Bartolo Colón: Making Baseball Great

Just do it Bartolo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One-Gun Salute

Tyler Collins taking his talents to Toledo

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

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

To the buzzard points!

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

Kool-Aid comes in many refreshing flavors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lose News

 The patented box and none defense

WHOA nelly, is there a lot of lose to get through, and we should begin today’s buzzard points with commentary on the franchise for whom the buzzard points are “named,” those wacky Washington Bullets/Wizards/Buzzards, who have shown quite a path to folly this season after reaching the second round of the NBA playoffs a season ago.

• The Buzzards hatched a pipe dream plan at the end of last season to somehow try and woo local native and favorite son Kevin Durant to D.C. when he becomes a free agent this coming summer. The Buzzards wanted to clear out a whole lot of salary cap room for KD, so they went into this past season with a team staffed almost entirely by players whose contracts would end this coming summer as well. The edict also came down from up high to head coach Randy Wittman that the team should be playing modern, fast, sexy basketball – never mind the fact that Wittman is an old-school, defensive-oriented coach, and never mind the fact that the Buzzards, as constructed, didn’t really have a roster to play that way. It should probably not be a surprise, then, that the Buzzards cratered this season and missed the playoffs, which Wittman paid for with job.
The new coach, Scotty Brooks, is the former coach at OKC, and Kevin Durant apparently thinks very highly of Brooks. Connect the dots as you wish. Everyone associated with the Wiz are insisting that this hire wasn’t a blatant attempt at pandering to KD, and that Brooks really was their guy all along … or, at least, he was their 2nd-choice guy after Tom Thibodeau, who instead took a 5-year, $50 million offer to become coach and president of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Brooks got 5/35 to coach in D.C., which seems like a ludicrous amount of money to shell out for a coach. The biggest problem with outlaying $35 million for a coach is that you’re likely to wind up with $15-$20 million in dead money on your books, since coaches are hired to be fired. It makes even less sense to lay out $35 million for a coach who, quite frankly, isn’t very good. Sure, the Zombies in OKC reached the NBA finals during his tenure, but that had pretty much everything to do with having KD and Russell Westbrook and James Harden and not much to do with the assortment of simpleton offensive and defensive schemes Brooks had cooked up. The Zombies had a talent advantage far more than a tactical one.
Then again, Brooks’ coaching rep may have been revived somewhat by seeing what new OKC coach Billy Donovan has instituted this season – which looks a whole lot like what they were doing last season. OKC runs the most simplistic stuff in the NBA, verging on amateurish, consisting of Russell Westbrook charging to the basketball and/or throwing it out to Durant while the other three guys on the court are basically furniture. The Zombies are the worst passing team in the NBA, and three of their starters actually average less than an assist per game. They are there solely to fill out the numbers while Russ and KD go about playing hero ball. And when you have two of the five best players in the NBA on your team, you can get away with that … for a while, but eventually you get trumped by an opponent who actually knows what they’re doing. You can’t imagine Donovan gave up his job-for-life at Florida to come in and do this, since it clearly isn’t going to work on a championship level, which calls into question whether or not the Big Two in OKC are even paying attention to Donovan at all – and whether or not they were paying to Brooks all of those years. Quite honestly, if Kevin Durant had deeply, truly wanted Brooks to be the coach in OKC, given his caché and given that it’s a superstar’s league, do you really think Brooks would’ve been fired?
Which is why this latest attempt by the Buzzards to pander to Durant is foolish. Yes, sure, he’s from the area. We get that. But not all guys like going home and being the constant center of attention. And more to the point, after 10 years in the league and scoring titles and MVP awards, don’t you think KD wants to win? And that ain’t happening in Washington, where the Buzzards have only five players under contract for 2016, have no first round pick, will have to pony up a max contract to Bradley Beal, who appears to be made of glass, and who now have invested $35 million in a coach that everyone around the NBA thinks was one of the biggest hindrances to his previous team being able to win a championship. But everything about the Buzzards’ courting of Durant has been ludicrous, and there obviously was no Plan B in place for if/when KD didn’t come to be the savior of the franchise, which now seems almost certainly to be the case. In short, the Buzzards are completely screwed.
This is the sort of lunacy that you see in the NBA. Teams were dumping contracts and shedding salaries for about two years in the hopes of trying to lure LeBron. Teams just give up entire seasons at a time on the hope and the prayer that a ping-pong ball will bounce their way. Ultimately, what allows consistently good franchises to continue to thrive is the fact that some other franchises behave consistently stupidly. There’s a reason why teams like the Buzzards and the Kings continue to be so bad for so long. Sorry Buzzards, but Durant ain’t comin’ your way. I do know of one good possible destination for him, of course ...

