Quick Misses

Graphic by @effinbirds. Always good to be back after a long break ...

THE LOSE is back, there are a few things on my mind and I have a short attention span, so quick, let’s get to the buzzard points!

• It’s hard to imagine someone having a worse start to their NFL career than Nathan Peterman has had. You may recall that, last year, he was thrust into the starting QB role midseason for the Buffalo Bills in a game against the San Diego Los Angeles Chargers and was woefully unprepared, throwing five interceptions in the first half. He then reprised the role of the woefully unprepared QB during the Bills’ playoff game with Jacksonville. (And simply typing the words ‘Bills’ and ‘playoff’ together made me do a double take.) Forced into the game in a key situation late in the 4th Quarter after Bills QB Tyrod Taylor was knocked out of the game, Peterman promptly threw a pick that essentially ended the Bills season. But Taylor’s off to Cleveland now and Bills head coach Sean McDermott entrusted Peterman at the helm to christen the new season against the Ravens, and with Peterman at the helm, he promptly ran the ship aground:

Putting up a 0.0 QB rating is impressively terrible. The last person to do that was in 2014, and it was Geno Smith for the Jets who, strangely enough, also managed to put up a perfect 158.3 QB rating later in the same season – which may be a sign of hope for Peterman and the Bills, because if Geno Smith can do that, then anyone surely can. (Though I suspect there was some some indifferent Miami defending going on that day.) Peterman’s day against the Ravens was so bad that, at one point, he threw an incompletion and his in-game QB rating actually increased. I have not encountered such absurd sports math since the time the time the Pacers were 103% favorites against the Sam Hinkie Sixers. It was 40-0 Ravens two minutes into the 3rd Quarter when Peterman was finally pulled by McDermott, who said afterwards that he would have to “look at the film” before determining the starting QB for this week’s game, as if there was going to be some sort of magical insight discerned besides that the QB is not very good. Bad QB play is nearly impossible to overcome in the NFL, and it’s the QB play which makes Buffalo one of the front runners for being the worst team in the league a season after a playoff berth which, in hindsight, feels almost like it was accident.

• There were two wholly predicable disasters in NFL Week 1, with the Bills being one of them and the second one taking place at Ford Field in Detroit, where the Lions got blasted by the Jets in an error-strewn mess of a game, after which the Jets players said they’d figured out the Lions play calls and hand signals before the game, which speaks to a lack of preparation and organization. Now, disorganization is nothing new to the Detroit Lions, of course, but they decided to take dysfunction to yet another level this past off-season when, after a few decent-but-unsuccessful seasons (which is about the best the Lions can hope for), they fired Jim Caldwell and promptly hired Matt Patricia who, when we last saw his handiwork, was the defensive coordinator for a New England Patriots team that allowed the Philadelphia Eagles to score eight times in the Super Bowl. Literally no one I know who follows the Pats was sad to seem him go, and no one I follows the Pats thinks he’s any good as a coach, as whatever defensive success has happened in New England in recent years owes to the fact that the best defense is a good offense – the Pats hold the ball a long time, gain a lot of yards and score a lot of points, so the defense doesn’t have to rise to any level above mediocrity in order for the team to be successful. And this is yet another one of those bizarre “coaching tree” hires where a team assumes that everyone on that other team that wins all the time must really know what they’re doing. Quick, name me a Bill Belichick protege who has ever had any success whatsoever outside of Foxboro. This was a classic dumb hire by a dumb organization, one that seems hell-bent on wasting the prime years of their franchise QB’s career. The Lions do not appear to have any idea what they are doing, which is something we have all come to count on over the years.

• We can no longer speak of the Cleveland Browns losing streak after their 21-21 tie with Pittsburgh. Now we must speak of their winless streak. In Cleveland, this constitutes progress.

• I generally don’t care about tennis, in part because, in my experience dealing with athletes over the years, tennis players and their people were probably some of the least pleasant and most difficult to deal with. That, and the game is a bore to watch. But disciples of The Lose have specifically requested that I comment on the incident which took place in the Women’s final of the U.S. Open, which I did not watch but have now done so, during which Serena Williams was penalized three times – first for “receiving coaching” from the stands, which was iffy and is a dumb rule, then a second time for smashing her racket, and then a third time late in the match for continuing to argue with the umpire about what happened when she was penalized the first time.
Oh boy.
Now, admittedly here, I don’t know much about tennis – but I do know that Serena is boss. She’s probably the best women’s tennis player of all time, given her résumé. Of this, I think I know. But I’ve found the backlash to this incident rather curious, since people seem to want to pick-and-choose in going about spinning whatever narrative suits them. There is sexism, there is racism, there is a double standard because so-and-so did such-and-such in a such-and-such a match and didn’t get penalized to the extent Serena did. Now, sexism and racism and double standards may well exist and probably do. That would not surprise me, but that’s not for me to say. But there is a basic principle here about officiating which applies to literally every sport and game on the planet, one which people would do well to remember.
Officiating is necessarily the subjective application by human beings of objective criteria. It is inherently interpretive, because human beings are doing it, and human beings are inherently affected by biases, whims, past histories, what time they woke up that morning and so on and so on and so on. And every single individual game or match is, ultimately, a self-contained affair. It is in the present and in the moment, and officials react in real time to what they see taking place before them. This is why comparing what Serena did in the U.S. Open Final to what “so-and-so did such-and-such in a such-and-such a match” is, ultimately, irrelevant. We heard this same sort of line time and again during the World Cup this summer: “that shouldn’t have been a penalty because it wasn’t in this other game,” and so forth. Well, officials aren’t watching that other game. They’re watching the game unfold in front of them right now and reacting to what they see.
Another good footballing analogy here is a serious foul where the official has to determine if it’s worthy of a yellow or a red card. Footballing fans everywhere have seen fouls where guys, or gals, should have been sent off and weren’t, or vice versa. It’s ultimately a judgment call by the official – but, in the case of something like the issuing of a yellow or a red, there is little doubt that the player is in some hot water.
And see, Serena got herself in hot water. I think the coaching thing is dumb. It’s dumb and pointless – but it is a rule. All three times that Serena was penalized, she was deemed, in my less-than-expert opinion, to be in violation of rules, no matter how dumb or inane those rules may be. And when you do that, you put yourself at the mercy of the officials. Whether or not they choose to enforce those codes is not up to you. By the letter of the law, the officials in that match acted in a manner afforded them in the rules of the game. If you get yourself into that situation it is, first and foremost, your own damn fault. This is a basic, universal principle of sport here: if you don’t want to have a foul called against you, the best way to go about doing so is not to commit a foul.
And think about this for a moment here: what if the officials in that match don’t penalize Serena? I can guarangoddamnty you that there would be a rumbling of “Serena gets all the breaks” in the aftermath, because we do that sort of thing all the time. It’s mostly sour grapes, of course, to whine about “stars get all the calls” and such. The rookie pitcher doesn’t get the pitch on the black, LeBron and Harden always travel, blah blah blah. Given the petty nature of this sort of thing, I can say with almost 100% certainty that there are women’s tennis players who are annoyed with what they perceive Serena can get away with, simply because she’s a star. And she is a star. She is arguably the biggest star the sport has ever known. She’s such a star that her losing this match in such a manner rendered her victorious opponent’s triumph irrelevant in the public consciousness. Quick, how many of you knew Naomi Osaka’s name without having to go and google it?
Now, in the greater context, if this incident does, in fact, point out issues pertaining to sexism and double standards in tennis officiating and those issues get addressed, some good may come of it. But on a fundamental level, I can’t really have much sympathy for Serena here. Ultimately, you don’t get to behave in a manner that runs afoul of the rules and then complain when those rules are enforced, even if you think there are shitty or dubious motives involved in that enforcement.

