Blow Stuff Up

WE’RE GOING to blow some stuff up today here at In Play Lose, since there has been quite a lot of good lose going on here of late, and it’s hard for me to keep up with all of this failure. Some of this fluid, and I need to write some of this stuff down before situations change.
For example, I was fully intending to blow up USA FC, since I travelled down to Santa Clara last Friday for their Copa America Centenario opener against Colombia at The Pants, a game they lost 0:2 which was typical of the sort of play we’ve come to expect from the U.S. of late: sluggish, disjointed, defensively leaky, and generally low IQ football. We had to fight the Friday rush hour traffic to get down to Santa Clara in time for the 6:30 p.m. kickoff, but we didn’t quite make it and by the time that we’d reached our seats, Colombia had already scored a goal and started packing into their compact shape – setting a high directly in front of me, about 35 yards from the goal, and forming two banks of four in the back – daring the U.S. to figure out what to do and knowing they wouldn’t do it, and the game was essentially over.
So I was ready to kill that team after putting up such a limp performance before myself and 69,000 of my closest friends there at The Pants, but then the U.S. went out on Tuesday night and absolutely hammered Costa Rica 4:0 in Chicago, which was probably the best game they’ve played in the past two years, so I have to hold off on further scathing critique for the moment. 
This speaks to a dilemma that The Lose often encounters – so much lose, so little time, and jobs paying me actual money tend to get in the way. Of course, loyal Lose readers could always contribute to the cause by clicking on the handy gadgets on the side of this page and purchase some books … OK, shameless plug over …
Anyway, there is still lots of hot garbage out there worth scowing out to sea. And this is going to be a long blog entry, even by my own standards, since I’ve got a lot on my mind right now, so fix yourself a sandwich and pour yourself a lovely cocktail and settle on in. It’s time to blow some stuff up, and I have a lot of extremely worthy targets.
To the buzzard points!

• For my recent nth birthday, the Official Spouse of In Play Lose took me to Phone Co. Park to see the Giants game, and for some inexplicable reason, we have this propensity for going to games where the Giants inevitably blow the lead in the 9th inning. I think this particular game was something like the third time in a row, and fourth game in five, where the game wound up going extra frames after the Giants bullpen blew the lead, but the Giants offense came through this time, scoring in the bottom of the 10th for a 4:3 win to sweep a 3-game series with the San Diego Padres – which is already the third time this year that they’ve done that. The Padres are 0-9 against San Francisco this year, and given how they played during that series at Phone Co. Park, I’m surprised they aren’t 0-for against everyone else. The Padres win a few here and there simply because they can pitch, but otherwise they are a mess. Some teams are better than their record indicates, but the Padres are worse than their 25-35 record suggests. Much worse.
Against the Giants in this particular series, they didn’t hit worth a damn and when they did hit, they had runners repeatedly thrown out on the bases. Every ball hit into the air was a misadventure, as they dropped two pop flies – one of which allowed the winning run to score in the series opener – and turned fairly routine balls in the air into extra base hits by taking weird routes and kicking the ball all over the place. They played some of the weirdest defensive alignments I’ve ever seen, most of which the Giants hitters routinely beat and one of which involved playing with no center fielder, which led to a fairly harmless outfield knock rolling away for a double. At no point in any of those games, not even when the Giants bullpen was gagging away the lead in the third and final game, did you think for a second that the Padres would win.
The Padres followed up this folly in San Francisco by playing what is easily the most ridiculous 4-game series we’ve seen in baseball season, a home-and-home interleague set with their hated rivals, the Seattle Mariners. (The Pads and M’s are designated “rivals” by MLB, which is news to everyone involved). The Padres lost 3 of 4 games despite scoring 38 runs in the series, since they allowed 43. They lost a game 16:4 in Seattle in which their backup catcher came into pitch and was ultimately relieved by their shortstop (nice 53 mph change up, if you want to call it that). Two days later at Dog Food Park in San Diego, the Padres became the first team in the bigs to blow a 10-run lead without going to extra innings in 25 years, including giving up nine runs in an inning after two outs.
It was at this point that the Padres’ owner, Ron Fowler, decided to pop off and say a bunch of dumb stuff on talk radio, forgetting the #1 rule of being an owner, which is to shut up and write the cheques:

“It’s about as frustrating as it can get. In a normal environment, if you had performed as well as we have over the last three years, you’d probably be unemployed. But it’s baseball, with guaranteed contracts. We’ve got to get through it.”
– Ron Fowler

