Total Eclipse

Jordan Bell gives zero fucks what the Dallas Mavericks think

THIS reminder that Jordan Bell, who did this sick shit Monday night in Dallas and who will likely be the Warriors’ starting center next season, came to the Warriors through a draft day transaction in which the Warriors paid $3.5 million in cash to the Chicago Bulls in order to buy their way into the draft. The Bulls did this, according to team exec John Paxson, in order to “build equity” with the ownership, which is one of the dumbest excuses I’ve ever heard, and would be better stated as, “we needed cash in hand in order to buyout Dwyane Wade, whom we never should’ve signed to that bad free agent contract in 2016, since we knew he’d want out after we made that terrible Jimmy Butler trade.” I understand that the Bulls are somewhat unfamiliar with this whole rebuilding thing, but here’s a helpful little tip: when your team is short on talent, and you need players, you’re better off not selling off a high 2nd round pick but instead using it to, you know, draft a guy who knows how to play. I know, this is a novel concept here. The Bulls season got off to a flying start when two of their better players got into a fight at practice, with one of them breaking the face of the other. What was already looking like a 22-60 team, at best, is now looking more like a 12-70 team.

Yet somehow, the Bulls managed not to have the worst opening week in the NBA season, because no matter how low you set the bar, the Phoenix Suns will find a way to trip over it.
 
One of the things which makes the NBA so much more watchable than other sports leagues is the prevalence of “fun bad” teams, and the Suns generally fit the bill of fun bad, owing in part to having some young players with great potential, and owing in part to the fact that they don’t play any defense, which makes their games wildly unpredictable and, thus, wildly entertaining. But the Suns seem hell-bent on devolving from “fun bad” to just simply “bad.” They kicked it off last week by losing to Portland by 48 points at home in their season opener. They then managed to lose a home game to a bad Lakers team despite scoring 130 points, and got completely humiliated in a 42 point loss to the Clippers:

Head coach Earl Watson was promptly fired after this Clippers debacle, which doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense because the Suns are basically built to be bad this season. If you’re a prime candidate to go all-in on Tankapalooza, then who the hell cares if you’re losing all the time? This is the latest baffling managerial move during the Reign of Error that is Suns owner Robert Sarver, whose tenure has seen the Suns disintegrate from playing the hottest, sexiest basketball in NBA history into a heap of hot garbage rotting in the Arizona sun. The Suns tried like hell to tank last season, shutting down their best player, Eric Bledsoe, with six weeks left in the season and commencing a 13-game losing streak in order to try and accrue as many ping pong balls as possible. This didn’t work at all, of course, and they wound up saddled with the 4th pick in the draft, whom they used on Josh Jackson, whose acumen as a defensive specialist immediately gets called into question when his team is allowing 125.3 points a game, and who’d probably have a better touch on his jumper if he was shooting with a pair of catcher’s mitts. Somehow, GM Ryan McDonough got a contract extension last season despite assembling this slag pile of a roster, which contains a litany of draft busts and endless numbers of guys that make you think to yourself, “how is it possible that a guy picked in the Top 10 of the draft can be such a stiff?”

As for Bledsoe, who is still annoyed that he got shut down for no reason last spring when he was having a good season, he took to twitter in the aftermath of the Clippers debacle and said what everyone in Phoenix was already thinking. He then showed up at shootaround before Monday’s game with the Sacramento Kings, was promptly told to go home, and now McDonough is saying that Bledsoe likely will never play another game in a Phoenix uniform, which sounds more like parole to me than punishment. The Suns tried like hell to blow a seemingly unfuckupable game against a bad Kings team on Monday night, squandering a double-digit lead in the 4th Quarter before bravely staving off the come-from-ahead-loss and triumphing 117:115 in Jay Triano’s debut as head coach. That result may say more about how lousy the Kings are than anything about the state of the Suns, but after enduring about as bad a week as an NBA team can endure, even eking out a narrow win against a bad team constitutes something akin to progress.

