A Giant Inferno

"If you're going through hell, keep going."
– Winston Churchill

On May 12, at Pacific Bell SBC AT&T Phone Co. Park, the 2012 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants defeated the Atlanta Barves Braves 5-1. The Giants were 23-15 at the time, atop the NL West Standings and had just finished winning three straight from the NL East leading Barves Braves by an aggregate of 23-4.

And then this happened:

After today’s 7-2 home loss to the New York Mets, which completed a sweep by the Mets, the Giants now stand at 40-50, meaning they are 17-35 since the 12th of May. Some of that has been due to some bad timing with the schedule – the Giants have had a series of long road trips after the schedule was frontloaded with homestands – but they’ve also managed to lose three of four at home to the Miami Marlins and get swept by the aforementioned Mets, a team consisting of about four guys you would actually want and 21 guys I’ve never heard of. I think the season reached an absurd new low on Monday night when the Giants lost to the Mets 4-3 in 16 innings, leaving 18 men on base (11 in extra innings) and batting 1-for-15 with runners in scoring position.

[Side note: thanks to good pal Diane over at Value Over Replacement Grit for answering my query on the absurd number of extra inning games the Mets have been playing this year. The VORG is an official Friend of The Lose, or FTL, because we wouldn’t want any FTW going on around here, and you should read Diane's blog all the time.]

On May 14, the Giants ventured to Toronto for two games at The SkyDome (and I don’t give a shit what it’s called now, it’s still the SkyDome) against the last-place Jays, and the Giants got shellacked 10-6 and 11-3 and it’s been a free fall ever since. So my first instinct here is to blame Canada for the Giants miseries. Surely this is Canada’s fault. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO OUR TEAM?!?!?!? Except I really like Canada, have many friends there, speak excellent Canadian, and appreciate the fact that our northern neighbours are both extremely mellow and secretly badass. And that was 50 games ago, so surely the Giants should’ve gotten their shit together by now.

No, it’s not Canada’s fault. As the Official Girlfriend of IN PLAY LOSE just said from across the room, upon hearing what I was writing about, “it is with heavy heart that we regret to inform you that our team sucks.”

It’s really tough to watch this happening. The Giants won the World Series in 2010 and 2012, and the 2011 team, while being offensively inept and dreadfully boring, still managed to win 86 games and be in the race most of the year. And after a great start to this season, they’ve completely gone off a cliff. This can happen sometimes to veteran teams, of course, who can seemingly get collectively old and slow all at once. The 2001 Mariners won the most games in American League history, the 2002 and 2003 teams were among the best teams in baseball history not to make the playoffs … aaand then, in 2004, they were in last. They were old, slow, couldn’t hit nor field, and a good number of their longtime vets had outlived their usefulness.

Thing is though, the Giants aren’t really that old. Many of their best players are in their mid- to late 20s. Having made a whole bunch of terrible free agent decisions in the aftermath of the Barry Bonds era, the Giants have instead been living off a steady diet of serviceable veterans on short-term contracts while developing their own young players. The bulk of this team’s core is home grown talent they’ve now been hurrying to sign to long-term deals so as not to have to deal with free agency issues at all in the future. They made it a point to keep the majority of the 2012 team intact, and with good reason – they just won the World Series, for cripesake! But suddenly, the core seems to have just completely rotted out. Something is rotten in the proverbial Denmark. (Even more rotten than in the real Denmark, which doesn’t seem possible).

OK, so what the hell is going on here?

The Giants have had an absurd number of injuries, for starters, many of them in bunches and a number of them weird. Pitcher Ryan Vogelsong was pitching a shutout when he broke his hand batting; CF and leadoff man Angel Pagan may have done the remarkable in a rare Giants win, but he also apparently injured his leg severely on what was the most exciting play of the season, and he is now basically shelved for the year. NLDS MVP Marco Scutaro was hitting .330 again – remarkable for his age – then he broke a finger so badly that it’s now bent at an angle. He’s trying to play through it, amazingly. Broken fingers, strained feet, appendicitis, cyst removals from swollen knees – you name it, this team has been a M*A*S*H unit. But bad teams always have lots of injuries. Every team has some injury issues during a season, but bad teams suffer because there isn’t enough depth of talent to play through it and be successful.

The offense has gone into a complete tailspin here of late, lacking any sort of continuity and having guys come back from injury too quickly who clearly aren’t effective. But early in the season, the offense was carrying this team – which should be a red flag, because Phone Co. Park is the most pitcher-friendly park in baseball and any good offensive stats will tend to regress. The Giants will only win if they pitch well.

And therein lies the biggest problem: the Giants CAN’T PITCH. They haven’t worth a damn all season, but were bailed out early on by a string of improbable late game heroics, as the Giants pulled off one surprising comeback after another in the late innings. The team that threw four shutouts in their last 7 postseason games of 2012 – all wins – now has one effective starter (Madison Bumgarner) and a really good LHP setup guy and closer who never get in the games because they’re losing all the time. Matt Cain, the ace, followed up giving up 7 runs in 3 innings on Friday by lasting .2 of an inning today. Tim Lincecum, who found his form in the playoffs in the bullpen, and playoff hero Barry Zito are both rarely able to get out of the 5th inning these days, which means the bullpen is constantly taxed, guys are all out of sync, and everything’s a mess. Now the defense, which was so slick in the World Series, has started to come apart. The offense is wheezing. Even manager Bruce Bochy seems to be losing his Midas touch. They're inventing new ways to screw things up.

And there aren’t any good solutions. Their minor league system is iffy, so it’s hard to make deals. Conversely, they don’t really have a lot of guys a playoff contender would want (save for RF/fan favourite/weirdo Hunter Pence, who actually referenced that Churchill quote for the media last weekend), so trying to restock through deadline day deals isn’t really going to work. They’ll have some money to spend in the offseason, as the collective $40 million their paying to Zito and Lincecum comes off the books, but the Giants aren’t big players in free agency anymore. Their m.o. in the championship years has been to add on to good rosters throughout the season by fleecing the Marlins and Réal Ciudad Kansas through a series of trades and other acquisitions. There isn’t any point in going that route when you’re 10 games under .500 at the all-star break. The cupboard is far from bare, of course – Buster Posey is a good start, Matt Cain won't suck forever, Brandon Crawford will remember how to field, etc. – but there are some serious decisions to be made about the future of this team. And in the meantime, the slog continues.

The Giants have been a source of joy for us in recent years. On Oct. 1, 2010, I lost my job, but three days later I was caring far less about that and far more about the fact that the Giants had beaten the Padres on the last day of the season to clinch the division. Watching them proceed from there to win a World Series brought a joy and happiness that was a most welcome distraction in an otherwise terrible time. “Who cares if I don’t have a job? It’s 80° out and there’s a World Series victory parade!” Watching them go through this abysmal death march of a 2-month stretch has been extremely discouraging. The city that lives and dies with this team and sells out every game has been mired in an interminable hangover without the benefits one gets from of a few stiff drinks.

But I know that you cannot win every year. Admittedly, we’re a little spoiled here at the moment – two championships in three years is pretty remarkable, especially since they’d not won one since 1954. We Giants fans were becoming perilously close to being those annoying, irritating types who gloat constantly because their team wins all the time.

That would’ve been kinda awesome if that happened, wouldn’t it?

Hero(es) of the Week

Today the airport unit of the San Francisco Fire Department was pressed into service as first responders for one of the most unimaginably awful reasons – a Boeing 777 coming up short on its approach to the runway, smacking its tail first (which then separated from the rest of the body of the plane), spinning round and ultimately skidding to a stop as the fuselage became engulfed in fire. It's a terrible tragedy – 2 persons lost their lives in the crash and 49 were seriously injured – but it's also a damn miracle, as there were 307 people on the plane altogether.

