National Disaster

The Nats were absolutely horrible this past weekend

Well Casey was winning
Hank Aaron was beginning
one Robbie going out, one coming in
Kiner and Midget Gaedel
the Thumper and Mel Parnell
and Ike was the only one winning down in Washington
– Terry Cashman, “Talking Baseball”

WERE I to revisit my horrid baseball predictions from the preseason and attempt to justify why it is that I thought the Washington Nationals would win the World Series this year, I would be one of many writers and columnists and pundits feeling forced to do so – and one of many writers and columnists and pundits who’ve been forced to do so for the past four seasons. It’s a pretty easy choice, picking the Nats to win everything, because on paper, they’ve had more talent than everyone else in the National League, if not in all of baseball.

The Official Wife of In Play Lose has some allegiance to the Nats, having grown up in the D.C. area, and so we usually make it a point to take in a game whenever they come to San Francisco. The Nats rolled in for a 4-game series at Phone Co. Park against the Giants, who’ve been something of a M*A*S*H unit all season – their starting lineup of choice has played together all of three games the entire year – and have a starting rotation held together by duct tape and silly string. The Nats lined up Strasburg/Scherzer/Gonzalez to throw the first three games of the series, all top calibre pitchers matched against a cobbled-together rotation. Pitching and defense rule the roost at Phone Co. Park in San Francisco, where the mists and the cool weather and the winds put a severe dent in the offense. It looked like the Nats had three serious mismatches lined up, and with a little luck on Sunday afternoon against Giants ace Madison Bumgarner, a sweep would be possible.

Well, a sweep was possible, indeed.

We’re having a strange summer here in San Francisco. The last four days saw temps around 90° with no wind, no fog, and still, humid air – and in those sorts of conditions (which don’t happen EVER), Phone Co. Park plays more like the ballparks in Cincinnati and Philadelphia. It becomes a launchpad, with slick grass and a rock hard infield, to boot, and the Giants went about peppering the walls and skidding balls into Triples Alley and singlehandedly shortening the career of Nats CF Michael Taylor, who ran about 10 miles over the weekend chasing balls down. By the time Bumgarner completed his masterful performance on Sunday – a complete game 3-hit shutout with 14 Ks as well as a homer and an RBI double in a 5-0 Giants win – the Nats had been subjected to a 4-game sweep and been outscored 28-12 in the process.

This completed a dreadful West Coast road trip for the Nats, who went 1-6 vs. L.A. and the Giants – a nasty sort of 2-stop road trip even in the best of times –  and dropped to 10-20 since the All-Star Break, a slump which has seen them fall from having a healthy lead in the NL East to now being 4½ games behind the suddenly resurgent Mets and 10½ games out of the wild card race. Were it not for the Pittsburgh Pirates sweeping the Mets over the weekend – the ’Mazins somewhat magical second half being momentarily halted when they faced a team that actually knows what it’s doing – the Nats season may already be over. It certainly looked over for the Nats on Friday night when my wife and I attended the game, a Giants win by a score of 8-5 in which Bryce Harper did his Bryce Harper thing, hitting a 3-run RBI and driving in four, and the rest of his teammates seemed to be sleepwalking, as Scherzer got tattooed, the bullpen couldn’t stop the bleeding and the defense looked utterly lost. Quite honestly, that team looked dead.

What the hell is wrong with this team? Certainly, injuries have played a huge part in it. Denard Span really makes that team go from the leadoff spot, and he’s been on the DL for a while now. Anthony Rendon and Jayson Werth also spent large chunks of the season on the DL as well. But consider the Giants again, who are 2½ games out of first in the West and presently have three regulars and two starting pitchers on the DL. Injuries happen to almost everybody, at some point. Indeed, the absence of Rendon and Werth from the starting lineup on Friday night had nothing to do with health and everything to do with the fact that neither of them is hitting their weight in the month of August. I looked at the Nats lineup on the Jumbotron on Friday night and said to KC, “wow, that lineup isn’t any good at all.”

Indeed, the Nats have spent most of the past three seasons failing to live up to lofty expectations. On paper, they always look to be better than they turn out to actually be. This has been especially true on the offensive side of things. Even as Harper has developed into arguably the best player in the National League, he’s only one guy. They just don’t put up enough runs on a regular basis, not even for a starting staff which should – should – be absolutely dominant. The trade for closer Jonathan Papelbon from the Phillies gives the Nats what should – should – be a dominant back end of the bullpen with he and previous Nats closer Drew Storen. But this is where the Nats start running into trouble, of course, seeming like a team that’s far too obsessed with what’s happened in the recent past.

Storen, of course, coughed up the lead in the Nats’ demoralizing Game 5 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2012 playoffs, and also coughed up the lead in the 9th inning of Game 2 against the Giants last year. Storen was having a terrific season this year, and of all the things the Nats could’ve added at the trade deadline to boost their squad, which was in first place at the time, getting a closer shouldn’t have been that high on the list at all. That they did so speaks to a fundamental lack of confidence in their closer Storen to come through when they really, truly need him to – which is fine, I suppose, but you’ve been throwing him out there in the 9th inning for most of the past four years and he’s been pretty good. Two poor games is statistically a small sample size – but they just happen to be the two most important games in the history of the D.C. franchise.

One of the things which I am fond of saying in relation to scrabble is that you must fear metaphor. The reason for this is that the actual mechanics of the game are the same from game to game – but what changes from game to game is the importance that you attach. The fact is that some games do, in fact, mean more than others, and your performance is necessarily going to be judged by how you fare in those situations. The whole “Drew Storen is a choker” motif has been statistically proven to be untrue over time, but you don’t, in the end, get to choose how a game comes to mean. And for a seemingly star-crossed franchise that’s never been to a World Series, that was left to twist in the wind and rot in Montréal for half a decade by the commissioner and MLB, and that had it’s greatest team taken away by the baseball strike of 1994, the failings can seem all the more pointed and painful.

Of course, it’s hard to know just how the Storen-Papelbon combo will work in the bullpen at Washington, since the Nats haven’t been winning any games of late and on two occasions in the pivotal series with the Mets in early August, manager Matt Williams didn’t see fit to put them in the game as the Nats were blowing late-game leads on their way to getting swept at Citi Field – a pivotal series which seems to have changed the entire course of the narrative in the NL East. Williams is in his second year managing the Nats and trying to grow into the job, and his tactical acumen hasn’t been particularly stellar. It’s a lot easier to grow into the job when you have a terrible team to work with, and whatever mistakes you make pale in comparison to the mistakes being made on the field on a regular basis. Instead, Williams got handed the keys to a Ferrari and has been trying to figure out how to drive a stick.

And the second-guessing of everything Matt Williams does was probably inevitable after the trainwreck that was the playoff series last season with San Francisco, beginning with a strange decision in Game 2 of last year’s playoffs: his starter Jordan Zimmerman, having thrown a no-hitter in his last start of the season, was throwing a 2-hit shutout in Game 2 against the Giants and had retired 53 of the 58 previous batters he’d faced when he was yanked with two outs in the 9th in favor of Storen, who promptly coughed up the lead and, nine innings later, the Giants had won a 2-1, 18 inning marathon. The Nats got themselves into a pitching and defense and tactical matchup with the Giants, which pitted Williams in a chess match with Bruce Bochy, whose three World Series titles confirm him as MLB’s grandmaster, and Williams managed to maneuver his way into trying to save the season, in Game 4, using his 6th and 7th best bullpen options. The results were predictable. At the key junctures of the season, Williams seemed out of his depth. In the playoffs, some lateral thinking is necessary, of course – given the hot hand that was Zimmerman, he was sure to get the ball in Game 5, which meant that the Nats’ #1 starter, Stephen Strasburg, should’ve been available for Game 4. To hell with established roles at that point – you’re down 2-1 in a best-of-5 and you have to save the season! Yet there was Strasburg sitting next to Matt Williams, becoming more of a poster child for Washington Nationals ineptitude through inaction than he already was.

Strasburg, of course, was the #1 pick in the draft in the first of back-to-back years where the woful Nats hit the jackpot – drafts which landed them he and then Bryce Harper. He then blew out his arm, and the Nats have been cautious with him ever since. Too cautious. The ace of the staff in 2012, when the Nats had the best record in what was a loaded National League that season, Strasburg was shut down in mid-August under the wishes of the Nats’ front office, who had made the decision at the start of the year to limit his innings count for the season come hell or high water. So there was Strasburg sitting in the dugout watching Game 5 of the playoffs, perfectly healthy but off the roster, watching the Nats face the St. Louis Cardinals ace Chris Carpenter – a guy who, earlier in the year, had a rib removed because it pinching nerves and preventing him from pitching. (Umm, ick.) The juxtaposition of mentalities between the two clubs there is impossible to ignore. Baseball is a game full of voodoo and superstition and faith, of course – “never fuck with a winning streak,” as they say in Bull Durham – and while I don’t subscribe to that sort of hocus-pocus, if there was ever a franchise that deserved to be cursed for trifling with the baseball gods, it would be the one that willingly shut down it’s best pitcher who was perfectly healthy in the throes of what could’ve, and maybe should’ve, been a championship season.