Pause for some obligatory Giannis filth

Last season was fairly remarkable by NBA standards in that no head coaches were fired. It took all of a week this season for that change, and I suspect Watson won’t be the last. Coaches are hired to be fired. There are some legit reasons for firing coaches, of course, one of those being that they don’t know what they are doing (which you could argue was the case in Phoenix), but more often than not, they’re the fall guys taking a bullet for a front office that is incompetent and looking to cover their asses. Combine an ass-covering general manager with an impatient and irrational owner who just saw his team get embarrassed, and voilà, the coach is shown the door. And this rarely works, of course, because the new guy is immediately saddled with all of the same sorts of problems that plagued the old one. You can’t fire the players, of course – although they just tried to do that in Phoenix, and Bledsoe will now likely be traded for a bunch of stuff the Suns don’t want as they embrace being this bad on purpose instead of thanks to unintelligent design.

The head man gets all the attention as the tactician and the master strategist, but what’s true in all sports is that it’s the position guys, and the development guys, who are responsible for the true success. You should bear that in mind while watching the two best-run teams in baseball playing in the World Series. Having enormous resources like the Dodgers affords you the ability to pay big salaries, and also affords you a significant margin of error when overcoming mistakes (which is why this attempt to portray them as plucky underdogs, while well-meaning and well-written, is also wrong), but what’s really notable about the Dodgers is just how many reclamation projects they have on their roster. NLCS hero Justin Turner was a Mets throwaway. Leadoff hitter Chris Taylor was a mediocre Mariners middle infielder. Their success speaks to talent at the coaching development level: a change of a swing here, a new arm slot on a fastball there, a whole lot of patience and work, and now you’ve got guys who were wash-ups verging on winning the World Series. This was the way Andrew Freidman worked when he was the GM in Tampa, of course, but now he also has the biggest budget and, just as Moneyball morphed from quaint Oakland baseball counterculture into a championship philosophy when backed by big Boston dollars, Freidman’s emphasis on the organization in totality is paying huge dividends. As much as I hate the Dodgers, I have to admire what it is that they are doing.

And I was making fun of the Houston Astros right at the beginning of this blog, as they were simply the worst baseball team that I have ever seen, but GM Jeffrey Luhnow put the entire operation in place during those horrible years when the Astros were doing stupid stuff like this:

They turned those high draft picks into good talent, and coached up that good talent into being great. And as I’ve said before, that nitty-gitty focus on process and technique that goes into talent development isn’t sexy, takes patience, and it also takes a little bit of luck. There are times you land a player because other teams aren’t smart enough to land him. You have to work to minimize injuries, and even that might not prove successful. Hell, as much as I’ve made fun of The Process here at In Play Lose, I also have to have some sympathy, because it’s downright cruel that the 76ers have landed three stud players in Simmons, Fultz, and Embiid, and had all three of them suffer serious injuries in their rookie seasons.

Baseball is still a game where patience and process gets rewarded. Because of the disparities in market sizes and payrolls and such, it will always be assumed that big money franchises win because of big money when, in fact, big money franchises win when they invest that in guys who know the hell they are doing. Smarts still matter! The only sports where money trumps all else are auto racing and soccer, where the disparities are so vast between the haves and the have-nots that buying power can simply overwhelm brain power.

Although not always, as Leicester showed everyone a couple of seasons ago. But Leicester, of course, just fired another manager last week, and are on their third manager in three seasons. Everton also fired their manager, Ronald Koeman, in the past couple of days. Both Leicester and Everton are lesser clubs which actually dared to be ambitious, spending a whole lot of money in the past couple of years and, as it turns out, spending it rather badly, as Leicester can not find proper replacements for their championship-winners who get pinched, while Everton contrived to acquire three central midfielders, who all get in the way of one-another, and no actual center forward to receive their passes. Both clubs made quick managerial changes early in the season when they were teetering along the relegation line.

Given the huge hit you take when you get relegated, there are reasons for being cautious. Overambition can get you punished severely in soccer. I was just watching my beloved Good Guys from Norwich City squander away a winnable Carabao Cup match this afternoon against Arsenal, thanks to some poor Canaries finishing and a hint of dubious officiating (although Arsenal fan and World Scrabble Champion Austin Shin now owes me a New Orleans food truck lunch, since Arsenal failed to cover our agreed -1½ goal spread). For a club which has preached patience and process and continuity for years on end, Norwich have sure run through a lot of coaches lately: five in four years, in fact, a run which started when Norwich, after a good finish in the EPL in 2013, got ambitious and spent a lot of money that summer in the hopes of becoming a Top 10 club. They got it all disastrously wrong, got relegated, and have been bouncing up and down ever since. Sometimes that happens, of course, but if you get it wrong in Europe, you can pay for it for years or even decades.