•  Suffice to say, there has been a fair amount of anxiety among Golden State Warriors fans after Steph Curry turned his ankle in Game 1 of the playoffs against Houston. Steph has a history of these gnarly ankle injuries, after all, since it’s what held back his development at the outset of his career, and so you fear the worst when he goes hobbling off and misses two games of a playoff series. If there was anxiety among the Dub faithful during Games 1-3, then Game 4 was cause for sinking into deep despair, as Curry slipped on a wet spot and injured his right knee. Monday’s MRI revealed a Grade 1 MCL sprain, and he’s out of action for two weeks minimum, and it was hard to look at it in any way other than a dream 73-win season had just gone up in smoke. How could the Warriors win an NBA title without Steph? Could they even beat the Clippers in the second round?
But it’s amazing how the playoff narratives can turn. Less than 12 hours after Curry’s diagnosis sent reverberations all throughout the league, Chris Paul broke his right hand in Game 4 of the Clippers-Blazers series. As much as Curry means to the Dubs, Paul means that and more to the Clips. They simply cannot win without him. Further adding to the Clippers’ misery is the fact that Blake Griffin, who didn’t look fully healthy to begin with, reinjured his quad on Monday night in L.A.’s disastrous Game 4 loss in Portland. Both are now out for the entirety of the playoffs, and the question has shifted from, “can the Warriors beat the Clippers without Steph Curry?” to, “will the Warriors even be playing the Clippers?”
All of us can accept the abstract idea that injuries are a part of sports, but the past two days have shown us how all of your best work and preparation can seemingly come undone in the flukiest of circumstances. Steph Curry slipped on a wet spot on the floor. Chris Paul got his right hand caught in an opponent’s jersey. There is no way on earth to game plan for everything. Injuries are low-probability occurrences – the result of a single moment amid thousands – and yet, paradoxically, we all assume they are, in some way or another, inevitable. I don’t necessarily view teams as lucky when they avoid injuries so much as view others as being unlucky for having incurred them.
It would be easy to use injuries as an excuse, yet few who fall short ever do. The Seahawks lined up to face the Patriots in the Super Bowl with their three stars in the defensive backfield all having suffered injuries which would’ve possibly been season-enders, and yet there they were trying to play against Tom Brady and, well, it didn’t go so well. I’m always amused come playoff season when the whole rah-rah, macho ethos of playing with injuries comes up. Sure, you can play with injuries, but it doesn’t actually mean you play well with them. You see this a lot in the NHL, where everyone is incredibly secretive about injuries, and you’ll watch a guy in the playoffs and wonder why it is that he looks awful out there and his production has slipped, and he’ll then admit when it’s all over that he’d been trying to play with some truly gnarly injury for quite some time, at which point you understand why it is that he hasn’t been playing worth a damn, but if he was hurt and couldn’t play worth a damn, then why was he out there in the first place?
Curry’s injuries have added at least intrigue to what was a terrible 1st round series with the Rockets, who actively hate each other on the floor and who responded to James Harden’s game winner in Game 3 with dismay at having to change their offseason travel plans and play another meaningless game. The Dubs will put the Rockets out of their misery soon enough. But it’s been my opinion for the past two seasons that the Warriors are basically unbeatable, since they have to play badly in order to lose and they’re not going to play badly four times in a 7-game series, and that the only way they could possibly lose in the playoffs is if Steph Curry got hurt. Well, now I’ll guess we’ll find out.

• Speaking of Tom Brady, the endless stomach-turning soap opera that is Deflategate is back in the news, with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruling reinstating Brady’s 4-game suspension. That this nonsense has carried on this extent – 15 months, multiple appellate courts, and more than $20 million in legal fees – speaks to the bombast of all parties involved. In the end, the U.S. courts are not about to overturn the NFL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, which was agreed to by the league and the players union and which gives the office of the commissioner to act as both judge and jury in disciplinary matters, solely for the purpose of Tom Brady saving his reputation. The system may be screwy, but it’s what was agreed to by all parties at the bargaining table during labor negotiations.
I’ve believed all along that, when it came to doctoring footballs, Tom Brady and the Patriots broke the rules. Having said that, I have no doubt that other QBs and teams do the same kind of thing, and that it just so happened that the Patriots were the ones who got caught. While I don’t entirely dismiss the significance of such an infraction (and I think a good many people foolishly understate the importance of the league’s need to maintain the integrity of the game), I also think the infraction itself wouldn’t have been that big of a deal if it hadn’t been the Patriots who’d been caught, given the previous Spygate mess and given the perception throughout the league (and, more importantly, the resentment within it) that Bill Belichick and the Pats hold the league’s rules and policies in disdain and contempt.
I also think a lot of this mess would’ve been avoided if, at the time it occurred, the Pats just owned it and moved on – but they couldn’t own it and move on at the time, of course, because it was right before the Super Bowl and doing so would’ve meant having Jimmy Garappolo out there playing QB against the Seahawks. And with the destroyed cell phone and the like, it looks like Brady & Co. were trying to cover it up, and if you know nothing else about law and politics in this country, you should know that the cover-up always makes things worse.
Everyone involved in this mess winds up looking stupid and far too headstrong for their own good. It’s been suggested that, having extracted $1,000,000 in fines and a draft pick from the organization, it would behoove Roger Goodell to be a good winner at this point and reduce the suspension. But why would he do that? The NFL just spent 15 months and have gone through the courts to reaffirm Goodell’s right to play judge and jury. Going back on his original ruling would just make him seem even more weak and inept than he already is. And while Brady says he’s considering his legal options, nothing about this 2nd Circuit ruling seems to indicate that the courts are particularly interested in hearing more of this case. At some point, Brady and the Pats need to just give up on it. They aren’t going to win this one. In the long run, they may win in that the role of the commissioner will likely change, but continuing this case in court seems like a Hail Mary that not even Tom Brady could complete.

