Talentless in Seattle

Your Seattle Mariners

“An object at rest tends to stay at rest. An object in motion tends to stay in motion.”
– Sir Isaac Newton

“A team that’s bad tends to stay bad.”
– not Sir Isaac Newton

THE postmortems on the Seattle Mariners’ lost 2015 season started being written sometime around the middle of June, when the team slumped its way through a 2-9 homestand and permanently lost contact with the leaders in the American League. The Mariners are one of only two franchises in baseball to have never made the World Series. If/when the Toronto Blue Jays reach the playoffs at the end of September, the Mariners will inherit the distinction of having gone the longest of any franchise in the league without reaching the playoffs, not having been there since 2001. Mariner fans are patient to a fault, fatalist in nature and also somewhat absurdist. They’re used to 90-loss seasons in Seattle, having endured far too many of them over the course of 40 years. Run-of-the-mill bad years are to be expected there. But 2015 this was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be the year for the Mariners. (And it wasn’t just the locals who bought into the hype.) As such, the M’s flailing about 10 games behind the Houston Astros in the standings and reduced to going through the motions for the last few months of the season feels seems all the more depressing.

And the fact that it’s the Astros at the top of the standings makes it sting even more. Yes, the laughingstock Houston Astros, who turned in arguably the worst 3-year stretch in baseball history from 2011-2013, becoming the first team in MLB history to lose more than 105 games in three consecutive seasons. The Astros have stockpiled an impressive array of young talent through the draft in recent years, and that collective talent has exploded onto the scene in 2015, arriving earlier than expected. (I personally thought the Astros would be bad this year and good the next.) When Jeff Luhnow arrived to take over the GM position in Houston, he was handed a 100-loss team, the worst farm system in the majors, and a fan base so disengaged that the Stros were drawing 0.0 ratings on their local television broadcasts. But he also brought with him the know-how and philosophy of player development from the St. Louis Cardinals (and apparently also brought some of his passwords from St. Louis as well). And if you’re going to rebuild an entire organization from scratch, there is no one better to copy than the Cardinals. For all of the hype and the talk about the Oakland A’s and so-called Moneyball – their unique approaches to overcoming inherent financial disadvantages in baseball – time has shown us, in fact, that the modest middle-class franchise in St. Louis’ methods have proven even more effective.

And calling St. Louis “middle class” is based upon economic realities of the game, of course, having nothing to do with pedigree – the Cardinals have won more World Series championships than any other National League club. From a revenue standpoint, the Cardinals cannot ever hope to compete with the Yankees and the Dodgers and even their fiercest rivals, the Cubs. So the Cardinals haven’t even bothered to compete in that arena, and simply gone about cranking out one MLB talent after another. MLB free agency was always something cost-conscious franchises feared in the past, but in truth, it has been proven to frequently be fool’s gold – in signing free agents, you’re rewarding them for past performance, but most free agents are at or past the point in their careers where their skills begin to decline. As contracts increase in value necessarily, the end result, in essence, is a bad investment that simply gets worse over time. As terrific and beloved as Albert Pujols was in St. Louis, you can bet your bottom dollar the Cardinals are glad they aren’t on the hook for that 10-year, $254 million deal Pujols signed after 2011. No, that would be the California Los Angeles Angels of Costa Mesa Anaheim picking up that tab for Pujols, who can barely move (he hit into a 6-5-3 force out earlier this year – don’t ask) and is but a shell of the player he once was.

The aforementioned Mariners have a few potential albatross contracts of their own. In an effort to win now, they went all in on Nelson Cruz, which has proved a wise investment this season – seriously, if the Mariners were worth a damn, the guy would win the MVP, and he deserves some consideration anyway, as he’s been that good on a team which is that bad. They opened up the chequebook a year ago and splurged on Robinson Cano for 10 years and $240 million, and still owe over $100 million to Felix Hernandez and Kyle Seager – and part of the Mariners struggles stem from the fact that those three players I mentioned, while being pretty good this season, haven’t performed at the superstar levels expected of them. And they need to perform like superstars for the Mariners to be successful, because the rest of the roster has been, well, not very good at all. And seven years into the tenure of GM Jack Zduriencik, there is no excuse for that franchise, and the organization as a whole, to be as bereft of talent as it is.

Zduriencik’s arrival after the 2008 season was supposed to represent a new era in Seattle baseball, as he brought with him a track record of scouting and player development successes from Milwaukee. (Although a rather scathing article by Geoff Baker, the former Mariners beat writer at the Seattle Times, suggests that résumé was somewhat embellished.) The Mariners had been run into the ground by his predecessor, Bill Bavasi, whose disastrous 5-year tenure saw one ill-advised free agent signing after another, a 90-game winner becoming into a 100-game loser, a loving fan base plummeting in both numbers and enthusiasm, and Bavasi then topped off this particularly bitter-tasting sundae with a cherry of a trade – acquiring oft-injured and underachieving starter Erik Bédard from Baltimore in exchange for current Orioles superstar Adam Jones, current Orioles ace Chris Tillman, and three other players in what is, hands down, the single worst deal made in Major League Baseball since the turn of the millennium. You would think that Zduriencik couldn’t have done worse – but in fact, he’s not done much better. Indeed, the M’s record over the first five years of the Zduriencik era was almost identical to the Bavasi years. And while, in fairness, the Mariners have seemed to have an awful lot of bad luck this year – having played an ungodly number of close games and lost them, having an offense whose hard contact numbers don’t jibe with its BABIP, and having lost far too many man games among its starting rotation to injuries – you cannot look at this team without asking about the farm system. Where are all of those good young players? What happened to them all?