People complain about how top-heavy European soccer is, and with good reason. Last year in the EPL, the team that finished 8th was closer to being relegated than they were to finishing 7th. But one of the reasons why this ultimately happens is that all of the rank-and-file, mediocre clubs in European leagues have no incentive to try to be good, and all of the incentive to worry about being bad. It’s basically profit taking. Who cares if you 10th or your 12th or your 14th? So long as you’re not in the bottom three, it’s all good and ownership is cashing those enormous cheques. There’s no incentive to win, nor to actually be good, just don’t be horrible. That attitude renders half the fixtures in any weekend unwatchable, as not very good teams play not very well and muddle their way to scoreless draws or 1:0 margins. The product, on the whole, is awful. There are no fun bad teams in the EPL.

As much as I’m opposed to drafts, and believe in full-on free market when it comes to the players’ being able to make all of the money, at least with a draft, there is a possibility that it will balance out somewhat over time owing to the distribution of talent. Just because your team is terrible now, it doesn’t mean they have to be terrible forever. Norwich will never win the EPL, but maybe the Phoenix Suns can get their shit together and draft well and win an NBA title five years from now.

Nah, probably not. The Phoenix Suns are garbage. If only Robert Sarver would fire himself. Until then, the sun is definitely not coming out.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me at inplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.

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.

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.

Bartolo Colón: Making Baseball Great

Just do it Bartolo!

BARTOLO Colón is very much the people’s champion in the game of Major League Baseball, owing to his age (42), longevity (20 big league seasons), and suboptimal athletic physique (he’s listed at 5’11” and 265). Colón has amassed 221 wins with eight different teams in his career, and he’s still an effective starter with the Mets, as he sports a 2.82 ERA and has only issued four walks in 38+ innings pitched. Young pitchers pitch with their arms, but veteran pitchers pitch with their heads: Colón has been a strike throwing machine for years, a guy who uses guile and savvy and experience on the hill to make up his stuff diminishing over time. He’s actually a better athlete than he looks, clearly doesn’t take himself too seriously (watching him race Reds speed demon Billy Hamilton to the bag on a routine grounder to first was gif-worthy all unto itself), and he’s always got his wits about him:

Bartolo Colón has never been much of a hitter, however. Pitchers generally aren’t, of course, but Colón has been particularly bad. He sports an .092 lifetime batting average and a lifetime OBP of .099. He’s been hit by pitches twice but has never drawn a walk in 249 career plate appearances, which is closing in on an all-time record. He had never even had an extra base hit until 2014, when he legged out the first of his two doubles for the Mets. His swing is, well, not exactly elegant:

But on Saturday night at Dog Food Park in San Diego, Bartolo Colón broke baseball, broke the internet and earned himself lifetime baseball folk hero status against one-time Padres ace James Shields, who probably should just quit baseball right now:

Colón became the oldest player in Major League Baseball history to hit first home run. The Mets announcer declared it to be “one of the greatest moments in the history of baseball,” and he may not be far off. Baseball social media exploded when this happened. On a day where you have NBA playoffs, NHL playoffs, the Kentucky Derby, a championship prize fight, and on-going series between Nats-Cubs (two best teams in baseball) and Yankees-Red Sox (two most self-important teams in baseball), the #1 sports story on twitter was a 42-year-old fat guy hitting a dinger.
Awesome. I love it. We need guys like Bartolo Colón to keep the game fun. We need those guys who somehow stick in the bigs even though nothing about how they look indicates that they should be. (Buzzards coach Scotty Brooks once quipped that Houston Rockets fans loved it whenever he was on the floor, since they got to see nine of the best athletes in the world.) We need our proverbial 12th men in the NBA. (Scott Hastings was one of the best of those, he being the inventor of “the trillion.”) We saw this sort of love for the everyman in the NHL All-Star Game earlier this year, when the fans voted veteran enforcer John Scott to the game and he wound up being the MVP, reminding everyone that even the worst player in the NHL (which Scott probably was) can still play the game at an incredibly high level. These guys provide a connection with the fans to a game or a sport that none of us could ever, ever do.
Colón’s next scheduled start is in Los Angeles this coming Thursday, when he will square off against Dodgers’ ace Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw is the best pitcher in the game, of course, and will probably do what he always does and mow down the first eight Mets he faces. But Kershaw is also known to have a good sense of humor, and the Dodgers have clearly been making an effort to fun up the clubhouse this season after last season’s dismal malaise, and I think it would be one of the funniest things ever – and also something of a tribute to a guy who has gone a long way to making the game fun over the past 20 years – if, having mowed down the first eight Mets like he will almost certainly do, Kershaw then faced up with vaunted power hitter Bartolo Colón in the batter’s box … and intentionally walked him.