I'm not that far off when I say this happened in my backyard – we live 15 minutes from SFO, and we're basically the emergency aeroport shuttle for all of our friends who miss connecting flights, get stranded in bad weather, oversleep, are too hungover to fly, etc. This was a soul-shaking sort of event today, since air travel in this country has become so safe that you almost take it for granted – there hadn't been a major commercial aeroline accident at SFO since 1968, and there hadn't been one which was fatal since something like 1953. This just doesn't happen. You simply cannot believe a jetliner has crashed. You cannot believe that it is real.

And I just wanted to take this time to thank those first responders, who are the true heroes of every week. I live 2 blocks from S.F.F.D. Engine Co. #7, and the engines have a tendency to go revving thru the neighbourhood with sirens blaring at all times of day, which can be annoying. But the men and women of Engine Co. #7 also nearly collectively killed themselves (and I mean that in all seriousness, as several were injured) working in the middle of the night back in Sep. 2005 while fighting an inferno next door – a slum tenement not up to code which was gutted by a fire that nearly took all of the surrounding homes down with it, including mine. They very likely saved our house that night, and all of us who live in this neighbourhood were left standing helpless in the middle of the street, watching the fire crews work and hoping it would turn out OK. I will always be grateful for that. It was a horrific night I have since had the odd nightmare about – there were multiple fatalities among the residents of that building – and yet it could have been so, so much worse.

So I love the S.F.F.D., and their efforts at keeping people safe in this city never go unnoticed by me. They truly are The Good Guys and they are my Heroes For the Week – and pretty much every week, for that matter. A lot of people didn't lose today at SFO, in part, because of their efforts. But my heart goes out to the families whose loved one were lost or wounded. There are no words.

The LOSE has been on hiatus here, mired in deadline pressures and such at the office. We'll be back talking about silly games and such here in the near future. In the meantime, I need to write these damn articles. Nertz.

Go Tahiti!

Today the Confederations Cup kicks off in Brazil. This is somewhat of a dress rehearsal for next year’s World Cup, and the host country will definitely be under the microscope – not only will their progress in preparations for next year be scrutinized, but the Seleção themselves are a bit of a mystery, having played few meaningful games in recent years, and not looking terribly impressive in those. No doubt some of their top rivals will be watching today’s game with Japan closely and taking copious notes.

The Confed Cup always has a rather ersatz field, as it brings together the current champions of the world’s six regions. It’s a fun and somewhat unpredictable affair – witness the fact that the U.S. reached the final in this event four years ago, having beaten Spain in the semis, and the Screamin' Eagles then had the Brazilians down 2:0 a half hour into the final before the Seleção rattled off three goals to restore order to the universe. And this year the LOSE has a special rooting interest in this event, as it features probably the biggest underdogs you’re ever going to find in a major international soccer tournament, or just about any other tournament for that matter. There probaby hasn't been an underdog this big since Angola tried to play the Dream Team at the Barcelona olympics.

And that would be these guys:

I mean, uh, these guys ...

Behold the national team from Tahiti.

Tahiti won the most recent championship in Oceania, which is far and away the weakest region. It’s so bad, in fact, that the Australians started playing in Asia essentially because they got tired of winning all the time. No legit competition. The Socceroos departure has left the region at the mercy of New Zealand, who’ve shown themselves well – the All-Whites were the only team at the World Cup in South Africa that didn’t lose a game – yet somewhat inexplicably, New Zealand bombed out in the most recent Oceanic championships, and Tahiti wound up winning the tourney and punching a ticket to one of the more prestigious soccer events on the planet.

Tahiti is ranked about 140th in the world right now. They have one professional player, who plied his trade in Greece this past season. One of their goalkeepers used to play in France. Other than that, the Tahitians are all semipros or amateurs who mostly play in and around Papeete.

These guys are awesome. Their coach has stated that their primary goal for this tournament is to go through a half without getting scored on. Scoring a goal would be a triumph. Scoring a goal against Spain would probably get your picture on a postage stamp. They have no chance and they know it, but a few days they get to be treated like football royalty. And when they take on Spain next week at Estádio de Maracaña in Rio – an arena which is, quite simply, one of the games greatest stages, if not the greatest of all – they're damn sure going to enjoy the moment.

Compare and contrast the carefree attitude of the Tahitians with the plight of their first opponent in the tourney, which are the African champions from Nigeria. The Nigerians had a world cup qualifier in Namibia last week, after which the players stuck around Windhoek and refused to board their flight(s) to Brazil, briefly staging a wildcat strike after not being paid. This kind of thing seems to happen all the time in African football, which seems constantly besieged by political infighting and cronyism. FIFA finally had to step in and resolve this issue, working out a settlement between the national federation and the players, and the Nigerians are now headed across the Atlantic but aren't likely in the best of moods.

Not that it will likely matter that much in terms of the final results on Monday – the Nigerians have far more talent and will likely overwhelm the Tahitians. But the Tahitians don't need to win to acquit themselves well. By simply being there, they've already won, and I suspect they will embrace the challenge and compete accordingly. Even if they get thrashed (and they likely will), the actual scores of the games won't matter much. It's always better to play, and to lose, than not have the chance to play at all.

And in any event, they get to go back to Tahiti when it's over:

You could do worse.

How Do You Say "This Team Sucks" in Danish?

As I've said before, sports are the greatest of reality TV. Unscripted and unpredictable. You really do have NO IDEA what is going to happen. Most of the time, it will follow some sort of pattern you can expect, given who is at play and what the situation is. But not always.

I give you Exhibit A. These are the highlights of the World Cup Qualifier the other night in Copenhagen between Denmark and Armenia. The Danes won the Euros in 1992 and have been one of the consistently good footballing sides for about 25 years now. The Armenians, meanwhile, are one of the many dreadful European teams that turned up after the breakup of the Soviet Union. They just lost a home game last Friday to Malta, who hadn't won a relevant game since 1994.

Roll tape ...

We needed some enthusiastic Armenian broadcasters for proper effect.

Denmark 0:4 Armenia. And while we should give some props to the Armenians here for playing hard and playing with class, this performance by the Danes has "let's get the coach fired" written all over it. That first goal was 25 seconds into the game, the second was 15 minutes later, and it's hard to tell at what point incompetence gave way to indifference by the guys in the red shirts. Apparently, what remained of the crowd at the end of the game applauded the Armenians 4th goal and applauded as their players were substituted off. Can you blame them? If I sat through 90 minutes of this tripe, I'd ask for a refund.

Those four goals feature some of the worst defending I've seen at an international level. Well, this was worse ...

 
That's an own goal from a game where Uzbekistan, verging on their first trip to the World Cup ever, lost 0:1 to South Korea. Pretty much the most important game in the history of the country and you lose like that. The Uzbeks can still qualify, but they're going to need some help. It would be fun to see them make it to Brazil, because it's a country that could use some good news, and what's the point of any of this if you can't bring a few hours of joy to people here and there?

And now I have spent more time researching football in Armenia and Uzbekistan than I ever would've thought possible. We would sometimes search for obscure stories when I was working at daily newspapers just to get unusual datelines into the paper, all journalists being devious rascals at heart. You've be perusing the wires and come across some story datelined VADUZ or NOUAKCHOTT and then you just had to find a way to get it in the paper. The research I undertake in writing this blog feels a bit that way sometimes. In following the WCQ for Brazil 2014, I've found myself looking up the likes of Namibian goalkeepers and the history of football in the Faroe Islands. (The Landsliðið played hard but lost 2:0 to Sweden the other night, just so you know.)

But this is a good thing, in the end.