Indeed, the cutlers currently carving up the corpse of the Mariners, be they local or national, have all fixated upon that very point. During Zduriencik’s seven years in charge, the Mariners may have missed out on a few terrific talents available with the first picks in the MLB draft, but they’ve picked second twice and third once, which has netted them Mike Zunino, a catcher hitting .170 and striking out in a third of his at-bats; Danny Hultzen, an oft-injured pitcher whose career is, most likely, over; and former can’t miss prospect Dustin Ackley, whose been traded to the Yankees now after a career in Seattle which has been … well, suffice to say, he’s not going to be missed:

The thing is, Zduriencik wasn’t alone in thinking Ackley would turn out to be good. Quite honestly, everyone thought that way. And when the Mariners were dangling Cliff Lee at the trade deadline in 2010, on their way to a 101-loss season which featured the worst offensive team in the history of modern baseball, both the Yankees and the Rangers offered their top hitting prospects as trade bait – Jesus Montero and Justin Smoak, respectively. As fate would have it, Zduriencik managed to acquire both of them over the course of several years, and neither of them has amounted to anything. Now, prospects have been known to flame out, of course. Nothing is guaranteed, and everyone whiffs on a few from time to time. But what this speaks to, on an organizational level, is a lack of proper player development, which is the bugaboo of pretty much every awful franchise across the spectrum of North American sport.

Player development isn’t sexy and it doesn’t really get much attention – at least not until the process pays off. It’s hands on, it’s slow, and it requires patience. Players are not finished products when they arrive. Players can learn. Skills can be taught. It’s extremely easy to gloss over this aspect of the game, since it doesn’t take place on the field of play. Out of sight, out of mind. Statheads love to throw around numbers to show how good a player is, but it isn’t until an organization puts in the time to develop a player that any of those numbers show up in the first place. As a sports-watching public, we’ve become obsessed with the draft over the years, and a good number of franchises in pro sports have become obsessed as well, viewing it as some sort of quick fix to whatever ails them. Guess what? It rarely is.

The draft is an apparatus intended to create parity within a closed system, of course. The bad teams get first dibs on the best players available and, in theory, that should move them back towards being competitive again. Were that actually the case, of course, you wouldn’t see the same teams in the lotteries of the NBA and the NHL year after year, and you wouldn’t have such disparate levels of success.

The Edmonton Oilers seem to think they’ve struck it rich this year, drafting Connor McDavid with the first pick in the NHL draft after winning the lottery. (According to this rather zealous article, McDavid promises to be the single-greatest player in the history of all hyperbole.) His selection by the Oilers, followed by the pick of another supposed can’t-miss prospect, Jack Eichel, with the 2nd pick by the Buffalo Sabres, culminated a rather ridiculous season in the NHL in which the Sabres and the Seattle Totems Arizona Coyotes blatantly tanked in the hopes of landing one of the top picks. The Oilers, meanwhile, didn’t blatantly tank this past season – they really were that terrible. Edmonton has been so terrible that McDavid marks the fourth #1 pick in the draft the Oil have had in six years. What should give long-suffering Oilers fans hope is not the arrival of McDavid, but the arrival of former Boston GM Peter Chiarelli on the scene – mostly because it means the ouster of Edmonton’s failed coach/clownshoes GM Craig MacTavish and the end of his regime. Chiarelli’s first act was to fire basically everyone in the organization – assistant coaches, instructors, scouts, you name it. He fired them all, a good number of whom were former Oiler players with connections to the 1980s glory days of the franchise. There’s no guarantee Chiarelli will be successful running the Edmonton Oilers, but given the track record of his predecessors, he could scarcely do worse. All of the top picks in the world haven’t helped the Oilers one iota. What will, in fact, help them is to rebuild the organization from the bottom up and put good people in place on the talent development front. Indeed, as the money has gotten bigger and bigger in sports, as the ability to throw it around has become easier and player movement has become a given, that base need for talent development has, in fact, become more important than ever. And the Oilers never truly started over like the Astros did. As a rule, you should never count on the people who ran your franchise into ruins to somehow revive its fortunes.

With the draft and also all of the cost-containment measures instituted over the years – the salary caps and the luxury taxes and the revenue sharing and whatnot – the end result should be something akin to parity. And that has been to case, to some extent, with another result being that if you’re team is perpetually terrible, you’ve run out of convenient excuses as to why that is. It comes down to a question of competence, pure and simple. There is really no excuse for the Cleveland Browns and the Sacramento Kings. There’s no excuse for the Detroit Lions going 0-16 and winning one playoff game in 57 years, for the Colorado Rockies having basically one good month in the history of the franchise, and the Florida Panthers existing at all. In almost every case, at the root of those franchises’ collective struggles lays an inability to acquire, develop, and then maintain, good talent.

It seems maddening at times. The Mariners have developed about three good players in the past decade, but in St. Louis, they apparently grow good players on trees. The truly elite franchises always find good players, no matter where they are picking in the draft. Quite bluntly, all of the scouting combines and player rankings put forth by the supposed “draft gurus” ultimately don’t mean shit. The New England Patriots draft in the 20s pretty much every season in the most parity-laden league of them all, and all they’ve done is been to six Super Bowls since 2002. The Seahawks won a Super Bowl with 5th round picks turned All-Pros in their secondary, an inexhaustible rotation of defensive linemen, a 3rd round QB who was supposedly too short, and two starting receivers they paid all of $26,000 to sign. In baseball, the Giants have won three World Series in five years and haven’t signed a premium free agent away from another club since the Barry Zito debacle nearly a decade ago. In fact, ownership there actually put the kibosh on such signings, requiring both creativity from GM Brian Sabean and an emphasis on – you guessed it – the farm system. For years, the narrative put forth was that the Giants’ farm system isn’t very good, and yet the Giants had an entire home-grown starting rotation for the playoffs in 2010, had four rookies on the roster in 2014, you’ll find a farm system product occupying every position around the bases, and somehow they’re still in the playoff chase despite having had half their starting lineup on the DL at any given time. They just call up another kid up from the Sacramento River Cats and drop him in the lineup and he starts to perform. (The latest, Kelby Tomlinson, just hit a grand slam today against the Cubs and has been hitting .330 or so.) Indeed, what always impresses me most about call-ups to the Giants or the Cardinals or the Yankees is that they always seem ready to play at the big-league level. The excuses surrounding young players – they’re inexperienced, they need to learn, etc. – just don’t seem to apply in their cases.

