Losability: Your Cheap and Available NBA Preview

JaVale McGee is now on the Warriors. This brings me joy …

THE LOSE has been counting down the days until the NBA season gets going. No, seriously. I have been. Every time the Giants bullpen blew a save in September, I would tweet out how many days it was until the Warriors season opener. Suffice to say, I put this out in cyberspace a lot, and most of my followers probably hate me now – except for the Dodgers fans, who think it’s hysterical, but the Dodgers are trash and so I don’t really care what they think.

OK, focus here Lose … basketball!

It’s time for one of the more fascinating seasons in the league’s history to commence. The casual fan might think that it’s not particularly fascinating, seeing how, on paper at least, there is Cleveland and there is Golden State and there is everyone else. Aha, but it’s all of that “everything else” which interests The Lose, of course, because this is a blog where we like to chronicle and pontificate upon that which is done badly. And given the muddled middle class the league at the moment, and given the truly horrid franchises the league continues to drag behind them like tin cans tied to the bumper, and given the bizarre ways that the NBA conducts its business, this NBA will almost certainly give me plenty to write about.

And in a year where it seems so clear-cut from the get-go – the Cavs and the Dubs are enormous favorites to win their conferences and meet in the NBA Finals for the third straight year – the question then becomes how the other 28 teams prepare for what could, in theory, be a lost season. Do you tank? Do you go young? Do you look for a chink in the armor of the big guns and then try to make a move at the deadline which could possibly give you a shot in the playoffs? Do you simply lower your expectations?

And remember here, nothing is preordained. Nothing is set in stone. There hasn’t been more of a stone-cold lock to win a title, going into the playoffs, than the Golden State Warriors were a year ago, but then Steph Curry slips and falls in a pool of Donatas Motiejunas ass sweat in Houston and injures his knee, and the dynamic of the entire NBA playoffs suddenly changes. While the NBA is the most predictable of major sports in terms of which teams are going to dominate, having so few players involved in the game also means that you’re only a few injuries away from being in the dumpster.

I give you my Losability preview of the 2016-2017 NBA season, with teams ranked in my customary order, which is from the least likely to the most likely that they’re going to wind up being written about on this blog during the course of the season – for reasons good, bad, or otherwise. There are basically three reviews you can write in the critic biz – “it sucks” “it rocks” and “it’s boring” – and the worst of all is the third of those. Be brilliant or be terrible, but whatever you do, don’t be boring.  Those teams which are gravitating towards the bottom of this list fall in the third category – but sometimes for good reasons, of course, since a stabile and consistent franchise free of drama can make for a successful season even if it doesn’t make for very good copy.

The NBA season starts on Tuesday night. Here are my Losability rankings from worst to first with reasons why. Do the things listed here, and some hack with a laptop in the Bay Area is going to feel free to take shots at you:

30. Washington Buzzards Wizards: because really, who cares?

29. Denver Nuggets: because I don’t know anything about this team at all, and they are arguably the most uninteresting franchise in all of sports.

28. Charlotte Hornets: because they are a solid and steady team that will plod along and will probably have a decent season, all of which is good, but they aren’t terribly interesting.

27. Milwaukee Bucks: because in spite of running out Greek Freak at the point, an idea which I love, whatever hopes this team had of being good pretty much died when Khris Middleton got hurt, and I simply can’t subject myself to watching a team who can’t shoot go about not shooting on a nightly basis.

26. Toronto Raptors: because this team should probably be higher on this list, since weird stuff happens in the playoffs that’s worth commenting on, and at that point in the season I’ll probably wonder if they’re ever going to try and run an actual play on offense, but until then they are going to plod along and win 50-55 games and wind up being the second or third seed in the East so carry on.

25. Detroit Pistons: because at some point this year, I’m going to be subjected to watching Andre Drummond get hack-a-shaqed and shoot 25 goddamn free throws in a game, at which point I’ll go on a frothing rant about the NBA needs to fix this stupid quirk in the rules.

24. Orlando Magic: because when your season will be declared a success if one of your guys wins the slam dunk contest during the All-Star break, there isn’t a whole lot to get excited about.

23. Dallas Mavericks: because this savvy, veteran team and its savvy, veteran coach are capable of just about achievement, good or bad, without it really surprising me – be it through playing great team ball and becoming a playoff team or be it through turning into a MASH unit and winding up in the lottery; because Dirk has to age out at some point; because at some point Mark Cuban is going to realize he spent $94,000,000 on Harrison Barnes and have his worst case of buyer’s remorse since The Benefactor.

22. Utah Jazz: because this is another team which is going to be steady and carry on, and appears ready to take the next step, but they won’t be all that exciting going about it; because should my belief that the Jazz will wind up in a 4/5 matchup with the Rockets in the first round of the playoffs come to fruition (which also thus puts them in line to play Golden State in the second round), then they become really interesting to me, so talk to me in April.

21. Indiana Pacers: because someone should explain to me how Larry Bird can say he wants this to be an “up tempo” team while hiring Nate McMillan to be coach, since Nate’s teams in Portland and Seattle played at some of the slowest paces in the league.

20. San Antonio Spurs: because they probably would’ve been about 31st on this list until I started hearing all of these rumblings about possibly trading LaMarcus Aldridge, which would be dumb; because this team will be good-to-great, like they always are, and be ruthlessly efficient in their systematically suffocating bad teams into submission, which makes for turning off the games early and going and doing something else; because they looked old and slow by the end of last season, and the problem is that old and slow guys don’t get any younger nor any quicker.

19. Portland Trail Blazers: because these guys were a helluva lot of fun last year, and I appreciate their general conceit that the best way to defend the opposition is just to outscore them; because Evan Turner and Festus Ezeli? Really?; because they wildly overachieved last season, which is awesome, but they were also extremely fortunate last year in terms of health; because this season might be a case where they are a better team but it doesn’t necessarily translate into victories.

18. Memphis Grizzlies: because “Grit & Grind,” which is the identity of this franchise, seems pretty stale; because this was a great starting lineup in about 2013; because they used 28 players last year, and most of their best players are likely to wind up on the injured list again; because if they stay healthy, they still have Marc Gasol and Randolph and Conley and they could do some stuff, but probably not that much.

17. New Orleans Pelicans: because no team in the league is more dependent upon one guy; because that one guy, Anthony Davis, is always injured; because they replaced a bunch of dudes who could shoot but couldn’t defend with a bunch of other dudes who, quite honestly, I’m not sure what they do or what value they bring; because at some point, I should probably write about the fact that, as much as I love me some Pels, my trip to Milk Shake Arena last January convinced me that this is the least viable NBA franchise and I wonder, at what point in the future, they start looking to greener pastures.

16. Minnesota Timberwolves: because I love me some KAT and would take him on my team in less than a second; because Coach Thibs has got a tough job ahead of him here, insofar as he has a ridiculous collection of young talent with no real experience and he’s going to have to manage expectations, since you could make a case for them winning anywhere from 35-50 games that’s valid and the natural tendency is to verge towards being wildly optimistic and hopeful when you haven’t won a damn thing in over a decade; because one way or another, they should be fun as hell.

15. Atlanta Hawks: because it seems like 100 years ago that this team was the #1 seed in the East; because I remember when Dwight Howard was in the NBA; because replacing Teague and Horford in your lineup with Schröder and Howard makes me go “hmm;” because the basketball gods have a cruel sense of humor and I can totally see this team winding up in the 4/5 matchup in the East playoffs, winning it and earning a chance to yet again be embarrassed off the court by the Cavaliers.

14. Miami Heat: because the luster of the Pat Riley era in Miami has been tarnished somewhat now that LeBron and D-Wade are gone, and Chris Bosh is soon likely to be gone, and none of them have a whole lot good to say about it; because we’ll see just how great a free agency destination this really is now that you have a bad roster and you’ve turned over the keys to the franchise to Hassan Whiteside; because all the talk is about the future of the franchise, since in the present, this team could be dreadful.

13. Brooklyn Nets: because Linsanity!; because name me one other player on this team; because name me one guy on this team anyone would want; because maybe they can final get through the Five Stages of Grief about all of the draft picks they’ve given away to the Celtics, because the picks aren’t coming back and they need to just get over it; because unlike in many seasons, when teams are really bad because they’re tanking to try and get the #1 pick, the Nets will actually be trying and still be really bad.

12. Los Angeles Lakers: because I suspect this team will put the fun in dysfunctional, what with all of the strange goings-on behind the scenes involving the Buss family fighting over the ownership and the possibility of a triumphant return of the Zen Master in the future; because getting rid of Byron Scott and the blowhard bombast of Kobe is addition by subtraction; because in Luke Walton’s first season on the bench, the on-court product is going to be bad, but everyone knows it and no one seems too bothered by it, so long as Russell and Ingram show some improvement; because this team just might tank at the end of the year to try and protect their draft pick, but that’s to be determined.