I hate to break this to you, Ron, but this ain’t a normal environment. But one thing which is, in fact, true across all businesses, which you are giving credence to with your comments, is the fact that most bad businesses are bad because they have bad owners, and your stewardship of this franchise slots you in that realm.
After the best-became-the-worst offseason in baseball history before the 2015 season, the Padres are now rapidly deconstructing, but trading James Shields to Chicago White Sox only netted them a couple of lesser prospects, and the Padres are still responsible for picking up $28 million of the $58 million that Shields is still owed – and this leaves the Padres in a strange position of rooting from afar for Shields to succeed with the Pale Hose, since he has an opt-out clause in his contract after this season and pitching well in Chicago might lead to him doing so in search of bigger dollars, giving the Padres some much needed relief. Or, Shields could stink in Chicago, much like he did in San Diego, and not opt out of his deal and leave the Padres on the hook for $28 mil – which seems far more likely to be the case, given that the Padres seem condemned to suffer in perpetuity.
Is there a perpetually less relevant team in professional sports than the San Diego Padres? The Padres are usually not as as bad as they’ve been this year, but they’re never very good, either. They have never won a World Series, and naturally ran into buzz saws for opposition the two times they got far – the 1984 Detroit Tigers and 1998 New York Yankees. No Padres pitcher has ever thrown a no-hitter in the franchise’s history, meaning that this franchise is so dull that they don’t even offer up those occasional magical moments to remind their fans how special the game can be. While Tony Gwynn is indisputably the face of the franchise and the greatest player in team history, the 2nd-greatest player is probably Dave Winfield, who’s far better known for leaving San Diego for the Yankees on what was, at the time, the biggest free agent contract in baseball history than for anything he did while he was there. Oh yeah, and they used to dress like they worked at Taco Bell.
The Padres have a lovely downtown ballpark, albeit one that, like most West Coast ballparks, tends to be hard on the hitters, which can certainly make it a tough sell for free agents (as if the fact that the franchise has never done anything of note in 40+ wasn’t a big enough red flag). And the atmosphere in that ballpark is entirely dependent upon how many of the visiting fans are in attendance. Dog Food Park has become something of a de facto home away from home for the Giants, who usually bring about 15,000 fans with them, and the Mets and Cubs and Cardinals fans always turn up en masse to enjoy a weekend getaway, while the Pads fans sit in embarrassed silence. And can you blame them? What the hell is there to be happy about? What is there to be hopeful about?

• I was somewhat casually observing, from afar, when the Mariners recently played three games in Cincinnati against the Reds. And there was no point, in any of those 27 innings, that I ever thought for a second that the Mariners would lose. Whatever lead the Reds managed to cobble up was certain to be given away by the arson squad bullpen we spoke about previously. 2-run lead? 3-run lead? It didn’t matter. Sure enough, the kerosene kids came in from the pen and whatever hope the Reds had for winning swiftly became bombs bursting in air. 
The bullpen has been historically awful in Cincinnati, but it isn’t like the rest of the squad is any great shakes. Indeed, their 22-36 record may actually be better than they deserve, seeing as how their lineup, starting rotation, and bullpen have all been performing below replacement level for most of the season. Were it not for the historically inept offensive output of the Barves, the Reds would be the worst team in baseball.
And what’s shocking about this is just how fast this came about. It was only four seasons ago, in October of 2012, that the Cincinnati Reds headed home from San Francisco with a 2-0 lead in their best-of-5 playoff series, having hammered the Giants twice at Phone Co. Park. The Reds had a terrific team that season, an NL Central winning team which, had they mustered one more win at home, would likely have been favorites against the Cardinals in the NLDS, and favorites against the Tigers in the World Series after that.
But then the Rids literally kicked away Game 3 of that series with Giants, losing 2-1 on a Scott Rolen error and letting the Giants off the hook. San Francisco then came out and clobbered the Reds in Game 4 to even the series. They then put two on the board and loaded the bases early in Game 5 against Mat Latos, at which point Buster Posey ripped the soul straight out of the franchise:

The Reds have been sinking ever since. And as the losses mount and the misery deepens, those sorts of moments resonate and sting even more.
Because make no mistake about it, the Reds were a better team than the Giants that season. They were the better team and they threw it away. This is why I always speak of making the most of your opportunities when they come. They don’t come often, and the fall from the top can be swift and steep. It can take far longer to scale that summit than it does to fall, and right now, the Reds can’t even look towards a summit. It’s more like they’ve sunk into the Marianas trench.