The Golden State Warriors, meanwhile, were never particularly lucky in the NBA lottery. The one time they landed the top pick, they drafted Joe Smith. It was a draft about as exciting as the name of the player they picked. So how did they build a champion? They landed Steph Curry with the 7th pick of the draft, as well as Harrison Barnes. They landed Klay Thompson with the 11th pick of the draft. Draymond Green was a 2nd-round pick with a crazy skill set that didn’t make sense in the NBA – at least not until the coaching staff started experimenting with different lineup sets and different styles of play. Not only did the Warriors win their first NBA title this year, but they did so with a cutting-edge style of play. I’ve never really bought into the great infatuation with the NBA draft lottery. As I’ve mentioned before, only two players in the history of the lottery won the NBA championship with the team that drafted them first overall – David Robinson and Tim Duncan. Most of the teams mired in perpetual misery in the NBA are there for a reason, and no one player is that likely to help them out. For all the acumen that Sam Hinkie has shown playing the metagame of the NBA salary cap during his tenure as GM in Philadelphia, making the 76ers into a laughingstock in the process, he hasn’t actually shown whether or not he has an eye for actual talent. Perhaps somewhat worryingly, the returns on his drafts wouldn’t seem to indicate that he does, which would set up the Sixers and their fans for possibly even more misery for the foreseeable future.

And the problem with teams that go bad is that they often tend to stay bad. Sure, 28 and soon to be 29 of the 30 teams in MLB have made the playoffs since 2001, but maintaining that level of play is far more difficult. Pro sports in North America are fraught with narratives of teams whose quality run the gamut from mediocre to awful for decades or even centuries, in the case of the Cubs. I ran across a post on a Vancouver Canucks fan site recently theorizing about the value of tanking – the Canucks having dipped from being one of the élite clubs to one of those also-ran mediocre sorts who can push to grab a playoff spot but likely go no further than that. Are you better off just blowing it up at that point and starting over? The problem with that line of reasoning, of course, is that success through failure is no guarantee. The Houston Astros’ of the world that seemingly rise from the ashes are few and far between. Once it goes bad, it often stays bad for quite a while. It’s been 22 years since the Blue Jays were in the playoffs. The Warriors went 40 years in between NBA titles. The Mariners have spent the past 14 years wandering aimlessly in the woods. My guess is that none of the people driving the discussion on the Canucks board remember very clearly the era when the Canucks had 17 straight losing seasons. One glorious Stanley Cup playoff run aside, that team was miserable to watch, run both incompetently and cheaply. The last time the Canucks were truly terrible, in 1999, they lucked out and, with some draft day finesse, landed both the Sedin twins with the 2nd and 3rd picks in the draft. Good luck finding one generational type player again, much less two. (Having the Winnipeg Jets Atlanta Thrashers stupidly select Patrik Štefan with the #1 pick helped their cause as well.)

The Royals are an interesting example, having finally shed their 29-year absence from baseball’s playoffs a year ago, and now sprouting the best record in the American League. Drayton Moore looks like a genius in Kansas City now, of course, since all of the young players he stockpiled have begun to play worth a damn, but it should be remembered that mid-summer a season ago, the Royals were basically going nowhere. Were it not for a hot finish to the season, which propelled the Royals into the playoffs and on to the World Series, Moore was quite possibly going to be out of his GM’s job, because the body of his work in his career indicated that he didn’t really know what he was doing. Indeed, one of his greatest moves was something somewhat accidental – shut down reliever Wade Davis, the key to the Royals amazing bullpen, was basically a throw-in in the James Shields trade a year ago. He was terrible as a starter in Tampa Bay, but someone on the Royals coaching staff thought that he might make a good reliever. And while they’ve added some pieces here and there in the offseason, the core of the Royals were homegrown on the farm. About a decade’s worth of player development work in Kansas City is finally paying off – but during that time, the product the Royals put forth on the field was often insufferable.

The great myth which has arisen in pro sports is that money solves all your problems. But far more evidence would seem to indicate that a franchise which seemingly has license to print money also has license to spend it badly. The entire principle of Moneyball was the idea that the poor-mouth Oakland A’s simply didn’t have the finances to compete with thoroughbreds like the New York Yankees, who have a seemingly inexhaustible well of resources from which to draw. While there is certainly a correlation between the size of a club’s payroll and its success in major league baseball, what gets forgotten in that equation is that often that large payroll is actually spent to keep the players you already developed. The core of the Yankees championship teams from the 1998-2000 – Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, etc. – were prospects developed within the Yankees minor league system. They were able to attain other key pieces to those teams through trading other good prospects they developed. Now, having a large revenue stream afforded the Yankees the ability to go out and sign some free agents, and also absorb other large contracts in trades, but the entire success of the organization was fundamentally based upon its ability to produce top-quality prospects.