11. Phoenix Suns: because I like some of the pieces here, particularly Devin Booker, but I have no idea how many puzzles they go to; because the combination of promising young talent that doesn’t fit, and seasoned vets who don’t fit, should make them an interesting player come trade deadline time; because I have no idea what the hell they are going to do on the court, but I doubt much defense will be involved, and I also doubt many Suns wins will be involved; because so long as your team is owned by Robert Sarver, you’re liable to do something stupid as an organization which will end up in this blog.

10. Cleveland Cavaliers: because the Cavs somehow find a way to invent drama in their organization, even when they are on their way to a championship; because they may as well take most of the regular season off, since it doesn’t matter what their seed is going into the playoffs, and their biggest problem this season is going to be with managing the boredom, which leads me to a fascinating team which could possibly benefit from the Cavs’ general state of inertia and ennui and sneak up on them in the standings …

9. Boston Celtics: because at some point, having 84,000 draft pricks stockpiled has to actually translate into some good players; because it’s likely to happen this coming summer (Thanks Nets!); because I love me some Al Horford on this team, and I think they’re going to be a pain in the ass to play against; because someone make a damn shot!; because if the Cavs take a lot of the season off, which they might, and the Celtics put it all together, which they might, and maybe the Celtics are able to use some of those 84,000 draft picks and finally swing a deal at the trade deadline, then … wait, no, the Celtics can’t challenge the Cavaliers in the East, can they?

8. Houston Rockets: because wow, the offense is going to be amazing; because wow, the defense is going to be awful; because in Mike D’Antoni’s system, I expect James Harden to put up MVP numbers; because I think this team will win a lot of games this season, particularly at home, simply because they’ll be impossible for teams to prepare for on short notice; because conversely, I think the Warriors might put up 150 on this team, and the Clippers might put up 140 on this team, and it will be wildly entertaining; because unlike last season, they don’t seem to hate each other – yet.

7. Los Angeles Clippers: because having both Chris Paul and Blake Griffin in their contract year could either be a really good thing or a really bad thing; because their first four – those two guys + DeAndre Jordan and J.J. Redick – is good enough to beat 28 of the 29 other teams in this league all by themselves; because there are 300,000,000 people in this country but for some fuck knows why reason the Clippers can’t find one of them capable of playing the three; because as much as I like Doc as a coach, I hate him as a GM, and when the most successful thing you did in the offseason is give your son a larger allowance, it doesn’t impress me; because reaching the Western Conference finals, which I believe is the Clippers’ ceiling, will feel like both a success and a failure, which would be a uniquely Clippers sort of accomplishment.

6. New York Knicks: because one way or another, this team will force its way into the headlines; because whatever upside this team has after adding Noah and Rose in terms of their ability, the downside that comes from adding two guys who are perpetually injured is far, far greater; because the sooner they realize this is now Porzingis’ team, the better off they will be, but that ain’t gonna happen so long as Carmelo Anthony is there; because why is Kurt Rambis?; because I’ll be curious to see how Jeff Hornacek works under Phil Jackson, seeing as how he managed to nearly get the Suns into the playoffs a couple years ago with not-very-good talent; in that same vain, because I wonder if Hornacek will dare to junk the sacred Triangle offense – and if he does so, if it means that Phil is soon to be headed out the door.

5. Philadelphia 76ers: because it’s Year 1 of the post-zombie apocalypse era in Philly now that Sam Hinkie is no longer in charge of this franchise, and now that the ponzi scheme that was ‘The Process’ has collapsed, the roster Hinkie left behind is one helluva mess; because already Ben Simmons has broken his foot and Nerlens Noel is having “minor” knee surgery (of which there is no such thing), which sucks but also sort of solves, in the short term, the dilemma of how you possibly find enough minutes and enough space on the floor for Simmons and Noel and Okafor and Embiid and also Dario Šarić; because Embiid has looked great in short bursts in the pre-season, but is his conditioning anywhere close to being good enough to get through a whole season after being out for more than two years?; because at some point, the 76ers have to make some deals, since all of those big guys cannot possibly coexist, and it’s those deals which ultimately will determine where this team is going.

4. Chicago Bulls: because my God, this has to be most mismatched collection of talent that I’ve seen since those Mike D’Antoni Lakers teams; because you’ve added Rondo, who can’t shoot, and Wade, who can’t shoot, and also Michael Carter-Williams, who can’t shoot, and that right there are three of the bottom 10 in 3-pt FG% among active players with over 400 attempted treys, and all of them need the ball, and so does Jimmy Butler; because with all of the talk about Fred Hoiberg being “a college coach,” he now has essentially a college-type roster with a bunch of dudes who can’t throw it in the ocean; because it seems like Hoiberg is being set up to fail, which is weird, since it’s the guys who hired him who also assembled this roster.

3. Oklahoma City Thunder: because for fucksake, NBA media, stop it with this bullshit “boo hoo OKC got screwed” narrative that’s been cropping up all summer; and also because, for that matter, stop making it seem like Russell Westbrook did something other than simply maximizing his value when he signed that contract extension this summer, which is what he should do and which ultimately doesn’t have anything to do with the Thunder; because christ the media following this team are a bunch of babies; because when you see Westbrook’s usage rate this year, it will become crystal clear why Durant didn’t want to play with this dude in his contract year; because prognostications about this being a 50-win team and such are entirely based upon wishful thinking, since a lot of people don’t like the way that Durant bailed on them and want to pretend that they can still be good without him; because I don’t think they’ll be very good without him and I don’t really like this roster minus KD and Ibaka, even though I do love me some Steven Adams.

2. Sacramento Kings: because welcome to hell; because where do begin?; because oh yeah, we should probably begin with the fact that the owner comes off as a condescending twerp who is full of shit, and it doesn’t matter how tricked out your new building is, so long as you have a guy like that at the helm of the organization, your team is never never ever going to be any good; because I can’t understand why, after putting up with the constant ownership squabble going on behind the scenes in Memphis, Dave Joerger decided to commit career suicide by taking this coaching job; because not only is the present dire, but years of wasted draft picks combined with upcoming draft picks lost in bad trades make the future look even worse; because I suspect that they’ll be stubborn instead of being prudent, and won’t make inroads into trading Boogie Cousins when they really should do so, because they live in denial in Sacramento and they think they’ll somehow be able to convince him to re-sign and not leave when his contract expires.

1. Golden State Warriors: because, quite simply, this team is going to be great – but we won’t know just how great until the springtime.

Don't Take the World Serious

Party like it’s 1948

FROM the standpoint of The Lose, there are two dream World Series matchups. One would be the Washington Nationals against the Seattle Mariners, because it would be the first time both clubs had reached the Fall Classic. And the other? The Chicago Cubs vs. the Cleveland Indians – two franchises who’ve contributed greatly to the definition of modern failure in American sports. And now that the Indians have done away with the Blue Jays in the ALCS, and the Cubs taken care of the Dodgers in the NLCS, that second matchup has now come to fruition.

Be still my foolish heart.

I have a strange reason for my rooting interest in this World Series, one not based in any sort of reality at all, but entirely based upon a work of fiction – a work of fiction by me. In this novel that I published back in 2014, the main character is from Cleveland and he’s a big Indians fan. There is a scene in the book that takes place during a game between the Indians and the A’s on Aug. 16, 2013 at the Oakland Coliseum. The book was written intending for it to be happening in real time during the summer and fall of 2013, and a major event had occurred in the story on Aug. 15, and going to the Indians game the day after was the perfect way to launch the next phase of the plot. Later on in the story, I also folded in a Cavs game and a football game between Michigan and the Akron Zips, whom I had no idea would playing when I started writing this story about a guy from Cleveland who went to Akron and who has a sister who went to Michigan. (So, of course, they needed to wager on that game.) Three chapters of the book take place in Cleveland, and in keeping with my real time plot line, I made sure that, when he is sitting in a bar and his brother is watching a Browns preview show on the TV that I got the upcoming opponent correct, which was the Chiefs.

And, of course, I have written about Cleveland on this blog before.