• The WNBA is badass, people. Watch that sport. Given the women’s basketball players in this country some love. They’re among the most dominant of athletes we’ll ever see in our lifetime. The U.S. women’s national team has won six straight Olympic golds and lost one game in the last 19 years. It is the pinnacle of performance in the sport of women’s basketball. The WNBA season which just concluded with the Seattle Storm winning their third championship was great, interest was up, and I appreciate that ESPN dedicated more attention and more resources to the league. Now we need to get more money in the league, so these players aren’t breaking their bodies playing year-round all across the globe in order to make a living. And I’m happy that in Seattle, they’ll get to close out the era (error?) of Key Arena with a championship. I’ve sent many, many, many, many, many days in that building, which is due to be razed here this fall as a new arena is going to be built.

• I’ve spent the whole goddamn summer drafting blog after blog after blog about how bored I am with the game of baseball. In short: Three True Outcomes baseball sucks. But I was so bored watching it that I also got bored writing about it, and there’d be a very good possibility that all of you would be bored reading about it.

• When you’re football team is condemned to the swirling, sucking eddy of despair that is life in the second division, you’d best find ways to have fun with it. Norwich are, well, not very good, owing mostly to the fact that, after not being very last year while nonetheless being blessed with several élite young talents, the club promptly sold those élite young talents for large numbers of quid – one of whom, James Maddison, has looked mighty fine so far for Leicester City – while maintaining the same roster full of mediocre players who were mediocre a season ago. It does bring me joy that Ipswich Town are garbage, and that the 1:1 with Norwich two weeks ago means those clowns still haven’t beaten us since 2009, but that’s about all to be happy about so far. Bleah, Div. 2 sucks. We do, however, have the Taco League going amongst myself, The Official Spouse of In Play Lose – a loyal Swansea City fan – and local Stoke City fan Mike “Words With” Frentz. Fan of the losingest team buys the tacos at the end of the season. If your team gets relegated, you buy twice. If your team gets promoted, you eat twice. Spouse is currently four points ahead of me after seven games, while Words With is two points in back of me. The first full-on, no-holds-barred, double-or-nothing grudge match occurs this Tuesday when Stoke host the Swans. If all our teams get relegated – not impossible, since all of our teams are varying degrees of trash – then we’ll, well, I don’t know what the others will be doing but I’ll be pouring some stiff ones:

 • It’s good to be back. Drop me a line at inplaylose@gmail.com if you have comments or suggestions. At some point we will do another mailbag edition here soon. And even though I’m still very down on American football, I’m sure there is some bad football happening somewhere on one of the many dozens of sports channels at the moment so I’d better get busy. (Go, Rutgers, go.) I already know there will be bad baseball today, since I’m going to the Giants game, although the Giants are undefeated in my trips to Phone Co. Park this season. We’ll see is the winning streak is sturdy enough to withstand the collective ennui and malaise.

Quick Misses

Who knew curling was so hazardous?

THE LOSE is not into curling, which is basically shuffleboard while being cold. If I’m going to play shuffleboard, it’s going to be on the deck of a cruise ship with a festive rum drink in my hand. I will admit, however, that I ventured into a curling club near to my home out of curiosity, and the club director game me the hard sell: “We have league night every Saturday, and we have a keg of beer.” Now that’s my kind of sales pitch right there! And I’ll give curling some props because it’s the only sport in the Winter Olympics that a normal person could actually do, which adds a niche sort of watchability of it, and it’s also one of the few sports where being great at it doesn’t require cheating death. That said, were I to curl, with my unsnug 2x4 of a right foot, I’d probably find a way to hurt myself, most likely doing something stupid like falling over the stones, which I’ve now seen two competitors do, the most recent being one of the Russian mixed doubles team.

Oh, wait, that’s the “Olympic Athletes from Russia” mixed doubles team. The fact that you have to use that phrase in these Olympics is one of the dumbest things ever and speaks to how ridiculous that supposed “ban” levied by the IOC against Russia really is – they threw the Russians out of the Olympics, and yet there is 160+ of their athletes competing. The argument put forth is that you shouldn’t punish the athletes who have never tested positive for any sort of performance enhancing drug, and I can see that reasoning, but the whole bloody point of throwing the Russians out of the Winter Olympics in the first place was to say that given there has been systematic doping and total lack of oversight and compliance, it’s impossible to assume that anyone involved in that structure isn’t cheating. They are assumed to be doing so since you’ve gone out of your way to cover it up!

But no, instead, the IOC decided to pussyfoot it in deference to political and monetary forces, which is their way when it comes to this sort of thing. As I’ve said previously, I’ll take the IOC seriously about their desire to supposedly stamp out all drug-related cheating from its midst when it goes back and expunges every single medal ever won by an East German, because everyone knows they were doping and there are plenty of records in the archives to prove it. This ridiculous grandstanding on the part of the IOC in the run up to the Olympics in more farcical and hollow than if they’d done nothing at all.

In the meantime, I should ask any number of cyncial figure skating fans among my circle of friends if, instead of using the term “SWR” to explain ridiculously marked up scores for skaters from that part of the world, they’re now using “SWOAR” instead.

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Oh for fucksake

It seems odd to me that the Winter Olympics in Korea have so far been hampered by, well, by winter. I mean, isn’t the whole point of the event that it takes place in snowy and icy conditions? But the cold and the snow and, worst of all, the winds have made a mess of some of the events on the slopes. They’ve already had to restructure the entire Alpine skiing program because of the high winds, rescheduling three races and so severely rejigging a fourth, the men’s Combined, that it pretty much took all of the fun and joy and drama out of the event – the idea being that the speed guys will go super duper fast in the Downhill portion, and then the technicians will try to reel them back in with the Slalom, but then they lopped a huge chunk of the Downhill off and made it pretty much impossible for any of speed dæmons to have any chance of winning the overall title. The high winds severely curtailed the slopestyle snowboarding event, which is one of the most truly beautiful and jawdroppingly awesome events in the entire Games, and when it came for the women’s event, it basically rendered the course unplayable, with competitors falling all over the place. It clearly wasn’t safe for the athletes to be out there and the event never should have happened. But it did happen, and the competitors are fuming over the fact that they felt they’d been put at risk – and rightfully so.

But I have to say that I’ve read a whole bunch of stuff from columnists and journalists decrying how little concern both the IOC and the FIS – skiing’s governing body – had for the women’s snowboarders in deciding to allow this competition to continue, and I find the amount of indignation over this somewhat curious, because this is the Olympics that we’re dealing with here, this is the IOC, and anyone who thinks the IOC truly gives two shits about the concerns of the athletes is fooling themselves. Why would you be surprised by how all of this came about? Athletes come and go, they have short careers and simply pass through history, whereas this nonsense concept of the “Olympic ideal” has been around since the ancient Greeks.

Ultimately, the reason why you should be concerned about the IOC’s handling of a state-supported doping case is not because state-supported dopers have an unfair competitive advantage, but it’s because taking those sorts of drugs can kill people! This is why the message put forth by the IOC in regards to the ‘OAR’ is so troublesome – oh, hey, you just go on ahead and keep on doping over there, and win some medals and such, and if some kid drops dead in one of your training centers pumped full of this junk, well hey, at least they’re out of the public eye when it happens. And that sort of catastrophic event, unfortunately, is what it takes to get someone’s attention. It didn’t occur to anyone that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t be designing luge tracks where sliders can go 90 mph until a Georgian crashed off the course at Whistler and 2010 and was killed – but by that point, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it. So a few gals on snowboards got blown around in the wind the other day. Well, you know, no one died, so ultimately it wasn’t so bad, now was it? On with the show! The show must go on!