Because guess what, folks, winning championships is hard. It’s really hard. You need great talent, smart management, great timing, good health and also having a little bit of luck doesn’t hurt. As spoiled as we are here in San Francisco, what with the Giants hoisting three new championship banners in the past five years and the Golden State Warriors getting to hoist one here this coming autumn, it’s not lost on people that the Giants went 56 years without winning a World Series, and the Dubs went 40 years without winning an NBA title. And contrary to popular belief among the stathead set, winning championships is why you play the game. It’s how you’re ultimately judged when your career is done, fair or not. It’s why you started playing in the first place, and players go to amazing extremes in order to try and win championships. In last year’s Super Bowl, the Seahawks’ three best defenders – Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Kam Chancellor – were all trying to play with what would otherwise had been season-ending injuries. After the Stanley Cup playoffs are over, players always reveal that they’ve played for the previous two months with broken wrists, broken hands, torn muscles. Questioning the wisdom of doing such a thing is another issue, of course, but the fact is that these are the most competitive people on earth, and capturing that grand prize is all that truly matters in the moment to any of them.

That shutdown of Strasburg coincided with the season that Chipper Jones retired from the Braves and he perhaps explained it best when asked his opinion of the Nats moves. He’d arrived in Atlanta in 1996, the year the Braves won a World Series and in the midst of a 14-year-run of playoff appearances. But the Braves never won another title in his entire career, despite being good and sometimes great. Chipper had come to understand that success was fleeting in sports. When you have the chance to win a championship, you simply have to make the most of it. Jones basically said that the Nats were idiots for doing that. Strasburg held his tongue throughout the season, then voiced his disapproval after he’d been shut down, since he was feeling fine and wanted to pitch and wanted to try to win – which is exactly what the organization should’ve been thinking as well. Sure, the organization has to be mindful of long-term concerns, but the clock is ticking from the moment a player comes up to begin with. You want a guy to have a long career with your franchise, but you don’t always have much of a say in how long that career is going to be. And if you’re Strasburg, and you know that time is short and the opportunities to win titles can be few and far between, are you really going to be that interested in reupping? Sure, money talks, but there’s plenty of money for everyone. Winning, and the chance to do so, often becomes paramount in a free agent’s mind.

I really do feel that 2012 is going to haunt this franchise, if it isn’t already doing so. The 2012 flag that very easily could’ve been flying in Nationals Park is flying over on McCovey Cove. They’ve spent the past three years adding to the core of the roster – Harper, Rendon, Span, Scherzer, Fister – yet they seem to be running in place and perpetually underachieving. That core, meanwhile, is crumbling – Werth is aging, Ryan Zimmerman can’t move, Desmond is costing himself millions in a contract year with a dismal season both offensively and defensively. The Nats were struggling through all of the issues – helped in part by a terrible division – but now the wheels seem to have come off. Something needs to change in a hurry. In the meantime, the clock is ticking and the window continues to close.

There’s still time for the Nats to salvage this season, of course. (For starters, they have a few games coming up with the likes of the hapless Colorado Rockies and the rotting corpse of a franchise that is the Miami Marlins.) 4½ games isn’t an impossible deficit to overcome. The Mets seem a bit slump-proof at the moment, however, given how they pitch. Then again, they just got skunked by the Pirates while the Nats were failing to hit, pitch, field, coach, or even show a pulse for the past weekend. If the Nats somehow rally, they may owe the Pirates a beer or two.

It’s one thing to be awful in perpetuity, and the Nats certainly went that route for a while. That sucks, to be sure. But sports in North America tend to be a boom-and-bust enterprise, and failing to maximizing your opportunities during the good times just makes the bad times seem even worse. Just look at the other team I picked to reach the series – the Mariners won 116 games in 2001, one of the greatest teams in history, but blew their opportunities in the playoffs and haven’t made the playoffs since. The club continues to peddle 2001 nostalgia in lieu of putting a competent product on the field, but the Seattle fans have come to no longer care about such a thing. Waxing nostalgic about glory days that didn’t turn out so glorious only makes the losing more insufferable. The only way you cleanse yourselves of some of those disappointments is to go out and win. John Madden has always been fond of saying that “winning is a great deodorant,” but it’s also a great disinfectant and stain remover as well.

Just a Typical Saturday Morning

We may not play very well, but we’ll look good, damn it.

7:00 A.M. and I’m up early for the telecast of the season opener and Carrow Road looks grand when bathing in bright sunshine and wait what is Neil doing with this lineup, no Redmond and no Jerome in the first XI and this strikes me a EPL rookie manager mistake in trying to win with tactics instead of talent but this is OK, good pace and controlling the play, pressing high and looking dangerous and JESUS CHRIST GRABBAN HOW IN FUCK DID YOU MISS THAT? cross to the center of the box he has an open goal and skids it off the outside of the post for fuck sake and for fuck sake how is that not a red or at least a yellow? Palace guy gets neither from Simon Hooper the EPL rookie referee who I think I remember from Norwich games in the championship last season and who I think I remember being awful although he’s right to book Tetley although the three full rolls from the Palace winger on the dive score him no style points and the Canaries players are right to crowd around him “get the fuck up you fucking sissy” was that in the mike? but it’s OK they are controlling the possession but not enough numbers forward and Palace have some dangerous wingers they are kinda good I think I picked them 6th in the EPL pool for a reason and DAMN IT a goal against the run of play, down 0-1 and a little spooked into the second half and DAMN IT MARK SOMEBODY cheeky set piece from Palace on a corner catches Canaries asnooze jeez an NOW you decide to bring on Redmond and Jerome when you’re down 0-2? about fucking time well this game sucks REDMOND SHOT FROM DISTANCE GOAL and, hmm, that was really poor defense from Palace there and JEROME GOAL ON A BICYCLE KICK!!! FUCK YEAH!!! but wait what is that blind as bats Simon Hooper doing? disallowed goal for dangerous play? are you fucking kidding me? that wasn’t dangerous play it was a guess by an official not having a great day well this game sucks and it’s a good thing our keeper is a stud because that’s some pretty naïve defending going on there from the good guys in the yellow and the green stoppage time one last gasp HOW THE FUCK IS THAT NOT A PENALTY? that was a good old fashioned two-hand shove in the back it was so bloody obvious that anyone would’ve called it if they weren’t blind as bats well done Simon Hooper you’ll undoubtedly grade out by the FA as the worst official in the EPL this week good luck in your next assignment in Rotherham or Leeds or some shit town or, even worse, Ipswich, well it’s just one game and oh, look, Palace just waltzed in for an oh-by-the-way goal in the 95th minute which is the sort of thing that comes back to bite you in the ass when it comes down to goal difference at the end of the season so that’s Norwich City 1:3 Crystal Palace and there’s the whistle and it’s only one game and Palace is pretty good but still it’s a disappointing result with enough truly hideous and bad calls by the referee to almost mask a few glaring weaknesses but not quite so it’s welcome back to the EPL and this is looking like it might be a challenging season for The Good Guys and that game sucked I cannot believe I woke up early for this fuck this I am going back to bed …

Celebrity Fiction Edition

Matt Tunnicliffe’s scorecard from the 2014 National Scrabble Championships. He wasn’t pleased with how he played.

TWO of the good guys in the game of scrabble – and two official Friends of The Lose – were playing in a best-of-5 final on Wednesday at the North American Scrabble Championships in Reno. Matthew “Muffin with Tentacle” Tunnicliffe defeated Jesse “Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod” Day 3-2 to win the championship in a series that was tight, tense, and suspenseful. It was something of a heartbreaking and excruciating loss for Phonerz, who lost one game in the series on the account of playing IR inadvertently late in the game, which isn’t a word and which Matt quickly challenged off. Scrabble is, like all sports and games and contests, often decided by mistakes, if not nearly always so. Everyone makes them from time to time, no matter how good they are.

I was watching this match streamed online while commuting, and I physically cringed when I saw my good friend and club mate Phonerz play IR. For a moment, I felt physically sick. I was sitting next to one of my regular commuting companions on the Caltrain, whose name I don’t even know, and she was startled when I yanked the earbuds out of my ears and facepalmed.

“What happened?”
“He played IR.”
“Uh, who did what?”
“Scrabble,” I said pointing to my phone. “It’s the nationals.”
“What does IR mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not a word.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s not a word. He lost the game because of it.”
“Do you like Words With Friends?”

Sigh.

Jesse handled the defeat with class, however, which means it will probably be safe for me to give him some shit the next time I see him. (And if it’s not safe, I think me and my bad ankle can outrun him and his bad knee.)

As for Matt, the scorecard at the top of the page should give you an idea of his sense of humour. He’s one of the funniest guys in scrabble, and possesses the heightened sense of absurdity that you’d expect from a guy who’s been rooting for the Ottawa Senators all his life. He’s contributed some factoids to this blog, and he gave me permission to reprint here two of his scrabble short stories.

These two stories chronicle battles between Matt and Nigel Richards, who has won everything in English-language scrabble, recently won the French championship after spending nine weeks learning the dictionary, and is presently studying the Klingon dictionary as our planet’s chosen rep for the Interplanetary Scrabble To The Death Festival. These stories also feature some dazzling construction of scrabble game boards, links to which are end the end of the stories, and they possess a sentiment very much in keeping with the ethos here at In Play Lose.