• There is no team I want to kill more than the Oklahoma City Thunder. I hate that team. I truly, truly hate that team. And I have very good reasons for doing so, of course:

I hate everything about that team. I think that the team I used to be a season ticket holder for was stolen. I think their owner is a sleazebag, I think the money for the purchase came from a crook (and obviously, I wasn’t alone in thinking that), and I think the whole thing was aided by Little Napoleon himself, David Stern, who got his little snot nose bent out of joint because some politicos in the state of Washington had the audacity to tell him they didn’t want taxpayer money to keep propping up his voodoo economics – voodoo economics he as much as kowtowed to when he locked out the players for the umpteenth time. I think the Oklahoma City Thunder embody pretty much all that is wrong with the business of professional sports in North America, and I cannot wait for the day that the two superstars they lucked into having are no longer there to save them and they sink to the depths of the NBA, because no player worth their salt will ever want to play for that shit team in that shittowne.
And now that I’ve got that out of the way, I’m going to attempt to be objective.
And I am not going to engage in any sort of schadenfreude in this, which is hard for me to do, because I really HATE this team, and the opportunity presents itself quite nicely after what happened in the Western Conference Finals when the Thunder first found themselves up 3-1 in the series against the Golden State Warriors, and then later found themselves leading by seven points with 5:00 remaining in Game 6, on their home floor, AND THEY LOST THE SERIES, and I just want to jump up and down and point and laugh at them for being a bunch of choke artists, but this is In Play Lose here, a forum where we try to explore failure with a critical eye. And so this is going to be hard for me here, because there are really very few teams on this planet whose misfortunes I will invariably revel in to the point where it will compromise my judgment.
One of those is the Dodgers. I hate the Dodgers. I’ve hated them for a lifetime. This is how much I hate the Dodgers: the one-and-only time that I played rotisserie baseball, I was participating in a league that was restricted to National League players, and I refused to draft any Dodgers. It probably cost me the league title, in fact, because my team made up of Cardinals and Phillies and Astros wound up finishing second, but Dodgers doing well on baseball fields was an evil which I didn’t wish to profit from. And this sort of thinking is completely irrational and stupid, of course. At the aforementioned Giants game, I was sitting in the right field arcade, where the fans spent most of the game getting on Matt Kemp. Now, admittedly, Kemp was making himself an easy target out there by making a mess of almost any ball that was coming his way, but Giants fans particularly hate Kemp because he is a former Dodger – which is ridiculous, of course. The Dodgers drafted Matt Kemp, after all. It wasn’t like he had any real choice in the matter. We’re getting all over this guy because he was essentially the unwilling property of some other team that we don’t like. If you think about it that way, it’s all kinda stupid.
But Oklahoma City is different. That was MY team. That was a team I had invested my money in back when I lived in Seattle and it’s gone, so I cannot ever like that team and cannot ever want them to be successful. I still remember when OKC made the NBA finals against Miami, and ESPN did one of those silly nationwide polls about “Who do you want to win the NBA Finals?” and 48 of the 50 states were colored OKC blue while two more – Washington and Florida – were emblazoned in that weird reddish hue of the Heat. I briefly broke my vow never to watch the NBA again that season simply for the joy and delight of watching OKC get stepped on by the Heat, after which I stopped watching it again, only to be tempted into coming back to the game once more by the Warriors four seasons ago. And now the Warriors are NBA champions and rank among the greatest teams in the history of the sport, and they play the most beautiful basketball that I have ever seen, and the idea that their run would somehow be cut short by THAT STUPID FUCKING TEAM FROM OKLAHOMA CITY was absolutely revolting to even think about, much less watch unfold over the course of those first six games of that series.
Can you tell that I’m getting this out of my system?