So yeah, I am down with Cleveland. I am so down with Cleveland that the idea of Cleveland winning a championship softened considerably the blow of the Golden State Warriors losing the NBA Finals this past summer. But it also bears pointing out that, in this fictional world of mine which stars a loyal Cleveland Indians fan, that particular fan also has made a conscious choice not to wear anything with a Chief Wahoo logo on it. His particularly peculiar ethnicity is something of a running gag throughout the novel – no one really knows his true ethnicity, and he delights in the fact that no one can ever figure out where the hell he came from – and someone whose ethnicity is impossible to define also doesn’t like the club’s defining of an ethnicity using an awful caricature. And it pisses me off, because this is a franchise whose contributions to breaking the color barrier in baseball haven’t really gotten enough play: the Dodgers broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson in 1947, but the Indians took that barrier and stomped all over it once and for all by winning a World Series the following season with Larry Doby in the outfield and Satchel Paige in the bullpen, and as often happens in sports, shifts in thinking often change when it becomes you can no longer compete and no longer win – perhaps it’s not the right reason for change, but the end result is nonetheless correct. So the Indians winning a World Series in 1948 with black players on the team – in what also happened to be the first World Series televised by a national network – was actually a huge deal, but then the franchise blunts this legacy almost entirely by continuing to trot out this ghastly logo. Get rid of that damn thing already.

So now we’ve got the Indians in the World Series in a year where everything seems to be going Cleveland’s way, but of course it can’t all work out because this is Cleveland we’re talking about, after all. Tuesday was going to be a festive day in Cleveland already, since it’s opening day of the NBA season and the Cavs get their rings and get to hoist a championship banner into the rafter of The Q, but instead of getting to focus all of the attention on that, now you also have Game 1 of the World Series going on at the same time, so that attention naturally gets divided, and all the while you also have the Cleveland Browns limping towards an 0-16 season, having already used 6 QBs while going about confirming its status as the worst franchise in all of North American professional sports. It can never be too good in Cleveland. There is always a caveat.

And about those Cubs, who’ve now reached the World Series for the first time since 1945 and haven’t won the damn thing in 108 years. I’ve always had something of a disdain for the Cubs, who are a uniquely North American sporting phenomenon in that the franchise has spent much of those 108 years actively marketing and monetizing failure. No team fails as successfully as the Cubs do. Historically, attendance has increased in seasons when the team’s performance has plummeted. The entire narrative of the franchise has been that of a team that is “cursed,” with Bartman and the billy goat and all of that other nonsense, when in reality, they were generally terrible for most of those 108 years and ownership was perfectly happy with that. From a business standpoint, it makes twisted sense: if the team is wildly profitable regardless of on-field results, then why bother to invest in the product?

And there has always been this collective sense of masochism among the Cubs faithful. It was explained to me by a native Chicagoan, in the aftermath of the White Sox winning the World Series, that a lot of Cubs fans she knew had started out being Sox fans because the Sox were generally good, but had switched allegiances to the Cubs when they got older and more affluent and moved uptown. The chance to go to Wrigley for a game was an opportunity to channel their inner Rimbaud and revel in their angst while also trying to pick up chicks, as the atmosphere was something akin to a frat party booze cruise. Winning or losing didn’t seem to actually matter. In fact, winning could often be seen to be getting in the way. Were this Europe, of course, the Cubs would’ve been relegated decades ago and would be trawling about the lower leagues in irrelevance; instead, the Cubs are a multi-billion dollar bonanza.

In ripping the Cubs, of course, I must admit that I was really impressed by the reaction of the Cubs fans to their team reaching the World Series for the first time since 1945. There was a pervasive and remarkable sense of awe about it, an enormous sense of relief. Having been here in San Francisco for the end of a couple of enormous droughts – the Giants winning a World Series for the first time in 56 years, and the Warriors for the first time in 40 – that sense of relief was palpable and pervasive in both cases, a feeling that’s hard to describe and almost certainly impossible to replicate. It really does feel like a collective reward for a community having stuck it out for so long.

Long-suffering fans, of course, tend to develop appropriately good senses of humor about it all, and so you have to make it a point to mock them whenever possible. I once penned lyrics for a song called Cleveland mocking the Indians and set to the tune of Paul Simon’s Graceland. A particularly absurd tug-of-war developed, meanwhile, during the famous McGwire vs. Sosa home run chase, since we had some Cubs fans in the newsroom of The Santa Fe New Mexican, which is where I was working at the time, and we would rotate assignments nightly and you could rest assured that any time the Chicagoan was working the sports desk you’d have a giant photo of Sammy Sosa in the newspaper the next day – which actually got somewhat irritating and was soon widely ridiculed by the other staffers, one of whom was from St. Louis and always made a point of saying “the 9-time World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals” in the presence of the Cubs fans. Whenever I was on the sports desk, I’d try to get Ken Griffey Jr. in the paper – if you remember, he was in that home run chase for a large part of the season as well – and we finally reached the point of annoyance with these Cubs fans where the ultimate in newsroom chicanery came into play, which is to mock someone in-house by printing out a fake page: one with a huge picture of Swingin’ Sammy Sosa swingin’ for the fences with the headline SOSA: ‘I SPIT ON BABE RUTH’S GRAVE.’ If you scrolled through old copies from those days of mine at The New Mexican, you might find more than a few photo captions written in the form of haikus …

It’s somewhat unfortunate, of course, that one fan base’s collective lifelong angst is going to be relieved at the expense of another’s. The proper resolution for this series, it would seem, would be for the series to be tied 3-3 and have Game 7 called off because of the early onset of winter in Cleveland, making the baseball impossible due to heavy ice and snow settling in for months. If you think that scenario is utterly ridiculous, consider that Game 4 of the 1988 Stanley Cup finals between the Edmonton Oilers and Boston Bruins was never completed. Or maybe Game 7 will just never end. They’ll play for days on end, and Andrew Miller will throw 53 innings of scoreless relief and strike 155 batters out in the process. The late author Bill Kinsella (who was a friend to many of us in the scrabble community) has a marvelous novel entitled The Iowa Baseball Confederacy about a game involving the Chicago Cubs in the early 20th century that lasts for more than 2,000 innings. When you fail as frequently as these two teams, it just lends itself to letting the imagination run wild. Oh, and speaking again of fiction and the imagination, everyone should go back rewatch the film Major League, which has become a vital cog in the Cleveland faithful’s identity over time and which, interestingly, was given a 1-man tribute in 2014, on the 25th anniversary of its release, by David Ross, who will be catching in this series for … the Cubs … it just gets better and better ...

And, of course, the fans of whichever side wins will no longer be cute and charming and quaint. They’ll instantly become annoying and irritating and “the worst.” We kill our idols in sports, of course, and as soon as the downtrodden become powerful, they become the enemy. I’ve seen this first-hand here in San Francisco. I’ve seen this one a few times online: “Giants fans are THE WORST.” Yeah, right, like you gave two shits about Giants fans prior to 2010. Warriors hate is even more wonderful. One of my favorite tweeters routinely rounds up and retweets an assortment of scathing critiques of the Warriors and their fans, which is totally awesome, since you would have never heard that spoken during the 40 years prior to the Warriors winning an NBA title, during which time the franchise was something of a dumpster fire. Becoming a scourge because your team is successful is, on balance, a nice problem to have.

I’m going to root for the Indians, but not that fervently. In truth, I don’t really care that much who wins the World Series, and in a lot of ways, I’m not really sure that it matters. In the end, I think that baseball, as a whole, wins out in this particular World Series, because this series is very much a celebration of the loyalty of longstanding fandom. The role of the fans is very easy to downplay in the big business of sports, particularly as the revenue emphasis has shifted away from gate receipts and towards TV money, but if the fans didn’t exist, then ultimately neither would the games themselves. The players themselves have no connections whatsoever to Billy Goat curses or to Joe Table blowing the save in Game 7 against the Marlins. To the players, all of that stuff is ancient history, and it has nothing to do with them. Players come and go over time, but the fans are constant and, as such, the historical narrative of the franchise is a constant as well. This is gonna be fun. Sports are fun, they bring people together and are joyful and are best when not taken too seriously. The sun will, in fact, rise over Chicago or Cleveland the day after the World Series is over, and at that point, you can start building up the optimism again. There’s always next year, of course, and pitchers and catchers will be reporting for spring training sooner than you realize.

What a Glorious, Glorious Mess

We’re so screwed …

THE OFFICIAL Spouse of In Play Lose suggested that we go out for burgers and beer and catch the end of the Seattle-Arizona game at a local watering hole appropriately named The Phoenix. They were midway through the 4th Quarter at this point, and I hadn’t been watching the game, nor had I been the least bit bothered by this fact, since by all accounts online it wasn’t a particularly good game.

Which is putting it kindly. To be fair, the defenses were incredible for both teams, but …

When I had last looked at the stats online, with the game well into the 4th Quarter, the Seahawks had amassed a total of 3 first downs and 83 total yards. Their offense had run 28 plays the entire game up to that point, as opposed to Arizona’s 62. Yet they were only trailing 3-0 because they’d blocked a field goal and also stuffed Arizona on 4th down. Somehow, they were still in the game.