I thought this would be a good way to tip my cap to Matt for his performance in Reno. I, for one, welcome our new muffin overlord:

- - -

Nigel stole my mom's car
So yesterday I spent my Saturday the same way I spend most of my Saturdays: hustling Scrabble players at Confederation Park. This is how I buy my food for the week.
"You sure got a lot better when money was on the line," said my latest victim as she reluctantly handed over a crisp $10 bill.
"Yeah, well, what can I say? I play well under pressure."
The lady scowled and left. I pocketed the money and dreamed of the Arby's I would purchase with it on the way home. My first hot meal in a month!
"Anyone else up for a fun game of Scrabble?! Maybe make it interesting and put a couple bucks down?!"
A man emerged from behind the trees. "I'll play!" he said in a thick British accent. He was comically dressed: a top hat and monocle adorned his jolly face, and a royal blue overcoat barely covered his large gut. The pocketwatch and handlebar moustache completed the ensemble.
"Sure thing! You know the rules, right? Want to put a few bucks on the game?" I asked, hoping his wallet was as luxurious as his attire.
"Oh, why not?" he said, pulling out a velvet pocketbook. My eyes widened and stomach growled. "How about $100? I have no clue how much this Canadian currency is worth, anyways."
"Oh!" I said, trying not to gawk, "$100 is fine. Pocket change, really." I did not have $100. "Sure, I'll bet that much. Let's play!"
The fat English man sat down and we played. He was awful. Almost every one of his plays consisted of exactly two tiles. It was like he was fishing, but never hit anything. I did my best to play poorly, too. I didn't want to scare him off in case he was interested in more money games. Even playing my worst Scrabble, I beat him handily.
"Well done, old chap!" said the man. "I guess I have a lot to learn!"
"Yeah, thanks," I said, trying not to damage the $100 bill as I folded it and placed it in my sock. "Your best bet would be to stop playing only two tiles a turn. You'll never win that way."
"Oh, no, I'm sure I understand the strategy of Scrabble quite well," he said with a chuckle. "Two tiles a turn is fine!"
"Um... no. Trust me, you need to play more tiles. You'll never win that way." I said, forgetting that I was supposed to be convincing him to play more games with me.
"Well, we'll see," he replied. "How about another game, boyo? Higher stakes?"
I licked my lips. "Sure. What kind of stakes?"
He riffled through his pocketbook. "Oh I don't know. How does $5,000 sound?"
I almost fell off my chair. I had to take a second to calm down and collect myself. "F- five-thousand dollars sounds fine."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes!"
"Shake on it?"
We shook on it.
"Alright then."
At that moment, the man grabbed the front of his overcoat and pulled hard. The entire disguise came off. The fatness, the moustache, the British accent. It was all a ruse. The man who stood before me was Nigel Richards, beard and all. I almost barfed.
"Don't have $5,000, do you kid?" he said in his normal voice.
"W- well, I - I..."
"How about that red Mazda 3 you drove here in. That must be worth almost five gees."
"M - my mom's car?" I live in my mom's car when my bedroom at home needs to be fumigated.
"Yeah, that'll do, I guess. I already have five red cars, but I guess I can use that one as a lawn ornament. Bet you feel stupid for dissing my two-tiles-a-turn strategy now, eh? Well, ready to play?"
"Ohcrap..."

game on ...
 
———
Nigel stole my dad's car
Several months after my first incident with Nigel Richards, I finally convinced my parents to let me borrow my dad's car. You see, I had wagered my mom's car in a game of Scrabble with Nigel. Through some extraordinary circumstances, I lost that game. Just barely. My parents were quite pissed. They made me get a part-time job to pay to replace the car.
So I was driving to my new job one day, thinking about how unlucky I am. Seriously? How did he get 730-something points playing two tiles a turn? What a lucksack.
I tried to keep my mind on the road. If I crash my dad's car, my parents would kill me. No question.
I looked at the rear-view mirror, and then back at the road. Wait. Did I just see that? I looked again. Nothing. Whew. I looked a third time. There it was! A bearded man on a bicycle with a Scrabble board under is arm. Nigel!
"No!" I thought. I stepped on the gas and sped away. I was not interested in another encounter with that man.
After turning several blocks, I lost him. Whew. Eyes back on the road. There is was again! This time in front of me! How the hell did he catch up?! I sped past him and zoomed away at 120km/h. No way he could follow me on a bike with me driving that fast.
Then I heard the sirens. Crap! I guess I was going 120 in a 40 zone. I will never be able to pay this ticket. I make minimum wage at Wendy's! I pulled over to the curb and the police car did the same. The officer approached my car and I rolled down the window.
"Up for a game?" It was Nigel!
"What the? No! Get away from me!"
"Oh come on. I'm bored. Just one game of Scrabble?" he asked again.
"No! You took my mom's car! Now I have to work a crappy job to pay her back!"
"Well, tell you what. We'll play for the car. You win, you get your mom's Mazda back. I win, I get this lovely Toyota Venza. Sound fair?"
"No! This is my dad's car! And we both know what's going to happen! I'm going to have the game of my life. Getting all sorts of bingoes and scoring a ton of points, and then you're going to pull off some sort of ridiculous comeback and win out of nowhere. That's what's going to happen! So no, we aren't playing!"
"Oh come now. Tell you want. I'll sweeten the deal. I have to win AND get two triple-triple bingoes. Otherwise, you get the car back."
I thought about it. "Well... two triple-triples would be hard to get. Especially if I play super defensively... But no! I won't do it! You'll find a way to win!"
"I like your uniform, by the way. Wendy's makes good burgers. It's weird how "Trainee" is actually sewn onto your shirt there. Like you're forever a trainee. I mean, usually they put it on a nametag, but that stitching looks permanent. Weird."
"OPEN THE BOARD!"
So I sat down to play with Nigel, thinking there would be no way he could beat me AND get two triple-triple bingoes... 

game on ...

That Didn’t Take Long

The ex-journo in me is jealous for never getting to run a headline like this

IT TOOK all of three days for The Worst Call Ever in soccer to be replaced by The Even Worse Call Ever in soccer, but when I say “the worst call ever,” I should probably qualify that remark.

There is a difference between calls and non-calls. Four particularly awful non-calls which taint the history of soccer are The Hand of God, The Hand of Gaul, The U.S. getting jobbed in 2002, and the most vicious play in the history of the World Cup. In all four of those cases, the outcomes should have been bloody obvious to anyone who was actually paying attention. (In order: 1. No goal for Argentina; 2. No goal, and likely no World Cup, for France; 3. American penalty and German sent off; 4. Toni Schumacher sent off at the least, if not locked up for felonious assault, and I am genuinely surprised no French player just went and decked him.) Now, in all of those cases, the officials somehow didn’t see the plays. They were out of position, the angle was bad, what have you. Honest mistakes, all of them, although inexcusable in every case. Soccer, in recent years, has acknowledged that the referee has it tough and looked to give the referee on the field some help, by giving the linesmen more authority and also having a fourth official on the sidelines who can point out infractions to the headman on the pitch, but as we saw the other night in the CONCACAF Gold Cup quarterfinal, when the fourth official incorrectly called a foul in the penalty area and the referee foolishly went along with it, awarding an undeserved penalty to Mexico and essentially ending the match, the process still isn’t exactly foolproof.

The four Worst Calls Ever that I highlighted above are all errors of omission – guys missing stuff. That’s annoying and somewhat baffling when it occurs – there were only about 110,000 people in the building who saw Maradona handle the ball, so how could the guys in black somehow miss it? – but understandable. In general, it’s probably best to err on the side of calling nothing when you aren’t sure, and letting the game sort itself out on the pitch. As a referee, you look like something of a blind doofus when this happens, but as we’ve discovered this week with CONCACAF, it’s better to be thought of as a blind doofus than some of the terms being through around to describe first Walter López, the Guatemalan referee from Sunday’s game with Costa Rica, and now Mark Geiger, the American official at the center of controversy following last night’s semifinal at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

Two more infamous officiating decisions happened to involve the same countries – the Germans and the English – and the exact same situation – a English shot striking the lower side of the crossbar and landing/not landing over the goal line – some 44 years apart. In the 1966 World Cup Final, the goal was given in England’s 4:2 victory, despite many German protests. In 2010, the goal was not given, even though it had obviously crossed the line. England went on to lose and this decision is what has led to goal line technology being instituted by FIFA. Small consolation for the English, but as a Seahawks fan who saw his team lose out of a playoff spot thanks to a phantom TD by Vinny Testaverde, and saw the NFL adopt instant replay almost immediately thereafter as a result, I can say that the loss wasn’t entirely in vain. In both cases, the positioning of the officials at the moment of the strike made viewing the flight of the ball impossible. (To add to the intrigue of 1966, the Soviet linesman who ruled it a goal, when asked about it on his deathbed, reportedly responded by saying, “Stalingrad.”) So, again, these are understandable, if not entirely excusable.

The error on Sunday night in East Rutherford, however, was an error of commission, and those are often far, far worse. It was a case of a referee taking a wild guess, stepping in and awarding a penalty in extra time of a scoreless game and directly affecting the outcome. It was an awful call, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. But it pales in comparison to the nonsense which happened last night in Atlanta in the match between Mexico and Panama, a match which showed everything that is bad about the beautiful game, and showed everything that is especially bad about the game in this little confederation of the world called CONCACAF where I reside.