Indeed, even in the Wild West capitalism that rules the roost of professional soccer, where the biggest clubs can seemingly drop €50 million on a player as easily as you or I drop $2.25 for a cup of coffee, talent development at the academy level is often even more important. Developing young talent adds depth to your squad, after all, which is essential when you have a season that can last 55-65 games. Young talent is also an asset that you can sell to other clubs and fetch a nice price. European clubs with poor development systems have to overpay to fill out their squads, which is inefficient, since that’s money not being used for buying players you actually want. Spending inefficiently also often leads to too much debt. It’s possible to spend yourself into oblivion, which is what happened to Rangers, who went broke and had to start all over again the Scottish fourth division, and, more recently and more humorously, at Queens Park Rangers, who were so desperate to make it to the Premier League that they were carrying a wage bill in the second division in 2013 that almost was as high as EPL champion Manchester City, and likely breaking quite a few financial rules while doing so. After one inglorious season in the EPL, QPR are back in the second division again, and also having to face up to the regulators for their past transgressions. Now, few teams have ever spent quite as spectacularly stupidly as QPR, but the point is that all of your big spending has to be matched by an structure in which you’re creating more talent for your organization.

And speaking of stupid spending, what immediately comes to mind here on this continent is the L.A. Dodgers, whose payroll this season is pushing $300 million and who’ve spent about $90 million or so simply to make some players go away. At one point in and around the trade deadline, the Dodgers were responsible for about 25% of the Marlins’ payroll. They’re going to look really stupid when if the Giants catch them in the National League West, since $300 million apparently doesn’t get you a shortstop hitting his weight or a bullpen that doesn’t suck six ways to Sunday. But what’s truly frightening about the money the Dodgers organization is throwing around is not the idea that they can seemingly but any player they want, but that for the $90 million they wasted telling Matt Kemp and Dee Gordon and Dan Haren and Michael Morse to get lost, they could pretty much buy the entire Cardinals development apparatus. And why wouldn’t they do that? No one working the backwaters of A Ball and AA is making any money at all, compared to the salaries you get at the higher levels of the game. Why wouldn’t the Dodgers simply target everyone the Cardinals or the Astros employ and offer to double their salaries?

The Lose wonders if this is where the next arms race might occur in sports – through the systematic pillaging of another organization’s development apparatus, you also force other clubs to have to spend more to keep it intact. Indeed, one of the beauties of having so much money at your disposal is forcing your rivals to spend money they don’t wish to spend to keep up. Then again, you’ve already seen something similar happen in the NFL, without a whole of good results. Bill Belichick’s New England staff has been systematically raided over the years, yet none of his former assistants have come even close to matching his success, and a good number of them have graded out to be among the worst head coaches in the league. (And in the case of Scott Pioli in Kansas City, arguably the worst General Manager in the league.) The same sort of thing is now happening with the Seahawks, which have lost two defensive coordinators to head jobs in Jacksonville and Atlanta. (Sadly, no one will take offensive coordinator/big tool Darrell “I’d-run-the-same-stupid-play-again-in-the-Super-Bowl” Bevell off their hands yet.) The salary cap might eventually catch up to the Seahawks, whose scrubs-cum-superstars all have to be paid like it, but only if they’ve lost the ability to generate more superstars out of thin air through their coaching and development.

Which brings us back once more to the Seahawks’ next door neighbours there in Occidental Square, the Mariners. What, pray tell, do they do? All the indications are that Zduriencik is a goner at the end of the season – apparently, soon-to-be Red Sox president Dave Dombrowski mentioned to someone that the Seattle job would’ve been his second choice, which is interesting, seeing as how Seattle doesn’t yet have a job opening – and likely manager Lloyd McClendon will go with him. Even though I think Lloyd’s done OK, all things considered, it’s a results-oriented business and the results have been disastrous. I would like to think that whomever comes in to clean up the mess will be given carte blanche to just get rid of everyone and start over. The trouble with Seattle is that patience is diminishing among the fan base as fast as their numbers. And with about $100 million players on their rosters, the Mariners were built to win now, but they don’t have a farm system capable of producing enough players to compliment them. And while it may be good news that Zduriencik’s tenure is soon to be up, as Friend of the Lose and long-suffering Northwest columnist Art Thiel points out, the same guys who hired Zduriencik will be hiring his replacement. They haven’t gotten these hires right in 14 years, so why would anyone think they will start showing wisdom now?

Regardless of whom the Mariners hire, that franchise – propped up by Microsoft money in a Microsoft town – might want to heed the words of one of Microsoft’s former CEOs and focus on development. The Mariners’ greatest success – the 116-win season of 2001 – came primarily because, even though they had lost three Hall of Fame players in successive seasons (Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez), they had built up a talent base able not only to withstand the losses but adequately replace them – which took nearly a decade to accomplish. It doesn’t have to take that long, but there likely isn’t going to be a quick fix to what has been a long, slow, and insufferable leak.

National Disaster

The Nats were absolutely horrible this past weekend

Well Casey was winning
Hank Aaron was beginning
one Robbie going out, one coming in
Kiner and Midget Gaedel
the Thumper and Mel Parnell
and Ike was the only one winning down in Washington
– Terry Cashman, “Talking Baseball”

WERE I to revisit my horrid baseball predictions from the preseason and attempt to justify why it is that I thought the Washington Nationals would win the World Series this year, I would be one of many writers and columnists and pundits feeling forced to do so – and one of many writers and columnists and pundits who’ve been forced to do so for the past four seasons. It’s a pretty easy choice, picking the Nats to win everything, because on paper, they’ve had more talent than everyone else in the National League, if not in all of baseball.

The Official Wife of In Play Lose has some allegiance to the Nats, having grown up in the D.C. area, and so we usually make it a point to take in a game whenever they come to San Francisco. The Nats rolled in for a 4-game series at Phone Co. Park against the Giants, who’ve been something of a M*A*S*H unit all season – their starting lineup of choice has played together all of three games the entire year – and have a starting rotation held together by duct tape and silly string. The Nats lined up Strasburg/Scherzer/Gonzalez to throw the first three games of the series, all top calibre pitchers matched against a cobbled-together rotation. Pitching and defense rule the roost at Phone Co. Park in San Francisco, where the mists and the cool weather and the winds put a severe dent in the offense. It looked like the Nats had three serious mismatches lined up, and with a little luck on Sunday afternoon against Giants ace Madison Bumgarner, a sweep would be possible.