And if there were any team in the NFL I’d expect to find in a 3-0 game late in the 4th Quarter, it’d be the Seahawks, who have the best defense in the league and who have given up the fewest points in football in each of the past four seasons. They’ve invested heavily in their defense, which is loaded with some of the game’s best talent on that side of the ball: Earl Thomas, Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor, Michael Bennett (the last two of whom are hurt at the moment).

But the Seahawks also have an offense which is absolutely terrible. The Seahawks’ dilemma on the offensive side of the ball is, in my opinion, somewhat emblematic of the struggles I am seeing throughout the league as a whole – only in the Seahawks case, there is still enough overall talent in the squad to overcome most of the problems.

The Seahawks got to be one of the best organizations in football through scouting and player development. They beat the bushes looking for players and found gems all over the place. Other than Thomas, who was a #1 pick, most of their best players have been acquired later on in the draft. Being lower-level draft picks means they signed for cheap as rookies, meaning the Seahawks had money to spend on even more good players they found and developed. They won a Super Bowl through accruing an enormous stockpile of young, inexpensive talent on both sides of the ball. But young players who grow up to be stars ultimately have to be paid like stars. You can’t pay Russell Wilson like a 3rd round draft pick forever.

The Seahawks have chosen to invest heavily in their defense, and done so at the expense of their offense – and in particular, in their offensive line, which is a complete mess and can’t block anyone. It doesn’t do much good to invest $100m in Russell Wilson if you can’t keep him standing upright. Their offense line has been atrocious the past couple of seasons, and only seems to get worse. They could get away with it when they still had the now-retired Marshawn Lynch in the backfield, since Lynch was the best in the game at running behind his pads and being his own blocker, but now they have no running game to speak of and the normally fleet-footed Wilson’s been beat to shit as well and can barely move. The Seahawks one good drive in this entire game was ultimately stymied by holding penalties on consecutive plays – which, in the bigger picture, is probably an improvement over letting Wilson get clobbered two times more, but in the moment is utterly galling. I hate this team’s offensive line.

I mentioned in my last post, after watching that abysmal Broncos-Chargers game, and after watching some of that terrible Colts-Texans game last Sunday night, how I think the quality of play in the NFL isn’t very good – and the reason that is, I suspect, is entirely due to roster churn. In the NFL, when you have a 53-man roster and a salary cap to work with, you have to make choices how you’re going to spend your money. You have to pay your stars, of course, because they’re stars and you need them in order to succeed, but the trade-off is trying to pay less down the roster. The Seahawks, for an example, have an enormous number of rookies on their team this season, and they aren’t alone in that. Young players are cheap and available, but young players also make a lot more mistakes, and there is no opportunity to build any sort of continuity with all of this turnover. Football is, first and foremost, a game of attrition – at some point in time during a season, you’re likely going to need everyone on your roster other than your 3rd QB to make a contribution. This isn’t like other sports, where you can just bury young players deep on the bench for the whole season. Everyone on the squad needs to play, and often needs to play a lot, and more inexperienced players mean fewer cohesive units, which means more mistakes, which means the overall quality of play suffers across the league.

And where this is most evident, of course, is on special teams, which is usually composed entirely of said youngsters alongside a few return specialists and the obligatory flaky kickers. We saw some doozies today on special teams in the NFL. The 49ers gave away a possession against those pewter pirates from Tampa Bay with this rather remarkable return in a game seen by dozens at The Pants down in Santa Clara:

Meanwhile, the Jacksonville Jaguars – the league’s closest equivalent to the Sacramento Kings – did somehow contrive to let the Oakland Raiders punter, who fumbled a snap, run 30 yards on 4th-and-24:

Which brings us back the Arizona Cardinals, who are getting ready to punt with 4:45 left in the game right about the time I sit down with a Harp and order a burger at The Phoenix. The Seahawks offense has been inept, and basically all they need to do is play good defense and be sound on special teams and they’ll sneak out with a 3-0 win. Ugly? Sure, but they all count the same, in the end.

So, of course, the Cardinals get the punt blocked.

And what’s worse, the Seahawks don’t even have the block on. They were playing for the return. They block the punt because one of their guys just basically pushes an upback right into the Arizona punter while everyone else is running down field to set up a return. Had the block been on, this likely would’ve been a Seahawks TD. As it were, the lone other Seahawks guy in the general vicinity comes up with the ball at the Arizona 30 yard line. And this is inexcusable from Arizona. The blocked punt is one of the single worst plays to give up in football, because of the field position and momentum swings. You just can’t do that.

But it’s the Seahawk offense we’re talking about here, and they do nothing at all. But their kicker Steven Hauschka somehow wobbles a long field goal through the uprights to tie the score. Hauschka has generally been a good kicker in his career but he’s had some particular problems in games in Phoenix. Apparently, it’s not a great surface for kickers – it’s a weirdly unique surface that actually gets rolled out of the domed stadium after games. In any case, the score is now 3-3 and it’s off to OT, at which point the game gets preposterous.

The teams swap FGs on the first two possessions in OT, so it is 6-6 and now it is sudden death, but you really feel like Arizona is going to win the game because the Seahawks defense is gassed. They have been out on the field for almost 90 plays and over 46 minutes and the Cardinals march to the 1 yard line but the Seahawks manage to stuff the Cards there and then, after a delay of game, on come Arizona kicker Chandler Catanzaro to win it with a 24 yard FG. A gimme. A chip shot. A piece of cake …

Doink! Off the upright. No good.

Earlier in the game, the Seahawks had blocked a FG by having LB Bobby Wagner time the snap and jump over the center into the backfield, which is a legal play so long as you don’t use the center to gain any sort of leverage. Wagner did it again on this kick at the end of the game – you can see it really well on the slo-mo replay from field level and imagine how unnerving this is for a kicker, because the ball is being placed down and there’s an opponent right in your face! So Catanzaro gets spooked, shanks the kick and the score remains tied, and a tie in this situation is as good as a loss for Arizona, since they are 1½ games behind the Seahawks in the NFC West and desperately need a win. They’ve literally kicked this game away.

And the Seahawk offense then marches down the field in what is as much as garbage time, since this game still being tied is playing with house money and since the unit is still somewhat fresh, seeing how they’ve scarcely been on the field all night. They get down to the Arizona 10 with :10 on the clock and on comes Hauschka for a 28-yard chip shot of his own …

… and he misses wide left. Good snap, good hold, no pressure. Hauschka just spazzed.

What the actual hell is going on?

I don’t think you’ll see a weirder game in the NFL all season. This game ends 6:6, pretty much like it was meant to be. Ties don’t happen very often in the NFL – and usually when they do, it means that both teams probably deserved to lose.

Amazingly enough, I’ve actually been in attendance for an NFL game which ended in a tie, which happened in 1997 at New Jack City in Landover, a game which ended 7:7 between the Redskin Potatoes and the New York Giants which was most notable because Potatoes QB Gus Frerotte scored on a 1-yard run, ran out of the end zone in excitement, head-butted a wall and concussed himself and had to leave the game. I was actually saving mention of that game for a piece I’m working on about the worst sporting events I’ve ever seen, but tonight’s nonsense in Phoenix demanded being blogged about and, thus, that nugget of a night back in 1997 needed to be unearthed.

This was a truly terrible game tonight between two of the league’s supposedly better teams. As terrible as the NFL has been about, well, almost everything, it’s always been a league that does try to figure out ways to improve the game and make it better. They were the first to add replays, they’ve adopted rule changes when the balance tilts too much towards the offense or the defense, etc. But from what I’ve seen so far this season – which, admittedly, isn’t much – the overall quality play in the NFL seems really, really poor right now, which goes a lot father towards explaining why the ratings are down than any other excuses like elections or hurricanes or discontent with guys protesting the national anthem. The game just isn’t very good right now.

But for the last 5:00 of the 4th Quarter, and the 15:00 of OT, this was bad football at its finest. Inept offense, woful special teams, strange coaching decisions, penalties, along with a few moments of brilliant defense to remind you how the game is actually supposed to work. What a glorious, glorious mess this was. I’ve not enjoyed such an awful display in ages. It almost makes me want to watch more NFL … almost, but not quite.

That Was Some Week That Was

Baseball is stupid

LOTS of stuff to write about in the world of failure and despair from the past week, so let’s get right to it, because I have a short attention span and will probably forget what I wanted to say by the time I’m done with writing this entry. No time to waste. To the buzzard points!