Geiger, by the way, is considered the best American referee. To his credit, his work during the 2014 World Cup was highly regarded – he became the first American official in history to work a match during the knockout stages of the competition. But saying he’s the best American referee is not necessarily a compliment. Geiger works MLS games, and last night the rest of the world got to see, firsthand, what everyone involved in MLS, and watching MLS, has been saying for years – the officiating sucks.

And I hate trashing referees, for pete sake. They work hard and they do the best that they can in whatever sport they are officiating. As a tournament director in scrabble, I’m called upon to officiate when there are rules disputes, and I’ve gotten it wrong in the past and made the wrong decision. It happens. The rules are complex and, at times, confusing. You mess up sometimes. You get it wrong. It happens. So I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of the officials. Furthermore, I generally believe that no matter how many errors referees and officials commit, the players commit far more of them. Whining about officials gets tiresome, as it’s often little more than a cheap cop-out on the part of players for a bad performance.

But when an official is as bad as Geiger was on Wednesday, and when his actions directly and grossly impact the game, it’s impossible to ignore.

He put his stamp on the game 25’ in when he tossed Panama’s Luis Tejada under rather iffy circumstances. Tejada was going for a ball on a header, his back to Mexico’s Francisco Rodriguez, and his elbow/forearm clipped Rodriguez on the side of the face. Rodriguez, of course, acted like he’d been shot, and Geiger pulled out the red card. This was one of those letter of the law/spirit of the law sorts of things. Sure, you need to be in control of your body out there, and getting the elbow up is definitely something they’re trying to crack down upon, but the contact on the play wasn’t any more than you see on quite a few air-to-air collisions which don’t even result in fouls being called. It is a dangerous play, although it is more clumsy than reckless, and there isn’t much intent to it. Yellow? Perhaps. Red? Well, like I say, this was iffy.

 
But what makes that worse was the fact that, earlier in the game, Mexico’s Carlos Vela had full-on slugged Panama’s Anibal Godoy with an elbow on a set piece, which also could have resulted in a sending off, and yet for this received only a yellow. Now, frankly, neither play deserved a red card, but what’s worse, in this situation, is that Geiger has, with those two calls, essentially established the boundaries for this game. Which is what you do when you’re an official – you have to let it be known, up front, what the parameters are going to be for a game, what’s going to be tolerated and what isn’t, etc. The official is there to make calls, but first and foremost, the official is there to keep the game moving. And what two calls by Geiger did, in terms of setting the ground rules, was make it clear in the Panamanians’ minds that the same rules didn’t apply to both sides.

Panama plays with a chip on its shoulder. They piss people off, they’re tough and scrappy and annoy a lot of opponents. Like most of their Central American brethren, they resent the favored-nation status afforded to the two big guns in the North American part of the confederation. In short, they’re not the sort of team you want to have thinking they’re being jobbed.

Even reduced to 10 men, they outplayed El Tri, deserved to be up 1-0 after a nice goal (and were subjected to some awful behavior from Mexican fans, being pelted with beer and garbage as they celebrated). They were mere minutes away from winning the game, from advancing to the final, and hopefully helping to rid themselves of the memory of one of the most heartbreaking defeats imaginable two years ago, when Mark Geiger decided to pretty much lose his mind, and a near-riot ensues:

OK, first off, the play in question that starts this mess: Mexican player trips a Panamanian defender, he loses his balance and falls on the ball. There has to be some intent here. Without intent, you can’t call a penalty on that play. I’m not sure how any guy who is falling on his ass has any intent other than breaking his fall. If anything, there should be a foul on Mexico for the trip. The Mexican players appeal for a hand ball, because that’s what players do, but even that’s half-hearted. That isn’t a penalty.

So that’s bad enough, now think about the situation: it’s 89’ into the game, Mexico is losing. They just got bailed out, three days earlier, by a phantom call against Costa Rica which was the source of ire and scorn across the footballing world, and called into question the entire ethics and credibility of the tournament in the process, as at-the-death penalties are wont to do. And you’ve also got a team that’s already feeling slighted, having had to play the game with 10 men, and who’ve also been subjected to the opposition’s fans throwing shit at them, which the security in the stadium has done nothing about, and then you call that penalty? Are you serious? And you’re going to make that call on top of what happened the other night: the bogus penalty awarded to the big team with the big fan base which helps prop up this tournament, a bogus penalty that was regarded as a disgrace and the act of scoundrels and crooks and thieves, and in repeating that process, you’re going to make yourself look like a scoundrel and a crook and a thief in the process and damage your credibility and damage the entire credibility of the tournament even more? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Kind of a lot to think about in an instant, I know. But if Geiger hadn’t been completely clueless in his approach to managing the game, it likely wouldn’t have come to that in the first place.

We like to think that games are played in a vacuum. We like to think that, somehow, outside stimuli and situations don’t dictate the actions on the court or the field once they begin. Guess what? They do. If you’re officiating this game, you have to be damn sure that, if you’re calling that penalty, at that time in the game, under those conditions, that’s it’s absolutely, positively the right call. Quite honestly, anything short of a Panamanian player catching the ball with both hands or making a form tackle straight out of the NFL shouldn’t be a penalty in that situation.

Now, a common complaint you hear in other sports is that, with the game on the line, the officials swallow their whistles. You see it in the NBA and the NHL all the time, in fact – what was a foul early in the game isn’t with 2:00 left on the clock. This can drive you crazy sometimes (particularly watching the NHL, where it seems at times that only a two-handed Paul Bunyan impersonation with the stick is going to draw a whistle). Studies have been done in baseball which show how umpires behind the plate tend to widen and shrink the strike zone depending on situations. For example, the strike zone gets really wide in a 10-0 blowout, because common sense dictates to move the game along and get it over with. There is nothing in the rule book about this, and no umpire is taught this. It’s simply a normal reaction by human beings whose main job, as I said before, is to keep the game moving. We’ve all come to expect this. Players and fans adjust. They play within the parameters and the boundaries established by the officials.

So does that mean Mark Geiger should swallow his whistle in the 89th minute of a CONCACAF semifinal? Not necessarily. But to make a call like that shows him to be so out of touch with the situation as to verge on being obtuse. Someone who is that out of touch has no ability to control a game.

And players figure that stuff out and act accordingly. One of the ugliests moment of last summer’s World Cup – the injury to Neymar in the Brazil-Colombia match – was the result of about 80 minutes of tension built-up, in part, because the Brazilians had correctly deduced that the referee wouldn’t dare throw one of them out of the game and went about systematically chopping down James Rodriguez every time he touched the ball. It was a cynical approach, but it was working – Brazil won the match, after all – and it was all fun and games until the frustrations started to boil over, the game got far too physical and Brazil’s best player got hurt. The referee in that particular game had lost control the match, in some ways, before it had even begun – he was somewhat understandably intimidated, of course, since you’re in Brazil and you’ve got 200,000,000 Brazilians who will potentially be angry at you.

And in some ways, Geiger is cursed from the start of this particular game. For that, he can thank Walter López, the Guatemalan referee who made a mess the other night. If López makes the call that he did in favor of Costa Rica, he looks dumb. If he makes it in favor of Mexico, he looks corrupt, given all of the financial implications of Mexico making the final. So not only does López look corrupt, but he paints widely with that brush and, after that, if Geiger makes any sort of a last-gasp penalty call, it will inevitably be called into question. In Mexico’s favor? He’s corrupt. In Panama’s favor? It’s retribution for the other night. You can’t win. So don’t play! Just swallow the damn whistle. Any sort of guff you get for not blowing the whistle there was going to be minimal, at best.

And instead, now you have this:

 
Charming.

Geiger makes a terrible call and all hell breaks loose, and pretty much every bad cliché and everything ugly about the beautiful game results. You’ve got Panamanian players losing their minds and shoving the referee, which is not OK. You’ve got fans throwing more crap on the field, which is not OK either and we’ve put up with too much of it already, which makes me wonder why CONCACAF so desperately wants those kind of people going to the games. You’ve got an altercation on the pitch as the benches empty. You’ve got the players chasing the referee off the pitch at the end as he’s surrounded by security. Everyone looks bad, in the end. It’s all a farcical spectacle of a game in a scandal-ridden part of the world where no one seems to know how to run the game properly.

When the match finally resumed, Mexico’s captain Andrés Guardado converted the penalty to tie the score at 1-1, leading to one of the stranger goal calls ever on Univision – “GOOOOOOOL Mark Geiger” – and also creating one of the strangest scorelines that I’ve ever seen in football: ‘90+10 Guardado (pen)’ And in a surprising bit of candor, Guardado admitted after the match that he thought, for a moment, about deliberately missing that penalty in the 90-10th minute:

“It was painful. Yes, for a minute, yes [I considered kicking it wide] but in the end, we are professionals and you think about the times you have been on the other side and the hearts of the other team’s players aren’t moved. This is football, sometimes you are given and sometimes it is taken away. Whether it should have been a penalty or not, that is not our fault.”

Normally charasmatic Mexican coach Miguel Herrera echoed that sentiment in his subdued post-game comments:

We didn’t play at all well. The first penalty wasn’t a penalty, but it had nothing to do with me … I am worried about how the team played. We didn't create anything … No era penal … Not the team’s fault. Sometimes you have to take advantage of circumstances in your favor. That is football … FIFA referee told me that penalty against the Netherlands wasn’t a penalty. What am I going to do? … We didn’t deserve to win, we didn’t play well …

Oh yes, the second penalty, the one that in stoppage time, the one that gave Mexico a 2:1 win. That was sort of soft and there may have been some offsides on the play, but it was probably the correct call – but at that point, the game had been so compromised that it didn’t really matter whether it was the right call or not.