• Whereas the entire Brady foray into the American court system had an air of frivol about it, nothing could be further from the truth regarding the longest-running tribunal in British history. Some 27 years after a crush at Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium in the run-up to the FA Cup semifinal game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest resulted in the deaths of 96 people, a jury has concluded that those 96 people suffered wrongful death owing to gross negligence on the part of local authorities.
This case was, and continues to be, absolutely disgusting. (This ESPN 30 for 30 documentary on the subject is worth watching.) I was in the U.K. not long after this occurred, and authorities there had engaged in a cover-up and a smear campaign, one which essentially blamed the victims and portrayed Liverpool’s fans as being nothing more than a bunch of hoodlums and lawless thugs.

“Within 30 minutes of the disaster unfolding, senior police officers knew they had made catastrophic errors. Their response was to deflect the blame and claim the deaths were the responsibility of disorderly fans. It was a story all too easy for the British public to accept. Throughout the 1980s, hooliganism had blighted the game. Liverpool supporters, in particular, were easy to smear. After all, their actions had played a major part in the Heysel disaster at the 1985 European Cup final against Juventus, when 39 people were killed. High-ranking politicians and police officers at Hillsborough briefed journalists that Liverpool fans robbed the dead, molested corpses and urinated on police trying to help the injured. It was an outrageous lie.”
– Tony Evans, former Times football editor

Politicians and law enforcement officials were using one terrible tragedy from four years earlier as a justification for why another occurred. And I can tell you from being in the U.K. not long after Hillsborough that the lies and the rumors and innuendo about Liverpool and its fans permeated everything. They were thugs, villains, hooligans. If Liverpool F.C. came to your town and brought it’s troupe of hoodlums with it, you’d better be ready: extra police, extra security barriers, and maybe you should put some plywood up over the windows of your business. Friends of mine who’d said they’d visited Liverpool and stood on The Kop at Anfield for a match were thought of as being crazy, if not suspicious. It was all a load of nonsense, and spoke to our worst sorts of propensities for self-preservation at all costs. Rot in the hell of your own making, those of you who saw fit to perpetrate such lies. I’m glad there may finally be some peace and some closure for the families who lost loved ones that day.
And I think that rather than come to view Liverpool F.C. as a bastion of hoods and thugs worthy of loathing, this tragedy simply made me want to like the club even more. Among the “big” clubs in England, Liverpool are probably my favorite. I’ve been once to the city, but didn’t have the chance to visit Anfield. I wouldn’t mind having that chance in the future.

• An exchange between New York Rangers defenseman Dan Boyle and New York Post reporter Larry Brooks, he of John Tortorella fame, after the Rangers season came to an end in the first round of the playoffs against Pittsburgh:

Boyle: I don’t want him here.
Brooks: What? You know, the feeling’s mutual, man.
Boyle: Nobody likes you. Nobody respects you. Just so you know.
Brooks: OK.
Boyle: At least I’m leaving here with the respect of my teammates. Instead of [expletive] someone like you, who tries to bury somebody. That's all you do. It's not a critique. I'm telling you I don't want you here. I have no respect for you. I want you to get the [expletive] out.
Brooks: I don’t care what you think,
Boyle: I can tell you to get the [expletive] out if I want to!
Brooks: You can, but I don’t have to listen to you.
Boyle: Yeah, ya do! I want him out. And that other [expletive] clown, Brett, or whatever the [expletive] his name is. Where's he at? Everyone else is fine. I want him out. It’s my right. Can they not all stay here? I have tons of respect for some of these guys. I just don't want him here. That should be fine … Can you just [expletive] leave?
Brooks: If you had asked me politely, I might have.
Boyle: POLITELY? Why would I be polite with you? Are you kidding me?
Brooks: Grow up.

Charming.
For the record, Boyle is 39 and his contract is up in New York, and Brooks pilloried his signing as a free agent in a column last October. The clown Brett he was referring to was fellow Post reporter Brett Cyrgalis:

Seriously, yelling at reporters who are trying to do their job is stupid. (Unless they ask something as stupid as this.) Contrary to what most athletes think, it is the media and the press that makes you relevant and not the other way around. If we do not talk about you, then no one out there cares. Quite honestly, at this point no one should care about Dan Boyle, anyway. He was nothing more than a serviceable player on a team that wound up going nowhere. But I am sure he was a gritty leader and a great locker room guy and all of those other hockey clichés you throw around about guys who do nothing of use on the ice.

• Music? It can only be Prince. They played nothing but Prince during NBA telecasts after his death, and you should play nothing but Prince pretty much ever. You would not be worse for it. This is my favorite Prince song, and I am gonna play it, damn it:

Prince

As my wife said to me earlier today, "I want to be 1% as sure of who I am and who I want to be and how to express myself as Prince was."