Awww, c’mon Russ, you’re being a little bit hard on yourself

So I want to laugh and chortle and guffaw at just how stupid and incompetent the Oklahoma City Thunder were down the stretch of Game 6, and brand them as nothing more than a bunch of chokers who will never win anything, but I can’t do that. And there are a couple of reasons for that.
For starters, saying that Oklahoma City “choked” takes away from what their opponents accomplished. 28 of the 29 other teams aren’t coming back in that series. The Golden State Warriors won that series because their stars – first Klay Thompson in Game 6, and then Steph Curry in Game 7 – took over the games with shot making skills that no one else possesses, or has ever possessed, in the history of the sport. At its base, everything that the Warriors do is based upon the fact that Steph and Klay take, and make, the hardest shots in the NBA. They take shots which are bad shots for everyone else in the league and they make them – and because they make them, you have to account for them and guard them and plan for them and scheme for them, at which point the rest of the Warriors are free to run roughshod over you. It’s a tightrope and high wire act at Golden State. They have radically altered the geometry and the mathematics of the game, but when Steph and Klay can’t make those shots, the most invincible force in the NBA can suddenly seem mortal and ordinary.
Klay’s 11 treys and 41 points in OKC saved the Warriors’ season, and then Steph finished the job in Game 7. Prior to that, it appeared that they had met their match. I kept wondering at what point in the series the Warriors would find themselves again, as they looked all out of sorts and their offense wasn’t working and the Thunder were all over them. But it’s nuts just to think about it – I’m watching these games and hoping for the Dubs to go back to being otherworldly, to go back to doing things no one else can do in the game, or have ever done in the game, for that matter. With their success, the expectations have become absurdly high, and that they managed to reach those heights in the clutch simply adds to the lore and the legend.
And as for Oklahoma City, they were great. They were absolutely great in the playoffs. For the last five games of the Spurs series, and for most of the first six games of the Warriors series, they looked like a completely different team. In fact, I would suggest that their loss in Game 6 of the playoffs was less of a choke and more of a regression to the mean. Golden State rose from the dead and returned to being the team we know, and unfortunately, Oklahoma City reverted to being the team we know.
Here’s a video breakdown of OKC’s offense in the 4th Quarter of Game 6. This is bad offense. 12 of the last 13 OKC possessions consist of one pass or less. No ball movement, poor spacing, one-on-one playmaking leading to turnovers and bad shots. Hero ball. That’s not good basketball.
But that’s OKC for you. This is what they do, and they’ve been doing this for years. They have outrageous natural talent on that team, with great athletes all over the floor, yet they run the most simplistic offensive schemes in the NBA. Russ and KD play hero ball while the other three guys on the court are basically furniture. And when you’re checked out on the offensive end of the floor – and why wouldn’t you be, since you’re not going to get the ball – you tend to then check out on the defensive end, as well. It’s hard to call Game 6 a choke by OKC because choking somewhat implies that something out of the ordinary just happened, but nothing out of the ordinary happened here. Oklahoma City does this all the time! The Thunder blew more 4th Quarter leads than any other team this season for a reason. They do stupid stuff!
And indeed, what got them to within 5:00 of the NBA finals was the fact that, in the playoffs, the Thunder had stopped being themselves. They flummoxed first the Spurs and then the Warriors because all of their tendencies had gone out the window. “Wait? What’s going on? This team is passing the basketball! There is ball movement and spacing, everyone is involved and engaged and contributing, and holy shit there is a lot of talent on the floor. Steven Adams is a stud in the post. Where has he been all season? And now Serge Ibaka is making plays too? I had forgotten he was even in the NBA! Hey, suddenly it makes sense to have a defensive specialist on the floor like Roberson who can also slash and hit the offensive glass. And holy shit, when everyone’s engaged, they actually play defense! Stifling defense! Durant is a human pogo stick on defense who can contest any shot anywhere on the floor, Adams can protect the rim and Ibaka can switch onto just about anyone. Wow, this team is terrifying! What do we do?”
But then, when they were up seven points with 5:00 left in the 4th Quarter of Game 6 – statistically, they’re around 93% favorites to win, at that point – midnight struck for cinderella and OKC suddenly turned back into a bunch of pumpkins. As much as I’d been waiting for the Warriors to snap out of it and remember who they are, there was also this faint hope that Oklahoma City would remember who they are, as well, which is exactly what happened. They collapsed in Game 6, and then their offense stalled out in the 3rd Quarter of Game 7, when they only scored 12 points and threw the ball all over the gym and resumed with their usual finger pointing and bickering on the floor. And in the aftermath of this series, it’s easy to suggest that OKC’s playoff performance foretells of greater things next season, but the meltdown in Game 6 wasn’t the aberration. The aberration was the fact that they were in the position at all to go melting down.
So if you’re OKC, now what do you do? Kevin Durant is a free agent, and he has a wealth of options. A lot of NBA experts assume that KD will sign the “1+1” deal because that makes the most financial sense. I would suggest that’s a dangerous assumption, because it implies that OKC is going to be willing to offer that contract in the first place. They may wind up having to do that, in the end, simply because they’ll have no other choice, but it’s a prickly and somewhat stingy organization by nature that doesn’t like yielding that much control. If KD signs a 1+1, and comes back for the 2017 season, OKC has basically one season to try and win a championship, because come the summer of 2017, it turns into salary cap hell.
It’s salary cap hell to some extent already, because the weird quirk in the salary cap which has allowed OKC to skate buy paying both Russ and KD is coming back to bite them. They have no cap space at all to work with this offseason, so they’re hard-pressed to afford to replace anything that they lose. Last season, the Portland Trail Blazers basically trolled the Thunder and fucked with them by throwing $73m at Enis Kanter, an RFA whom the Thunder had the right to match, and the Thunder had to suck it up and bite the bullet and match and essentially pay $73m for a backup center who cannot guard his own shoes because his role on the Thunder was irreplaceable. I would imagine some team will throw $50m at Dion Waiters this offseason, who is also an RFA, and as much of a long, strange trip as the Dion Waiters Experience can be, they don’t really have any other options. They have no draft picks, they’re way over the cap, and making any sort of a deal is coming from a position of weakness. Then the summer of 2017 rolls around and Durant could trigger his option and become a UFA and you’ll have to pay him about $35m a year, and Westbrook becomes a UFA and he’ll cost about $30m a year, and Ibaka’s a UFA as well and he’ll probably be around $20m a year, and at some point you’re also going to have to pay Adams, who is 22 and blossoming into a terrific player, and if Kanter was worth $73m on the RFA market then what will a team with money to spend (which is everybody, at this point) be willing to offer Adams? $100m? $125m? It’s not out of the question. And yeah, I’m throwing around ridiculous figures here, but this is the reality of the modern NBA. So if you add all of that up, and throw in the NBA’s luxury taxes for going over the salary cap, OKC’s payroll would be in excess of $200m for the 2017-2018 season if they tried to keep this team together, and that’s just not going to happen, and the worst-case scenario is that you lose KD, Russ, Ibaka and Adams and are left with $120m sunk into a badly defending center and the Dion Waiters Experience, at which point you’re hoping there are some élite talents available in the 2018 draft, and probably also the 2019 and 2020 drafts as well. So the Thunder need to win now (now being next season), but if KD signs a 1+1 and comes back for another year, he’s going to be swimming in the biggest fish bowl in sports. If he got annoyed with every reporter asking him about his future this season, that unwanted attention will be magnified by the prospect of the whole team breaking apart.
And you can look at the glass as half-full if you’re the Thunder after this past off-season: “we were so close to winning a title this year. We were so close and just need to take that last step.” Or, you can also look at it half-empty, wherein the Thunder really can’t play any better than they did in this year’s playoffs and it still wasn’t good enough to get them a championship. OKC maximized their potential for a couple of rounds of the playoffs, but expecting that team to finally toss away all of their self-destructive tendencies and play that way for an entire season just might be too much to ask.
As much as I hate that franchise and everything about it, I do have to begrudgingly give them some props. The Warriors were pushed like no team has pushed them in the past two years. For that fact alone, OKC proved to be worthy adversaries. But that’s all you’re gonna get from me, OKC. Now go away.