The Olympics are, first and foremost, a television program. We’d all like to think it’s an athletic competition above all, but it’s not. It’s a TV program. Networks rule the roost, come hell or high water, and the sports have to fit the proper programming windows around the world, which is why you have figure skaters doing routines at 9:30 in the morning and why biathletes are shooting in the dark. Athletes are entertainers, first and foremost, and what history has shown, time and again, is that behind every entertainer is some shyster or scofflaw who benefits far more from the entertainer’s labor than they themselves do.

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The Suns with an interesting variation on moving without the ball

One of my Christmas presents from The Official Spouse of In Play Lose is a pair of tickets to see the Sea Dubs – the Santa Cruz Warriors, the D-League G-League affiliate of the Golden State Warriors. It’ll be a good excuse to get out of town for the weekend and head down to the Monterey Peninsula, and the Sea Dubs are good fun and provide good bang for their buck. And the Sea Dubs’ opponents in this game we’ll be attending in March are the Northern Arizona Suns who, at the moment, quite possibly have more NBA-caliber players on their roster than their parent club in Phoenix. But don’t just take my word for it:

“I’m going to be the first to say it. They’ve got to send the whole Phoenix team to the G League for that. I’m sorry. Except Devin Booker and T.J. Warren. The rest of them have got to go to the G League.”
– Denver Nuggets guard Will Barton

The Phoenix Suns have reached a new level of ineptitude, a depth at which they are no longer simply incompetent but are, in fact, contemptible. Watching the Phoenix Suns will make you hate the game of basketball. A week ago, in the first game of the ESPN doubleheader, Cleveland and Minnesota played one of more exhilarating games we’ve seen in the NBA all season, with the Cavs winning 130:128 in OT on a buzzer-beater by LeBron in a game where the two teams combined to sink 40 3-pointers, which is an NBA record – and whatever good vibes you may have had from seeing the game played at a spectacular level were almost immediately erased in the nightcap, as the Suns proceeded to score all of 9 points in the 1st Quarter, allow the Kawhi-less Spurs to score 41 points in the 2nd Quarter, and trail by as many as 53 before ultimately losing by 48 … at home, no less. Only a last-second alley oop dunk by the Suns prevented them from joining this dubious list of teams who got beat by 50, and it was the worst home loss in franchise history, besting (worsting?) their 47-point loss to Portland in this year’s season opener. It was a hideous and hateful performance by the Suns against San Antonio, one that almost seemed designed to kill your love of the game.

Throw in this past Monday’s 129:83 drubbing here in the Bay Area by the Warriors, and the Suns have now become the first team in 49 years to lose three games by 46 points or more in one season – a laughable result, as the Warriors thought so little of the Suns that Steve Kerr and his coaching staff essentially took the day off, letting the players run the huddles during the timeouts as well as the morning shootaround and film session. And it wasn’t like the Warriors were racing up and down, trying to run up the score. If anything, they went easy on the Suns. The pace wasn’t terribly fast, and the Warriors as much as treated the game like preseason, working on their sets and progressions. Hell, they could’ve won by 60 if they’d wanted to, since the Suns could scarcely string two passes together, routinely had their pockets picked for easy steals, missed open shots, missed contested shots, took bad shots, took even more bad shots and missed all of those as well, messed up their defensive rotations, and played with all the verve of the residents of a morgue. Some people chimed in afterwards and said that the Warriors essentially autopiloting this game was a sign of disrespect to their opponent. Hell yes, it was a sign of disrespect, but the Phoenix Suns disrespect the game of basketball pretty much every time they step on the floor.

The Suns were missing guard Devin Booker in both of these recent 40-point shellackings. Booker is a 24-point a game scorer who is out injured at the moment, and the Suns having 18 wins is a testament to just how good Booker is, since Booker has to basically do everything on his own on the offensive end, seeing as how he has no one competent enough to pass him the ball, nor competent enough to turn his passes into assists. The Suns have the worst defense in the NBA, the second-worst offense, the worst point differential, and the most losses. If anything, their record of 18-40 is an overperformance on their part. To their credit, they get to the foul line more than almost every team in the league, but they also foul more, and thus give up more free throws, than almost every team in the league, which means their games are not only displays of complete incompetence, but are also maddeningly ponderous with all the stops and starts.

The Suns roster is an amalgamation of bad ideas and failed philosophies. They’ve wasted three Top-10 picks on big guys who can’t play, valuing raw upside potential while having no apparatus in place to help those guys actually develop into sound NBA players. Someone asked me after this past draft which of the top prospects I thought would be a bust and I immediately said Suns forward Josh Jackson, who put up a -43 while shooting 4-18 against the Dubs on Monday. I said this not because I think he sucks, but because the Suns are bound to mismanage and misuse him. Their two best players, Booker and T.J. Warren, were taken more towards the middle of the 1st Round in the draft, when the light when on and it suddenly occurred to someone in the Phoenix front office that you should take the best player available. What? Draft a guy that can play? What a concept!

I hate this team. I absolutely hate this team. Whenever I watch this team play, I’m amazed that anyone involved with its construction and operation still has a job. In fact, GM Ryan McDonough actually got a contract extension, though it’s not quite clear what he’s done to deserve it other than have the good fortune of having Booker fall into his lap in the draft. The Suns fired coach Earl Watson three games into the season – two of which were 40-point losses – but interim appointee Jay Triano has done little to distinguish himself apart from drawing up one groovy inbounds play which took advantage of a loophole in the rules no one ever thought of. (There is no goaltending on an inbounds pass because it’s a pass and not a shot.) The Robert Sarver reign of error in Phoenix is reaching pre-Joe Lacob Warriors era levels of despair, having taken over what was a franchise known throughout its history for playing high-level, exciting, sometimes revolutionary basketball and driven it straight into the ground.

NBA Tankamania is about to take off after the All-Star break, a full-on race to the bottom with eight teams having 18-19 wins and 37-40 losses among them – and the Knicks seem hell-bent on making it a 9-team race, having given up on the season after the Porzingis injury. I’d put the Suns as favorites to reach the bottom and I wouldn’t even call it tanking, because the Suns are so bad that the operation’s best efforts wouldn’t look much different than its worst. People in the baseball world have gone back and attempted to portray the Houston Astros as having tanked, forgetting that they were truly that bad to begin with, a 110-loss team which also possessed the worst farm system in baseball and had literally become unwatchable, putting up 0.0 ratings on their local TV broadcasts. Much like those Astros, the Suns don’t have to make any special efforts this year to go about being the worst franchise in the NBA. They’re already there.

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It can be construed as a sign of growth and development in the game of soccer that the U.S. Soccer Federation’s presidential election drew the interest that it did. A lot of people cared about the result. Soccer’s growth in this country is unquestioned. It’s been shown in surveys to have reached the level of being the 4th-most popular sport in the country for a reason. More people are playing the game, and more are watching the game, than ever before – and, given the catastrophic collapse of USA FC last fall, more people are also angrier than ever before. Sports are ultimately a results-oriented business, and it was that disastrous result which finally caused the extremely insular USSF to reach a day of reckoning about what it’s doing.

So there was high palace intigue at the USSF’s meetings in Orlando last weekend, and the final results left quite a few people unsatisfied, and with good reason. After all, if an organization is serious about reform, and then elects the sitting VP to the top position, the optics wind up looking pretty bad. In the end, Carlos Cordeiro proved to have some pretty savvy political chops, having dared to announce his candidacy for the position before outgoing president Sunil Gulati had decided whether or not he was going to seek reelection, which rankled many of soccer’s top brass but also earned him some cred with those within the organization who wanted change. This allowed him to build enough of a base to defeat the establishment’s preferred candidate, Cathy Carter, and then pivot to the rank-and-file and urge them not to go for one of the anti-establishment candidates, most of whom were former players and none of whom possess any proven business sense. It was well played by Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs exec who admits he doesn’t understand as much about soccer as he would like.