THERE ARE no words to express how sad I am to hear about Prince's death, and to explain what an artistic hero of mine that he was because of his talent, innovation, and zealous independence. Rest in peace, Prince. Today we all found out what it truly sounds like when doves cry.

But rather than be sad, it's much better if we celebrate his life through his music. I recommend that you just sit back and let Prince take care of things. This is concert from 1982, before he was a mega-star, and it's truly remarkable and worth taking in. If there was one artist on this earth I would want to play for me, and I had my choice of them all, it would be him.

I am getting tired of writing obits. 2016 can bite me.

Swings and Misses

Remember when Mario Balotelli used to be good at football?

LET’S cut right to the chase. We don’t have time for an intro. To the buzzard points!

• The Lose doesn’t care much for golf, considering it to be a good walk spoiled in much the manner of Mark Twain, yet it is competition and a difficult one at that, one in which the margins of victory are so small – often just a single-stroke out of 280+ over the course of four days of play – that the differences between being good and being great are minute and nearly microscopic. The game can be pretty unforgiving, particularly on the mental side of things. If it starts going bad for you in the middle of a round, it’s not like you can call timeout or make a substitution. You have to tough it out, figure it out on the go and get through it. And golf has always been a sport where results are all that matter. If you suck for the first two days of a tourney, they cut you and you’re gone with no dollars to show for it. If you suck for a whole season, they relegate you, kicking you off the PGA Tour and sending you back to the dreaded “Q School.” Quite honestly, I think some other sports would be well served to do this sort of thing. The 76ers should’ve been relegated and been playing the Fort Wayne Mad Ants in the D-League several years ago. (Not that I’m making fun of the Mad Ants here. I love me some Mad Ants. If any of my friends go to the North American Scrabble Championships in Fort Wayne, Indiana, this summer, and don’t come back with Fort Wayne Mad Ants apparel in tow, you have clearly failed at life.)
Anyway, while I don’t care all that much about the game itself – personally, I only play golf while carrying a wine bottle with me in the golf bag – I understand it’s incredibly difficult, and The Lose appreciates everything to be done well, in part because it gives me something to write about when it’s done really badly. And golf done badly, at it’s highest level, makes for spectacular viewing. Golf is a game where there is probably a greater sense of disconnect between the élite and everyone else than in any other sport, in that whereas most of us at least had some illusion of being good at a sport at some point when we growing up, no one that I know has any such illusions about golf. We’re all bad golfers. All of us. We’re all terrible. And if you can be bothered to sit through watching an entire golf tourney, you’re generally going to see the game’s élite separated by only subtle moments here and there – Player A will hit the green and sink a long putt, whereas Player B may be on the fringe and take a par, and that will wind up making the difference – but rarely do you see it decided in spectacular fashion. That’s not normal. Tourneys being won on miraculous shots are magnified simply because they hardly ever happen, and the same can be said of tourneys being lost by catastrophic and inglorious collapses that leave the audience dumbstruck.
Which is precisely what Jordan Spieth did on Sunday. Spieth, who is the #1 player in the world, having won two majors already at the age of 21, was cruising his way to winning The Masters on Sunday, having fired four consecutive birdies on Holes 6-9 to open a sizable lead with only 9 holes to play … and over the course of the next 40 minutes or so, that lead completely evaporated, as he bogeyed the 10th and 11th and then hit the ball in the water twice and took a 7 on the Par-3 12th. He basically gave The Masters away in that sequence, winding up finishing tied for 2nd, a collapse scarcely seen in a major tournament before.
How exactly does someone overcome a choke like this? Well, the solution is pretty simple, and it would be the same solution if he hadn’t choked – go on to the next tourney and try it again, which is this coming weekend at the Texas Open. The Masters is one of the so-called “majors” in golf, but what does that actually mean? There is history and prestige to winning the tournament, but fundamentally what you do to win the tournament – complete 72 holes in the fewest number of strokes – is no different than in any other tournament. This is why I talk about that you must fear metaphor. The mechanics of the game are the same no matter what you do, but it’s the meaning that you attach to the game which changes. And like I say, it works both ways, good and bad. I remember an interview from long ago that the young Boris Becker gave after first winning Wimbledon. He was asked if his goal was to win the U.S. Open that fall and he said no, that his goal was to win the tournament in Indianapolis later in July, simply because Indianapolis was the next tournament on his schedule. Win or lose, that’s how you should always approach it.
Spieth handled the disappointment well (then again, what’s he going to do? Throw a tantrum on live TV?) and he’s a bright young player with a terrific future and an already accomplished past, so here’s to hoping he wins a few more and puts this one behind him and that, at some point in the distant future, he’ll be asked to recall the 2016 Masters and be able to laugh about it. I sure hope he’ll be able to laugh about it, since everyone else will be.