Well, a sweep was possible, indeed.

We’re having a strange summer here in San Francisco. The last four days saw temps around 90° with no wind, no fog, and still, humid air – and in those sorts of conditions (which don’t happen EVER), Phone Co. Park plays more like the ballparks in Cincinnati and Philadelphia. It becomes a launchpad, with slick grass and a rock hard infield, to boot, and the Giants went about peppering the walls and skidding balls into Triples Alley and singlehandedly shortening the career of Nats CF Michael Taylor, who ran about 10 miles over the weekend chasing balls down. By the time Bumgarner completed his masterful performance on Sunday – a complete game 3-hit shutout with 14 Ks as well as a homer and an RBI double in a 5-0 Giants win – the Nats had been subjected to a 4-game sweep and been outscored 28-12 in the process.

This completed a dreadful West Coast road trip for the Nats, who went 1-6 vs. L.A. and the Giants – a nasty sort of 2-stop road trip even in the best of times –  and dropped to 10-20 since the All-Star Break, a slump which has seen them fall from having a healthy lead in the NL East to now being 4½ games behind the suddenly resurgent Mets and 10½ games out of the wild card race. Were it not for the Pittsburgh Pirates sweeping the Mets over the weekend – the ’Mazins somewhat magical second half being momentarily halted when they faced a team that actually knows what it’s doing – the Nats season may already be over. It certainly looked over for the Nats on Friday night when my wife and I attended the game, a Giants win by a score of 8-5 in which Bryce Harper did his Bryce Harper thing, hitting a 3-run RBI and driving in four, and the rest of his teammates seemed to be sleepwalking, as Scherzer got tattooed, the bullpen couldn’t stop the bleeding and the defense looked utterly lost. Quite honestly, that team looked dead.

What the hell is wrong with this team? Certainly, injuries have played a huge part in it. Denard Span really makes that team go from the leadoff spot, and he’s been on the DL for a while now. Anthony Rendon and Jayson Werth also spent large chunks of the season on the DL as well. But consider the Giants again, who are 2½ games out of first in the West and presently have three regulars and two starting pitchers on the DL. Injuries happen to almost everybody, at some point. Indeed, the absence of Rendon and Werth from the starting lineup on Friday night had nothing to do with health and everything to do with the fact that neither of them is hitting their weight in the month of August. I looked at the Nats lineup on the Jumbotron on Friday night and said to KC, “wow, that lineup isn’t any good at all.”

Indeed, the Nats have spent most of the past three seasons failing to live up to lofty expectations. On paper, they always look to be better than they turn out to actually be. This has been especially true on the offensive side of things. Even as Harper has developed into arguably the best player in the National League, he’s only one guy. They just don’t put up enough runs on a regular basis, not even for a starting staff which should – should – be absolutely dominant. The trade for closer Jonathan Papelbon from the Phillies gives the Nats what should – should – be a dominant back end of the bullpen with he and previous Nats closer Drew Storen. But this is where the Nats start running into trouble, of course, seeming like a team that’s far too obsessed with what’s happened in the recent past.

Storen, of course, coughed up the lead in the Nats’ demoralizing Game 5 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2012 playoffs, and also coughed up the lead in the 9th inning of Game 2 against the Giants last year. Storen was having a terrific season this year, and of all the things the Nats could’ve added at the trade deadline to boost their squad, which was in first place at the time, getting a closer shouldn’t have been that high on the list at all. That they did so speaks to a fundamental lack of confidence in their closer Storen to come through when they really, truly need him to – which is fine, I suppose, but you’ve been throwing him out there in the 9th inning for most of the past four years and he’s been pretty good. Two poor games is statistically a small sample size – but they just happen to be the two most important games in the history of the D.C. franchise.

One of the things which I am fond of saying in relation to scrabble is that you must fear metaphor. The reason for this is that the actual mechanics of the game are the same from game to game – but what changes from game to game is the importance that you attach. The fact is that some games do, in fact, mean more than others, and your performance is necessarily going to be judged by how you fare in those situations. The whole “Drew Storen is a choker” motif has been statistically proven to be untrue over time, but you don’t, in the end, get to choose how a game comes to mean. And for a seemingly star-crossed franchise that’s never been to a World Series, that was left to twist in the wind and rot in Montréal for half a decade by the commissioner and MLB, and that had it’s greatest team taken away by the baseball strike of 1994, the failings can seem all the more pointed and painful.

Of course, it’s hard to know just how the Storen-Papelbon combo will work in the bullpen at Washington, since the Nats haven’t been winning any games of late and on two occasions in the pivotal series with the Mets in early August, manager Matt Williams didn’t see fit to put them in the game as the Nats were blowing late-game leads on their way to getting swept at Citi Field – a pivotal series which seems to have changed the entire course of the narrative in the NL East. Williams is in his second year managing the Nats and trying to grow into the job, and his tactical acumen hasn’t been particularly stellar. It’s a lot easier to grow into the job when you have a terrible team to work with, and whatever mistakes you make pale in comparison to the mistakes being made on the field on a regular basis. Instead, Williams got handed the keys to a Ferrari and has been trying to figure out how to drive a stick.