I am someone who has always viewed the world as being far, far larger than just the small corner of it I inhabit. A part of how I choose to understand the world is through learning about how we, as humans, play games – how we compete and, yes, how we fail. And no game on earth is a bigger deal than soccer, a simple game with simple rules that takes on every sort of political, ethnic, ideological, and cultural connotation humans can invent. Just as it's been argued that understanding America requires and understanding of baseball, the same can be said of "the beautiful game" and what it says of the world around us.

Although in Denmark right now, they're probably not too excited, and understandably so. I'm not sure how you say "this team sucks" in Danish, but most Danes speak English better than I do, and I'm sure that particularly American English phrase has been uttered repeatedly.

IN PLAY LOSE Important Concept #2: The MODGOD

Another extremely important theoretical concept here when it comes to our continuing explication of failure is something that I refer to as the MODGOD Theory of Good Intentions.

MODGOD stands for Modified Guterman-O’Donnell and is named for Jimmy Guterman and Owen O’Donnell, co-authors of the book Worst Rock-And-Roll Records of All Time: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love to Hate. In this book, the authors, who are a pair of longtime rock critics, layout a theory as to how otherwise extremely talented artists end up making terrible records, and it goes something like this: an artist(s) gets a great, great idea for a song or a record. They love the idea, think it’s the greatest idea they've ever had, and they approach the ensuing recording project with every ounce of earnest, heartfelt sincerity. But what happens along the way is that they also shut off their internal bullshit detector. And celebrities have enough say and sway that they can then afford to ignore those types of people – producers, engineers, bandmates, managers, etc. – who would point out what an awful idea it is. They can force their idea through the pipeline against whatever opposition may be there. And the end result, of course, is a terrifyingly bad recording. A dreadful product which started out with nothing but the best of intentions.

Feel free to steal this theory and apply it to just about everything else in the world around you. Most of us do not intend to fail. Quite often, you will come to discover that the worst outcomes are rooted in what seemed, at the time, to be the greatest of ideas. Saying “he means well,” ain’t a compliment.

IN PLAY LOSE Important Concept #1: Sayre’s Law

I figured that it’s important, as we go forward here on the LOSE with further explorations of losing, to define a couple of theoretical concepts which will come up in future posts. I can then link back to these later on.

The first of these is Sayre’s Law, which is named for U.S. political science professor Wallace Stanley Sayre and refers to his attempts to explain the particularly vicious nature of politics in academia – in any sort of dispute, the intensity of the feelings involved is inversely proportional to the value of what is actually at stake.

In the sports world, this concept shows up most glaringly every four years during the Olympics, a spectacle which consists of a whole lot of sports that people only care about once every four years. The more seemingly irrelevant the sport, the more prevalent the petty politicking and big-fish-in-small-pond behaviours. You’re more apt to find cheating and corruption in these sorts of situations, because the stakes are otherwise small, and since those who have a passion for the particular endeavour cannot hope to ever achieve any other sort of reward, they’ll fight like hell for whatever crumbs they can get.

Apply this to your own life as you see fit.

3 Points is 3 Points

There are no bad wins ... there are no bad wins ... there are no bad wins ...

Back in action in "The Hex," which is the 6-team, 10-match CONCACAF qualifier for the World Cup. US is playing tonight at The Office, which is the Jamaican's home ground in Kingston. Tough place to play. Reggae Boyz compete hard at home. World Cup Qualifying is always great stuff. There are no sure things – witness that Malta won a game tonight for the first time since 1993, and Liechtenstein got a draw with Slovakia.

The U.S. got a 1:0 lead on a goal at 30' by Altidore, who seems to finally be starting to fill his enormous potential. Four years ago, he positively abused the Spain backline in the U.S. 2:0 upset win over the future world champs, but he's mucked around lesser European sides since until he found his scoring touch this year in the Netherlands, and it's thought he will be for sale to some nice German or EPL club this offseason.

Anyway, this is a great and welcome surprise. So the U.S. has a 1:0 lead late in the game. 89' of the game, actually. And this wide position on the free kick is no big deal, right?

No problems here at all, right?

Jamaica ties the score at 1:1

What was that rubbish?

Uh, guys, can you play some defense please?

The U.S. has been prone to some sloppy defending here of late, and this was atrocious. Absolutely inexcusable to give up points in the last minute like this when the game seemed in hand.

And if you're the Jamaicans, now that you've been given an absolute gift, it would be a good idea here to tighten the screws on the back end and take the 1:1 draw.

Four minutes of stoppage time added on ...

Yes this happens

Not exactly stout defending by the Jamaicans here:

 I have no idea what those guys are doing. Clearly none of them could be bothered to, Oh, you know, mark someone 8 yds. from the goal!

I was afraid Brad Evans, of Seattle F.C., would miss this just strictly due to shock setting in upon realizing that he is this wide open!

But he didn't miss:

So the final is Jamaica 1:2 U.S. and the Screamin' Eagles pick up the 3 points for the win, go top of the standings in The Hex with games in hand and a whole lotta home games left. They're pretty well positioned now after looking pretty shaky early in the campaign.

This would go down as a bad win if there were such a thing. But the whole idea of any game is to win, and winning means not making the big mistake at the wrong time – or making it a minute before the other team does, I guess. You can win ugly if the other guys lose uglier, and it's better than going down in a blaze of glory any day. There are no bad wins ... there are no bad wins ...

Shameless Plug

A Beautiful Cup, a novel written by some stiff

I just thought this would be a good time to mention that my novel, A Beautiful Cup, which I wrote in 2003, is available in all appropriate ebook formats. It's available for $7.99 from the publisher, Smashwords, and is also available for $9.99 at Barnes & Noble and I think it's available on amazon and a few other places. It's a fun read and I hope you buy it and enjoy it.

Obligatory IN PLAY LOSE related content: one of the characters in the book is a former world-class 400 hurdler at the University of Minnesota.

I have about 3-4 other novel projects in the works here, some further along than others but all sharing one trait: at the moment, they're all pretty bad. They need some work. I'll be busy this summer.

The Worst Team Money Can Buy, June Edition

We’re going to stay away from the obvious here in choosing this month’s award for The Worst Team Money Can Buy, which would mean selecting the Los Angeles Dodgers, because ripping this sorry lot is shooting fish in a barrel. But after Don Mattingly decided to call out two of his overpriced players – benching Andre Ethier and then Matt Kemp – the Dodgers did seem to get some semblance of a clue this past week, at least for the short term, as they won three of four against the equally moribund California Los Angeles Angels of Yucaipa Anaheim. Now, the Angels fooled everyone briefly with an 8-game winning streak, although it should have been taken with a grain of salt because they beat on the Mariners and the Kansas City Royals (or Réal Ciudad Kansas, as we call them around here, the football-style club name making them seem somehow less incompetent), but the Angels then promptly gagged vs. the Dodgers and are now struggling with the Astros. The Freeway Series in L.A. should have been dubbed The Battle of Who Could Care Less.

Mattingly will ultimately be a fall guy in L.A., I would bet, even though he has a lineup full of round holes and nothing but square pegs to work with. Last year’s astonishing deal with the Red Sox continues to pay little to no dividend, which is a shock to absolutely no one, as the Dodgers took on every bad, bloated contract the Bostons had in exchange for James Loney, a good-field-no-power 1B now plying his trade in Tampa Bay. The Red Sox just gave away all of their problems in one fell swoop and have laughed their way towards the top of the AL East this season. The deal was intended to be a bold foray by the new Dodgers ownership, a salvo across the bow to announce their arrival as big time players after coughing up $2.3 billion – yes, billion – for the franchise at auction. And when people spend money this badly, you wonder sometimes how it is that they ever accrued so much in the first place, given that their decision-making seems problematic.