And anyone who suggests Guardado should’ve missed the first penalty on purpose is kidding themselves – he’s a pro and you have to play the game to win – but, at the same time, if he had chosen to do so, no one would’ve thought the worse of him for it. Mexico won the game, but didn’t feel particularly good about winning this way.

And El Tri are in an impossible position come Sunday’s final vs. the Jamaicans. Given all that’s gone on in this tournament, a win on Sunday will be tainted. Not even their own press is giving them much support after Wednesday’s debacle. But given all that’s gone on in the past week, there is sure to be more interest and better TV ratings than you’d have thought a Mexico-Jamaica final would garner, and a possible Mexico-U.S. playoff in October for the Confed Cup spot promises to be some mighty interesting viewing. What is it they say about all P.R. being good P.R.?

As for the Panamanians, their coach has said he is thinking about getting out of the sport entirely, and there’ve been rumblings that the team doesn’t want to go to Philadelphia for the 3rd place game against the U.S. They’ll show, I suspect, but I doubt their hearts will be in it.

And as for the U.S., well, the American contributions to the game of soccer have looked awfully bad here of late (not the least of which being that lame effort against Jamaica in Wednesday’s other semifinal). We like to look down our noses at all of these pesky little countries in CONCACAF and their corrupt little schemers, but the fact is that there are American soccer officials sitting in American jails implicated as key figures in all of CONCACAF’s scandals, and it was American officials – not just Geiger, but the fourth official from the Mexico-Costa Rica game the other night – who showed themselves to be woefully incompetent this past week, and a tournament on American soil has gotten completely out of hand. I doubt anyone was on the take here, and really do chalk this up to sheer incompetence, but it doesn’t matter. Perception is everything, and the perception right now is that soccer in this part of the world is a joke. We’re as much a part of this mess as all of those supposed banana republics and tropical tax havens we sneer at. The U.S. Justice Department is looking into the ways the game is being administered and developed across the globe, but obviously the ways it’s being administered and developed here at home leave a lot to be desired.

The Treachery of Penalties

Ceci n’est pas une pénalité

 
FOOTBALL is life. Fans around the world live and die alongside the clubs and the teams that they support. (Sadly, this has far been too often literally the case.) If you want to better understand the world that we live in, and you want to do so through the games that we play, there really is no other sport than soccer that really matters. Baseball and cricket? Sure, those are in the same vague realm of discussion. But soccer is king. It is endlessly fascinating, and also endlessly infuriating.

Soccer has always been a game of the masses, the poor and the working class. Indeed, when you hear complaints nowadays about the wildly popular, multi-billion entity that the English Premiere League has become, the majority of the complaints you hear center on the idea that the EPL has lost its connection to the fans. As the prestige of the league has grown since the EPL was formed in the early 1990s, the players have become even higher-priced, facilities been upgraded, the English game has been beamed on satellite TV around the globe, the pounds and the dollars and the euros flowed in, and the potential for more pounds and dollars and euros been monetized. In the process, some would argue, the game has gone about pricing out the average Joes who helped make the game what it was in the first place. These were originally clubs, first and foremost, they were representations of unique groups of people. (Never forget that Manchester United began as a sports club for railroad workers.)

A good number of these complaints which are the loudest from longstanding Chelsea faithful – they’re certainly glad to see their Chelsea Blues winning EPL crowns and Champions Leagues, of course, after the London club dabbled in mediocrity for most of its existence, but the games at Stamford Bridge are no longer catered to them, instead targeting the middle and upper classes, the ‘fair weather’ fans if you will you go to Stamford Bridge less to see than to be seen – the sorts of people who don’t, in fact, live and die with the fates and fortunes of the club. Chelsea’s fortunes changed dramatically, of course, when Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich decided to poor a large amount of his fortune into the club after purchasing it in 2003. Abramovich has spent untold millions of his own over the past decade for players – the club itself didn’t post an operating profit until a modest, £1.4 million showing in 2012 – and the result is one of the best and most popular clubs on earth. But that definition of ‘popular’ is a curious one, of course – the Chelsea F.C. brand maybe worth up to £200 million worldwide, but the general narrative thread pervasive in England is that they and another recent darling, Manchester City, owe their success entirely to deep-pocketed, Johnny-come-lately ownership, whereas the real clubs in England – Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur – have built more than a century of tradition and success through their hard work and good old fashioned English ingenuity. A narrative which was probably rubbish to begin with, and is even more so now that Man U and Liverpool have American owners while Arsenal’s fate continues to be in the hands of a Frenchman, but we are all susceptible to our own mythology. But the argument put forth frequently and repeatedly is about how, in the process of making billions and transforming middling mid-table clubs like Chelsea and Man City into global brands, they know longer identify with the supporters who have backed them for generations, and there is some merit to that. Identity is crucial in understanding football, understanding those who fervently follow it ... and understanding those who have put up with the kind of bullshit that we saw on the pitch on Sunday night in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Part of why the supposed homogenization of the EPL Football is troubling to many is that soccer is, and always has been, a game of the working class. Games should, in theory, be diversions from real life, they should be escapes and pastimes. But that’s not true and it’s never been true. It wasn’t true a decade ago, a century ago, it wasn’t true 2,000 years ago when 200,000 Romans used to go to the hippodrome and root on their favourite team in the chariot races, an event which usually involved drinking too much, gambling too much, rioting after their team lost, rioting after their team won, keeping detailed statistics about which riders were good and which horses were good, etc., etc. (Hell, for all we know, there was a Roman Natus Silvicus doing his DMMMVIII analysis.) Not much has changed, really. And as we’ve said before about soccer, the game’s origins, when traced back to its ancestors in Latin America, have always shown it to be a game with massive popular appeal – but also a game bankrolled by enormous sums of money and power. That unstated power struggle and tension between the classes is innate to the game, and always has been.

Soccer is not an escape from life at all. In fact, it’s more of a microcosm of life than any other sport. It’s part of why it’s endlessly fascinating. Soccer is not fair, and the results are often not just – much like life, in fact. Soccer is a game where getting a draw – simply breaking even and getting by – is an acceptable result. Both of these notions I just put forth run counter to the fundamental optimistic ethos of America, which is why, I suspect, the game hasn’t fully caught on here (at least not yet, anyway, but that’s a further discussion we can have at a later time). And when Guatemalan referee Walter López decided to award a nonsensical, nonexistent penalty to Mexico in the 123rd minute of its scoreless CONCACAF Gold Cup quarterfinal with Costa Rica, it tapped into another value that working class football fans can relate to both on the field and of: being screwed over by The Man.

No official in any sport has more power to influence the outcome of a match than the referee does in soccer, simply through his ability to award a penalty – the success rate of which is upwards of 80% – in a game where scoring is otherwise so damn hard. There is but one of them on the pitch and he is judge and jury, his word the rule of law – and to the rank-and-file, worker bees making up the soccer-following faithful, many of whom live in nations where judge-and-jury types declare themselves presidents for life, that authority figure is deemed to necessarily be corrupt. He is a crook! He is a cheat! The other team has him in their pocket, which is why he gifted them that penalty. He won that game for them, the blasted ref! He is as crooked and dishonest as our opponents!

Now, The Lose is fundamentally opposed to conspiracy theories. I don’t believe there are grand master plans being orchestrated behind the scenes to deny certain teams – in this case, the team from Costa Rica – advancement in certain tournaments – in this case, the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the regional championship. I don’t really want to go down that road, and so I’m going to be objective here and look at this particular play once more.

Upon further review, that call sucks. That’s not a penalty. That’s a terrible call. Given the situation – a scoreless game in extra time – and given the consequences – giving Mexico the opportunity to win on what is essentially the last kick of the match – it just might be the worst call I’ve ever seen. Why Walter López and his team of apparently blind as bats sideline officials felt such a sudden urge to exert such profound influence over this match (especially when they didn’t do it 10 minutes earlier, but we’ll get to that) is something that conspiracy theorists can only dream about.

I mean, come on here. That’s not a penalty. Look at that play again. The ball is a foot above Mexican striker Oribe Peralta’s head as he goes flying and flailing through the air. He cannot reach that ball. Whatever contact came between he and Costa Rica’s Roger Miller looks incidental at best, and the ball is as good as past him when he starts with his “I can fly” routine. You can’t call a foul on that play. You just can’t, unless there is some little known statute in the rules by which Miller impeded Peralta’s ability to spontaneously grow 12” taller. It’s not impeding progress to the ball when the ball can’t be played. That’s just dumb and stupid. Peralta only half-heartedly tries to influence the call, and watch the video again. He and his El Tri teammates are surprised and bemused by the spot kick being given.

Saying this is a bad call is an affront to other bad calls. If you’re going to be awarding a penalty in the 123rd minute of a game, and as much as handing the game to one team in the process, you’d better be 100% certain you got it right. López had no idea what was going on here. It was the 4th official who ‘spotted’ the infraction, but he’s not in any better position to see this play unfurl, either, and let’s not pass this off on some sideline guy. It’s the referee on the field’s decision, and he blew it. He flat blew the call. There is no other way to say it.