What Cordeiro will actually do remains to be seen. He said all of the right things and made all of the right promises – most importantly that he intends to be more inclusive and consensus-building when it comes to decision making. Cordeiro says he intends to hire a GM for both the men’s and women’s programs, which is a start, but he comes off as something of a technocrat whose solution to most problems is going to be to form a committee. This approach makes me nervous, given that committees tend to set out to design horses and wind up designing camels, but given the previous approach, in which an autocrat sees fit to do something as dumb as name Jürgen Klinsmann the technical director, I suppose we can hardly do worse. And as I said before, the USSF has been an overly insular organization, one in which assorted entities have entrenched themselves – and sometimes also enriched themselves – and one of the problems with an insular organization is getting those sorts of people to give up what they have for the greater good. Far too many decisions wind up being made for the benefit of far too few. Cordeiro has stated one of the prime objectives is solidifying the joint U.S./Canada/Mexico bit for the 2026 World Cup – which I’m all in favor of, because given how truly terrible we’ve been as a nation when it comes to developing talent, the automatic bid which comes with being host may be the only way that we can qualify.

That was a joke. Sort of.

The fact of the matter is that the talent development wing of U.S. soccer is broken. It’s too expensive for kids to play, it’s too expensive and time-consuming for adults who want to coach. The entire apparatus is exclusionary in nature, far often becoming a question of one’s ability to pay rather than one’s ability to play. That all needs to change. And this doesn’t just speak to our presently inept men’s national team, either. On the women’s side, one of the great effects of Title IX was that it gifted U.S. soccer an enormous talent advantage over the rest of the world, but as big European clubs continue to see a value in investing resources in the women’s game – which they are starting to do, and will continue to do – that edge is going to get smaller and smaller.

But it’s hard to get the sorts of entrenched self-interests in an organization such as the U.S. Soccer Federation to see the forest through the trees. Everyone involved in this election had skin in the game and potential conflicts were everywhere. What’s clear is that final kingmakers in this election were the Athletes Council, who held more than 20% of the vote and who made sure to vote in a block, thus giving themselves the power to swing the election. What’s not clear is whether or not they acted out of greater interest or out of self-interest. Given the propensity for everyone in the game to squabble over salaries and bonuses and whatnot, the former cannot necessarily be assumed. That’s not to be accusatory, either. I’m just inherently skeptical of the entire process.

The big loser in all of this was MLS, who has been painted as one of the bad guys and an impediment to reform. There’s some good reason for this, of course – it’s an entity which still hasn’t figured out its place in the footballing world, and seems far too self-important for its own good. But the frustration with MLS is also misguided, in that the goal of the league is, first and foremost, to be a good league. That MLS and it’s marketing wing, SUM, have wound up heavily funding and financing the USSF can run counter to that goal. Sure, MLS wants to have good American players coming through the pipeline, but first and foremost, they need a product on the field, and they’re going to use guys from anywhere on the globe they can find in order to make that possible, nationality be damned, which is as it should be. This sort of thing is not new, mind you – people in England bitch all the time about there not being enough English players in the EPL – and the point is that you cannot look to MLS to be a vanguard for the American game as a whole. It should reflect the American game, but not define it.

I don’t know where any of this is going, but as I’ve said previously, I don’t care that the federation is now profitable. Not having money was a legit excuse for not putting out a good product in the 1980s, but here we are missing World Cups in 2018, and that excuse no longer holds. One of the themes we touch on repeatedly here at In Play Lose is that the people who create the problems are very rarely the ones capable of finding the solutions. My hope is that U.S. Soccer will remain mindful of the need for serious reforms and reach outside of itself in search of new ideas. But in the past, everyone involved in U.S. Soccer thought they were doing good things instead of actually going about doing them. It’s hard to reach out when you’re too busy patting yourself on the back.

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 atinplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.

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.

Lose Thyself

How did you fuck this up? YOU’RE STANDING RIGHT THERE!

“I wish I loved anything as much as the Masters loves itself.”
– Scott Pianowski, Yahoo Sports

NOW that the NCAA Tournament has concluded in decidedly unsatisfying action, CBS can pivot and suck up to the bastion of smugness and self-importance that is The Masters. There are no sacred cows here at In Play Lose, and one which deserves to be taken down more than any other is golf. Golf is garbage. Golf is a good walk spoiled and a waste of open space. Golf is the only sport where I actively enjoy watching guys screw up and look forward to it happening. When Jordan Spieth choked away the Masters in 2016, it was the first thing I’ve found about golf worth caring about in decades.

That it’s such a stupid game takes away from some things about it that are laudable. For instance, I love the idea of the cut. If you suck the first two rounds, they throw your ass out of the tournament and you get no money. Good. You played terrible, you deserve nothing. Likewise, if you’re not in the Top 125 for the season, they throw your ass off the PGA Tour and you have to go to Q School to get back. I appreciate that players police themselves and that they report their own infractions. All of that is good stuff. But then you have something as dumb as what happened on the LPGA Tour last weekend, when Lexi Thompson, who was well on her way to winning the tournament, was suddenly assessed a four-stroke penalty in the middle of the final round on account of a rules violation from the previous day – a violation which no one involved in the tournament had noticed and was imposed after it had been pointed out by a television viewer in an email, and you see just how stupid the rules of this game actually are. That the rules of a game can permit a viewer at home to directly affect the outcome like this is the single-most most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard of in sports.

When you are a spectator, you are there to watch and nothing more. You should never have a direct hand in the outcome. Players make mistakes, like Lexi Thompson did in that case, and officials make mistakes as well, some of which seem outrageous – in the NCAA Final, it seems impossible that the zeeb standing right there missed North Carolina’s Kennedy Meeks being out of bounds with :50 left in the game and the Tar Heels clinging to a 1-point lead. (We’ll get into that mess in a minute). But missed calls are a part of the game, ultimately, and we shouldn’t be altering results from afar – afar being, in Lexi Thompson’s case, as far away as someone’s livingroom.

• Speaking of undo outside influence on sports, one of the most awkward and preposterous of scenarios is going to come into play here in the next few weeks when the media members vote on the All-NBA teams. This is because the NBA, in their knee-jerk reaction to Durant going to the Warriors, and the superstar-driven Players Union, in their desire to get paid above all else, created one of the worst systems imaginable for determining compensation, which is to create a tier of players eligible for enormous extensions from their existing clubs based upon being named to All-NBA teams.
The consequences of this are fairly enormous. For a player, it could mean up upwards of a $70,000,000 difference in the value of their future contract. For the team, meanwhile, it also can create an enormous dilemma: do you really want to invest that much for that long in one player? One of the reasons why the Sacramento Kings were desperate to unload Boogie Cousins was the fact that they couldn’t justify to themselves doling out a $200,000,000 contract to a guy who is a complete head case and a complete pain in the ass. There are two players in particular – Paul George in Indiana and Gordon Hayward in Utah – who have had tremendous seasons, who are in the discussion among the media set for receiving votes for all-NBA, and whose future contract situations for their employers are likely going to be determined by whether or not they get enough votes from reporters and broadcasters to be named all-NBA.
And if I’m part of the NBA media – a lot of whom I follow online, and a lot of whom take this seriously – I want absolutely no part of this vote. It’s not up to me to make the news. It shouldn’t be up to me to have a hand in determining the fates of the Pacers and the Jazz and the Kings and anyone else. But the NBA has proven remarkably good over the years at creating its own absurdity. Whatever CBA the two sides come to ratify every few years is always full of loopholes and absurdities and unintended consequences. You can understand why the image-conscious set in the league’s New York offices get so upset when LeBron and Steph and the sort are sitting out games, however – their brilliance on the floor does well to mask all of the lunacy that takes place off of it.