• Speaking of intentional walks, Bryce Harper had better get used to them. Harper was walked 13 times in 19 ABs by the Cubs during a four-game series in Chicago. In Sunday’s 13-inning game, Harper managed to reach base seven times without an official plate appearance – six walks and hit by a pitch. He had no plate appearances in either of the last two games of the series. Cubs manager Joe Madden was adamant in not letting Harper beat him – and he was proven right by doing this, as the guy who hits behind Harper, Ryan Zimmermann, had a historically awful day on Sunday in stranding 14 runners on base. The Nats got swept by the Cubs, who exposed Washington’s obvious flaws. The Nats are winning with pitching, but apart from Harper, who is the best player in the NL if not the game, their lineup completely stinks.
That it was good strategy by Madden doesn’t make it attractive viewing. The on-field look is bad. Harper has said repeatedly that his goal is to make the game fun again, but it ain’t any fun at all for the fans to watch one of the game’s greatest talents being force fed a steady diet of four wide ones. I liken this to insufferable Hack-a-Shaq strategies employed in the NBA on bad foul shooters like Dwight Howard and DeAndre Jordan and Andre Drummond. I don’t want to watch Andre Drummond shoot 20 free throws, nor do I want to watch a circus act whereby DeAndre Jordan is sprinting down the court and running as far away from the ball as possible while being chased by some guy trying to foul him. That’s not basketball, in my opinion.
But it is good strategy, and what’s often the case in sports is that good strategy ends up looking awful, but is far too effective to ignore. The sport of hockey has never been the same since the neutral-zone trap was devised, a defensive tactic intended to make the center of the ice a claustrophobic mess and suffocate the opposition’s skill players. The chief architects of this strategy, the New Jersey Devils, have multiple Stanley Cup banners waving in the rafters of their Newark arena to show for it. In the Champions League final in a couple of weeks, the world will be subjected to the ways of Atletico Madrid, a club which plays some of the ugliest soccer on the planet: defensively stout, overly physical and, at times, overly cynical as well. It can be just horrible to watch, and yet it’s damningly effective – Atletico is in their second UCL final in three years, and won the title in La Liga in 2014. Atleti can’t hope to match either the flair and dynamism of Spanish rivals Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona, nor do they have the resources to creatively compete, so they don’t even bother to try. Atleti’s approach is one of heightened pragmatism, and it continues to yield results – which is all that matter, in the end. Intellectually, you can appreciate this, but it’s not particularly easy on the eye.
And on the field, when faced with this, you just have to figure out how to beat it. It’s all that you can do. Whining about it isn’t going to do any good. Harper’s going to keep being walked from hereon out until the Nats get even more guys on base before him and get some protection in the lineup behind him. The NBA big men I mentioned before turn into huge late-game liabilities, with Drummond being the biggest, as his .355 free throw percentage this past season was the worst in NBA history. He’s so bad at the line that the Detroit Pistons just can’t have him on the floor at the end of the game, which made trying to beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round of the playoffs all the more difficult to do. Eventually, if these sorts of somewhat cynical strategies become pervasive, leagues will try to legislate them out of existence – I think you can do it in the NBA by further clarifying the intentional foul rules, for example; in the NHL, meanwhile, they’ve been trying to unclutter the center of the ice for more than a decade now and I’m not sure it’s really worked. But in the meantime, make the damn free throws! And if you’re the Nats, hit! Hit, god damn it! Hit!

