, it is all true: the fire-dance you are waiting for in the next life happens every night on my livingroom floor.”

I quoted verbatim a passage from The Fire Dance, a poem on p. 27. He turned to p. 27, confirmed I had uttered it correctly, and then sold me the book for $75.

And there was always an element of heartbreak in his work. Optimism, too – his poems would have this curious sense about them of “it’s all going to be alright … well, not really, but we’ll manage and get by.” Tate was, in some ways, born with a tinge of heartbreak to him by nature. His debut book was titled The Lost Pilot, and the title poem is about his father, a WWII bomber pilot who was killed when his son was only 5 months old. He had grown up never knowing his father, only imagining him, and yet there was a connection there impossible to let go of. It was unshakable and unbreakable, a disappointment he was destined to be saddled with that what never of his choosing:

The Lost Pilot
for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,  
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,  
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.  
But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,  
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,  
read your face as Dallas,  
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads  
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.  
However frightening, I would  
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make  
you face your wife, or Dallas,  
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy  
orbiting, and I would not try  
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know  
is this: when I see you,  
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,  
spin across the wilds of the sky  
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were  
the residue of a stranger’s life,  
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,  
I cannot get off the ground,  
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling  
to tell me that you are doing  
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune  
placed these worlds in us. 
 – James Tate

And when I began writing poems again in 1998, after a long hiatus, one of the first poems that I wrote was in a similar vein – it was called Breaking Down the Bridge, and is about the grandfather that I never knew, but whose influence upon my family and the way they acted was inescapable. And I had Tate’s Lost Pilot in mind when I wrote it:

Breaking Down the Bridge
for George Morgan (died 1971)

Yours is a lost entry: never was your name
a subject of dinner conversation, no jaundiced
photographs perched upon bookshelves
or the hearth. My one true point of
reference: an abridged quotation

from your second son. When I asked
of you, he paused to edit and strategize,
portraying you as a man content
rocking in a rocking chair, passing
the hours with a volume of Plato.

We were driving that day, perusing
valleys of butternuts and zealous fog,
incomparable landscapes inhabited
by the sorriest of folk. Your homelands.
After decades of founding and refounding

your dreams – Chicago and Detroit,
Bay City and Watertown – you built
an empire here, a hotel and stone
castle on the bank of a small pond,
and you fancied the horses, spending

your every last moment at the Downs,
even as misdirected trotters carried
your dowry and your ægis back
to the stables. I inherited your features
and your luck at the races (I hit the Daily

Double and it paid $4.80). I’m saddled
with the bitterness of your two youngest
sons, anchored in the mud while
the eldest – my father – cut himself
loose. I never even knew you, yet

I find myself inexorably stuck with you,
the bridge between us a ludicrous
wrought iron bridge which hovers
atop a dry riverbed, the river long since
having altered its course. Place a hammer

in my grasp and I would hammer free
the rivets and bolts, reducing that bridge
to an elegant heap of rubble, waiting
for summer rains to overflow the gulch
and carry the remains to the sea.

That poem was published in Washington Square, the literary journal of New York University, in 2000. I still have the copy of that literary journal over here on the shelf, a copy I remember purchasing at a bookstore in Santa Fe on what was otherwise one of the lousiest days of my life, a day so lousy that I’ve spent 15 years and $10,000 on therapist bills trying to come to terms with what it meant. But there was my work on the pages of this terrific literary journal, and for a moment there, being an abandoned and mentally ill artisan suddenly seemed worth it. A few weeks later, I was at City Lights in San Francisco and I peered over the shoulder of a man reading through that particular issue of Washington Square. I asked him what he thought about the poem on p. 50 (mine), he read it and nodded and said it was pretty good, I then said, “I wrote that,” and he not only bought the journal but asked me to sign it. What price, small victories?

And also published in that edition of Washington Square were three poems by James Tate.

I always wondered if, when reading through the issue, if he noticed the poem on p. 50, noticed the subject matter and the word “lost” in the opening line, and made the connection, coming to realize that it was an homage to his work. Probably not. He probably just read it and said, “this Morgan guy, he’s kind of a jackass.”

There’s a weird sensation when someone whose work you so admired, whose work meant so much to you, passes on. It’s an odd sort of creative emptiness you cannot really explicate. You feel a great loss, even if you never knew them. You feel like you disappointed them somehow by not living up to their level of inspiration – you weren’t good enough to say that they influenced you. Robin Williams made me want to be funnier. Roger Ebert made me want to be more mutable and insightful. I wish I’d been a college kid when Kind of Blue and Time Out came out in 1959 so I could use Miles’ and Brubeck’s masterworks to try and seduce cute girls. When I turned 46 on the 25th of May, and began to attempt to plot some sort of life course for the umpteenth time, I was instantly reminded of three other artisans, across a multitude of genres, whose work I truly admired and revered who died when they were 46 – Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Sandman. My new life course immediately involved vowing to make it to 47, since none of those three did.

But on the writing front, I know what I want to say. Or should that be that I know how I want to say it. I am proud to be an absurdist, a humorist, a satirist – understanding that doing so requires sharper senses of observation, incisiveness, and compassion than I thought I was capable of. It’s who I am, who I want to be, and who I strive to continue to be. And I owe more thanks to James Tate for that than anyone else. I wish I’d had the chance to thank the Lost Pilot himself for steering me in the right direction all of those years ago now, even if I was too dumb at the time to realize it.