• They call Old Trafford the ‘Theatre of Dreams,’ but lately theatergoers have been subjected to a steady diet of Greek tragedy, a ponderous and plodding piece of theatre leading to an ending that was fated all along. And what better way to liven things up on stage at the Theatre of Dreams than by hiring the sport’s biggest drama queen?
They’d barely finished engraving Manchester United’s name on the FA Cup trophy when United pulled the trigger on a move that was the worst-kept secret in all of soccer, sacking manager Louis Van Gaal and replacing him with Jose Mourinho. Winning the FA Cup was all  the silverware Van Gaal had to show for three years on the job, and the on-field look was bad. The football was terrible, a cynical product verging at times on being unwatchable. Rather than win with superior talent, United instead attempted to numb their inferior opponents into a stupor and simply wait for them to screw up. With some £200 million in wage bills and another £300 million more in transfer fees doled out to assemble this squad, you’d think you’d get more bang for your British buck than slow, unathletic build up using side-to-side square passing while clogging up the middle of the pitch. This is not the Man U way. When you’re one of the biggest clubs in the world, not only do you have to win, but you have to look good doing it, and Van Gaal’s United failed on both fronts. For Manchester United Inc.’s international brand, what’s almost as important as being good is continuing to be relevant.
The Van Gaal experiment was always doomed to fail. He signed a 3-year deal, and had made it clear from the beginning that it was his last job and he wasn’t going to sign a new deal after that. There’s fundamentally a very good reason why clubs are wary of letting coaches reach the final year of their deals – if the coach seems as if he’s a lame duck, the players feel free to tune him out, and Van Gaal was a lame duck from the moment he took over. It’s been pretty obvious from the play on the field that few of the guys wearing a red shirt were particularly happy to be there (it’s been reported that several players told management they’d ask for transfer if Van Gaal were retained), and this story of Mou taking over at Old Trafford has been floating around in the British press ever since he got whacked at Chelsea. They’re apparently replacing Greek tragedy with opera buffo at the Theatre of Dreams, because this marriage of media whores and megalomaniacs will likely be a comedy of errors.
Oh, it will start out alright, of course. Mourinho will come in and spend a lot of money. He loves doing that. He’ll spend a lot of money on players that they want, and spend a lot of money on players they don’t need. We already know this is going to happen, since it also seems inevitable that Man U will go out and sign Zlatan Ibrahimovic to play striker for them, who is still a great player and all but a) he’s about 68 years old; and b) their two best players at the moment are 18-year-old Marcus Rashford and 19-year-old Antony Martial, both of whom are strikers, and it would make far more sense to just pencil those two into the lineup for, oh, maybe the next 10 years or so and try to build a team around them. But Mourinho has no patience for talent development and no patience for young players, even though United’s academy turns them out in droves, just like Chelsea’s academy turned them out in droves, but kids were just cash cows to Chelsea so every kid at United may as well start looking forward to a long career in Belgium or the Netherlands while waiting for that opportunity at United which will never, ever come.
And the results will be marginally better next year, as Mourinho’s militant pragmatism will take hold but he’ll whitewash it a different color of paint, and a 1:0 win over West Brom with Mourinho on the bench will somehow seem better to the Man U faithful than a 1:0 win over West Brom with Van Gaal on the bench. And by the second year, he’ll have spent even more ridiculous sums, and they’ll trot out 11 players who can win simply by rolling the ball out and telling them which direction to run, and Man U will likely win all sorts of trophies and Mou can bask in his glow of being “the special one” once more. But as soon as any hint of trouble arises, whatever sort of free-flowing and attractive football the players have concocted on their own will immediately dry up and be replaced by pragmatism and cynicism and oppressively defensive tactics – tactics which are quite easy to replicate with any sort of team or collection of players, and Man U will most certainly be the latter, a collection of players lacking any sort of cohesion or unity who will first turn on each other and then turn on the manager, a guy who is a “masterful man manager” when he’s winning and simply “a pain in the ass” when he’s losing. And they’ll all end up hating each other and hating Mourinho as well, who will then turn on his players and start throwing them under the bus and throwing management under the bus as well.
Wait, I think I’ve seen this play before. That’s because it happens everywhere that Mourinho goes. He’s never a long-term solution. He’s a quick fix. He makes you relevant in a hurry, you speed ahead and then the engine redlines and finally bursts into flames. This marriage of convenience between Manchester United and Mourinho just isn’t going to end well. It’s going to end in a messy divorce and all of it promises to be wildly entertaining. All that you can do is sit back with your beer and your popcorn and your cotton candy and enjoy your ticket to the circus.