• With the sweep of the Nats, the Cubs have moved their record to 24-6. They’re already 7½ games ahead in the NL Central. Their run differential of +102 through 30 games is absolutely ridiculous, and at this pace, they’ll shatter all-time records in that department. Projection systems are already forecasting this team to win 105-110 games, with the all-time record of 116 wins not being out of the question.
And none of it matters.
Because this is the Cubs, mind you. This is a franchise which hasn’t won a World Series since 1908. And for the next couple of months, it will be a giant lovefest at Wrigley Field, as the Cubs win a ton of games and score runs for fun and run away from the field and leave the Pirates and the Cardinals and the rest of the National League in their rearview mirror, but at some point, that’s going to change and the pressure is going to start to build. It’s going to build into a 16-tonne gorilla riding on their backs come playoff time, because anything other than winning a World Series will be a failure.
And all it takes in baseball to be a failure is a bad week. The 116-win Mariners of 2001 had a bad week in the playoffs and they were gone. Say the Cubs roll into the playoffs and face the Mets and Noah Syndergaard thunderbolts his way to a 2-hit shutout of the Cubs in Game 1. Here comes the doubt creeping in. Or suppose the Cubs face the Giants, with a team deep in postseason experience, and Bumgarner does his superhero routine in Game 1, and Joe Madden gets outfoxed by Bruce Bochy in Game 2, which wouldn’t be the first time Bochy has stolen a game in the playoffs. What happens then? Cubs fans will be losing their minds, the media will be just killing them and the pressure will be palpable, tangible.
Playoff baseball is hard. It’s really, really hard. One of the better and more memorable baseball teams of my lifetime, the 1986 Mets, endured two of the most tense, intense, brutally difficult playoff series I’ve ever seen in order to win the championship – at no point against either the Astros or the Red Sox did you think, “oh yeah, Mets got this one, no problem.” There isn’t a Giants fan I know whose heart didn’t very nearly stop during loser-out Game 5 of the 2012 playoffs against the Reds. If it’s easy to win the championship, it’s the exception rather than the rule.
So the Cubs can run up the win totals this summer, but I suspect it’s going to get a whole lot more difficult for them, as the National League is loaded with big-time front-end starters and every team who fancies themselves a contender is going to want to beef up. Good. Let it be difficult. In the meantime, let the Cubs have their fun.

• I mentioned the Giants in that previous conversation, since they have plentiful offense and three studs in their rotation and I suspect they will win the NL West (plus, you know, even year bullshit and such), but they do need to get their shit together on the back end of the rotation. Last week, the Giants became the first team in major league history to yield two innings of 12 runs or more in less than a week. The second of said innings occurred last Thursday against the Rockies.
The 5th inning started with Colorado leading 4-3 and the Rockies were hitting Matt Cain pretty good. Cain is beloved here in San Francisco, a guy who toiled for years with so little run support that his name has become a verb around here, as in, “the Giants got mattcained today at Busch Stadium, losing 1:0 to the Cardinals.” Cain blossomed into first a playoff ace – a 0.00 ERA in the 2010 playoffs – and then tossed a perfect game and was their #1 starter in 2012. But he’s lost two whole seasons now due to arm trouble, and the rehab isn’t going so well. The Rockies started beating on him pretty good in the top of the 5th. From the game log:

Top 5th: Colorado
• Trevor Story homered (393 ft.) to deep left center. Colorado 5, San Francisco 3.
• Carlos González doubled to left.
• Nolan Arenado reached on Brandon Crawford’s throwing error, Carlos González to third, Nolan Arenado to first.
• Gerardo Parra singled to center, Carlos González scored, Nolan Arenado to second. Colorado 6, San Francisco 3.

OK, so this isn’t working. Clearly, the situation calls for ADDING MORE GASOLINE TO THE FIRE!

In comes journeyman long reliever and recent call-up from the AAA Sacramento River Rats River Cats Vin Mazzaro and POP! goes the top on this new bottle of bourbon I have in the liquor cabinet, since The Official Spouse of In Play Lose and I are definitely going to need a drink, if not two or maybe 10:

• Vin Mazzaro pitching
• Mark Reynolds reached on Kelby Tomlinson ‘s fielding error, Nolan Arenado to third, Gerardo Parra to second, Mark Reynolds to first
• Tony Wolters doubled to right, Nolan Arenado and Gerardo Parra scored, Mark Reynolds to third. Colorado 8, San Francisco 3.