And the second-guessing of everything Matt Williams does was probably inevitable after the trainwreck that was the playoff series last season with San Francisco, beginning with a strange decision in Game 2 of last year’s playoffs: his starter Jordan Zimmerman, having thrown a no-hitter in his last start of the season, was throwing a 2-hit shutout in Game 2 against the Giants and had retired 53 of the 58 previous batters he’d faced when he was yanked with two outs in the 9th in favor of Storen, who promptly coughed up the lead and, nine innings later, the Giants had won a 2-1, 18 inning marathon. The Nats got themselves into a pitching and defense and tactical matchup with the Giants, which pitted Williams in a chess match with Bruce Bochy, whose three World Series titles confirm him as MLB’s grandmaster, and Williams managed to maneuver his way into trying to save the season, in Game 4, using his 6th and 7th best bullpen options. The results were predictable. At the key junctures of the season, Williams seemed out of his depth. In the playoffs, some lateral thinking is necessary, of course – given the hot hand that was Zimmerman, he was sure to get the ball in Game 5, which meant that the Nats’ #1 starter, Stephen Strasburg, should’ve been available for Game 4. To hell with established roles at that point – you’re down 2-1 in a best-of-5 and you have to save the season! Yet there was Strasburg sitting next to Matt Williams, becoming more of a poster child for Washington Nationals ineptitude through inaction than he already was.

Strasburg, of course, was the #1 pick in the draft in the first of back-to-back years where the woful Nats hit the jackpot – drafts which landed them he and then Bryce Harper. He then blew out his arm, and the Nats have been cautious with him ever since. Too cautious. The ace of the staff in 2012, when the Nats had the best record in what was a loaded National League that season, Strasburg was shut down in mid-August under the wishes of the Nats’ front office, who had made the decision at the start of the year to limit his innings count for the season come hell or high water. So there was Strasburg sitting in the dugout watching Game 5 of the playoffs, perfectly healthy but off the roster, watching the Nats face the St. Louis Cardinals ace Chris Carpenter – a guy who, earlier in the year, had a rib removed because it pinching nerves and preventing him from pitching. (Umm, ick.) The juxtaposition of mentalities between the two clubs there is impossible to ignore. Baseball is a game full of voodoo and superstition and faith, of course – “never fuck with a winning streak,” as they say in Bull Durham – and while I don’t subscribe to that sort of hocus-pocus, if there was ever a franchise that deserved to be cursed for trifling with the baseball gods, it would be the one that willingly shut down it’s best pitcher who was perfectly healthy in the throes of what could’ve, and maybe should’ve, been a championship season.

Because guess what, folks, winning championships is hard. It’s really hard. You need great talent, smart management, great timing, good health and also having a little bit of luck doesn’t hurt. As spoiled as we are here in San Francisco, what with the Giants hoisting three new championship banners in the past five years and the Golden State Warriors getting to hoist one here this coming autumn, it’s not lost on people that the Giants went 56 years without winning a World Series, and the Dubs went 40 years without winning an NBA title. And contrary to popular belief among the stathead set, winning championships is why you play the game. It’s how you’re ultimately judged when your career is done, fair or not. It’s why you started playing in the first place, and players go to amazing extremes in order to try and win championships. In last year’s Super Bowl, the Seahawks’ three best defenders – Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Kam Chancellor – were all trying to play with what would otherwise had been season-ending injuries. After the Stanley Cup playoffs are over, players always reveal that they’ve played for the previous two months with broken wrists, broken hands, torn muscles. Questioning the wisdom of doing such a thing is another issue, of course, but the fact is that these are the most competitive people on earth, and capturing that grand prize is all that truly matters in the moment to any of them.

That shutdown of Strasburg coincided with the season that Chipper Jones retired from the Braves and he perhaps explained it best when asked his opinion of the Nats moves. He’d arrived in Atlanta in 1996, the year the Braves won a World Series and in the midst of a 14-year-run of playoff appearances. But the Braves never won another title in his entire career, despite being good and sometimes great. Chipper had come to understand that success was fleeting in sports. When you have the chance to win a championship, you simply have to make the most of it. Jones basically said that the Nats were idiots for doing that. Strasburg held his tongue throughout the season, then voiced his disapproval after he’d been shut down, since he was feeling fine and wanted to pitch and wanted to try to win – which is exactly what the organization should’ve been thinking as well. Sure, the organization has to be mindful of long-term concerns, but the clock is ticking from the moment a player comes up to begin with. You want a guy to have a long career with your franchise, but you don’t always have much of a say in how long that career is going to be. And if you’re Strasburg, and you know that time is short and the opportunities to win titles can be few and far between, are you really going to be that interested in reupping? Sure, money talks, but there’s plenty of money for everyone. Winning, and the chance to do so, often becomes paramount in a free agent’s mind.

I really do feel that 2012 is going to haunt this franchise, if it isn’t already doing so. The 2012 flag that very easily could’ve been flying in Nationals Park is flying over on McCovey Cove. They’ve spent the past three years adding to the core of the roster – Harper, Rendon, Span, Scherzer, Fister – yet they seem to be running in place and perpetually underachieving. That core, meanwhile, is crumbling – Werth is aging, Ryan Zimmerman can’t move, Desmond is costing himself millions in a contract year with a dismal season both offensively and defensively. The Nats were struggling through all of the issues – helped in part by a terrible division – but now the wheels seem to have come off. Something needs to change in a hurry. In the meantime, the clock is ticking and the window continues to close.

There’s still time for the Nats to salvage this season, of course. (For starters, they have a few games coming up with the likes of the hapless Colorado Rockies and the rotting corpse of a franchise that is the Miami Marlins.) 4½ games isn’t an impossible deficit to overcome. The Mets seem a bit slump-proof at the moment, however, given how they pitch. Then again, they just got skunked by the Pirates while the Nats were failing to hit, pitch, field, coach, or even show a pulse for the past weekend. If the Nats somehow rally, they may owe the Pirates a beer or two.

