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| 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
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.