• The Lose is down with women’s sports, and has always been down with women’s sports, and one of the things which I find curious is the fact that we here in the U.S. laud and praise and fawn all over our women’s national soccer team, who are great but who also act like a bunch of drama queens a lot of the time, and yet we pay pretty much no attention at all our women’s national basketball team, who are arguably one of the greatest teams in the history of sports. The U.S. women have won six Olympic gold medals in a row and have lost one game in that past 18 years. They’re so dominant that whomever they pulverize in the Olympics or the World Championships are basically just happy to be there. We’re a nation that loves winners and loves excellence, but the U.S. women’s basketball team may, in fact, be too good for their own good, because if all someone ever does is win, there really is no drama and no competition and, thus, there is no reason to watch it after a while.
Thus you have the dilemma of the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team, who only seem to make national headlines now when they lose – which doesn’t happen often it at all. The Huskies had their 111-game winning streak snapped last Friday in Dallas, losing 64:62 in OT to Mississippi State and it was national news, because it had been so long since UConn had lost a game that losing no longer seemed possible.
And in an instant, the sport of women’s college basketball became interesting.
The two teams played a year ago in the Sweet 16, and UConn won by 60 points. Mississippi State were listed as a 21-point underdog for the game last Friday, were +2000 straight up in Las Vegas, and a Huskies win was considered such a given that you could still get +400 betting on the Bulldogs straight up at halftime of the game, even though Mississippi State had an 8-point lead. And this was for a national semifinal, mind you. Mississippi State were a #2 seed in their regional, meaning they were considered to be one of the eight best teams in the country going into the tournament. Any #1 vs. #2 matchup on the men’s side would likely produce one of the tourney’s best games. On the women’s side, when the #1 is UConn, it’s just another blowout.
Being one who is a purveyor of everything that is done badly is only truly possible if you appreciate excellence first, and Connecticut certainly are that. But there is a sense of self-perpetuation about the Huskies at this point – if you’re the female equivalent of a 5-star recruit, there is nowhere else you’d ever even think to go to school, and unlike on the men’s side, where the best players are gone after one or two years, the women play four years of college, meaning not only does Connecticut have all of the best talent but they get to keep them all for four years time and actually develop cohesive squads. But other than the odd blip here and there, when a freak athlete like Brittney Griner winds up at Baylor, the game consists basically of UConn and everyone else.
And ultimately, that isn’t good for the game as a whole. You can certainly appreciate that sort of greatness for what it is, but when it feels as if all that UConn has to do it show up and roll the ball out and they’ll win, it almost trivializes the efforts that it took to be that good in the first place. Soccer fans will understand this feeling, to be sure – why would a casual fan even bother to follow Serie A or the Bundesliga after a while, when it’s obvious from the get-go that Juventus and Bayern Munich are going to win the league? If a team goes 111 games without a loss, it feels about as close to inevitable as it can get, but we don’t like inevitable and we only like dynasties to a point. The great upset, like Mississippi State pulled last Friday, is inevitably a triumph of the imagination and a reminder of what is possible. And it’s only when you tap into those possibilities that you can truly grow.

• Having felled the Soviet Union on the sport, the gals from Mississippi State then promptly messed up their own personal Miracle of Ice by losing to Finland. Mississippi State got beat by South Carolina 67:55 in the NCAA Final, and it might have helped their cause if their head coach, Vic Schaefer, hadn’t made one of the more moronic coaching moves I’ve seen in a long time, which was to have point guard Morgan William – who hit the game winning shot against UConn, and who scored 41 in MSU’s regional final win over Baylor – sitting next to him on the bench during the entire 4th Quarter, when South Carolina went on a 12-0 run to put the game away.
We’ve created this bastion of largesse that is the cult of the college coach in America and, as such, we have a tendency to absolve them of blame when they screw up. College coaches, being a selfish and self-preservationist lot, have of course figured this out and always do a nice job of subtly shifting the blame to their players when they lose. And since the sports media in this country that covers college sports is predominantly composed of former coaches and guys who seem to aspire to be coaches, it’s easy for them to gloss over the fact that coaches do, in fact, screw up.
They do it a lot, in fact, and sometimes on the highest stage. (An associate of Dean Smith’s once said the only two things he wouldn’t talk about were his divorce and “the Marquette game,” the 1977 NCAA Final where his strategic ploys backfired, he got outcoached by Al McGuire,  and Marquette wound up an upset winner.) Some in the media attempted to ascribe ulterior motives to Schaefer’s ploy against South Carolina – he was “trying to send a message” to his player, who was, in fact, having a pretty bad game – but I’m dubious of attaching any motivation other than that he played a hunch and it blew up in his face. The aphorism Hanlon’s razor is applicable here: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

• The men’s NCAA final followed a fairly typical script in which the team that, to my eye, seems to be the better team – in this case Gonzaga – plays poorly and loses, while the team that isn’t as good – North Carolina – wins by doing whatever it can to make the game into a mediocre mess. Both teams were basically dreadful, and the officials contributed to the morass by calling 44 fouls and killing the flow of the game. Some of my more conspiratorial of friends have suggested this game followed another familiar pattern, whereby the lesser-pedigreed team ultimately got screwed over by the officials, but what more seemed the case to me was that Gonzaga blew the game in the first half, when North Carolina was terrible and the Zags had numerous chances to build a big lead, only to miss open shots and let the Heels back in the game. I had no real dog in this hunt: I would have liked to see Gonzaga win since I’m from that part of the country, but I also have always appreciated the fact that Roy Williams is one of the few coaches who wants his teams to attack and play fast and be creative in an era where most supposedly “great” coaches take the easy way out and just play defense all the time. I just wanted to see a good game, which I didn’t get.
I cared very little about the NCAA tournament this year. For the first time in over 30 years, I didn’t fill out a bracket. The Midwest Regional final between Oregon and Kansas was the first full game of college basketball I had watched all year. I used to be able to excuse the generally nervy and poor play you’d see in the NCAA tourney simply because the event was a great theatre piece. But while it’s improved somewhat with the new rule changes, the game still basically sucks. I’ve never had any delusions that college basketball was anywhere near the NBA in terms of caliber, but the margin seems greater to me than ever. You can understand why it is that the NBA is disinclined to want to draft any kid who has spent four years playing college basketball, since it’s likely the kid didn’t improve, and likely didn’t learn anything about playing the game while they were there.
And this is unfortunate, because basketball, as a whole, has benefitted greatly over the years from the lab experiment nature of the college game – coaches, when facing talent gaps, have always had to come up with different and unique approaches. Most everything that is good about today’s NBA – the pace, the spacing, the geometry – finds its origins in the lunacy that was Loyola Marymount in the late 1980s. There hasn’t been anything remotely innovative on a college floor in years. What shortening the shot clock in the NCAA has primarily achieved is cutting down the amount of time teams waste running some meaningless offensive pattern that’s been drilled into them by their head coach. They all still go into panic mode with :10 on the shot clock, having gone about making themselves eminently guardable, but at least it happens sooner.
And the whole business of college sports is so rotten that I can’t get too enthused about it – along with the fact that we basically pay lip service to the rot, like the Monday night telecast did when glossing over the perpetual academic fraud case at North Carolina. Keep in mind that Roy Williams earned a $250,000 bonus for winning the national title, while his players all got groovy T-shirts and hats.
And if you didn’t need reminding of just how fucked up the world of big-time college sports is, I recommend that you watch the recent Showtime documentary Disgraced about Patrick Dennehy, a Baylor basketball player who was murdered by a teammate in 2003, at which point Baylor head coach Dave Bliss attempted to cover his ass and got caught, on tape, telling staffers they should lie to the authorities and portray the deceased as being a drug dealer, among other things. This has always been a case of interest for me simply because I was living in Santa Fe and working in the media when Bliss was the head coach at New Mexico, before he took the Baylor job, and where Dennehy played for one season before transferring. Bliss had come to New Mexico from SMU, where his best player has since admitted he was paid amid other allegations, and while there were never any formal allegations of impropriety at New Mexico there were always rumors and innuendo floating about. One of the problems with big-time college sports is that there are always rumors and innuendo flying about, and officials turn a blind eye to the fire that accompanies that smoke. But we do turn that blind eye to it, going so far as to try and gloss over behavior that turns from unethical to criminal, much as what has happened at Penn State and, now on two occasions, at Baylor. Amazingly enough, Bliss got another coaching gig eventually, which he just resigned in light of this documentary and after running his mouth again, whereas the assistant who turned him in has never gotten another job and is now doing educational work with the Texas prison system.
Bliss was toiling away at Southwestern Christian University, lest you think the rot and sleaze of college sports only affects the big time programs. My favorite recent example of this was an article in Sports Illustrated documenting a spate of graduate transfers in college basketball. The graduate transfer rule has been around for a decade, and states that if you graduate from your university but still have eligibility to play, you can enroll at a different school in a graduate program and play immediately. No one ever gave this much thought until Russell Wilson did it and went from being the starting QB at N.C. State to leading the Wisconsin Badgers to a Rose Bowl. More and more players are doing this, particularly in college basketball, and among the great comments in this college sports suck-up piece bemoaning the scourge of graduate transfers from smaller programs to larger ones is the idea that some coaches are, in fact, attempting to slow their kids’ academic progress. Are you serious? What in the hell is wrong with these people?
As time goes on, I further and further distance myself from the corrupt, unjust, and disgusting industrial complex that is the NCAA. I just want nothing more to do with it. That means caring less and less about things like the NCAA tournament – an event that I used to love. I just can’t make myself care any more. I’m better off for not caring. Watching the NCAA Final is proof, in fact, that I probably still care too much. If I’m going to point the finger at others for perpetrating the hoax of college sports, I should also point it at myself for watching it all this time.