• Baseball season is here and be still my foolish heart. So much lose on a daily basis, all summer long. The American League looks to be a muddled mess, with about 13 teams being able to make a case for being in the race at the start of the year. I have no idea who is any good or bad in the AL. But the hot lose-on-lose action is going to be in the National League, which looks like it’s housing the 5-6 worst teams in baseball. There are the Phillies, of course, who were also wretched a year ago (and who’ve already managed to run into two double plays when the infield fly rule was called during the first week of the season), and the Braves look to be dreadful as well, and it’s not looking so good in Milwaukee or Cincinnati, either (and you can’t attribute much to the Reds’ good start since most of it came at the expense of the Phils), and the Rockies still can’t pitch, so they’ll likely be propping up the standings from the bottom and they even managed to make the Padres look good over the weekend, the Pads having been swept and been outscored 25-0 in three home games with the Dodgers at Pet Food Park to open the season, only to then score 13 and 16 runs on successive nights in Denver.
So that’s six teams who ran the gamut from pretty bad to really bad, two in each division, all of them looking like a 10-game losing streak waiting to happen, and it seems to me that what’s ultimately going to separate the actual good teams from one another on the NL is the extent to which they beat up on the bad ones. You can’t be losing 2 of 3 to the Brewers or 3 of 4 to Atlanta. There are lots of easy wins to be had and the top clubs in the NL need to be ready to feast, since it looks like there are far too many good teams for too few playoff positions.

• If I had to hazard a guess as to who will win the American League, I’d probably put my money on the Toronto Blue Jays. Between the baseballing Jays and the basketballing Toronto Raptors, who are the #2 seed in the Eastern playoffs in the NBA, there is a lot for my sports loving friends north of the border to be excited about in the coming months, which is a good thing, since apparently everyone in Canada forgot to play hockey this year.
The NHL playoffs commence here in a few days, and for the first time since 1970, they will feature no Canadian franchises. But even 1970 deserves something of an asterisk, since there were only two Canadian teams at the time, and the NHL was going through one of it’s weirder periods, being a daffy sort of league known for occasionally doing things that don’t make much sense. The league had rapidly expanded from 6 teams to 12, and in an effort to get the new kids up to speed had split the league into the old guard in the “East” and the the expansion franchises in the “West,” awarding four playoff spots to each division – and thus guaranteeing a recent expansion franchise a spot in the Stanley Cup finals – even though the Original Six teams were far superior. The Montreal Canadians, at 92 points, finished tied for fourth in the East that season, losing out on a tiebreaker for the final playoff spot to the Rangers while finishing with six points more than the West-winning St. Louis Blues and 28 points more than any other Western Division team. The Toronto Maple Leafs, meanwhile, were lousy and finished last in the East, but Toronto’s always lousy so that’s nothing new.
The seven Canadian franchises have no weird twists or shifts in league policy to blame for their malaise in 2016. None of them made the playoffs, nor were any of them particularly close. The best of the bunch, the Ottawa Senators, finished eight points out of a playoff spot. It’s always a shock not to see the Montréal Canadiens in the playoffs, since it happens so infrequently, but the Canadiens endured that sort of lost season due to injuries – most notable to goaltender Carey Price – that can happen sometimes in sports. There’s not much you can do when that happens. It’s just not your year and you just have to heal up, write it off and not read much into it. Edmonton’s hopes for the season, which weren’t all that great to begin with, pretty much evaporated when Connor McDavid, the #1 pick in last summer’s draft and the latest player to be burdened with trying to carry this franchise on his shoulders, promptly hurt his shoulder and missed two months.
The three other Western Canadian franchises – Vancouver, Calgary, and Winnipeg – all crashed in burned after making the playoffs last season, although it should be said that advanced metrics didn’t really like any of those teams a season ago, viewed their success as somewhat fluky and would consider this crashing and burning more to be regressing to the mean. It was particularly depressing for this lifelong Vancouver Canucks fan to watch them start the season blowing leads late and racking up the Bettman points by gagging in OTs and shootouts, since those are the sorts of games that fringe teams need to salvage in order to keep themselves going. If fringe teams are losing close games early in the season, they tend to atone for that by losing by even larger margins late in the season. At one point, the Canucks lost three straight games 5:2, which no team had ever done, and then later lost nine in a row and went about a week without scoring a goal. I thought for a while that they were tanking, but then they went and won all three games against playoff teams on a California swing, so they screwed up that as well. The Canucks couldn’t even bomb out right. Watching this team was a waste of my time.
Then there are the Maple Leafs. No, let’s not go there.
The Lose is very pro-Canada when it comes to hockey. (Except for the Flames and the Oilers, who can both suck it.) It was outrageous and shortsighted in the mid-1990s when Gary Bettman came into the league with his dumb Southern strategy and all of a sudden Canadian franchises were deemed to be unable to compete financially, on account of a weak Canadian dollar at the time, and pretty soon you had the Nordiques playing in Denver and the original Jets going off to suffer a painful death in the Arizona desert. It was a dimwitted and shortsighted strategy which still hasn’t quite worked. The NHL has more badly performing franchises than any other league and it has little to do with market sizes and weak Canadian dollars and has far more to do with them being located in places where ice doesn’t actually form. Canada is where the game is loved and idolized and mythologized, and Canadians deserve better than the nationwide incompetence they were subjected to this season.