And referees do that sometimes. They make mistakes. Unfortunately, moments decide matches, since the moments when the ball does actually go in the net are so few and far between. I maintain that a pivotal moment in the transformation of the U.S. as a nation into USA FC came in South Africa in 2010 – not in the moment where they won, but in the moment where they should’ve won but got screwed over by a clueless referee, because a lot of sports fans in this country got justifiably outraged by it – although defacing the guy’s Wikipedia page was probably not cool. When have Americans ever been up in arms about soccer? And that was a classic officiating mistake, one which budding American soccer fans didn’t understand but all of them should’ve, since it involved a concept – the make-up call – which runs rampant in the American sport of basketball. And if you don’t remember the play I’m talking about off-hand, it occurred late in a 2:2 game against Slovenia and the referee, Koman Coulibaly from Mali, made sort of an iffy call which gave the Americans a free kick. Now, this sort of scenario plays out a lot in soccer. A referee makes an iffy call, realizes it’s an iffy call and then, on the ensuing free kick, immediately blows his whistle and points the other way, indicating that some sort of a foul has been committed. You don’t have to explain the foul, you just point the other way. And you can get away this is in soccer, because nothing ever happens, anyway. It’s not like the free kick you iffily awarded resulted in a goal or anything, because no one ever scores in soccer.

Except, of course, that the U.S. did score.

But the whistle had blown and the goal was disallowed. There wasn’t anything even remotely close to a foul committed by an American player. In fact, there were about three Slovenians grabbing ahold of American players. (Not that it did much good. That play looks like a jail break.) There was no foul. It was a phantom call. A make-up call. Coulibaly got outed, and you could tell that he knew it. How could you tell? Because after the game was over, Coulibaly was understandably subjected to a verbal barrage from American players, and rather than flee the scene, or just start flashing red cards about, Coulibaly just stood there and took it.

Welcome to the footballing world, America. You’ve now been jobbed at the game’s highest level. Congratulations, you’ve arrived.

And speaking of being screwed, one of the first narratives which arose from the El Tri faithful was to resurrect that no era penal bullshit from last summer, when they were knocked out of the World Cup in a 2:1 loss to the Dutch thanks to a somewhat marginal penalty being called late in the game – never mind, of course, that the Mexicans blew the lead, and never mind the fact that the official missed an even more egregious foul in the first half which should’ve given the Oranje a spot kick. And another narrative which arose was that Mexico was the better team in the game and had created the better chances, so they deserved to win. Well, if you’re supposedly the better team and supposedly create the better chances, but the score is still nil-nil, you probably don’t deserve to win since your finishing is so poor. I don’t really care who ‘deserved’ to win the game, and I don’t really care what happened in Brazil in 2014 or South Africa in 2010 or what have you. On the night of the 19th of July in the New Jersey swamplands in a game between Mexico and Costa Rica, that call by Walter López decided the game and THAT WAS A TERRIBLE CALL.

What’s all the more galling from the Costa Rican point of view is that the play involved Peralta, who shouldn’t have even been on the field. At 113’ Peralta committed this nasty, scissored, prison rules sort of challenge and should’ve seen red:

That sort of a play breaks people’s legs. It also gets you punched out by the opposition. That was a cheap and dirty play which fortunately resulted in no injuries, but Peralta only saw yellow from Walter López. And in attempting to look at this play from the most honorable and noble point of view, what I can deduce is that López only showed yellow because, in sending Mexico down to 10 men at this point, he would be unduly wielding his influence over the game. But then, of course, he turns around and awards a dubious penalty three minutes into stoppage time, giving Mexico a near certain win on the game’s last kick (I say near-certain for a reason), so that notion I suggested just went out the window. Hey, I’m trying here. I’m trying to give the referee at least a little benefit of the doubt.

And the Ticos handled this with a surprising amount of class and restraint. They said their piece to the referee and they were done with it. They opted to take the high road when, clearly, it would’ve been easy for them to fly into a collective rage. Reaction was a little stronger within the country of Costa Rica, meanwhile, with everything up to the current and former presidents weighing in on the injustice. (To be fair here, a good number of members of the Mexican media were also rather skeptical.) But there was no comment on the matter from the head of the Costa Rican FA, Eduardo Li, primarily because he’s in jail in Switzerland, awaiting extradition to the U.S. as part of the Justice Department’s wide spread probe of CONCACAF’s corruption and misdoings, some of the allegations of which center on this very tournament.

And this is where Walter López has really dug a deep hole for himself. He’s also dug a deep hole for the Mexicans, who can’t win – they did win the game, after all, yet the legitimacy of their win is called into question. It also checkers the entire tournament, because not only does this call look like an act of complete incompetence, but it also looks like the work of corruption in a region of the footballing world where corruption has clearly run amok.

For those of you who have no idea who Peter Prendergast is, he’s the Jamaican referee who made this awful call which cost the Belgians dearly against Brazil in 2002. CONCACAF has a decidedly unfavourable reputation in the footballing world, in spite of the fact that confederation, as a whole, has had far more international success than its African and Asian counterparts. CONCACAF are perceived as jokers and fools. It’s viewed as a confederation having three big countries – only two of which matter and neither of which they particulary like – a bunch of Central American countries no one can name, and a merry band of corrupt Caribbean would-be kingfish looking to use the game to line their pockets. Uncle Sepp and his FIFA cronies were quick to say the Justice Dept. probe wasn’t their problem at all, it was obviously a CONCACAF problem and that the confederation was obviously full of sleaze and graft and shysters. And sadly, they weren’t totally wrong in saying that. And yet it’s also grossly unfair – ridiculing a country’s FA, or a wider confederation, as being incompetent and corrupt also often implies that somehow they want it that way. But so long as you have Jack Warner lining his pockets with contributions to nonexistent football foundations, and Geoffrey Webb using his 10 Rolexes as collateral to post bond and get out of American jail, the notion of corruption and cronyism in North American football is hard to deny.

The CONCACAF Gold Cup is already something of a strange tournament, given that it always happens in the same country – the United States. There simply aren’t the resources to hold it in most CONCACAF countries. As cool as it would be to hold a joint Carribbean Gold Cup in Jamaica and T&T et. al, it’s not really viable. This year, they deviated from the norm in having the Canadians ‘jointly’ hosting – they played two games in Toronto, which begs the question as to why the Canadian home football grounds were available for this tourney but somehow not for the Women’s World Cup. You could hold it in Mexico, of course, but Mexico prefers the tourney being held in the U.S., since the short distance is enough to insulate them from the media and their zealous domestic fan base, while they can bask in the adoration of the enormous throngs of Mexican fans who live in this country and attend any El Tri match in America en masse. Which is cool by me. I live in a primarily Hispanic neighbourhood where Mexican expats and immigrants are my neighbours and I respect them tremendously, knowing that they are a part of this nation and have been a part of this nation for generations. They are vocal and enthusiastic supporters of El Tri and I have no problem with them showing their support for their side here in their home-away-from-home. I’ve always had a problem with the nonsense the USSF used to do pre-1990, when they would do things like schedule critical World Cup qualifiers against Mexico in the L.A. Coliseum and 60,000 Mexican fans would show up and it would be virtually an away game for the U.S., the USSF caring far more about the gate receipts than they did about the fortunes of its national team. Quite a few former American players have talked about how they felt they were betrayed by their own federation, and rightfully so. And in the case of the CONCACAF Gold Cup, it ends up being this weird sort of hybrid tourney where the Mexicans are essentially second hosts (and, this year, the third hosts), but Mexico’s fans always turn out in droves, often outnumbering American fans in the final attendance numbers for the event.

And to CONCACAF officials, those attendance numbers are all that really matter. Only 37,000 turned out in Baltimore for the Yanks’ laughable 6:0 quarterfinal win over Cuba on Saturday. For the Mexico-Costa Rica game in Jersey on Sunday, the attendance was probably double. Mexico’s presence in the semifinals is likely to guarantee a sellout for the semifinals at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, whereas a Costa Rica-Panama matchup was likely to be sparsely attended. The great complaint within CONCACAF, of course, has always been that decisions are made solely to try to maximize the number of Mexican fans in the seats. The Mexicans counter this by saying that their numbers of fans are important to the confederation, but yet all of those guys from small Caribbean countries vote in a bloc so as to negate Mexico’s greater influence over the game. In any case, the presence of the two big guys on the block in the semis, with the chance alive for them to meet in the final next weekend in Philadelphia, is in CONCACAF’s best interests all-around.

Cue the conspiracy theories.

If you’re a referee, nothing makes you look more like a lackey or a stooge than awarding dubious, late-game penalties. As I said before, soccer is a game loved by the poor and huddled masses and yet controlled by the rich and the powerful, and The Man on the field is perceived to be doing the rich and the powerful’s business. Scores of Italian soccer fans have decried and documented in dossiers for decades the number of times Juventus has been awarded curious 90th minute penalties on their way to Serie A championships – Juventus being owned by the richest industrialists in Italy, of course, who’ve been thought to be bribing referees much like they’ve been thought to be bribing corrupt Christian Democrat politicians all these years. This interesting Grantland article about the disgraced Dynamo brand – Dynamo having always a name attached to clubs run by the secret police in Eastern Europe – comes complete with an appropriate 90th minute penalty enabling Dynamo Berlin to clinch an East German title. (It’s strange that Houston chose Dynamo as a nickname, but having worked for a company owned by the owner of Houston Dynamo, I can say with great authority that yes, he really is that out of touch.) Those sorts of curious coincidences have been plaguing the game for decades. Far too many critical matches, in far too many places, have wound up being decided by referees picking strangely convenient times to influence the outcomes. It happened far too frequently for people not to suspect foul play, and a fair number of those times, those suspicions have been shown to have been with merit. Just earlier this year, in fact, the African Cup of Nations in Equatorial Guinea descended into farce, and the spark for that tire fire was a last gasp penalty awarded to the hosts for a flop in the box against Tunisia, with the Tunisians incensed and feeling cheated as a result and chasing the referee off the field. Let the chaos and the confusion begin.