That Was Some Week That Was

Baseball is stupid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One-Gun Salute

Tyler Collins taking his talents to Toledo

TYLER Collins is King of My Personal Belgium for the week for flipping the bird to all of the fans at Tiger Stadium Comerica Park after misplaying a routine fly ball and turning it into a Little League triple for the Oakland A’s. Certainly, when you’re a reserve outfielder for a not very good team and you’re off to a terrible start – Collins was carrying a .313 OPS at the time – frustration can start to fester, and Collins obviously lost the plot in a moment of madness. And who among us hasn’t wanted to flip off the paying customers from time to time? The customer is not always right. Even so, you just can’t do this. I can understand the sentiment, but you gotta keep your finger gun in the holster. (And for godsake, don’t do something like this.)

If you do something as stupid as this, you can expect to be booed pretty mercilessly from hereon. Collins was sent down to the Toledo Mud Hens after this, although Tigers brass insist it had to do with performance and not with Collins letting the fans know they were #1. But fans are quite forgiving if you put out some good performances. The best way to win them over is to play well. I’d have thought Jonathan Papelbon’s name would be Mudd in D.C. after picking a fight in the dugout with the franchise, but he’s got 7 saves and the Nats are off to a hottish start, and the Nats fans have given Papelbon an appropriately long leash. (If he starts blowing saves, all bets are off, of course.) And Detroit’s a tough town with people who aren’t afraid to flip the bird at The Man themselves, so if Collins comes back and plays hard, hits well and displays some slick fielding, such actions could provide the basis for cult hero status.

To the buzzard points!

• There were three truly dreadful series in the first round of the NBA playoffs, with teams so grossly outmatched that you wondered how they even got to the playoffs in the first place. And two of those teams had pretty good reasons for being so bad, as the Dallas Mavericks and Memphis Grizzlies were beset by massive injury issues as the season went on which crippled them past the point of being competitive. The Griz were particularly star-crossed this season, losing Marc Gasol and Mike Conley for the season and generally resembling a MASH unit. The Grizzlies used 28 players this season, which is an NBA record, including four instances where they hastily signed guys to 10-day contracts and immediately put them in the starting lineup. They had absolutely no chance whatsoever against the San Antonio Spurs, losing all four games in one of the most lopsided playoff series in league history.
But if you’d told me at the season’s outset that the third ill-equipped team come playoff time would be one that returned everyone from a club that reached the conference finals the season before, I’d have thought you were nuts. But the Houston Rockets took dysfunctionality to epic levels this season. They started 4-7, got coach Kevin McHale fired, generally ignored interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff, and stumbled their way to a 41-41 record and a #8 seed in the West, which got them a playoff matchup with the Warriors. You’d think that seeing Steph Curry go down with a series of injuries would’ve buoyed the Rockets, right? In the six quarters after Curry injured his knee, the Rockets got outscored by 60 points.
Perhaps my favorite moment during Houston’s 114:81 capitulation in Game 5 last night came in the third quarter, when Michael Beasley set a useless screen for Jason Terry, who was stuck in the corner in a bad area of the floor. Terry gave Beasley the ball for no apparent reason and promptly ran three feet out of bounds – at which point Beasley passed it to him, after which the two of them started arguing with each other. You just ran a play designed to pass to a guy out of bounds! You’re both wrong! What in the hell is wrong with you?!?!
This team hated each other. This was a bad chemistry experiment which left a toxic cloud filling up the lab. It’s pretty apparent that James Harden and Dwight Howard can no longer co-exist, and if Howard were to opt out of his contract and forgo the $23m owed him, everyone involved would probably be the better for it. Harden put up 35 points in Game 5 while Howard added 21 rebounds, numbers as empty as the nutrition information of the back of a package of twinkies. Chemistry does matter in sports, particularly in a league of opulent egos like the NBA. This is fundamentally a professional workplace, and you have to be able to work together.
In hindsight, what’s remarkable about the Rockets may not be that they cratered this season, but that given the personalities involved, they were ever a good team in the first place. This roster was crafted was the NBA’s preeminent analytics guru, Daryl Morey, and yet it seems so warped and mismatched to render most of those analytics theories moot. In a simplistic sort of nutshell, NBA money ball emphasizes getting three types of shots: three-pointers, high-percentage shots around the rim, and free throws. The Rockets chuck up a lot of threes, but only Harden can actually make them. The bigs on the team, meanwhile, are easy to defend: foul them. Howard, Clint Cappella, and Josh Smith all shot below 50% from the free throw line, so any possession resulting with them at the stripe is a plus for the opposition. And since you’ve got all of these bigs who throw bricks, you can’t have them on the floor late in a close game, which means you’re going small and can’t defend the rim on the other end – and they weren’t playing much defense to begin with. Nothing about the way this team is constructed makes any sense at all.
I would think Morey survives, given that most everything good about this franchise is his doing, but he needs to blow this team up. I wouldn’t expect Bickerstaff to be back on the bench, and this certainly falls in the category of “good job,” but it’s also a tricky job, because your #1 priority is trying to work with Harden, who is a terrific player but who also hoards the ball and plays no defense and has a propensity for me-first behavior.
Another oddity about the Rockets is that they actually made a late push to get into the playoffs, winning their last three to get there, since the 1% chance of winning the lottery was far better odds than they ever had against the Warriors, and since making the playoffs means forfeiting their first-round pick to the Denver Nuggets as part of the misbegotten Ty Lawson trade, Lawson having eventually been released and signed by the Indiana Pacers. (More on them in a minute.) Having behaved in enough of a professional manner to care about making the playoffs, that professionalism certainly didn’t extend much further. Houston was an absolute disgrace last night in Game 5, and put forth about as embarrassing a playoff effort as I can remember. C’mon, have some pride! The Mavericks and the Grizzlies and the shattered L.A. Clippers were playing their asses off with no hopes of being successful, but it was evident last night that the Rockets just flat don’t care. So long Rockets, enjoy your vacations and thanks for the comic relief.