How much does a bad team cost these days? Well, if you’re in the NBA, it’s $535 million, which is the final price for the June WTMCB nominee Sacramento Kings to be sold to a group of Bay Area investors. Now, I will make no bones about the fact that I’m a Seattle basketball fan, and have gone on and on about the Seattle v. Sacramento saga previously, and I think Seattle got jobbed a bit here owing to the continuing interference of that little troll named David Stern, but I am opposed in principle to franchise relocation, and I wish the folks in Sacramento good luck. Because they’re gonna need it, as the deal in place for the Kings is so bad on the Sacramento end that it seems almost doomed to be a failure.

Between the Seattle group’s deep pockets and the NBA’s need to practice some public extortion, they’ve driven up the cost of doing business so high that, in order to “save” the Kings, the group of investors on the Sacramento side a) spent $535m for a franchise valued at around $295m by Forbes; b) agreed not to take $18m in supplemental revenue sharing will still playing in Arco Sleep Train Arena for the foreseeable future; and c) agreed not to take any revenue sharing money at all once a new arena is built. Now, the Seattle group could do that, because they’re bazillionaires and the revenue streams would be there in the future in Seattle, which means they would be payees into the NBA's coffers. The Kings, meanwhile, take a minimum of $20m a year from the league in just to break already (and more likely more than that), and the realities of demographics suggest the Kings will NEVER be able to be a payee into that system. So this group who bought the Kings are losing money from the moment the ink dries on the Purchase Agreement, and will continue doing so until a new arena opens and probably long thereafter, since the economics of the game aren't likely to remain stagnant.

And the iffy arena deal in Sac claims it will only include $258m in public subsidy from parking revenues – which could turn out to be more like $340m or more – and that the building will be done in 2-3 years – which almost certainly be longer. And all that time the Kings will STILL be losing money. If the building takes 5-6 years, which is far more likely than not here in the Republic o’ California, you're talking about being down $100m off the top. Then again, they just $535m for the Kings, so maybe they have $100m to needlessly chuck down a rathole. But I just don't see how this team can hope to compete, other than to luck their way into a superstar in the draft lottery. And in chatting with frustrated Seattle basketball fans and theorizing with them about the subject of future NBA landscape shifts happening, I have argued that the most likely franchise to relocate in the future is still the Sacramento Kings, albeit 5-6 years from now. Not that it's much consolation to present-day Seattleites, of course, a lot of whom want to extend the middle finger in the direction of the NBA offices, and are right for feeling that way.

But that $535m in Sac is chump change compared to the $2.4 billion – yes, BILLION – that the taxpayers in Dade County will be ponying up over the next 40 years to pay off the bonds used to finance the modernist monstrosity that is Marlins Ballpark. Having bitten hook, line, and sinker for the claims from Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria that the franchise was going broke, the county along with the city of Miami cleared out a swath of Little Havana for this ballpark. The Marlins constant low payrolls and cheap ways masked the fact that they were, in fact, profiting wildly and basically pilfering baseball’s revenue sharing plans to do so, but Loria et. al strong armed and sweet talked their way into getting this deal shoved through the various wings of South Florida government, teaming up with politicos who were long on ambition and short on smarts.

It galls me somewhat that a snake oil salesman like Loria – who bought the Expos in Montréal, ran them into the ground, sold the club to MLB and bought the Marlins – managed to luck his way into winning a World Series a few years ago, thus adding some sort of credibility to his regime (an achievement which had EVERYTHING to do with the fact he brought Montréal’s outstanding baseball development staff with him to South Florida, and NOTHING to do with his acumen as an owner) while some truly decent and long-suffering franchises continue to go without.

This ballpark deal has already led to a mayoral recall, the Securities and Exchange Commission has an open investigation going, and the Marlins have returned to their cheap ways this season after an offseason fire sale that followed last year’s ill-advised free agent spending spree, fielding a team this season that is currently 15-41 and may go down as one of the worst the game has ever seen. The Fish most definitely rot from the head. The fans in Miami are in open revolt – the Marlins are singlehandedly responsible for 40% of the decline in MLB attendance so far this year. Loria has managed to blunt all the wonderful lifestyle advantages South Florida possesses in the process, as no free agent in their right mind will want anything to do with this toxic waste dump of a franchise. Meanwhile, Giancarlo Stanton, who is potentially one of the great players of his generation, can only count the days before he can leave.

The Marlins have pretty much poisoned the well for every other sports entity in the state when it comes to doing business. Already this year, the Florida state legislature has ignored a request from the Miami Dolphins for public assistance in remodeling their aging stadium, and then turned around and nixt a plan for property tax relief so as to finance remodeling of Daytona International Speedway – both of which are far more economically significant than the Marlins, mind you, since DIS generates something like $1.5 billion annually in economic benefit for Central Florida, while the Dolphins stadium frequently hosts Super Bowls and NCAA championships and such. (Good luck to the Tampa Bay Rays ever getting out that terrible dome in St. Petersburg, that's all I gotta say.) Now, perhaps something good will come out of this in the end, in that municipalities will stop shelling out enormous public subsidies for sports franchises so willingly. But in the meantime, there are plenty of good seats available in Miami to watch the Marlins, the Worst Team (Your Tax) Money Can Buy in June and pretty much every month for the next 39 years.

Uh ... Don't Do That

As we were just saying the other day, German soccer is on a real good run right now, and their national team is probably one of the 3-4 teams that might – might – be able to give a good run at the Brazilians next summer. And while I'm not qualified to be any sort of a soccer coach, my first bit of advice on how to beat them (or, really, anybody for that matter), would be to suggest that you DON'T DO THIS:

What the hell was that?

Apparently it's now being listed as taking 9 seconds for the Germans to score vs. Ecuador tonight during a friendly in Florida. Ecuador deservedly got beat after that bit of silliness, losing 4:2.

The Germans have a game this weekend vs. the U.S., who lost 4:2 in a friendly tonight to Belgium, a team that looks potentially terrifying here in the future since most of their players are EPL calibre and are also in their early 20s. The U.S. will likely get a beatdown from the Germans this weekend, but it's a good warmup for the CONCACAF Hexagonal. There ain't anyone in this neighbourhood that's even comes close to being as good as the Germans, that's for sure.

Unlikely Hero of the Week

Zion, Ilinois 1915. (foto found by cousin Pamela)

My hero of the week is me, because I've decided, on the occasion of my mumblety-mumbleth birthday, to lose something that I've had for a long time.

My nicotine habit.

Best confidante and best editor Laura said to me once, "sometimes I'm amazed that you're not addicted to everything." I actually have a really high tolerance level for most medications and drugs, which means a lot of stuff just doesn't do anything for me at all. The only two things that I can't seem to do without are caffeine and nicotine. One of those has got to go, and it ain't the coffee, I can tell you that.

I've stopped numerous times in the past two decades but I've never been able to quit. Big difference. And I've always resumed again. Usually, I just try to be nonchalant about it and try to act as if quitting is no big deal. This time I'm doing it differently: by announcing it here before a worldwide reading audience, I am setting myself up for PUBLIC SHAME AND RIDICULE here on the blog if I don't stick to it. Help me out here folks. Help me stay with this.

I think it'll be OK. Just as a warning, I'll probably be cranky, bitchy, agitated and annoyed. So, in other words, I'll just like I always am.

Seriously, I want this to be a positive, life-changing experience, so all shows of support are appreciated. Thanks everyone out there for reading. Keep reading and I'll keep writing, because someone out there will keep losing. But in this case, I'll win out in the end.

Worthy Adversaries

If you had to lose the biggest game of your life, how would you like it to go? Would you rather a close game that came down to the finish, or would you rather get blown out? For competitors, of course, the answer is NEITHER, because it would never even occur to them that they would lose. But this is IN PLAY LOSE where we contemplate such questions, and in light of Saturday's Champions League Final at Wembley between Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich, this question sprung to my mind.

If you had to choose, which would you choose?