And don’t kid yourself – Mexico reaching the CONCACAF Gold Cup Final is in the confederation’s best interests, whereas the Ticos were a great story in Brazil in 2014 and have a hell of a good team but are still a small country that no one has ever heard of. Had Walter López decided to lose his mind and make that terrible at 123’ against Mexico, giving the Ticos a penalty kick, it would’ve been looked at as being gross incompetence. But since it happened the way it did – given what was at stake, given what it means in terms of attendance and TV ratings, and given the backdrop of rampant corruption throughout the confederation’s administration – and Walter López’s call looks far, far worse. It looks crooked and corrupt in a region of the world where flying right and playing it straight on the football pitch is probably a good idea right now.

I’m someone who is always going to assume that incompetence until there is conclusive proof otherwise, but even this one had me wondering. My hope is that you can ultimately chalk this up simply to stupidity and no other outside influences. I don’t have any earthly idea what Walter López did or didn’t see – and contrary to the Sports Illustrated joke tweet from before, I suspect we won’t be seeing him officiating at this level again. In general, if you screw up that badly as an official, and you bring the game into disrepute in the process, you aren’t ever officiating at that level again. That’s not to say soccer officials are expected to be perfect, of course, but mess up so badly as to overly influence a game to its detriment, and that’s likely the last time you’re going to be seen on that stage. (People in Seattle, Portland, and all of American soccer will rejoice if that’s the case after this 11-on-7 nonsense from the U.S. Open Cup, some of the worst officiating ever seen on an American soccer pitch which I would give more time to if the competition wasn’t so small-time and amateurish by nature.)

In the end, this was a shitty way for Costa Rica to lose a game, maybe the shittiest way to lose imaginable – one which reminds that, for all the good you do on the football pitch, it’s easy to be undone by one particular individual who is entrusted with ensuring fair play and yet who may or may not have an agenda, may or may not have a fat wallet, and who may or may not have a clue. The soccer official has a tough and thankless job, but a good rule of thumb in the business, across all sports, is that if you’re officiating a game and we come to know your name as a result, you really kind of fucked that one up.

Money Can't Buy Me Love

“I don't know the precise number and don't want to get into it, but a significant number of teams are continuing to lose money and they continue to lose money because their expenses exceed their revenue even with revenue sharing, and fairly robust revenue sharing, when some teams are receiving over $20 million checks from their partners.”

THESE were the comments from commissioner Adam Silver this past week about the economic realities of the NBA – or, at least, the way that he wants to spin those economic realities. Remember, Silver is fundamentally a mouthpiece for the owners, and now that the NBA is on the verge of unprecedented revenue growth, after one of it’s most successful seasons ever, the owners immediately start to play coy and try to cry poor mouth. It’s an act which seems somewhat ridiculous, given that the NBA made $4.8 billion in revenues in its recently concluded fiscal year, and a new TV deal is about to kick in which offers up $24 billion in broadcast rights over nine years.

Sadly, Silver taking this tact isn’t really all that surprising, given that labor relations between the league and the players union have generally been terrible – there have been three work stoppages in 20 years for a reason. Given that revenues are going to soar, it also means the players’ share of the pot are going to soar as well. The NBA’s salary cap already jumped 10% this offseason, to $70 million, and as per the terms of the CBA, where the players get half the basketball-related income, the salary cap is only going to get bigger and bigger from hereon.

Which it should. As I’ve said before, when it comes to professional sports, I am purely a Marxist. I think the players should get everything, frankly, because no one goes to an NBA arena to watch an owner. Not even Mark Cuban. (Sorry, Mark.) And I agree with the general premise put forth in this 538 piece that the élite in the NBA are, in fact, underpaid relative to their importance – not just in terms of their on-court value, but in terms of their overall importance to the continued growth and popularity of the league as a whole. The NBA is a star-driven enterprise, and has been for decades. Even in this era, when we’ve seen the emergence of the Spurs and the Warriors as champions through an emphasis on sophisticated tactics and great team play, those principles are still centered on transcendent talents like Tim Duncan and Steph Curry making it possible. First and foremost, professional athletes are entertainers. They are artisans and thespians performing on society’s favorite stage. And as has pretty much always been true in the entertainment business, for every popular entertainer who makes a large sum of money for their performance, there is someone who isn’t performing at all who stands to make even more through riding their coattails.

And in the NBA, that would be the owners, all of whom are now sitting on a gold mine. Forbes recently pegged the average value of an NBA franchise at $1.1 billion. You can primarily blame Los Angeles for this sudden and ridiculous escalation, just as you can blame Los Angeles for pretty much every shift in the business of sport since the Dodgers left Brooklyn, as Steve Ballmer ponying up $2 billion to buy the historically- and comically-awful Clippers, thus taking Donald Sterling off the NBA’s hands, has led to a domino effect sending values of other franchises skyrocketing. Ballmer, of course, also played a large part in the $500 million bidding war over the Sacramento Kings, another event jacking up the NBA’s collective value: if the league is only as good as its worst franchise (which the Kings most certainly are, but more on those idiots in a moment), and its worst franchise can pull half a bil when it crosses the block, then the league’s not really doing too badly, now is it?

Notice how I am throwing the word ‘billion’ around a lot in this post. Well, you can bet the players union notices how often you use the words ‘NBA’ and ‘billion’ together in a sentence. The league and its players formed something of a unique partnership in the early 1980s, when the league truly was verging on collapse. Implicit in the agreement with David Stern to cap salaries and tie them to a percentage of a basketball revenues was the idea that, as the revenues for the league increased, the salaries would inherently increase as well. This was smart business at the time, to be sure, but time and again the crux of hostile labor negotiations has been that owners want to somehow welch on that promise. In the last labor dispute, a lockout which cost 16 games of the regular season, the NBA extracted a concession from the union whereby the players’ share of the revenues dropped from around 57% to the 49-51% range it is now. This was, in fact, a huge concession on the players’ part, one which ultimately stemmed from the fact that it didn’t matter what percentage of the revenues you were getting when you weren’t getting any at all, which is what was happening with no games go on.

It sucks that the union capulated at the time, but you can see why they did, and it’s hard not to be incredulous. The players were simply doing their jobs, showing up and playing and putting on a good show and doing their part to make the league successful, but the league was struggling, in part because of the economic downturn and, in part, because of bad business decisions made far over the players’ heads. The owners were essentially asking to be saved from themselves and asking the players to do it for them – and ‘asking’ is putting it kindly.

So now the NBA stands on the verge of spectacular growth and prosperity, and you already have the owners and their mouthpiece Adam Silver talking about franchises losing money and the league having to write big cheques to cover expenses. This is all preemptive posturing for a CBA which isn’t going to expire for another few years. The players, of course, aren’t buying it.

“All of the data we have access to indicates that our business is thriving and will continue to do so in the near future. We agreed not to debate some of the finer points of negotiation in public, and aren’t going to change that approach now in response to some remarks from the Commissioner on Tuesday. We are, however, going to take him up on his offer to share the audited financials with the union. We also want to ensure that everyone understands the facts of this business: Under the CBA, we do not have a gross compensation system. The players’ 50% share is calculated net of a substantial amount of expenses and deductions. New and renovated arenas around the league have proven to be revenue drivers, profit centers, and franchise valuation boosters. That has been the case over the past few years in Orlando, Brooklyn, and New York, to name a few. In some instances, owners receive arena revenues that are not included in BRI. Many teams also receive generous arena subsidies, loans and other incentives from state and local governments as part of their arena deals. Virtually every business metric demonstrates that our business is healthy. Gate receipts, merchandise sales and TV ratings are all at an all-time high. Franchise values have risen exponentially in recent years, and the NBA has enjoyed high single digit revenue growth since 2010-11.” – Michelle Roberts, NBPA chief

And they shouldn’t buy it, because while half of the basketball related revenues are going to the players, it’s pretty apparent that there is a good amount of tangential revenue which is not going to the players. There is a fundamental dishonesty to all of this posturing going on by the league. Silver, meanwhile, pretty much directly contradicted himself in further statements about the state of the business of the game:

“The goal, of course, is to have a robust 30-team league, not just a league where teams … in large markets or owners who are willing to lose lots of money can have top-notch payrolls. So I think it’s very positive. The league is very healthy. I think owners recognize that are our owners are extremely competitive.”

So, it’s a healthy league with ‘signficant’ numbers of teams losing money? Hmm, those two notions don’t seem to jibe.