Kool-Aid comes in many refreshing flavors

• The playoffs in any sport are all about match-ups, tailor-making game plans to suit your opponents, and making adjustments on the fly. You don’t bother with too many adjustments during the course of the regular season, when the opponents change nightly and you barely get any time to practice, since you’re too busy traveling between cities and trying to get players healed up, but you can’t operate the same way in the playoffs. The Charlotte Bobcats New Orleans Hornets were down 0-2 to Miami, and got hammered twice by the Heat in the process, and Steve Clifford chastised the media for suggesting he needed to make adjustments. He then did exactly that, of course, going bigger with his lineups and ducking his team’s trey-happy trends, and three games later, Buzz City are verging on advancing to the next round while the Heat seem absolutely flummoxed.
Were it some meaningless game in Sacramento in February (and all games in Sacramento are meaningless all the time), the Indiana Pacers taking a 13-point lead into the 4th Quarter and then deciding to field a lineup which had no Paul George, no George Hill, and no Monta Ellis – in essence, fielding a team with almost no functioning offense – might have made sense. Rest some guys, save some wear-and-tear, try some new offensive sets out, yadda yadda yadda. But the Pacers did so in Game 5 of their playoff series with the Toronto Raptors, and it blew up spectacularly.
The game was in Toronto, the series was tied 2-2, and the Raptors are the most neurotic team in the NBA, a franchise scarred by endless playoff failings. So you’re up 13, Paul George has 37 points through three, the Raptors are imploding at home once more, the fans are restless and the press in two nations is sharpening their virtual pencils and priming to just kill this team once again, and then Pacers coach Frank Vogel, who is usually a very good coach, rolls out an offensively-challenged unit to start the 4th Quarter and leaves them out there when it all starts going horribly badly. By the time Vogel gets George back in the game, it’s too late: the lead has been more than halved, the tide has turned, the Raps are emboldened, the crowd at Mediocre Airline Center Centre is going nuts. The Raptors went on a 25-9 run in the 4th to win the game 102:99, and rather than going back to Indianapolis with a 3-2 lead against a team laden with a dubious psyche, the Pacers now find themselves facing elimination.
And this was not the time for the Pacers to go with some standard-fare bench rotation. You’re not playing the Kings in February here. This is the playoffs. I can certainly understand that Paul George needs a breather from time to time. He’s recovered remarkably from a grisly injury to return to being NBA élite, but you do have to watch his minutes. Fair enough. But Paul George was absolutely murdering the Raptors in this game. He was crushing their collective wills to live every time he had the ball in his hands. If you leave him out there to start the 4th and let him do his thing, he’ll have plenty of time to rest if/when you put the game away.
And if you are going to go with some standard bench rotation to start the 4th, and things start going bad out there on the floor, you need to adjust immediately. Playoff wins are precious, and you’re facing a desperate team. There is no pointing saving it for later if there isn’t going to be much of a later.
I’ve made mention before of the fact that the Giants’ winning the World Series in 2014 was aided by two of their opponents – the Nats and the Cards – leaving their best arms in the bullpens and trying to skate by in crucial situations. First and foremost, you have to save the season! This game was a golden opportunity lost by the Pacers, who are underdogs in this series and squandered a chance to very nearly put the series away.

• And since I mentioned the Heat and the Hornets game last night, won by the Hornets 90:88 with Dwyane Wade not getting a call at the end, the Miami Heat never, ever get to complain about officiating again after the 2006 NBA Finals in which Wade shot 97 free throws and the Dallas Mavericks lost their minds. How about instead you run an actual play in your final few possessions, instead of just letting Wade make something up just because he was able to do it a decade ago and therefore should be able to do it now. With Kobe School thinking like that, it’s as if Byron Scott suddenly got the coaching job in Miami. And it wasn’t a foul. So there.

• People say you shouldn’t read much into April baseball standings because “it’s early” and you shouldn’t make much of the fact that teams are/aren’t doing very well. But the term ‘early’ is generally vague, and basically represents a period of time from when the season begins until your team of choice does/doesn’t keep winning/losing so much.
I have no belief whatsoever that the great starts of the Chicago White Sox and Washington Nationals will be sustainable, since the Chisox will invariably come to suffer from the lack of a 14-year-old’s leadership in their clubhouse while the Nats will, at some point, have to stop feasting on a diet sweeter than the dessert line at a Las Vegas buffet. The Nats have the easiest schedule to open a season that I’ve ever seen – Phillies, Braves, Marlins, Twins – and are 14-6 in spite of the fact that they have three of their regulars hitting around .180 and Dusty Baker is already leaving his starters in for too long.
But this is In Play Lose, of course, and we shouldn’t waste our time on teams doing well. Let’s take a look at the basement.
The Houston Astros have the worst record in the American League right now and the Houston Astros can’t pitch. Pitching is hard enough in that amusement park of a stadium in which they play, but they managed to overcome it last year, during their feel-good rise from being a godawful team to being a playoff team, by emphasizing the pitching staff keeping the ball down and playing solid infield defense. The Astros can’t get anyone out, and are giving up more runs than any team in the AL. Perhaps more worrisome for the ’Stros than the slow start is the fact that Cy Young winner Dallas Keuchel’s velocity on his pitches is way down this year. If his stuff doesn’t improve, it doesn’t bode well.
Keuchel and the kerosene kids making up their bullpen got clobbered by Mariners in an 11:1 drubbing on Tuesday, dropping their record to 6-15, and while you can’t imagine a team with this much young talent is going to continue to be this bad, their formula for success on offense last year – hit enough home runs to make up for striking out so much – may not be sustainable, and perhaps we’ll see some regression to the mean in 2016. The Astros were far better than we thought in 2015, but they may be worse this season. But I can’t believe they are this bad.
The 4-17 Atlanta Braves, meanwhile, really are this bad. Freddie Freeman managed to launch a home run in the Barves’ 9:4 loss to Boston at Fenway last night, which was the fourth home run they’ve hit all season, having gone their previous 15 games without hitting one. Their lineup last night was filled out with wash-ups and stop-gaps like Jeff Francoeur. A.J. Pierzynski, Erick Aybar, Nick Markakis, Drew Stubbs and Kelly Johnson. That lineup would have been mediocre five years ago, much less now. They’re 29th in runs, 29th in average, 27th in OBP and 30th in slugging. Oh yeah, and the pitching sucks, too.
There may be some hope for the Braves on the horizon, since they made a few savvy deals with dumb teams like the Padres and Diamondbacks and were able to somewhat decently stock their farm system, but for this self-important franchise and it’s fair weather, fickle fans, 2016 is going to serve up a healthy amount of humility. And hey, what better way for the Braves to attract fans out to the Cobb County exurbs to their bright and shiny new SunTrust Park in 2017 than with a 100+ loss team?