It’s one thing to be awful in perpetuity, and the Nats certainly went that route for a while. That sucks, to be sure. But sports in North America tend to be a boom-and-bust enterprise, and failing to maximizing your opportunities during the good times just makes the bad times seem even worse. Just look at the other team I picked to reach the series – the Mariners won 116 games in 2001, one of the greatest teams in history, but blew their opportunities in the playoffs and haven’t made the playoffs since. The club continues to peddle 2001 nostalgia in lieu of putting a competent product on the field, but the Seattle fans have come to no longer care about such a thing. Waxing nostalgic about glory days that didn’t turn out so glorious only makes the losing more insufferable. The only way you cleanse yourselves of some of those disappointments is to go out and win. John Madden has always been fond of saying that “winning is a great deodorant,” but it’s also a great disinfectant and stain remover as well.

Just a Typical Saturday Morning

We may not play very well, but we’ll look good, damn it.

7:00 A.M. and I’m up early for the telecast of the season opener and Carrow Road looks grand when bathing in bright sunshine and wait what is Neil doing with this lineup, no Redmond and no Jerome in the first XI and this strikes me a EPL rookie manager mistake in trying to win with tactics instead of talent but this is OK, good pace and controlling the play, pressing high and looking dangerous and JESUS CHRIST GRABBAN HOW IN FUCK DID YOU MISS THAT? cross to the center of the box he has an open goal and skids it off the outside of the post for fuck sake and for fuck sake how is that not a red or at least a yellow? Palace guy gets neither from Simon Hooper the EPL rookie referee who I think I remember from Norwich games in the championship last season and who I think I remember being awful although he’s right to book Tetley although the three full rolls from the Palace winger on the dive score him no style points and the Canaries players are right to crowd around him “get the fuck up you fucking sissy” was that in the mike? but it’s OK they are controlling the possession but not enough numbers forward and Palace have some dangerous wingers they are kinda good I think I picked them 6th in the EPL pool for a reason and DAMN IT a goal against the run of play, down 0-1 and a little spooked into the second half and DAMN IT MARK SOMEBODY cheeky set piece from Palace on a corner catches Canaries asnooze jeez an NOW you decide to bring on Redmond and Jerome when you’re down 0-2? about fucking time well this game sucks REDMOND SHOT FROM DISTANCE GOAL and, hmm, that was really poor defense from Palace there and JEROME GOAL ON A BICYCLE KICK!!! FUCK YEAH!!! but wait what is that blind as bats Simon Hooper doing? disallowed goal for dangerous play? are you fucking kidding me? that wasn’t dangerous play it was a guess by an official not having a great day well this game sucks and it’s a good thing our keeper is a stud because that’s some pretty naïve defending going on there from the good guys in the yellow and the green stoppage time one last gasp HOW THE FUCK IS THAT NOT A PENALTY? that was a good old fashioned two-hand shove in the back it was so bloody obvious that anyone would’ve called it if they weren’t blind as bats well done Simon Hooper you’ll undoubtedly grade out by the FA as the worst official in the EPL this week good luck in your next assignment in Rotherham or Leeds or some shit town or, even worse, Ipswich, well it’s just one game and oh, look, Palace just waltzed in for an oh-by-the-way goal in the 95th minute which is the sort of thing that comes back to bite you in the ass when it comes down to goal difference at the end of the season so that’s Norwich City 1:3 Crystal Palace and there’s the whistle and it’s only one game and Palace is pretty good but still it’s a disappointing result with enough truly hideous and bad calls by the referee to almost mask a few glaring weaknesses but not quite so it’s welcome back to the EPL and this is looking like it might be a challenging season for The Good Guys and that game sucked I cannot believe I woke up early for this fuck this I am going back to bed …

Celebrity Fiction Edition

Matt Tunnicliffe’s scorecard from the 2014 National Scrabble Championships. He wasn’t pleased with how he played.

TWO of the good guys in the game of scrabble – and two official Friends of The Lose – were playing in a best-of-5 final on Wednesday at the North American Scrabble Championships in Reno. Matthew “Muffin with Tentacle” Tunnicliffe defeated Jesse “Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod” Day 3-2 to win the championship in a series that was tight, tense, and suspenseful. It was something of a heartbreaking and excruciating loss for Phonerz, who lost one game in the series on the account of playing IR inadvertently late in the game, which isn’t a word and which Matt quickly challenged off. Scrabble is, like all sports and games and contests, often decided by mistakes, if not nearly always so. Everyone makes them from time to time, no matter how good they are.

I was watching this match streamed online while commuting, and I physically cringed when I saw my good friend and club mate Phonerz play IR. For a moment, I felt physically sick. I was sitting next to one of my regular commuting companions on the Caltrain, whose name I don’t even know, and she was startled when I yanked the earbuds out of my ears and facepalmed.

“What happened?”
“He played IR.”
“Uh, who did what?”
“Scrabble,” I said pointing to my phone. “It’s the nationals.”
“What does IR mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not a word.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s not a word. He lost the game because of it.”
“Do you like Words With Friends?”

Sigh.

Jesse handled the defeat with class, however, which means it will probably be safe for me to give him some shit the next time I see him. (And if it’s not safe, I think me and my bad ankle can outrun him and his bad knee.)

As for Matt, the scorecard at the top of the page should give you an idea of his sense of humour. He’s one of the funniest guys in scrabble, and possesses the heightened sense of absurdity that you’d expect from a guy who’s been rooting for the Ottawa Senators all his life. He’s contributed some factoids to this blog, and he gave me permission to reprint here two of his scrabble short stories.

These two stories chronicle battles between Matt and Nigel Richards, who has won everything in English-language scrabble, recently won the French championship after spending nine weeks learning the dictionary, and is presently studying the Klingon dictionary as our planet’s chosen rep for the Interplanetary Scrabble To The Death Festival. These stories also feature some dazzling construction of scrabble game boards, links to which are end the end of the stories, and they possess a sentiment very much in keeping with the ethos here at In Play Lose.