Now, I will freely admit that I am an NBA skeptic, and have done so countless times before. Being a former Sonics season-ticket holder will make you one. Emotions aside, however, the NBA made what were, in my opinion, two horrible long-term business decisions in a) permitting the Sonics to be stolen – yes, stolen – from Seattle and moved to Oklahoma City by Clay Bennett and his merry band of robber barons; and b) going above and beyond to prevent the acquisition and relocation of the Sacramento Kings to Seattle and going so far as to allow them to be sold to a guy who so far has proven to be an incompetent nutjob. The main reason for David Stern’s distaste for Seattle, of course, is that the little Napoleon and some of his enterprise’s dubious business practices got called out onto the carpet by a good number of political officials in the city of Seattle and the state of Washington – most notably, the need to extort municipalities for sweet arena deals financed with taxpayer money. Without going into great detail the economics and ethics of spending taxpayer money in such a fashion – I personally don’t mind it, but can understand why others do – posturing for what amounts to public subsidies is a hard-sell during times of greater fiscal austerity, and it’s even more of a hard-sell when it comes from an enterprise that it literally making billions and billions of dollars.

But that’s precisely what’s going on in the state of Wisconsin, where amid all of his efforts to gut the state budget, the would-be presidential candidate governor hasn’t seen fit to prevent the Milwaukee Bucks from further bleeding the public coffers. These should be the salad days for the NBA, yet this continual asking for public handouts would suggest that some of the franchises are as droopy as wilted lettuce.

The Bucks say they need a new deal, they need a new building, they need more revenue sources so that they can compete – and by ‘compete,’ of course, they mean competing in terms of profit margins and franchise values. And there is, in fact, some merit to this idea. It’s not complete nonsense. As I’ve explained previously, a great misunderstanding about salary caps is that a cap number is applied across the board – every team will have up to $70 million to spend next year – but the amount of revenue is vastly different from team to team. The Lakers’ newest broadcast deal, for example, is worth 10 times that of the Miami Heat’s. The operating costs of doing business in Milwaukee are therefore necessarily going to take up a larger percentage of your revenues than they are in a place like L.A. or New York.

But see, that fact alone is why emptying the Seattle market was, in the long term, a stupid move. Seattle is the 13th-largest television market in the country, and also one of the richest cities in the nation. By moving that franchise to Oklahoma City, and then keeping another franchise in Sacramento, you’re essentially stubbing your toes, since sheer demographics tell you that a healthy franchise in either of those two cities can never ultimately generate the sorts of revenues that one could in Seattle. Instead, Seattle is now the perfect talking point whenever an owner of an NBA franchise wants to posture for a new building. The Bucks’ brass made a point of saying that if they didn’t get a new deal, they’d look to move to Seattle in a couple of years – which was news to everyone in Seattle, of course, since no one there took the idea of the Bucks relocating there with more than a grain of salt. The fact is that arena deals grow stale, and building go out of date, remarkably quickly. They are little more than smash-and-grab jobs, quick infusions of cash for enterprises which often then go about squandering that cash rather quickly.

And the NBA, as an entity, stands to make untold billions over the next decade – and also stands to squander enormous amounts of it. The salary cap is, first and foremost, a method at cost-control – an effort on the part of the league to prevent itself from letting its own bad business practices run amok. Even within that salary cap, which is essentially a glorified series of accounting tricks, there are all sorts of provisions which essentially give franchises relief when they make bad decisions: the amnesty clause lets you essentially pay players to go away and free up the same sum to sign someone else; the stretch provision lets you pay a player to go away over twice the length of their contract plus one year (i.e., instead of paying them $10 million over two years, paying them $4 million over five). The league has also invented revenue-sharing measures for teams in supposedly smaller markets (which freeloaders have OKC have made a point of taking advantage of) and a luxury tax system which is actually quite steep, whereby violating the salary cap leads to enormous financial penalties – but teams that want to win, and have the financial resources to do so, really don’t care much about that. The Warriors payroll for next season was verging on $100 million before they traded David Lee. Given that they just won the NBA championship, and are working on a new arena in San Francisco which, when if it eventually comes to pass, will make the franchise worth even more than the billion-plus it already is, going that far over the cap makes sense for the Dubs. But that drives the costs up for everyone else – in their need to win a championship and legitimize themselves before Durant and Westbrook leave and gut the franchise forever, even cheap and stingy OKC is biting the bullet next season and going over the salary cap. And consider a truly badly-run franchise like the Nets, who were saddled with what amounted to $180 million in wage bills and luxury taxes in 2014 while putting out on the floor a woefully old and mismatched club that could scarcely make the playoffs. All the money in the world didn’t make the Nets any better. If anything, it made them worse.

I haven’t seen an entity more infatuated with its own accounting than the NBA since I stopped working for nonprofits. There isn’t a single discussion about a player that doesn’t ultimately devolve into a discussion about that player’s contract. But the league has gone about doing this to itself over the past 30 years. The fact is that there is plenty of money to be had in the NBA, but money can’t buy you love and it also can’t buy you a clue. A great deal of the stories and the articles about the NBA over the past year make reference to how the business of the league is going to change once the new TV money kicks in. Why anyone thinks it’s going to actually change is beyond me. Just having more money at your disposal affords a franchise that doesn’t know what it’s doing even more opportunities to misuse it. Bad franchises are going to continue to be bad and, if anything, the amount of dollars being squandered will make those mistakes seem even larger than they actually are – which, in a P.R.-driven entity like the NBA, is actually the worst sort of mistake to make.

No amount of money from a tricked-out new arena or a new broadcast deal is suddenly going to make the Sacramento Kings less stupid. The Kings recently made one of the worst trades imaginable, shifting three players they didn’t want to the 76ers, who also got a first round pick and the right to swap draft positions with the Kings twice. The Kings did this so as to free up some cap space to pursue some free agents – most of whom, of course, had no interest in playing for the Kings. Remember the principles of Edmonton Disease here – if dollars are essentially equal (and a salary cap makes that the case) then why would a player willingly go to a franchise that sucks? (Monta Ellis actually took less money to go to Indiana.) After all that, the Kings signed a couple of bit players and then signed Rajon Rondo to a 1-year deal, in the hopes he will magically resurrect his career, but if Rondo does, in fact, do that, then a year from now, he will almost certainly try to go elsewhere, given that the Kings are likely to be terrible for the foreseeable future – a fact which the 76ers are banking on in obtaining the rights to swap draft positions. Of course, cashing in on that would also necessitate the 76ers improving. They’ve been a joke of a team on the court and given precisely zero fucks about it, made a million deals and have positioned themselves to have as many as four 1st-round picks in next year’s draft, but given Sam Hinkie’s track record with the draft in Philly – willingly taking on two guys who were hurt and couldn’t play, one of which, Joel Embiid, still isn’t playing, and also drafting Michael Carter-Williams whom they promptly traded a season after they picked him – I’m not sure the 76ers having four 1st-round picks is necessarily a good thing.They’ve shown an aptitude for being bad, but it’s easy to be bad. Actually being good is another question entirely.

What the Kings and the 76ers have in common is that they’ve sunken to the bottom of the heap in the NBA through being incompetent. Whereas Edmonton Disease speaks to the nature that some markets are more attractive than others, it also speaks to the idea that, as attractive as the idea is to want to ply your wares in New York or Los Angeles, being on a terrible team in a great place to live still constituted less-than-ideal working conditions. No legit free agent wants any part of the Lakers until Kobe is gone, nor the Knicks until the Zen master gets hold of how to actually run a professional basketball franchise in this day and age. You’ve seen free agents of some quality signing this offseason with places like Milwaukee and San Antonio, and also with the Lakers’ crosstown rivals the Clippers, because players know they’re going to get paid regardless and they want to win. No one wants to be second-fiddle to Kobe for a year with a Lakers club that looks to be a 55-60 loss team.

It shouldn’t be lost on people that two of the Warriors’ highest-paid players this past season – David Lee and Andre Iguodala – were rendered bench players and didn’t bitch about it. The weren’t happy about it, of course, but the Warriors went nuts and they went along for the ride – and, in the case of NBA Finals MVP Iguodala, he stepped up when needed. They wanted to win. Along with being quick to cast the players as superstar entertainers, the league has never done anything to disparage the perception that players are greedy and selfish and care only themselves. In fact, it’s often the opposite that’s true. In this labor-management dynamic, it really isn’t the labor that are the greedy ones.

Silver’s posturing in the press this past week should serve to remind us that, even with money raining down from the sky and growing on trees, it’s still business as usual in the NBA – which is too bad, really, since great commercial success over the years has afforded cover to an entity whose business often makes no sense and whose missteps are almost entirely self-created along the way. This is a league where teams routinely and willingly makes trades for guys they don’t want, knowing it will make them worse; where three head coaches got fired from playoff teams after the season, yet somehow Byron Scott and Derek Fischer still have a gig; and where franchises willingly tank entire seasons, and sometimes two seasons, in preparation for some sort of possible talent bonanza that rarely, if ever, comes to fruition. It’s all nuts, and it’s a testament to the quality on the court that this mad circus carries on.

Whereas you can argue about whether the EPL or La Liga or Bundesliga reigns supreme in the soccer world, there is no debate in basketball. The NBA has the best players and the best clubs, and the massive revenues to back that up. It would do well not to go about killing the golden goose. You’d like to think that labor troubles can be averted in the future. It’s an awfully big pie where talking about here, and as much as the two sides want to squabble about the pieces they get, they should at least all agree that they’re all going to eat the damn pie and go from there.

Mmm, pie … I haven’t had lunch yet … now I’m hungry …