• The Lose has been all-in on the Indians since the start of the postseason. I thought that Cleveland had the most complete team coming in the AL playoffs, even with some serious injuries to the starting pitching rotation. Their offense is underrated, they play good defense and run the bases better than any team in the sport, and their manager, Terry Francona, is one of the savviest bench operators in the business and seems to have a great feel for his club.
Francona didn’t wait long – the 5th inning of Game 1 – to unleash the ultimate playoff weapon on the Red Sox, which is super reliever Andrew Miller. Miller may in fact be the most dominating pitcher in the game at the moment, striking out 15 batters per every 9 innings pitched. Summoned early in Game 1 against the Bostons, Miller promptly wiped out the Red Sox threat and has been basically unhittable ever since, completely flummoxing first the Red Sox and now the Toronto Blue Jays, who were utterly hopeless against Miller in the first two games of the ALCS and who have taken to whining about the umpiring in response.
Francona feels free to use Miller at any point in the game that he senses danger. And you can do this in the postseason, of course, when games are scarce, wins are crucial, and also because there are extra days off which are built into the schedule. Even for someone like Miller, who seems to have a rubber arm, you still have to manage his innings during the daily grind of a major league season.
The idea of the postseason super reliever – a guy who is flexible and versatile and can fill all sorts of needs – is certainly nothing new. The Texas Rangers did this with Alexei Ogando, and the Giants of 2012 did the same thing with Tim Lincecum. Both of those guys were starters who, when free of the burdens of pacing themselves like a starter needs to normally do, could just rear back and fire whatever was in their repertoire. In the case of Ogando, he just didn’t really fit into any postseason starting rotation plans for the Rangers, whereas Lincecum had completely lost his mojo as a starter in San Francisco. The nature of playoff baseball, which often requires creativity on the part of the manager, turned a couple of spare parts into vital cogs.
Miller is like a number of brutally effective relievers in the game today in that he began his career as a not-terribly-effective starter. Casual baseball fans probably don’t know much about him, and they probably don’t know that he’s been in the majors for 10 years, played for six different teams, and his numbers as a starter were pretty awful. A similar case study would be Wade Davis of the Royals, who was terrible as a starter and who was basically a throw-in as part of the James Shields trade between K.C. and Tampa Bay, only to wind up being the ace reliever the Royals didn’t know they were getting, and almost certainly needed in order to break their 30-year World Series drought.
And that guys like Davis and Miller seemingly come out of nowhere speaks to the quandary you face in baseball today, in that you need premium relief pitching in the game today but you have no idea where it’s going to come from, no idea where to get it, no idea how to sustain it, and no idea how long it’s going to last. It’s an odd thing to hitch your fortunes to, but when it works out, you can be as successful as the 2010/2012/2014 Giants. And when it doesn’t, well, you can wind up looking like the Giants last Tuesday. Speaking of which …

• It was not a surprise to anyone here in San Francisco to see the Giants bullpen collapse in the 9th inning of Game 4 against the Cubs – in part because they’d collapsed in the 9th inning of Game 3 against the Cubs the night before, only to scramble their way to an extra inning victory. In the immediate aftermath of such a debacle, it was easy to pin the blame on the manager, Bruce Bochy, who cycled through a ridiculous number of pitchers in that 9th inning of Game 4 without success. But when your bullpen has blown the lead in a fifth of your games during the season, it’s not like you’re spoiled for choice. Bochy tried 100 different things this year and none of them worked.
The Giants tried, quite desperately in fact, to add some ace relief pitching at the deadline. It was sort of a strange trade deadline this year, in that two teams – the Yankees and the Mariners – were both dumping players at the deadline, seemingly out of the playoff chase, only to then resurrect themselves in the last couple months of the season and nearly claw their way back into it. The Giants are always active at the trade deadline, although often doing so in sneaky and subtle ways, and they wanted to get Andrew Miller from the Yankees as much as anybody else this year, but all reports indicate that they didn’t have the sorts of prospects in their system which the Yankees were seeking. They also didn’t have the sorts of prospects necessary in order to pry another target, Mark Melancon, away from the Pirates. I’ve read several articles in the past week about the Giants lamenting the fact that they’ve depleted their farm system.
Which is weird.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for 16 years, and for most of those 16 years, all that I’ve heard is how the Giants farm system doesn’t have any great prospects. Seriously, this has been the lament of the local baseball intelligentsia seemingly forever. And yet this is the same club that won a World Series in 2010 with an entirely homegrown starting rotation, and another in 2014 with homegrown talent at every position around the bases. For a team with a supposedly depleted farm system all those years, the Giants sure did have a lot of good players come out of that system.
This speaks to the folly of the infatuation with things like amateur drafts in sports, about which an entire cottage industry has sprung up, and about which I pay them very little attention. Sure, in hindsight it looks like it a smart idea for the Giants to be drafting Madison Bumgarner and Buster Posey with your first round picks in the draft, but name me the guys who were drafted before them. A lot of that good home cooking I was talking about was done by the Giants on the fly. On that 2014 team, you had a converted catcher, Pablo Sandoval, playing third base; you had a rookie second basemen, Joe Panik, rushed to the majors and playing because they’d had so many injuries at the position that the Giants were out of ideas; and you had a shortstop, Brandon Crawford, who’d been rushed to the majors from A ball in 2011 basically under the guise of “well, he can certainly field at a big league level, and hopefully we can teach him how to hit at the major league level” – a premise which is, well, completely nuts, yet five years later Crawford’s one of the Giants major run producers as well as being a Gold Glover. All three of those guys I just mentioned were rushed to the majors, but all three of them were, first and foremost, ready to play when they arrived. They were prepared, above all else.
And ultimately, there is a HUGE difference between “prospects” and “players,” and it’s very easy for people to confuse the two. Prospects are assets, of course, and they certainly come in handy when it’s time to make a deal, but far too many prospects fizzle out and amount to nothing. Trading for prospects doesn’t do a whole lot of good if you don’t have the sort of coaching and development staff in place to turn them into good players. Sound and systematic player development is the #1 reason why good teams stay good over time, even though the draft system is stacked against them.
Perhaps the best example of the difference between “prospects” and “players” that I can think of comes from the NCAA, where you would think that recruiting is everything and the only thing. But for decades, you never heard anyone say “oh yeah, that recruiting class at Nebraska is full of 5-star prospects. That Tom Osborne is an ace recruiter.” You never heard it because it never happened, and yet there was Nebraska winning all of the games and winning national titles and the like. For being a collection of mediocre talent, they sure did wind up being good players. Even in the arms race that is college sports, at some point you have to stop recruiting and actually start coaching.
But we love prospects, of course. We love their potential and the promise of a brighter future that they bring with them – potential which, in truth, is very unlikely to be fulfilled. The NBA is the most ridiculous when it comes to selling the power of potential. Hell, how else do you wind up with a con man like Sam Hinkie holding court in Philadelphia, selling the fact that the team will be really good five years and that’s why, as a 76ers fan, you should continue ponying up thousands of dollars for season tickets and be served a steady diet of the worst product in the history of the league in the interim. Oh sure, it might have been different in Philly if all of those tanking maneuvers had paid themselves off sooner in the form of the #1 pick in the draft, but pinning all of your hopes on a magic ping pong ball is only a 25% proposition if you’re the worst team in the NBA and considerably less than that if you’re not. Even sure-fire prospects can turn out not to be sure things. Those truly awful, and I mean truly awful, Astros teams of lore wound up repeatedly with the top pick in the MLB draft, and while they got a lot of those selections right, they also whiffed by not picking Kris Bryant, because everyone whiffs a few, in the end.
And in the end, the Giants didn’t have “prospects” to make a deal this summer, and wound up being saddled with a bullpen that led to an increase in sales of Excedrin and Jack Daniels among the Giants faithful who put up with watching this mess. Acquisition and development of talent is a weird dynamic in pro sports. You want lots of it, of course. You want so much that you can deal it away to someone else and hope that it flounders elsewhere – and let’s be honest, you do want it to flounder elsewhere, because this is a zero-sum game in which there are always winners and losers, and you never want to be the losers, no matter how much you “wish them well.” And you always have more draft picks than you have places available, so it’s worth it to go beating the bushes and seeing who might turn up. You’ll probably find a gem or two if you look closely enough.