I thought this would be a good way to tip my cap to Matt for his performance in Reno. I, for one, welcome our new muffin overlord:

- - -

Nigel stole my mom's car
So yesterday I spent my Saturday the same way I spend most of my Saturdays: hustling Scrabble players at Confederation Park. This is how I buy my food for the week.
"You sure got a lot better when money was on the line," said my latest victim as she reluctantly handed over a crisp $10 bill.
"Yeah, well, what can I say? I play well under pressure."
The lady scowled and left. I pocketed the money and dreamed of the Arby's I would purchase with it on the way home. My first hot meal in a month!
"Anyone else up for a fun game of Scrabble?! Maybe make it interesting and put a couple bucks down?!"
A man emerged from behind the trees. "I'll play!" he said in a thick British accent. He was comically dressed: a top hat and monocle adorned his jolly face, and a royal blue overcoat barely covered his large gut. The pocketwatch and handlebar moustache completed the ensemble.
"Sure thing! You know the rules, right? Want to put a few bucks on the game?" I asked, hoping his wallet was as luxurious as his attire.
"Oh, why not?" he said, pulling out a velvet pocketbook. My eyes widened and stomach growled. "How about $100? I have no clue how much this Canadian currency is worth, anyways."
"Oh!" I said, trying not to gawk, "$100 is fine. Pocket change, really." I did not have $100. "Sure, I'll bet that much. Let's play!"
The fat English man sat down and we played. He was awful. Almost every one of his plays consisted of exactly two tiles. It was like he was fishing, but never hit anything. I did my best to play poorly, too. I didn't want to scare him off in case he was interested in more money games. Even playing my worst Scrabble, I beat him handily.
"Well done, old chap!" said the man. "I guess I have a lot to learn!"
"Yeah, thanks," I said, trying not to damage the $100 bill as I folded it and placed it in my sock. "Your best bet would be to stop playing only two tiles a turn. You'll never win that way."
"Oh, no, I'm sure I understand the strategy of Scrabble quite well," he said with a chuckle. "Two tiles a turn is fine!"
"Um... no. Trust me, you need to play more tiles. You'll never win that way." I said, forgetting that I was supposed to be convincing him to play more games with me.
"Well, we'll see," he replied. "How about another game, boyo? Higher stakes?"
I licked my lips. "Sure. What kind of stakes?"
He riffled through his pocketbook. "Oh I don't know. How does $5,000 sound?"
I almost fell off my chair. I had to take a second to calm down and collect myself. "F- five-thousand dollars sounds fine."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes!"
"Shake on it?"
We shook on it.
"Alright then."
At that moment, the man grabbed the front of his overcoat and pulled hard. The entire disguise came off. The fatness, the moustache, the British accent. It was all a ruse. The man who stood before me was Nigel Richards, beard and all. I almost barfed.
"Don't have $5,000, do you kid?" he said in his normal voice.
"W- well, I - I..."
"How about that red Mazda 3 you drove here in. That must be worth almost five gees."
"M - my mom's car?" I live in my mom's car when my bedroom at home needs to be fumigated.
"Yeah, that'll do, I guess. I already have five red cars, but I guess I can use that one as a lawn ornament. Bet you feel stupid for dissing my two-tiles-a-turn strategy now, eh? Well, ready to play?"
"Ohcrap..."

game on ...
 
———
Nigel stole my dad's car
Several months after my first incident with Nigel Richards, I finally convinced my parents to let me borrow my dad's car. You see, I had wagered my mom's car in a game of Scrabble with Nigel. Through some extraordinary circumstances, I lost that game. Just barely. My parents were quite pissed. They made me get a part-time job to pay to replace the car.
So I was driving to my new job one day, thinking about how unlucky I am. Seriously? How did he get 730-something points playing two tiles a turn? What a lucksack.
I tried to keep my mind on the road. If I crash my dad's car, my parents would kill me. No question.
I looked at the rear-view mirror, and then back at the road. Wait. Did I just see that? I looked again. Nothing. Whew. I looked a third time. There it was! A bearded man on a bicycle with a Scrabble board under is arm. Nigel!
"No!" I thought. I stepped on the gas and sped away. I was not interested in another encounter with that man.
After turning several blocks, I lost him. Whew. Eyes back on the road. There is was again! This time in front of me! How the hell did he catch up?! I sped past him and zoomed away at 120km/h. No way he could follow me on a bike with me driving that fast.
Then I heard the sirens. Crap! I guess I was going 120 in a 40 zone. I will never be able to pay this ticket. I make minimum wage at Wendy's! I pulled over to the curb and the police car did the same. The officer approached my car and I rolled down the window.
"Up for a game?" It was Nigel!
"What the? No! Get away from me!"
"Oh come on. I'm bored. Just one game of Scrabble?" he asked again.
"No! You took my mom's car! Now I have to work a crappy job to pay her back!"
"Well, tell you what. We'll play for the car. You win, you get your mom's Mazda back. I win, I get this lovely Toyota Venza. Sound fair?"
"No! This is my dad's car! And we both know what's going to happen! I'm going to have the game of my life. Getting all sorts of bingoes and scoring a ton of points, and then you're going to pull off some sort of ridiculous comeback and win out of nowhere. That's what's going to happen! So no, we aren't playing!"
"Oh come now. Tell you want. I'll sweeten the deal. I have to win AND get two triple-triple bingoes. Otherwise, you get the car back."
I thought about it. "Well... two triple-triples would be hard to get. Especially if I play super defensively... But no! I won't do it! You'll find a way to win!"
"I like your uniform, by the way. Wendy's makes good burgers. It's weird how "Trainee" is actually sewn onto your shirt there. Like you're forever a trainee. I mean, usually they put it on a nametag, but that stitching looks permanent. Weird."
"OPEN THE BOARD!"
So I sat down to play with Nigel, thinking there would be no way he could beat me AND get two triple-triple bingoes... 

game on ...