This closes the book on Matt Cain, who is credited with giving up 8 runs. The next chapter is all Mazzaro.
 
• Chris Rusin grounded out, second to first.
• DJ LeMahieu singled to right, Mark Reynolds scored, Tony Wolters to third. Colorado 9, San Francisco 3.
• Charlie Blackmon doubled to left center, Tony Wolters scored, DJ LeMahieu to third. Colorado 10, San Francisco 3.
• Trevor Story singled to left, DJ LeMahieu scored, Charlie Blackmon to third. Colorado 11, San Francisco 3.
• Carlos González walked, Trevor Story to second.
• Nolan Arenado hit by pitch, Charlie Blackmon scored, Trevor Story to third, Carlos González to second. Colorado 12, San Francisco 3.
• Gerardo Parra singled to center, Trevor Story and Carlos González scored, Nolan Arenado to second. Colorado 14, San Francisco 3.
• Mark Reynolds doubled to deep left center, Nolan Arenado scored, Gerardo Parra to third. Colorado 15, San Francisco 3.

Make it stop!
 
• Derek Law pitching.
• Tony Wolters struck out swinging.
• Chris Rusin singled to right center, Gerardo Parra and Mark Reynolds scored. Colorado 17, San Francisco 3.
• DJ LeMahieu grounded out, second to first.
13 runs, 10 hits, 2 errors. Colorado 17, San Francisco 3.

Mazzaro gets credited with the last two runs allowed, so that’s 9 runs he allowed in total, 7 of them earned, in ⅓ of an inning. Suffice to say, it wasn’t Vin Mazzaro’s best outing. Amazingly, it wasn’t his worst. In fact, there have been five relievers who gave up nine runs in an outing over the last five years, and two are Vin Mazzaro. To the surprise of pretty much nobody, Mazzaro was promptly DFA’d the day after the game as the Giants went about hastily rearranging the deck chairs on what has been a Titanic-sized calamity of a bullpen. And you feel bad for the guy, since he’s obviously managed to cobble together something of a career as a AAAA reliever, getting gigs and bouncing up and down between the bigs and AAA but never really sticking. But when you’re this bad, at this point in a career, it’s hard to ever imagine you being given the ball again.
I was drunk by the time the Giants finished scoring four in the bottom of the 5th, at which point the entire inning had taken nearly an hour and I was halfway down the bottle of usquebae. Judging from the headline on the game recap, I take it the Giants lost:

• The pathetic Cincinnati Reds bullpen finally kept a clean sheet, to borrow a soccer term, allowing no runs in last Friday’s 5:1 Cincy win over Milwaukee. The Reds’ pen had given up a run in 23 consecutive games, which is a MLB record, and the Kerosene Kids in the pen wasted no time before starting a new streak, as the Reds gagged away a 6-2 lead the following day and then gave up seven runs in the top of the 10th in what turned into a 13:7 laugher in favor of the Brew Crew. It doesn’t take genius analysis to figure out why Cincy has now sunk into the NL Central basement.

• It isn’t going well in Minnesota, where the Twins are 8-23 and already 13½ games off the pace in the AL Central. The Twins smoke-and-mirrored their way to an 83-win season in 2015, a record propped up by a 20-7 month of May which masked the fact that they weren’t very good last year, either. Take out that month and you’re talking about a 71-95 record since the start of last season. Yeech.

• The 7-23 Atlanta Braves have hit 7 home runs in 1130 plate appearances, and are on pace to hit 38 homers as a team this year. They also have hit zero triples this season, are slugging .288 as a team, and have an OPS of .582 as a team. The Mariners’ post-DH record for offensive futility – 513 runs scored in 2010 – is most definitely in play. But according to the conglomerate who owns the Braves, everything is copacetic in Atlanta, as the owners are “pleased with what’s going on – other than on the field – at the Braves.” Uh-huh.

• And speaking of the Mariners, they’re still in first place in the AL West. Watch for locusts.

Talentless in Seattle

Your Seattle Mariners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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