• As much as I hate bullpens, it’s impossible not to speak of their (mis)management during this year’s postseason, the most galling of which came in Game 5 of the NLDS between the Dodgers and the Nationals. Reading the box scores from the games in this absurd series is reading the baseball equivalent of Ulysses or Infinite Jest: long, drawn out, periodically insufferable, generally engrossing, and completely strange.
The Dodgers have had to piece meal their way through the entire season, for which manager Dave Roberts deserves all kinds of credit. He’s made more bullpen moves this season than any manager in history, and he’s got a whole bunch of lefty-righty platoon guys on his bench who have splits wider than the Grand Canyon, so he’s been forced to micromanage every detail of the game. For some strange reason, the Nats decided to play the Dodgers’ game in the postseason series – and in Game 5, that strategy finally backfired and then imploded. Dusty Baker is a great clubhouse guy and a great players manager, but he’s not a manager known for his tactical acumen. He decided to try and play Strat-o-Matic against Dave Roberts in this series, which sort of makes sense, when you consider that the Dodgers collectively are a horrible hitting team against left-handed pitching, but doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t work with the team the Nationals have. The Dodgers may have a deep bench of flawed players who make for good specialists, but the Nats have a better starting lineup, and above all else, you need to have your best guys available when it matters. Amid the constant shuffling of relievers and pinch hitters and double switches, the Nats wound up putting themselves in a position in Game 5 where they were dependent upon essentially their worst players to get results. Don’t do that!
The 6-pitcher, 66-minute debacle that was the 7th inning of Game 5 was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The Nats start the inning up 1-0 and Max Scherzer is dealing. He’s thrown 98 pitches, but he’s a horse and he’s fine. The first pitch of the inning to Joc Pedersen is not a “bad” pitch, per se, but Pedersen puts a great swing on it and drives it out for a home run to tie the score – and Baker immediately springs out of the pen and pulls Scherzer after one pitch. Hey, hitters do that sometimes. They’re really good. They’re in the majors for a reason. If Scherzer was out of gas, then don’t put him out there to start the inning! If he’s OK, then leave him out there! He’s one of the best goddamn starters in all of baseball! You can live with 1-1 in the 7th inning. But instead we get six pitches, all of whom have been overworked in this endless and insufferable series, and none of them work out and the Dodgers score four runs. Then Baker compounds the disaster by twice making double switches, pulling Zimmerman and Rendon out of the game for no logical reason and essentially depending upon the last guys on his bench to somehow salvage the season when facing the Dodgers two best pitchers, Jansen and Kershaw.
And for godsake, stop bunting in the late innings when you’re losing! Outs are precious at that point! Don’t do that!
The Nats made a mess of this deciding game all-around. On three occasions, they had a runner on third with one out, failing to score in all three instances and seeing their hitter strike out all three times; they also had a runner thrown out at home by about 20 feet on a bad decision by the 3rd base coach. This is the third time in five years the Nats have been pushed out of the playoffs in the first round, all of which were galling failures and all of which involved bullpen malfeasance late in critical games. You wonder why it is that this team can’t win in the playoffs, given the talent on hand, but then again, if they keep losing when it matters, is the talent really all that good?
And it should be pointed out that in the four years since what was 2012’s best team in baseball decided to shut down their #1 starter before the postseason, Steven Strasburg has pitched a grand total of five innings of postseason baseball and the Nats haven’t won a darn thing. When Strasburg signed his enormous new contract this summer, I read several articles suggesting that, over the long run, the Nats had been proven correct in their decision to shut Strasburg down that season – which is completely, utterly WRONG with a capital WRONG. Strasburg didn’t pitch in the postseason this year because he was injured – a common theme in his career, unfortunately, but not necessarily something you could have predicted. He was fine in 2012, and the Nats needed him in 2012. Shutting him down as a precautionary measure made no sense and never will. You have no idea how things are going to go in the future. When you have the chance to win now, you have to take it.

• While watching the Dodgers-Nats game, I was also streaming the Thursday Night Football game as well, if only because I wanted to see how the San Diego Chargers would screw up. I don’t have a great interest in watching football, of course, but bad football? Oh yes, give me some more of that. As such, the Chargers are must-see viewing.
And “bad” is relative, of course. The Chargers are nowhere near the level of ineptitude of, say, the Cleveland Browns. But for years now, the Chargers have had this propensity for catastrophic collapses. This strong tradition began in the Norv Turner era, during which the Chargers often possessed large amounts of talent, particularly on the offense, but would periodically negate these advantages by shooting themselves in the collective feet. They’d go out against a good team and win some game 45-10 or something and look totally terrifying one week, and the next week, against some mid-level mucker of an opponent, the Chargers would commit five turnovers or 10 penalties or give up a kick return for a TD or do something else stupid and wind up throwing away the game – which would ultimately doom them, of course, because when you only have 16 games on the schedule, you just can’t afford to give games away. The coaching staff has turned over, but Mike McCoy’s had even less success in his time at the helm. The plight of the stumbling, bumbling, perpetually underachieving Chargers reached its absurdist end a week ago Sunday when they fumbled the snap on a potential game tying FG against the Las Vegas Oakland Raiders. And I have to admit that I was watching this game on Thursday night out of morbid curiosity, as I wanted to see how they would screw this game up.
They didn’t screw up, in the end, but not for lack of trying. The impotent Denver Broncos brought so little offense to the affair that even a defense as lax as the Chargers possess wasn’t particularly bothered. The Chargers jumped to a 19-3 lead – the only points allowed coming after they’d fumbled a punt on their own 10 yard line – then forced the Broncos to take a safety early in the 4th for a seemingly insurmountable 21-3 lead … aaand then they promptly fumbled away the kickoff. The Broncos offense rose from the dead and they rallied in the 4th, ultimately being done in themselves by a 3-play flurry of incompetence which featured a TD called back because of a penalty, a sack, and then a fumble. The Broncs got it to 21-13 and then, somewhat mystifyingly, the always humorous Chargers special teams stood by and watched as the onside kick rolled past and into a Bronco player’s arms, but the Broncos ran out of time.
After careful consideration of a good number of cities, I think I’ve come to conclude that San Diego should be the location of the future Hall of Lose. Nothing related to pro sports has ever gone well in San Diego. The one team that most definitely isn’t going anywhere – the Padres – are a perpetual loser and now, thanks to the moves and machinations of General Manager A.J. Preller, have also become something of a embarrassment. The city has lost two NBA teams in the past, and is likely to lose an NFL team in the foreseeable future – remember, the Chargers have been given an option by the league to explore a move to Los Angeles. With losing comes apathy, and let’s be honest here, San Diego is a pretty nice place, and you can spend your time and money a whole lot more wisely than pouring it down a rathole and watching a team lose. And San Diego will always be cursed by its proximity to Los Angeles – as much as they like to think of themselves as a unique individual market, no one else does, and you can be bad and boring in L.A. and still make far more money than if you’re bad and boring in San Diego.

• The Thursday Night Football game was a glorious mess, and the Colts-Texans game last night was also a glorious mess, and all of this bad football is good for The Lose business but doesn’t make for very good viewing. There has been quite a bit of rumbling about the fact that the precious TV ratings are way down in the NFL and trying to figure out why that is, and even though I’ve not watched all that much NFL so far this year, I do have one idea as to why the ratings are down: the product isn’t very good.

• The NHL season is only six days old, and teams have contrived to score on themselves not once, but twice. Be still my foolish heart.

• Eight more days until the NBA season opens and the Golden State Warriors go scorched earth on your ass. Consider yourself warned.

Closer, But No Cigar

OPENING Day, 1992, and I’ve got a ticket in what would become my favorite place to sit when attending games in the Giant Concrete Mushroom Fungus, which is in the third deck in the right field stands. Right field is where the action was in the Kingdome. The Mariners had embraced their position in baseball as that of an absurdist theatre piece, a franchise which had learned to laugh at itself and, as such, their response to a magazine declaring a seat at the top of the third deck in right field in the Kingdome to be the worst single seat in all of major league baseball was to paint that particular seat a different color and immediately bestow it something of a cult status. You wanted that seat. If you’re going to sit in the third deck in right field, and be 8½ miles from home plate, you may as well go all-in and be as far away as possible. The seat was in demand, and someone was usually sitting in it even during games the Mariners didn’t sell out – which were most of them, in fact. The Mariners could count on seven sellouts during the season, Opening Day and the six games when the Toronto Blue Jays were in town, for which 40,000 people from Vancouver would come down for the weekend and turn the Kingdome into a de facto home field for the Jays. Otherwise, you had plenty of choices, but I always made it a point to head for the third deck in right. Once you went to enough games, you got to know some of the other section dwellers pretty well, making for some shared experience, and when you sat in that part of the Kingdome, it only seemed like it was a long ways away, because the Kingdome was something of a launchpad, and left handed hitters would whack home runs off the façades of the second and third decks in right pretty frequently during the season. Hitting the ball into the upper decks in left field, however, was a much more impressive poke. That was rarified space for the likes of Mark McGwire. If someone hit one up there, you would have to tip your cap even if it was the opposition doing it. When you sat in the third deck in right, you had a far better chance of getting yourself a souvenir than you may have originally thought.