• The biggest reason that The Lose is happy the NBA regular season is finally ending is that Kobe Bryant is finally going to go away. Sure, it’s great he’s play 20 years and won 5 championships. I’ll give him that. But his last two seasons in L.A., where he was making $25 million a year mostly because no other free agent worth their salt would sign to play with Kobe, have been utterly farcical.
It’s bad enough that Kobe’s lost his game. Injuries and age have taken their toll. It happens to everyone and it’s tough to watch, particularly when it’s a player who’s been historically great. But what makes Kobe’s fall from lofty heights all the worse is that Byron Scott and the entire Laker organization have basically let him do whatever the fuck he wants out on the court to the detriment of his team and teammates. Among players who shoot as much as Kobe has this year, none have ever had a worse field goal percentage. Meanwhile, on the other end of the floor, the Lakers’ defensive rating when Kobe is on the floor is among the worst in the history of the NBA. Byron Scott actually had the audacity, after the Lakers lost by 48 to the Utah Jazz recently, to suggest that some of the players on the club needed to be held accountable for such a laughingly bad performance – which is completely inane, since Kobe’s been putting up one bad performance after another for two years straight and had carte blanche to do so, and so why should anyone on the team take Byron Scott’s words to mean anything, since there is clearly a double-standard here?
The Lakers have been a train wreck from the outset, naïvely thinking they could compete for a playoff spot and then having Scott coach them like it, sitting his young players out in the 4th Quarter when they should’ve been out there getting experience, consequences be damned. They gave Kobe all that cash primarily because he was still a box office draw, yet as the Kobe Going Away Tour has been carrying on in NBA arenas, he’s often been sitting out home games to compensate, which doesn’t play so well with your regularly paying customers. The Lakers have the second-worst record in the NBA, but if the ping pong balls work their mysterious ways and they fall out of the Top 3 in the lottery, they’ll have to forfeit their first round pick to the Sixers as a result of some bad trade or another over the years. D’Angelo Russell’s recent foray into undercover investigative journalism is only the latest in a series of headaches. They are a total mess worlds away from being competitive again.
Kobe’s last game is this Wednesday as the Lakers host Utah, and I just read the second-dumbest NBA column I’ve read all year (this being the dumbest) which suggested that Kobe’s finale should be the headline game on ESPN that night instead of the Golden State-Memphis game in which the Warriors are trying to break the 1996 Chicago Bulls’ all-time win mark. OK, sure, I’m a Dubs fan so maybe I’m biased, but let’s think about that for a minute … watch a washed up superstar go 7-20 from the field and guard no one and never pass … watch one of the great teams ever try to make history … well this is In Play Lose, after all, so maybe I should tune in to that game at Staples Center after all …
Anyway, congrats on your retirement, Kobe. Now go away.

• I always like to close out a Quick Misses post with some new music I’m listening to, and right now I’m listening a whole lot to Azel, the new record from Nigerien guitar maestro Bombino, who is probably my favorite single musician in the world right now. Bombino’s music is what happens when you take the transcendant, trance-infusing tones of the Sahara desert and mix it with a rock ’n’ roll attitude. I love everything on this record, but this track called Inar is a particularly good one. He’s playing here in San Francisco at The Independent later this month, and I’ll be there with my dancing shoes on and with an enormous glass of whisky in my hand so that dancing so much won’t hurt as much in the morning. Enjoy:

The Process is Dead. Fuck the Process.

Sam Hinkie checking the job postings on craigslist

FIRST off, a correction. In the past, during my many writings about the plight of the Philadelphia 76ers, I have made mention of the fact that Sam Hinkie, Philadelphia’s GM and President of Basketball Operations, came to the Sixers from the San Antonio Spurs. In fact, he came over to Philadelphia from the Houston Rockets. The Lose regrets the error, and curses our crack staff of editors and fact checkers here at In Play Lose World HQ for being so lax.

And now we need another correction, because the previous statement is incorrect. Sam Hinkie is now the former GM and President of Basketball Operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. The Lose regrets that error as well. (Well, not really.) And now that we’ve done our duty and attempted to maintain our journalistic integrity, it’s time to trash his ass.

Sam Hinkie resigned on Wednesday, and now The Lose is wondering just what in the hell I’m going to write about now. Now that baseball season is upon us, there will be no shortage of lose, of course, particularly in the National League, where there are about six teams which look like they’re going to be absolutely dreadful, none more so than the San Diego Padres, who hosted the L.A. Dodgers for three games as Pet Food Park to open the season, lost all three, and got outscored 25-0 in the process. With this atrocious and truly hopeless opening salvo to the season, Padres GM A.J. Preller, who undertook the worst MLB offseason spending spree ever last year, has immediately leapt to the top spot in The Lose’s unofficial list I keep in my head called, “Guys Who You Wonder How They Have a Job in Pro Sports.” It’s an unofficial list with no set number of members. A good number of the list’s occupants have found themselves being laid off in the past year or so – Ruben Amaro, Jack Zduriencik, Billy King – and it’s not looking so good for some others – I’m looking at you, Byron Scott – but Preller has rapidly ascended the list, having charged to the top with such brazen managerial incompetence that it has most likely left the Padres doomed to suck for the next 5 years, if not longer. (And this is already the franchise with the worst overall winning percentage in MLB, so the bar for success here is set pretty low.) I know it’s early in the baseball season, but the Padres look hopeless and Preller has already shot into the #1 spot.