• It must be early in the season, and the season must be weird so far, because the Seattle Mariners were in first place. Being atop the AL West on Apr. 26 was the latest the M’s were in first since the 2007 season. When you’re basically the worst franchise in the history of the sport – having never been to the World Series, and having missed the playoffs 15 consecutive seasons – you have to savor these moments of goodness. And guess what the worst franchise in the history of the sport is fetching?
$1,400,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes for a franchise that’s accomplished zero.
There was a fair amount of rejoicing among Mariners faithful at the surprise announcement that reviled Mariners chairman Howard Lincoln was stepping down, and that majority shareholders Nintendo of America were going to sell all but 10% of their investment in the club, for the ungodly sum of $1.4 billion, to the consortium of minority owners, all of them local businessmen and fronted by cellular phone magnate John Stanton. Given that they just announced a 61% decline in their profits, this certainly makes sense for Nintendo from a business standpoint.
But therein lies the fundamental, underlying problem which has plagued the Nintendo ownership of the club. Everything they’ve done for 24 years has been about the profitability of the business, but their ownership has been one of benevolent neglect, as they’ve done little to actually consistently field a decent product. Why be any good at baseball? It costs too much to be good at baseball! We can just have bobblehead giveaways and a frequent dabbling in 2001 nostalgia to get asses into seats at the beautiful Safeco Field, which is one of the great parks in America, dontcha know? In fact, it just might be the best of all!
Except for the fact that, from a player’s perspective, it sucks. No team in all of sports has a more acrimonious relationship with their own home confines than the Mariners. It’s a terrible place to hit, and the home-road splits among Mariners players are usually ridiculously skewed: there’s no place like somewhere else. And ‘somewhere else’ is where most every hitter of any quality would rather be, unless the Mariners grossly overpay them and throw $240 million at them like they did to Robinson Canó. Canó and Nelson Cruz have actually worked out OK, but the rest of their forays into free agent hitters have been colossal failures.
The park actually plays a bit more fairly when you close the roof – but ownership doesn’t like having the roof closed, because it detracts from the experience of going to the ballpark. Gosh, I don’t know, it seems like winning might be a good way to enhance the experience, don’t you think? Nintendo has seemingly cared little about that and, in what should be a surprise to absolutely no one, the fan base, which once numbered 3.5 million or so coming through the turnstiles annually during the M’s golden area around the turn of the millennium, has now shrunk to less than half of that.
What was always very strange about the Howard Lincoln era in Seattle – Lincoln having been Nintendo’s lead counsel as well as chairman of the club – is that the top brass always seemed to be incredulous at the fact that fans expected more of them. After all, Nintendo had stepped forth in the 11th hour and ponied up $100 million to save the franchise when it looked all but certain it was headed to Tampa Bay in the early 1990s. We saved baseball in this town, so what more could you possibly want? OK, great, you saved baseball and the fans in Seattle are sincerely, genuinely grateful for that. So what are you going to do next? That earns you some cred and gratitude and a long leash, but at some point, you have to actually deliver a quality product. It’s what you do next that ultimately matters.
It’s said at the end of Lawrence of Arabia that wars are fought by young and brave men, and peace is settled by cynical old ones. There is a reason why radicals and revolutionaries make bad rulers, for it’s one thing to conquer and another thing entirely to govern. And for it’s time, of course, Nintendo buying the Mariners was certainly radical, what with a mass infusion of Japanese corporate money going about purchasing an American club. The club is wildly profitable, of course – witness the pricetag Nintendo is about to fetch, a 14-to-1 return on its original investment – but while the balance sheets have never been better, the on-field performance of the Mariners over the past 15 years has arguably been worse than ever. So on balance, this foray into actually operating an MLB franchise has generally been a disaster.
The whole notion that just because you “saved” something, it somehow makes you smart enough to run it, and also impervious to critique and criticism, is completely idiotic, and you should be wary and downright skeptical of anyone who takes up that sort of position. Just because you have the financial wherewithal, or the appropriate positioning, to be able to take something over, it doesn’t mean you know jack shit about what to do with it.

Don’t worry, Mauricio. Tottenham fans are used to being disappointed.

• The title chase in the EPL this season has broken down to a question of which would happen first: Leicester City remembering they are Leicester City, or Spurs remembering they are Spurs. The Foxes opened the door a couple of games ago, salvaging a 2:2 draw with West Ham with a controversial, last-ditch penalty in a game in which their star striker, Jamie Vardy, earned himself a 2-game suspension for getting tossed out of the game and then calling the referee something that rhymes with a Cucking Funt. But Tottenham, who haven’t won a title in more than 50 years and are famous both for playing attractive football and for gagging at the worst possible moment, pulled out a Spursy performance this past Monday against West Bromwich Albion: dominating the game and hitting the woodwork thrice, leading only by a goal when they could have scored five, and then conceding an equalizer on a sloppy set piece and having to settle for a 1:1 draw. There is often a winner and a loser in such a match, even if the scores wind up level, and this was the worst 1:1 loss imaginable for Spurs, whose two dropped points leave them seven behind Leicester with only three games to play.
Spurs fielded the youngest team in the EPL for much of the season, and both their inexperience and immaturity showed in this match, most notably when their great young midfielder, Dele Alli, stupidly allowed himself to be baited into punching a West Brom player – something the referee missed but the cameras didn’t, and Alli’s now got a suspension which will see him sitting in the stands for the last three games of the season for his troubles. The Foxes can now clinch the title with a win over Manchester United this Sunday at Old Trafford, and if the title isn’t clinched Sunday, then Monday is a likely possibility, since Spurs are playing Chelsea, and all London clubs hate each other, and about the only thing Chelsea cares about at this point is ruining Tottenham’s season. The almost-certain 2nd-place finish, while disappointing in the moment to Spurs faithful craving a championship, is still a terrific result for Spurs, and this team has a bright, bright future if they can keep the core together and add some more depth up front for what promises to be a taxing season to come, given that they will have Champions League matches to play.
So the Foxes are on the verge of the unthinkable and it’s an incredible story, a love story between a modest British Midlands city and their football club, their rags-to-riches collection of players and their truly delightful manager. It’s quite difficult to put what Leicester City has done in an American context, since the sports systems here are so different. The American franchising system in sports doesn’t really compare, since they are closed systems and there is no enormous disincentive to being a terrible team. (And in the case of NBA and NHL, there are actually perverse incentives to be as terrible as possible.) The English League has 92 clubs on four tiers, all of whom find different comfort zones and define success in their own ways. The closest equivalent to it is probably the NCAA, where there are something like 300 different schools in Div. I and sort of divide themselves, and if you think of it in that context, an apt comparison would be Butler, whom I mentioned a few weeks ago: a modest mid-level side with no enormous accomplishments but with a nonetheless proud tradition of its own who suddenly steps onto the greatest stage and proves to be the equal of the big guns.
The story of Leicester City has captured the imagination of a lot of fans across Europe, many of whom have grown tired of the staleness and sameness of the same teams winning all the time almost entirely on account of finances – and a rigged and self-perpetuating system at that, since the prize structure is skewed towards the top-end, meaning that the same clubs keep raking it the money and the gap between the haves and have-nots further widen. (Given that the club made something like €90 million off the Champions League last season, is there any wonder as to why Juventus won Serie A for the fifth straight season despite selling off half their starting lineup?) Leicester are a triumph of tenacity, diligence and creativity.
And almost certainly, the lessons taken from Leicester winning the EPL will be poorly applied somewhere else. Some knuckle headed club directors will think, “we can win the Premier League too!” and go out and spend their gobs of UK TV money extraordinarily stupidly and wind up looking like clowns. But the 5,000-to-1 shot is on the verge of proving that the seemingly impossible can, in fact, be possible, and that gives hope to the lesser clubs everywhere. It’s fairy tale stuff, it’s the stuff of cinema and it would be awesome if they can finish the job with a win this weekend at Old Trafford, the self-described ‘Theatre of Dreams.’

• Finally, I need to give a shout out here to Ozzie Silva, one of the true heroes of In Play Lose, who died on Wednesday at the age of 83. Silva was the owner of the Spirits of St. Louis in the ABA, and mastermind of the greatest hornswoggle in the history of sports. Ozzie, we love that you managed to pick the NBA’s pocket and make David “Little Napoleon” Stern kowtow and kiss your ass for so many years. A toast to you, sir, and long live the Spirits.