On Opening Day, we’ve got reasons for some optimism up in the third deck in right. The Mariners are coming off their best season ever and they have some really nice young talent. They’ve got Ken Griffey Jr. in center, coming off a year where he hit .327 and established himself as the best all-around player in the game, they’ve got one of the best hitters in the game at third in Edgar Martinez, they’ve got smooth and slick fielding Omar Vizquel at short. They’ve traded for the power bat of Kevin Mitchell and while the price was steep – three starting pitchers going to the Giants – the front office has earned some trust by winning a few trades in recent years, in particular fleecing the Yankees for starting right fielder Jay Buhner in exchange for Ken Phelps, and also getting an impressive haul of pitchers from the Montreal Expos in exchange for Mark Langston – one of whom is one the mound tonight, a gangly fireballer named Randy Johnson who has the potential to be pretty good.

But there is also cause for concern among the third deck dwellers in right. There is ill will between the fan base and ownership, whose response to the best season in history was to fire the manager, Jim Lefebvre, who made it happen and replace him with Bill Plummer, a move best explained in this conversation I had at the time with a couple of Seattle media members at the time:

“If they fire Lefebvre, who would want this job?”
“I guess Bill Plummer is the front runner.”
“Bill Plummer? That stiff who coached third base?”
“That would be him, yes.”
“If the Mariners hire him as a manager, if means they’re not serious about staying in Seattle. That’s a move to strip the team down and make them as unwatchable as possible.”

Indeed, the franchise’s future is mirky and uncertain. In August of the previous year, owner Jeff Smulyan had outlaid his plan to relocate the franchise to Tampa Bay in a meeting with his creditors at Security Pacific Bank in an effort to stave them off, only to then have an anonymous bank employee steal the notes from the meeting and fax them to the Seattle Times. One of the reasons going to Opening Day in 1992 seems like a good idea is that you’re not really sure there is going to be an Opening Day in 1993.

The Mariners are playing the Texas Rangers to open the 1992 season and the Rangers can’t pitch, which has been a theme with that franchise for the entirety of its existence, and the Mariners jump all over them. Randy Johnson is alternately wild and wonderful, but the offense is giving him plenty of runs and plenty of margin for error. It’s 8-3 in favor of the Mariners going to the top of the 8th inning and when you see such prowess on the first day of the season, you feel as if everything is going to be OK.

And then the bullpen took over.

The top of the 8th lasts for approximately 9 hours. Four Mariners relievers combine to yield 9 runs on 7 hits and 3 walks, and when the fourth of those relievers, the ordained ‘closer’ Mike Schooler, gives up a 3-run bomb to pinch hitter Gino Petralli to give Texas the lead, I start to get the sinking suspicion that everything isn’t going to be OK after all. Sure, it was only one game, but I just knew that this team was going to be bad.

The Rangers won that game 12-10, swept the opening series of the season and the Mariners were in a full-on tailspin for the rest of the year, going 64-98. And Petralli’s 3-run shot was just the tip of the iceberg, as far as woful bullpen performances would go that year: of the seven home runs Mike Schooler would give up in 1992, four of them would be grand slams, which tied the Major League record. He bore the brunt of the scorn and ridicule, but his cohorts among the arson squad which composed the Mariners bullpen were nearly as culpable, inexplicably squandering one lead after another as the season become more and more dire. Like most everything that I dislike about baseball, it can be attributed to having been subjected to a steady stream of Mariners games when I was younger, and since this blog serves as an outlet and an opportunity for me to vent about deep-seated frustrations, I thank all of my readers who, so far, have put up with this 1,200-word act of exorcism.

I hate bullpens.

And in particular, I hate super specialized bullpens of the present day in baseball. I hate endless pitching changes and hyper fixations on match-ups, and I cannot fathom why it is that the conventional wisdom has reached the point that every team in baseball is so dependent and reliant upon their bullpen, and in particular, upon their closer – a position of importance which, quite frankly, shouldn’t be that important. In the regular season, with the dependence upon bullpens, bullpen management makes for boring baseball games. In the postseason, it makes for yet another area of the game where managers can completely screw things up – which is precisely what happened in Tuesday night’s AL Wildcard game in Toronto, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

There have always been relief specialists in baseball, of course, but the game wide fixation on the vital importance of the closer truly started coming into focus in the late 1980s. Like most bad ideas in baseball, this one seemed like a good idea at the time and like most bad ideas in baseball, it came from Tony Larussa, who pared back and crafted a very unique and specific role for pitcher Dennis Eckersley – the role we’ve come to know now as a “closer.” Closers pitch one inning – the 9th – and usually only do so if their team is ahead. They may pitch the top of the 9th of a home game if the score is tied, but rarely enter a game with the score tied on the road. It’s a preposterously pigeon holed little niche, but all games are copy-cat games in nature, and if something seems to work, everyone else is going to do it. And since the A’s were winning games by the truckload in the late 1980s, and Dennis Eckersley had a 0.61 ERA, thus rendering all games seemingly over when you trailed the A’s going into the 9th, by god everyone needed a closer! (Never mind those pesky details like having three frontline ace starters and a deep, powerful lineup and all that.) Certainly, Eckersley was wholly impressive in his time, just as Mariano Rivera would come to be wholly impressive in his time, and this is not to dismiss what they’ve accomplished so much as to question the importance in the first place.

The now-accepted definition of the “save” in baseball first came to pass in 1960, long before this strange infatuation with the importance of the bullpen had developed. In 1960, teams entering the 9th inning of a game had a .947 winning percentage. In 2013, in the era of closers and hyper specialization of bullpens, teams entering the 9th inning had a .945 winning percentage. No discernible difference. Move it back an inning and juxtapose once more: teams entering the 8th inning with a lead in 1960 won .899 of the time. In 2013, they won .897 of the time. (Sorry, I don’t have any more recent stats saved up anywhere.) So, in essence, nothing has changed, save for the endless numbers of trips to the mound by the managers in the late innings. The end results are basically the same, but the ways in which those results are being achieved have changed – ways in which are ultimately migraine-inducing. As baseball has seen the shift towards 12- and 13-man pitching staffs, with all sorts of left-handed specialists and right-handed specialists and the like, all that it’s really done is invent new things to do badly.

And I hate bullpens. I hate them. Nothing is more infuriating to the baseball fan than the blown save. The blown save ruins your day. It ruins your night out at the ballpark. Almost every long losing streak nowadays involves multiple games your team should’ve won in which your bullpen blew the save or blew the lead. Bad bullpens drive you to drink, they drive you to drugs and drive you to seek therapy. And what’s weird about it all is that this has become baseball orthodoxy. As a manager, you must have 7-8 guys in the pen, and you have to use this particular guy in this particular situation. But why is that, exactly? Why are you, as a manager, putting so much faith in a group of players who, on a base level, aren’t very good?

Because the truth is that if relievers were any good as pitchers, they’d be starters. At some point in their careers, all relievers were deemed to be lousy as starters and moved into the pen. Starters need a varied repertoire of pitches, they need to know how to pace themselves and, most importantly, they need to actually pitch with their heads. The NL wildcard game between the Giants and the Mets was a master class, taught by Noah Syndegaard and Madison Bumgarner, in the art of pitching with the head. Syndegaard established the corners early, figured out where the fringes of the umpire’s strike zone were located, and continued working those edges while throwing 98 mph. Bumgarner, meanwhile, went all fastballs the first time through the lineup, pounding the Mets hitters in on the hands, and then he changed to a steady diet of wicked off-speed stuff. Mets hitters were guessing all night, were off balance all night, while the Giants hitters were swinging and missing at basically unhittable pitches that they knew they had to swing at. It was an elegant performance by both of them and it was incredible to watch.

Relievers don’t do any of that. Relievers are in the game for 10-15 pitches at most. They generally have one thing they do well – or one thing that they’re asked to do well, anyway. They’re 1-note players with simplified repertoires. And it’s not so much a case that relievers aren’t very good so much as they are fickle. One year, they’re missing bats and striking everyone out; the next, they’re expendable. The Seattle Mariners’ 2014 bullpen was among the best in baseball. The same group of guys, in 2015, were so bad that every single one of them had been traded or demoted to AAA by season’s end. At the heart of the success of the San Francisco Giants – winners of three World Series since 2010 – lies an incredible stroke of good fortune, which was to stumble upon a core of four relievers who were consistent and who ranged from good to great for six years, which is pretty much unheard of. Here in 2016, that fortune has run out, as the Giants bullpen blew 32 saves this season. 32 saves! That’s several fifths of whiskey’s worth of blown saves. My liver hates the Giants bullpen right now.

There is some actual theory behind the steady stream of relievers. The first time a hitter sees a pitcher during a game is, statistically, the at-bat in which they are likely to do the worst. This has been born out by the numbers of the game forever, as there is a large increase in batting average during the second and third at-bats against a starter. Hence the need for a starter to think through the game and pitch with the head. So instead of having a tiring starter go through the opposing lineup a third time, you start bringing in reinforcements, you bring in fresh arms and that works great.

Until it doesn’t.