In part because the previous occupant of the #1 spot, Sam Hinkie, just resigned on Wednesday.

And to be clear here, I wish no ill will on any of these people. Folks losing their jobs suck. This is not some act of schadenfreude on my part. I have no ill will towards any of the terrible Pro Sports execs who I mentioned above. As I said before, what the hell am I going to write about now? Incompetence is good for The Lose business. It’s essential. Hinkie participated in a podcast with ESPN’s Zac Lowe this past Tuesday, which is worth a listen. He’s somewhat evasive and not particularly forthright in the interview, but given that he was obviously under some pressure (witness the fact that he resigned the very next day), you can certainly understand why. He seemed very bright and engaging and interesting, and I wish him nothing but the best from hereon out.

But having said all of that, you have to look at his body of work and wonder just how in the hell the ownership group in Philadelphia were dumb enough to a) hire this guy; and b) stick with him through three seasons so bad that Roget hasn’t found a synonym for ‘bad’ to describe just how bad it was. During Hinkie’s tenure, the 76ers’ record was 47-195. That’s a .194 winning percentage. The 76ers won on Tuesday night 107:93 over the corpse of the New Orleans Pelicans, a team whose five top scorers are injured and out for the season, thus raising their record to 10-68 and avoiding matching their club and NBA record for futility – the 1972-1973 76ers team that finished 9-73. After seeing their team lose 22 of its previous 23 games, the Sixers fans at Enormous Banking Conglomerate Center in Philadelphia were so giddy about this win that they chanted, “M-V-P! M-V-P!” in the direction of the game’s top scorer, serviceable journeyman forward and all-around good sport Carl Landry. (More on him in a moment.) When you start the season 1-30, and then go 1-22 later in the season, making it to the 10 win plateau counts as something of an accomplishment, I suppose.

It had gotten so bad in Philadelphia that earlier this year the organization hired former Suns and USA Basketball mastermind Jerry Colangelo as a ‘consultant.’ It has been suggested repeatedly that this was done at the behest of the league offices, because the NBA was embarrassed about the sorry state of the franchise – and, more to the point, the other 29 owners were outraged about the state of the 76ers, because what should be a marquee and lucrative franchise wasn’t generating the sorts of revenues it should be producing given that it had become such a laughingstock. And even though no one involved in the league could come right out and say it, what was going on in Philadelphia was clearly a case of an organization that was systematically tanking, trying to be as bad as possible in the hopes of gaming the system and improving its odds of winning the NBA draft lottery, hoping to somehow land a bona fide superstar. As I’ve said before, I hate the draft lottery and wish the league(s) would do away with it entirely, because it fundamentally provides a perverse incentive not to be successful – and when teams who have only a 1% of winning the lottery strike it rich, like the Chicago Bulls and the Cleveland Cavaliers have done, it only further legitimizes the strategy, because the 1% chance of winning the lottery that you get when you barely miss the playoffs is still better than the 0% chance you have if you’re the 8th seed and you’re playing the Dubs or the Cavs. For a league that has spent much of the past 30 years being hounded by accusations that games aren’t on the up-and-up – how did Mark Cuban put it? Oh, right, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Your game is rigged!” – the idea that one of your franchises is engaging in deliberately and systematically trying to fail doesn’t sit well in the corporate offices.

But it was pretty clear when Colangelo came on board that he wasn’t just a ‘consultant.’ In the 76ers pecking order, he was suddenly slotted above Hinkie, and reports indicate that Hinkie was going to be pushed even further down the totem pole in favor of Bryan Colangelo, the former GM of the Suns and the Raptors who happens to be Jerry’s son. He’s been named NBA Executive of the Year on two occasions, Bryan has, but his body of work as a whole as an NBA exec has been somewhat mixed. Quite bluntly, he wouldn’t be getting this job in Philly if his last name wasn’t Colangelo. Hinkie’s response to this impeding demotion was to pen a 13-page letter of resignation which is baffling and absolutely bizarre. (And for all disciples of In Play Lose, this is now officially required reading.) It reads like the opening of someone’s dissertation, rife with quotations and philosophical bents but lacking anything of substance.

And the substance is what’s at issue here. The substance is that the 76ers have won .194 of their games and so embarrassed the league that it’s looking into trying to rejig the lottery so as to somehow dissuade this kind of nonsense from ever happening again. They’ve attempted to game the system and its rules, running payrolls well below the salary floor and propping them up with zombie cap figures from contracts of players long since waived, running through endless numbers of players on endless numbers of 10-day contracts, and making trades for the express purpose of trying to make the team, as a whole, even worse than it was before. It’s at the end of that ludicrous letter that Hinkie tries to use his clearly superior mathematical skills to prove his point:

“In the upcoming May draft lottery, we have what will likely be the best ever odds to get the #1 overall pick (nearly 30%), a roughly 50/50 chance at a top-2 pick (the highest ever), and a roughly 50/50 chance at two top-5 picks, which would be the best lottery night haul ever. That same bounce of a ping pong ball (almost a flip of a coin) will determine if we have three first round picks this year (unusual) or four (unprecedented). That's this year.”