The game itself was spectacular, one for the ages. Bayern 2:1 Borussia, the winning goal scored at 89' by Arjen Robben, who rid himself of the dreaded 'choker' tag in the process – having missed a penalty in last year's final v. Chelsea, and flubbed a golden opportunity for the Dutch v. Spain in the 2010 World Cup Final. It was a game in which the phrase "hate for someone to have to lose" came to mind. A game truly worthy of being a final.

Had the scoreline read Bayern 4:0 at the end, no one would've been surprised. Bayern won the Bundesliga by 25 points this season, running up a ridiculous +80 goal differential in the process that is something straight out of a video game. They carry the moniker FC Hollywood, a jetset glamour club all about flair and style. Their team is so deep that several players who will likely be playing key roles at the World Cup in Brazil next summer couldn't even get on the field at Wembley. Their 7:0 aggregrate destruction of F.C. Barcelona in the Champions League semis made it clear that this was, player for player, the best team in the world. A dominating victory at Wembley simply would have been a coronation, a confirmation of greatness that most of us already knew.

Borussia, meanwhile, finished second in Germany this season. They have a young team which fielded only one legitimate superstar in their Polish striker Lewandowski. Reaching the final was quite an accomplishment for the Yellow Army, and even though they drew 1:1 twice with Bayern during the German season, Borussia were HUGE underdogs. And huge underdogs tend to play cautiously and conservatively – slow the pace, try to keep it close, park a bus in front of their own goal, maybe hope to go 0:0 and extend into extra time. Hell, even teams with far more talent than Borussia do that vs. Bayern. Last year's rather wretched Champions League final saw Chelsea win through one minute of Drogba brilliance and 119 minutes of cynicism, combined with Bayern's inability to hit the broad side of a barn.

Yet here was Borussia going straight out and punching Bayern in the mouth. Young, cocky, positive, a we-do-not-give-a-damn-who-you-are attitude. They buzzed and swarmed like bees the first half hour of the game, dominating play with a full court press straight out of Louisville, pressing Bayern everywhere and attacking the goal from all different directions. But after about the 30' mark, Bayern found their footing, at which point this game turned into a track meet on grass. Up and down, end to end, chances all over the place for either team. It could've been more like 5:4 than 2:1 were it not for the excellent goalkeeping on either side.

It really was a beautiful game to watch. A shame someone had to lose. Which wound up being Borussia, of course. One wondered if expending so much energy early would catch up with them. In the last 30' they gave up two goals in which their defense looked flat and square while the Bayern superstars did just enough to coax a couple balls into the net.

The game winner, in particular, came from a sequence that seemed unremarkable – just a free kick from midfield and a highball lofted lazily down to the edge of the 18. But then it's a bad bounce, chaos, a scramble play, Ribéry's clever backheel to Robben for a first touch and a leap over a sprawling defender into the clear, shifty little shot cross his body loaded with english that barely had enough momentum to reach the goal. Bang, just like that, 2:1 to Bayern. The goal seemingly came out of nowhere, and with the full 90 all but done there was basically no time for Borussia to recover.

And losing a game in such fashion simply magnifies all of the little moments here and there where you wish that you might have done something different. What if THIS hadn't happened ... what if I had done THIS instead of this ... what if THAT bounce had gone our way ... The devil is in the details, and the details will drive you crazy if you let them.

My high school basketball team was eliminated from the state playoffs by 2 points in OT, the winning shot coming with :01 on the clock. This after we'd cheated death at the end of regulation – down 10 with little more than 2:00 to play and we unleashed a furious rally, tying the game late, only to have our opponents take the lead on a basket with about :07 left, after which our point guard made a mad dash end-to-end and dished off a pass for a driving layup at the buzzer. It was such a crazy finish to reguation time that we were certain we would ultimately win in OT, thinking we'd broken their spirit as they gagged away their double-digit margin in the closing minutes. The ultimate result – losing by 2 at the horn – was a shock to the system. Game over, season over, high school career over for 8 of us on that team. I think we sat in the locker room for about 5 minutes without saying a word, a collection of statues. What could you possibly say?

And in retrospect, I would rather we lost 20. I would rather they just kicked our ass and shown they were clearly better than us in all phases of the game. Losing is losing, after all, but it's easier for me personally to acknowledge that an opponent was simply better. We attempt to qualify defeats, attaching terms like 'moral victory.' I personally hate moral victories, because there is implicit in that idea the notion that you could've won but ultimately didn't. You were 'gallant in defeat,' whatever the hell that means.

During the course of a season, of course, you can look back at your losses – the 'moral victories' and the blowouts and the like – and see if/how you've progressed from that point. Mistakes are correctable. Improvement possible. But there are, in the end, no moral victories in finals or elimination games. You lost. It's over. It's on to the next season, if there is one – and such is the nature of sports that no teams are ever exactly composed the same way the following season. Whatever collection of players you've assembled in that moment is a one-time deal. A good number of players on the Borussia side yesterday will likely never be on such as grand a stage again. 2:1 losses on 89' goals in such situations seem even harder to ultimately accept. In a 4:0 blowout, you are clearly second-best – but 2nd best, in an international competition, really is pretty good. It's OK to know you were 2nd best if 1st ultimately didn't seem possible.

I didn't want to hear people telling me, in the aftermath of my high school basketball team's 2-point loss in O.T., what a great game it was. Fuck that. But you know what? It kinda was a great game, now that I think about it 20+ years later ... hmm ...

And as fans and spectators and onlookers, we don't want 4:0 blowouts in Champions League finals. We want great games, memorable games rife with tension which are great theatre. Winners write the history books but have a tendency of doing it the same way over and over – we played great, we were superior, it was destiny, blah blah blah. That's all so boring and predictable. But ironically enough, it's more often the losers who ultimately make a game memorable. Whom other than the most ardent Bayern diehard would've wanted to watch a replay of a 4:0 blowout? But I could watch the video from yesterday's game at Wembley again and again, even though I know the outcome, simply to appreciate what I've seen.

So I applaud Borussia, in the end, for opting to play the way they did – opting for swashbuckling over cowering in their own half of the field all day, being tenacious instead of tentative. Living by the sword and ultimately dying by it. They lost but they damn sure made Bayern work for it, and the club has made a lot of friends in the process. And that does matter. I do believe "they were worthy adversaries," the old martial arts cliché, is about the more sincere compliment you can ever pay a defeated opponent, even if it sucks to hear. (And it does.) Borussia were worthy adversaries, to be sure. They lost, but German football – and, indeed, football as a whole – was a big overall winner.

And we sports lovers have been fortunate this year in that so many finals – the Super Bowl, the NCAA championship, and now the Champions League – that were actually worthy of the title. It also makes for better parties. I've been to more Super Bowl parties that petered out at halftime than I care to remember – warm beer, stale nachos, half-empty bars. Lame. We're all about the parties here at IN PLAY LOSE. It simply cannot be any other way. If you don't have good parties, then what's the point?

That One's Gonna Sting a Bit

Apologies for being a little slow here catching up on the LOSE news. I was busy last week as deadline nears at the magazine where I work. But we've had some shocking acts of losing here recently which cannot possibly go unmentioned.

As I have said here repeatedly of late, promotion to, and preventing relegation from, the English Premier League is a HUGE deal. Desperate times call for desperate measures and produce some utterly astonishing results.

This game from last weekend is a fine example. This is from the second division Football League Championship playoff between Leicester City, a club that knows frustration well – The Foxes have lost the FA Cup final four times without a win, which is a record – and the Hornets of Watford F.C., who are far more famous for being once owned by Elton John than they are for anything on the pitch. It's a two-game playoff, with goal difference, or "aggregate," being the tiebreaker.