And the reason that it doesn’t is that relievers aren’t very good. Basically all forms of bullpen management work until they don’t. You can run 5-6 guys out of your pen, all of whom throw 96 mph and try to just overwhelm the opposition, but eventually hitters start squaring those guys up when they figure out the pitcher’s delivery and figure out they’ve nothing else to throw. Everyone in baseball can hit 96 if it’s flat and they know it’s coming. And relievers get so specialized over time – fixating on doing one thing and one thing only – that they tend to be awful at other aspects of the game. A lot of them can’t field their position worth a damn, nor can they hold runners on worth a damn. If they don’t do that one thing and one thing only well, they’re as good as scrap.

Have I mentioned that I hate bullpens? Bullpens are fucking useless. Bullpens ruin lives. They ruin entire seasons and more. The greatest team you don’t remember were the 1997 Mariners, who set an MLB record for home runs and total bases and had four of the greatest players in the history of the game at their respective positions on the roster in Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Randy Johnson, and Alex Rodriguez (the one silver lining of that horrible season I mentioned at the start was the #1 pick in the draft, which was A-Rod). That team won only 90 games and was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, even with all that firepower and star power, because their bullpen blew 27 SAVES! Their bullpen was so horrid that, at the trade deadline, the Mariners traded three of their better prospects – outfielder Jose Cruz Jr., catcher Jason Varitek, and pitcher Derek Lowe – to the Blue Jays and Red Sox, respectively, for dead weight late inning relievers Mike Timlin and Heathcliff Slocumb, who weren’t any good and simply poured more gasoline on the fire. (The Varitek-and-Lowe-for-Slocumb trade is, without question, one of the worst trades in baseball in the past 25 years.) In the contemporary era, the worst offender have been the Detroit Tigers, who have as much as wasted a golden generation of great talent due to their complete inability to get anyone out consistently after the 6th inning.

And if you don’t have anyone in the bullpen who is any good, then why are you putting them in the game? This is the part I don’t get. If your bullpen is trash, running those guys out there who fail far too often feels turns the game into a Greek tragedy. I know there is more emphasis on things like pitch count and innings management with starters now, but I’m not entirely sure what that’s accomplishing. Guys don’t go out and through 150 pitches in a start any more, but guys are also generally in better all-around physical condition, thanks to advents in sport science over time. Now, I’m not saying you should burn out your starters and run them into the ground. I just don’t understand why there is this sense of dependence in baseball upon guys who, at a base level, aren’t necessarily very reliable. The deemphasis on the role of the starter seems to me to be less steeped in data and science more steeped into kowtowing to what’s become conventional wisdom which, quite honestly, should probably have never become conventional wisdom in the first place.

And this isn’t to say that every reliever totally sucks, of course. There have been masters of the craft, to be sure. Eckersley was brilliant at what he did. Mariano Rivera was brilliant at what he did, and if you have a guy who is that good at that one particular thing then by all means, use him. But Eckersleys and Riveras don’t grow on trees. If you don’t have a guy like that, then don’t play the game in the manner which requires having a guy like that. Do something else!

And to be more specific here, if you have a guy in your bullpen who actually knows what he is doing, then why on earth are you waiting until you have the lead in the 9th inning to put him in the game? This is the part of bullpen orthodoxy which has never made any sense to me. Every year, you’ll see some bad team at the bottom of the standings who’s got a closer on their roster who is, by most available metrics, a better pitcher than his compadres in the pen, but doesn’t seem to get in many games because his team is losing a lot. What good is that? That’s a waste of talent. Get him in the game! Put him in the game in the 5th, or the 6th, which is when your bad team is likely blowing a lot of leads. Will guys who aren’t very good blow the games later on? Maybe, but your best chance to win is by winning the inning that’s in front of you, a notion which seems obvious, doesn’t it? Am I missing something here?

Hyper specializing and minute bullpen management has just created more opportunities for managers to screw up – and managers already have far too much to do already. And this gets exacerbated in the playoffs, of course, when the situation dramatically changes – the series (and, thus, the season) is short, the stakes raised. This isn’t some July road trip to Kansas City and Minnesota. The situation, and the urgency with which you need to win postseason games, will often require that you do things differently. You can’t succumb to orthodoxy at that point.

The Orioles are going home early, in part, because for some nonsensical reason, they didn’t want to put Zach Britton in the game on Tuesday night in Toronto. Zach Britton is their closer, of course, and he pitched so well in that role this season – an ERA of 0.54 – to actually merit some discussion as a Cy Young candidate. (But only some discussion. No relieve pitcher should ever win the Cy Young, ever.) Orioles manager Buck Showalter never put him in the game – using six different relievers instead over the course of six innings – because it was never a “save” situation.

Wait … what? This is the ultimate “save” situation. You have to save the season! If he’s your best guy, Zach Britton needs to be in that baseball game on Tuesday night – and he certainly has to be in the game in the 11th inning when Ubaldo Jimenez gets in trouble. If he’s that good, he needs to be out there. I give the Indians manager Terry Francona props for not bowing to conventional thinking the other night in Game 1 against the Red Sox. His best guy in the pen is Andrew Miller, and Andrew Miller was in the game in the 5th and the 6th and into the 7th inning, when the game was teetering on possibly getting away from them. Waiting for later doesn’t do you any good.

But managers mess this stuff up horribly in the postseason. “Not a save situation,” was the reason Cards manager Mike Matheny gave when asked why his closer was sitting next to him in the dugout when his season ended in 2014. The Giants have been the benefactors many times over in recent years of managers making dumb decisions with their bullpens, most notably in this instance in 2012, which is one the most soul-killing moments I’ve ever seen in baseball, a moment from which the Cincinnati Reds franchise has never recovered.

And put yourself in Reds manager Dusty Baker’s shoes in that game. Think about the situation. It’s a do-or-die game, you’re already losing the game 2-0 with one out in the top of the 5th, the bases are loaded, your starter can’t get anyone out, and coming up to bat is Buster Posey, the MVP of the National League. This is as high a leverage situation as you’re ever going to find yourself in. You simply must get this guy out. The best guy in your pen is your closer, Aroldis Chapman, who throws about 104 mph, the ultimate strikeout pitcher at a moment when the strikeout would be key. Sure, you want to save him for the 9th inning, but what good is it to wait? Do you put Chapman in the game in the top of the 5th inning? Now, you may have reasons to keep him in the pen – you might trust your starter to induce a double play, you might have a guy in your pen who has been effective against Posey in the past (which, interestingly, Chapman is not), or whatnot – but if you’re managing the Reds, don’t you at least think about this possibility? It may seem like out-of-the-box thinking, but this is what’s required at this time of year.

Have I mentioned that I hate bullpens? We’re up to nearly 4,000 words already in this entry and like hell I’m stopping now. Another thing about bullpens I don’t understand: when your closer goes bad, why do you leave him out there? Look, some stiff reliever comes into the 6th and walks the first two guys, and the manager yanks him - and with good reason, because he’s bad. But a closer does that in the 9th, and you leave him out there even though he’s clearly not got his good stuff, because some days even the best guys don’t have their good stuff. Why is that? I never get that. I see so many of the blown saves occurring because for some reason, this one guy is supposed to finish the game for good or bad or whatnot. DON’T DO THAT!

I wonder where the game is going to evolve from here. The logical move, it would seem, would be for a club to shorten the bullpen and lengthen the bench, stacking it with more specialist hitters in order to counter specialist pitchers. Seeing Miller in the game in the 5th inning for the Tribe brings me back to an idea which seems much more useful to me, which is the idea of developing relief pitchers who aren’t specialized but who are actually good, and are thus able to enter the game at any time and in any sort of situation. The counter to that idea would be that you’d rely too much upon that guy and burn him out, so obviously, the solution would be to develop more than one of them, and if you look at really good relief pitchers from previous eras, that was exactly what they would do. It wasn’t uncommon for the Rich Gossage or Rollie Fingers types to be out there at any point in time that you needed them.

If nothing else, I wish for fewer pitching changes which kill the rhythm and the flow of the game. September baseball is particularly insufferable, when you have expanded rosters. (I believe the Giants had 19 men in their bullpen at one point this September. Good lord.) Why go through this pedantic exercise which, as the numbers show, ultimately isn’t making a significant difference in performance? Set up your bullpen however you want, and you’re still going to win games you lead in the 8th and the 9th inning the same amount of the time, so get away from reliance upon defined roles and specialists who are apt to flub. As spectacular as closers may seem to be, they’re ultimately best known for their spectacular failures. (I hadn’t watched that Gibson home run in years and it still gives me the creeps, but at least I found a video with Vin Scully doing the call, because Vin was the best and The Lose wishes him all the best in his retirement.)

And for god sake, don’t put Mike Schooler in the game, like, ever.