To Hinkie, all of the wheeling and dealing and horse trading has been, in essence, a math problem. That the 76ers could possibly wind up with four first round draft picks – their own plus three others (read here to try and make sense of it) – sounds really great, except for the fact that a large reason why the 76ers are 10-68 and still going through all of this mess is that, under Hinkie, they’ve drafted terribly. At some point you have to actually show that you’re capable of judging NBA talent.

We mentioned Carl Landry before, and he’s part of a “great” trade the 76ers made in the off-season. Knowing that the nitwit Sacramento Kings were desperate to free up cap space to try and sign some mediocre free agents, the 76ers agreed to take on Landry, Jason Thompson, and Nik Stauskas from the Kings. In exchange, the Kings agreed to give the 76ers rights to swap places in the draft with the Kings in 2017 and 2018. Everyone agrees in NBA circles that, for the Kings, this was a stupid trade. An absolutely stupid trade. You don’t give up swap rights to your picks when there is no guarantee you’re going to be any good. But the Kings, of course, have no idea what they’re doing and are run by a bunch of delusional weirdos, a good number of whom actually believed they’d contend for a playoff spot this year when all indications are that they’re likely to be dreadful for the foreseeable future. This wasn’t a good thing to give up, and so the early line on this was that the Sixers won the deal.

But you’re only going to “win” the deal if, in 2017 and 2018, your team is actually better than the Kings and you have something to swap! In the abstract, this deal may be a “win,” but it does absolutely nothing to help your team actually go about winning that deal by winning more games! Landry is basically there in Philly to be salary cap filler, Stauskas was already a bust in Sacto and the 76ers were simply taking a flyer on him, and Thompson was promptly traded to the Warriors for Gerald Green, another player the 76ers didn’t want but also one who basically can’t play any more, so they waived him and paid him $10,000,000 to go away and counted that 10 mil on their salary cap. This trade doesn’t count as a win, because nothing Sam Hinkie did here actually contributes to any improved performance on the floor.

And that’s where none of this works. All the back room procedural shit means nothing if it doesn’t result in wins. Wins! And simply promising it’s all going to get better some day doesn’t really cut it when what you have to show for 100 or so roster transactions is three good players on your team, and all you have to show from three drafts is the drafting of three centers, a point guard who can’t shoot, and a Slovenian guy with three years left on his contract in Turkey. There were some decent players in that 2014 draft. And sure, franchises whiff in the draft and miss on guys, but to come away with absolutely no useful players when you have two first round picks and you’re coming off a season in which you lost 26 games in a row is unforgivable.

This team was so young and so bereft of leadership this year that they finally had to relent and trade for Ish Smith to play the point – an unspectacular player but a safe pair of hands – and give up two of those precious draft assets to do so when they could have just signed him in the offseason in the first place. They wasted the third pick in the 2014 draft on Joel Embiid, who has missed two seasons with foot problems, and even if he comes back healthy next year, you now have all three of those centers still on your roster and nowhere on the floor to put them all, which means you’re going to have to move one of them and probably take a loss on the deal, because everyone knows you need to move one of them. Throw another four 20-year-olds out there – four 20-year-olds from what is shaping up to be not a great draft, by the way – and now the team is even younger and more raw and more inexperienced than before, and not likely to be any better, and it’s not a sure thing that they’ll ever get better, seeing as how there’s been no indication in three years that this team has any aptitude for developing players at all. But at least now, you can say that having all of these draft assets might bear some fruit, since it won’t be Hinkie doing the drafting.

But hey, we have cap space! Oh boy! Having cap space means little with the salary cap soaring in upcoming years. Everyone will have cap space then, free agents will be more able to choose than ever before, and as the Kings found out after making that dumb trade, having money to spend means nothing if your franchise is a toxic waste dump. No player worth his salt is going anywhere near Philly for years. The Colangelo family is going to have to do a lot of smoothing things over with the agents out there, a lot of whom Hinkie has pissed off, and the fact that he’s been systematically setting players up to fail for three years doesn’t make the organization look so good with the NBA rank-and-file. (Here’s a great story of how Kristaps Porzingis did basically everything possible to avoid being drafted by 76ers. He may be onto something there.)

Sam Hinkie clearly knows how to do the math, but he also clearly doesn’t have any eye or feel for NBA talent. Another thing he clearly knew how to do was spin a tall tale, since he somehow convinced the new ownership group in Philadelphia that he had some method and formula which would ultimately lead to great success. They’ve labeled this ‘the process’ in Philly, and if you read any Sixers fan message boards, it’s alarming to see just how many fans bought into this rubbish and drank the Sam Hinkie magical kool-aid, when it seemed pretty obvious from the get-go that it was a bad idea and was doomed to fail miserably. But P.T. Barnum was right. There really are suckers born every day. The 76ers have less resembled a functioning NBA team in the past three years and more resembled a combination of used car dealership and theatre of the absurd. If you actually bought into ‘the process,’ I hope that it also came with a year’s supply of snake oil. At least you only had to suffer through that for a year.