To set the scene here further: Leicester won the first game 1-0, and Watford are leading 2-1 at Vicarage Road, their home grounds, in the return match's dying moments when a questionable penalty is awarded to the Foxes. The conversion rate on penalty kicks is generally in the 80-85% range, mind you, and a goal here will give the Foxes a 2-2 draw in the match and they will win the playoff, thus advancing to the playoff finale at Wembley, where a shot at the coveted place in the EPL awaits. And in the unlikely event that the Foxes miss the penalty, the game would then end 2-1 in favour of Watford, then overtime will be necessary since the overall aggregate is 2-2. So the Foxes would seem to hold all the cards here, right?

Well ...

I have never seen anything like that. I also have NO EARTHLY IDEA what the Leicester goalkeeper was doing on that play.

To give you another perspective, here is some video shot from the grandstands at Vicarage Road:

I'm not sure how you overcome that sort of a collapse if you're the Foxes. The hangover from that game (and from the heavy drinking which would follow) may last about six months, if not longer.

And thus, with the 3-1 win and 3-2 aggregate score, the Hornets advanced to Wembley where they'll play Crystal Palace on May 27 for the right to join automatic qualifiers Cardiff City and Hull City in getting regularly thrashed competing next season in the EPL. This is a one-game, winner-take-all playoff, and pretty much all bets are off.

Leaf Blowers

"I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows."
– Bart Simpson
 
Down three games to one in the best-of-7 series against the heavily-favoured Boston Bruins, the Toronto Maple Leafs had squeaked out 2-1 victories in Games 5 and 6 to level the series. In Game 7, the upstart Leafs had shrugged off an early 1-0 deficit, outplayed the Bruins on the B’s home ice at Boston Garden (and I don't give a shit what bank has their name on the building, it's the Boston Garden), taken a 2-1 lead in the 2nd period and then, early the third, struck for two more goals to stun the home crowd and pretty much everyone watching – which apparently was everyone in Canada, as CBC reported it’s biggest TV ratings in history. Nazem Kadri’s goal at 5:29 of the third period, giving the Leafs a 4-1 lead, seemed to cement and finalize one of the more impressive, and shocking, about-faces in sports in recent years.

All it did was set the stage from which the Leafs could fall off, because the Leafs were just getting started.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are one of the most inexcusably bad franchises in all of professional sports. While they can claim 13 Stanley Cups in their history, they haven’t won a championship since 1967, the year before the so-called ‘modern’ era began in the NHL, when the league expanded from it’s “original six” and doubled it’s membership to 12 franchises. Not only have they not won a Stanley Cup in 46 years, the Leafs haven’t even been that close, not even reaching the finals during that time. More often than not in that time, the Leafs have been afterthoughts. Indeed, this year’s Leafs squad gave Toronto fans a sniff of the playoffs for the first time since 2004, and most experts considered that to be a grand act of overachievement.

And it’s not as if the Leafs can lean on the crutch of “we don’t have any money.” They are awash in loonies and twoonies. The Toronto Maple Leafs are the most valuable franchise in the NHL, estimated by Forbes to be worth $1,000,000,000 in a league otherwise awash in red ink. Toronto is the largest city in Canada, and the 5th largest city in North America. Through sheer demographic pull, the Leafs dominate the hockey media north of the border, which has also spawned a rather fierce and large battalion of Leafs haters – and with good reason, since the Leafs have done pretty much nothing in four decades to be worthy of such attention other than be based in Toronto. The Leafs have failed to succeed in spite of what seems to be almost unfuckable circumstances. Every external force would lead you to believe that the Leafs should be a dominant force in the NHL, not a meek also-ran mired in perpetual failure.

The North American sports model allows for such long stretches of ineptitude. As I’ve pointed out prior here in IN PLAY LOSE, poor enough performance in the Europe gets you banished to the wandering the badlands of Division Two. In North America, however, bad franchises continue to flounder seemingly ad infinitum with seemingly little or no consequences to the club. At the root of almost all spats involving the spectre of franchise relocations are teams which aren’t very good – which the owner can then blame of a lack of local resources, thus justifying their threats to move to greener pastures. But it also has led to some unique narratives in which failure, in fact, is embraced and ultimately celebrated, held up right alongside the stories of fame and glory. The story of the New York Yankees’ 27 World Series titles is inevitably intertwined with the 80+ years of frustration of the Boston Red Sox, who are almost always really good but never quite good enough. If I was the use the term ‘storied history’ of the Philadelphia Phillies, who have lost more games than any franchise in the history of professional sports, I would do so without irony. After enduring more than 10,000 losses over the centuries, you can understand why Philly sports fans would be apt to do things like boo Santa Claus.

Nowhere is failure celebrated quite like Chicago, however. The Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908, and every time they seem to be approaching that pinnacle, some sort of colossal failure or absurd debacle ensues, leading to the notion that the franchise is somehow cursed or predisposed to bad luck. This is a convenient sort of excuse, of course. The fewer chances you have to succeed, the more epic the failures seem to be. Indeed, the aforementioned Bruins suffered one of the most epic chokes in history three seasons ago, winning the first three games of a best-of-7 with the Philadelphia Flyers and losing the next four, including blowing a 3-0 lead in Game 7 at home. All the B’s did was go out and win the Stanley Cup the following season, and that collapse was easily forgotten. But to Cubs fans, of course, Steve Bartman and Steve Garvey and the Amazin’ Mets become supporting cast in the constant narrative of victimhood, the act of winning a World Series being a Promethean sort of task with failure seemingly decreed by the baseball gods.

In the excellent book Scorecasting (which is pretty much required reading for all loyal readers of IN PLAY LOSE) authors Jon Wertheim and Tobias Moskowitz dedicate an entire chapter to the Cubs, attempting to use mathematics and principles of economics to try and discern whether the Cubs are, in fact, cursed. It’s a fun exercise put forth by a couple of long-time Cubs fans, but by every metric they can model, the Cubs appear not to be cursed at all. It isn’t because of bad luck or misfortune that they’ve gone 105 years without a World Series title – it’s because the Cubs have been TERRIBLE.

Furthermore, the authors then venture into theorizing why the Cubs have been terrible for so long, and their conclusion shouldn’t be a surprise – they are terrible because there is no incentive to do otherwise. A string of Cubs owners over the years have made it a point to try and market the experience of going to a game at the 'Friendly Confines' of Wrigley Field, what with the day games and the ivy covered walls in the outfield and the shoehorned ballpark in among the trendy residential neighbourhood where enterprising neighbours sells tickets for rooftop bleacher seats. They actually document how the franchise’s attendance and overall value increases when the club is losing on the field.

“If they’re looking for a guy to push the button when they blow the place up, I’ll do it ... Chicago’s one of the worst places in baseball … really for anything … I read where they got approval for some more upgrades. Count me in the group of people extremely happy to see that. I guess I'm just spoiled. There is a tremendous history associated with it and there is something special about playing on the same field that guys like Babe Ruth did. But really, what kind of history is there? It's not like there has been one championship after another. It's mainly been a place for people to go and drink beer."
– Texas Rangers 1B/OF/DH Lance Berkman

Berkman is a rather outspoken player who is also somewhat of a goof, but he was definitely onto something when he said that. The ticket prices in Chicago are among the highest in the game, yet the beer prices are among the lowest. 100-year-old Wrigley Field may be quirky and charming for a fan, but the players generally dislike it. The place has become a spot for the Windy City’s hip and trendy to see and be seen, a frat party booze cruise where the game itself doesn’t really matter – and, in fact, where losing has taken on a bizarro aura of civic pride. But don’t take my word for it, just ask former Cubs manager Lee Elia. In case you couldn’t make that out on the audio:

“Fuck those fuckin' fans who come out here and say they're Cub fans that are supposed to be behind you rippin' every fuckin' thing you do. I'll tell you one fuckin' thing, I hope we get fuckin' hotter than shit, just to stuff it up them 3,000 fuckin' people that show up every fuckin' day, because if they're the real Chicago fuckin' fans, they can kiss my fuckin' ass right downtown and PRINT IT. They're really, really behind you around here... my fuckin' ass. What the fuck am I supposed to do, go out there and let my fuckin' players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the fuckin' nickel-dime people who turn up? The motherfuckers don't even work. That's why they're out at the fuckin' game. They oughta go out and get a fuckin' job and find out what it's like to go out and earn a fuckin' living. Eighty-five percent of the fuckin' world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here. A fuckin' playground for the cocksuckers. Rip them motherfuckers. Rip them fuckin' cocksuckers like the fuckin' players. we got guys bustin' their fuckin' ass, and them fuckin' people boo. And that's the Cubs? My players get around here. I haven't seen it this fuckin' year. Everybody associated with this organization have been winners their whole fuckin' life. Everybody. And the credit is not given in that respect. Alright, they don't show because we're 5 and 14... and unfortunately, that's the criteria of them dumb 15 motherfuckin' percent that come out to day baseball. The other 85 percent are earning a living. I tell you, it'll take more than a 5 and 12 or 5 and 14 to destroy the makeup of this club. I guarantee you that. There's some fuckin' pros out there that wanna win. But you're stuck in a fuckin' stigma of the fuckin' Dodgers and the Phillies and the Cardinals and all that cheap shit. It's unbelievable. It really is. It's a disheartening fuckin' situation that we're in right now. Anybody who was associated with the Cub organization four or five years ago that came back and sees the multitude of progress that's been made will understand that if they're baseball people, that 5 and 14 doesn't negate all that work. We got 143 fuckin' games left. What I'm tryin' to say is don't rip them fuckin' guys out there. Rip me. If you wanna rip somebody, rip my fuckin' ass. But don't rip them fuckin' guys 'cause they're givin' everything they can give. And right now they're tryin' to do more than God gave 'em, and that's why we make the simple mistakes. That's exactly why.”

Greatest rant in the history of sports. Apparently the Bleacher Bums at Wrigley Field can recite this verbatim, considering this tirade by their frustrated manager at the time to be some sort of badge of honour. I, for one, find the Cubs’ fans lifelong celebrations of failure to be rather baffling. I also find it impossible to sympathize – the club’s owners have pretty much banked on the notion that the fans are sheep for a century, and made few efforts over that time to legitimately field a competitive product. If that incentive isn’t there, why bother?

This sort of perverse fascination with failure also seems to run rampant when it comes to the original subject of this post, those wacky Toronto Maple Leafs. 46 years of high-profile failure will do that. There is an odd sort of acceptance of failure at play, one which, paradoxically, in tinged with the angst of high expectations. Their fans expect the Leafs to lose, but hope and pray and wonder if this is the year the losing will finally stop. The Leafs particular brand of ineptitude can largely be attributed to the dubious ways of owner Harold Ballard, who did pretty much all he could to run the franchise into the ground. Ballard was a cheapskate, among other dubious traits, and did all he could to maximize his profit margin while knowing full well the margin was always going to be there. Whatever poor product he put out on the ice was going to be a financial success regardless of the outcome.

The new ownership groups since Ballard’s death has done little to change the fortunes of the franchise around. Freed up from decades of cheapskate ways, the Leafs now spend freely and spend badly, whiffing repeatedly in free agency and doing a poor job in the areas of scouting and player development. They hire big name GMs and big name coaches, all of whom manage to do less with more, as big money simply breeds impatience. And while there are a few hockey players who can excel and even thrive living and playing in the fishbowl that is Toronto, quite a few more don’t like the constant, minute scrutiny. (This is akin to the theorizing which comes up every time the Yankees make a trade as to whether the player can cut it in New York.) The misfortunes of the Leafs, much like the Cubs, are ultimately their own making. The fact that simply making the playoffs should constitute an achievement in Toronto speaks to the overwhelming state of disrepair.

And Leafs fans had no real expectations of success in this postseason. Few people expected the Leafs to even give the Bruins a competitive series, much less find themselves playing Game 7. The Leafs were playing with house money. But it’s easy to forget that when, 3¾ games into a playoff series, Nazem Kadri scores to give the Leafs a 4-1 lead and they stand on the verge of a terrific upset.

And then this happened:

Yes, that happened. A collapse the likes of which the NHL has never seen.

It fits in rather nicely with the Leafs’ narrative of failure, even though what happens in the moment has nothing to do with what happened 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. And with such a colossal flop will come even more unrealistic expectations for next season, as the Maple Leafs go about attempting to live this one down. And while a good number of my Canadian friends (of which I have many, since I speak fluent Canadian) have gleefully engaged in some schadenfreude this past week, reveling in the failures of the hated Leafs, I cannot help but feel a bit for them. The reputation for being a choker is one of the hardest to live down. If anything, they overachieved this year simply to reach a point where they failed. But unfortunately, the Peter Principle is often strictly enforced in sports – you rise to the level of your own incompetence. In Toronto’s case, it’s a level which, until Monday, no one in hockey had ever seen before.

Capital Crimes

Today the LOSE presents the first of what I hope to become a regular series of guest posts from fellow long-suffering fans either intrigued or morbidly curious about the act of losing, or maybe just in need of an act of literary exorcism so as to purge some frustration. Tonight’s post comes from world-class scrabbler, perennial Austin Adult Spelling Bee winner, multi-instrumentalist, and long-suffering Washington Capitals fan Geoff Thevenot, author of the outstanding Scrambled and Unscrambled blog, which you should all read when you’re not reading IN PLAY LOSE. Take it away Geoff …

Hi, I'm Geoff. I grew up near Washington, D.C., and I have been a Washington Capitals fan since January 26, 1977, when my father took me, age 6, and my little brother Brian, age 4, to a Capitals game against the Detroit Red Wings at the old Capital Centre down the road. The Capitals won the game, 4-1; the goal sirens and loud cheering enthralled me, as did the entire contents of the game program and the next day's standings and boxscore because I was that kind of kid, and I was hooked for life. The starting goalies in the game were Roger Crozier for the Caps and Ed Giacomin for the Red Wings - my dad taught me how to pronounce Giacomin's surname, which I thought was really cool. No, I'm not old.

What I could not have known at the time was how rare an event I had witnessed. The Caps were a third-year expansion team at the time and would finish with just 24 wins in 80 games. My father had the good sense to take us to a game the Caps might win, against a strip-mined Red Wings team that hadn't done anything right since Gordie Howe left a few years before.

And what I *really* couldn't have known was the legacy I was heir to. The underpowered 24-42-14 team we watched that night, believe it or not, had made a quantum leap forward from where they were two years before. Coaches have won Jack Adams Trophies for less.

***

The Capitals began play in the fall of 1974, handicapped in a multiplicity of ways. The NHL contained just the Original Six teams of ancient legend as late as 1967, owing to the extraordinary stubbornness of its owners, but finally realized the opportunity before them and expanded to 12 teams in one go, and further to 16 by 1972. This thinned out the talent, but there was enough to go around - too few teams before meant that lots of deserving players weren't getting the chance to prove themselves, and the initial rounds of expansion helped fix that. But then a rival league, the WHA, started playing in the fall of 1972, and while not as powerful as the NHL, they had some money to throw around. They notably signed Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull, but they also competed for lesser talents - a second- or third-line player in the NHL might well be a star in the early WHA, and lots of less famous players made the leap as well...also, the talent pool itself was much thinner in the early 70s than it would be later, because the Europeans had yet to arrive. Into the late 70s, over 90 percent of NHL players were Canadian-born; by the mid-90s, only about 60 percent of them were.

But the NHL was still committed to expand once more, and so the Capitals and Kansas City Scouts would start playing in the 1974-75 season. (And they had reason to, if for nothing other than outracing the WHA to those cities.) There was an expansion draft, but it was most uncharitable: each existing NHL team got to protect 16 skaters and two goalies, so the best the Caps and Scouts could do was pick players that the existing teams viewed as no better than their 17th best skater or third-string goalie. And many of the class of players somewhat better than that, guys who could have helped here, were under contract to one of the 14 teams in the WHA. After the season, many observers thought that the 1974 NHL expansions had been a mistake. Can't blame them, though both teams do still exist - the Scouts moved to Colorado in 1976 and then New Jersey in 1981, becoming the New Jersey Devils we know today.

The Capitals, endowed with that foundation of sinking sand, proceeded to weaken themselves even further at the 1974 amateur draft. Look at it and you will cry. The three-year-old New York Islanders, picking fourth in each round but having the key advantage of knowing what the hell they were doing, came away with Clark Gillies and Bryan Trottier. The Capitals, picking first in each round, came away with Greg Joly and Mike Marson. (Their 1975 draft was even worse.)

And then there's this. Yes, that's right, white pants. That happened. Not for nothing are "diapers" and "despair" anagrams of each other.

As bad as you would expect a team forged in all these fires at once to be, the expansion Caps were even more fecal than that. The first thing you notice is the record. They won 8 games and tied 5 on the year, which means they lost the other 67. And away from home, they were far worse: they lost their first 37 road games outright before eking out a 3-2 win against the horrible-but-not-quite-as-horrible California Golden Seals (doesn't that name just tell you they're bad? Good sports teams don't have names like that). But the win-loss record is just the beginning.

Here is one of the coolest bits of symmetry in the sports record book. The record for goals scored by a team in one season is 446, by the 1983-84 Edmonton Oilers. Did you see this team? You wouldn't believe it. The Wayne Gretzky Oilers, at their peak. They lit people up every damn night. Too many weapons, including the ultimate one, Wayne himself. This was before the invention of the devilish (sorry) neutral-zone trap and other defensive strategies; this is what happens when one team has vastly superior talent and game planning at the exact moment in history when no one else has an answer for it, as happened with the 16-0 New England Patriots up until the Super Bowl that year. Video game numbers. Wayne Gretzky put up 205 points (87 goals, 118 assists) - the next best non-Oiler total was 121. They damn near broke hockey. Their like will never be seen again.

The record for goals allowed is exactly the same - 446. That's our expansion Capitals. Yes, you heard that right: when facing those Caps, a league-average NHL offensive team turned into the Wayne Gretzky Oilers at their peak. So what happened when a really good team faced them? We have your evidence: the first-year Capitals were placed, cruelly, in a division with the Montreal Canadiens, the powerhouse of the mid-to-late 70s. In their six matches, the Canadiens outscored the Capitals 49-9. (The Caps couldn't score either - they netted a sad 181 goals on the year, far below the league average of 273.)

There are just so many beautiful indices of the first-year Caps' ineptitude, I can hardly decide what to present first. The expansion Capitals are to hockey what Pedro Carolino's "English As She Is Spoke" was to English pedagogy:

- Since the '67-68 expansion that marks the modern era of NHL hockey, by my count, 16 players have achieved a plus-minus rating of negative 50 or worse; a plus-minus that wretched is a singular achievement. The expansion Capitals had EIGHT such players on the roster, including one (Jack Lynch) who managed to rack up a -54 in just 20 games; Bill Mikkelson, who played 54 games for the team that year, set the all-time record for worst plus-minus at -82.

- The Capitals had a 17-game losing streak, a 10-game losing streak, a 9-game losing streak and two 7-game losing streaks. All in the same season.

- There is a formula, commonly referred to as the Pythagorean formula, that predicts wins and losses from runs/goals/points scored and allowed in various sports, and it's usually pretty close to its target. When it's not, we can surmise that a team may have been unusually good or bad in clutch situations, or unusually lucky or unlucky. Almost every historically awful team also shows up as unlucky by this analysis, which makes intuitive sense - the worst teams ever should be those that were both bad *and* unlucky, right? Not these Caps, though: this formula suggests they should have ended up with something like 11 standings points, even less than the record-low 21 they actually had. There's a good reason they exceeded expectations: they got to play their expansion brethren, the Kansas City Scouts, who would have been the league's worst in almost any other year, and a few other troubled franchises. The league was unusually stratified at the time. In an NHL with a more normal competitive ecology, these Caps might have struggled to win even five games. Their record overrates them. (The 92-93 Ottawa Senators and San Jose Sharks, with win-loss records nearly as bad, would have blown the 74-75 Caps off the ice, no doubt in my mind. It was a different league by then.)

- To illustrate this further, there is a stat on hockey-reference.com called Point Shares, which attempts to mine the data and figure out how much each player contributed to his team's standings points for the year. In most cases, the point shares for all the individual players on a team add up roughly to the team's point total: for example, the 2009-10 Penguins add up to 100.15, and the team actually had 101 standings points. For normal teams, the average difference is about 4-5 points. The first-year Caps break this model: they had 21 standings points, but the sum total of their players' contributions is estimated to be...2.7. Yes, two point seven. As a team. In 1988-89, Mario Lemieux had 19.56 point shares by himself.

- Who was the 74-75 Caps' best player? Tommy Williams was a 34-year-old right winger who had spent the previous two seasons as a mid-line player for the New England Whalers of the WHA, after a largely undistinguished run of seasons in the NHL in the sixties. Williams would have had to hustle to make the third line on most NHL teams, but on these Caps, he was the man. He led the team with 58 points, tying him for 70th place in the NHL; Denis Dupere was a distant second on the team with 35.

- The first-year Capitals had three coaches. Teams with three coaches in a single season tend not to have the good records, as a rule. Jimmy Anderson was let go after his 4-45-5 start, but apparently he was not the problem, as Red Sullivan (these names sound like they're from the 1940s; surely fedoras and whiskey are involved in here somewhere) guided the hometown heroes to a 2-16-0 mark. Milt Schmidt, who I think was also the GM but am too lazy to check at the moment, finished out the year behind the bench with a rousing 2-6-0 record.

- A week in the life: During the week of February 18-25, 1975, when I was busy attending pre-K, the Capitals lost consecutive games 6-1, 9-4, 10-3, 7-2 and 6-2. You'd think they'd have gotten tired of that, but no, they went on to lose twelve more games in a row, including losses of 8-0, 12-1, 7-2 and 8-2. Ten of these seventeen games were at home.

- My father attended a second-year Caps versus Canadiens game. He has reported since that the entire game was played at one end of the ice, and that the Capitals appeared to be in slow motion like on the TV. The game ended 11-0 or something.

- The Caps surrendered eight or more goals 16 times. Yes, one fifth of the time.

- The Caps were shut out in 12 games and scored just one goal in 17 others.

- The Caps scored about 13% of the time on the power play, while giving up power play goals 29% of the time. And those don't even count toward plus-minus ratings.

- The Caps gave up 255 goals - on the road. Their *average* road game in 1974-75 was a 7-2 loss.

- Starting goalie Ron Low played 48 games and racked up a GAA of 5.45, and he was clearly the best goalie on the roster. The backup goalie, Michel Belhumeur (great name), was in net for 27 decisions and did not win any of them.

- As you'd expect, almost no one on the roster lasted more than a couple of years longer in the league after the year ended. Defenseman Yvon Labre (whose #7 was eventually retired by the Capitals, the equivalent of a Purple Heart), a castoff from the Penguins, lasted the longest.

- Their final game was an 8-4 win over those Penguins, who had already made the playoffs and thus started their drinking at 11 am instead of 11 pm. In music, this is called a Picardy third - a hopeful major triad at the end of a mournful minor-key piece.