We’ll blow some more stuff up later, because I have quite a bit to say about matters far more serious than what I’ve covered here. But for now, let’s peace out and play some music. One of my favorite bands, Dengue Fever, is performing this Friday at The Chapel in San Francisco, I will be in attendance and you should be as well, because this band absolutely shreds:

You Will Always Be The Greatest

NOTHING more needs to be said.

Requiem

HERE in North America, when you consistently lose, you become colorful and quirky and cute. The Chicago Cubs rolled into San Francisco this past weekend, bringing their usual throng of supporters out of the woodwork for the proceedings, and no franchise possesses a failure-based narrative and history quite like the Cubs, whose fan base take the narrative so far that, historically, their home attendance actually declines during seasons where the Cubs are winning on the field. (Which isn’t very often, so the filthy rich, money-grubbing Cubs ownership can rest easy.) There’s something of a badge of honor that comes with being a long-time supporter of the Philadelphia Phillies, who have lost more games than any other team in the history of sports. The Seattle Mariners have combined poor performance with an off-kilter, sort of Pacific Northwest sense of humor to create something of an absurdist theatre troupe over the years. And then, of course, there’s the entire city of Cleveland. While not necessarily embracing failure to the extent of the Cubs, most perpetually underperforming North American clubs come to at least approach their continued underperformance with a veil of humor and humility.

But some would also argue that those franchises’ owners simply go through the motions and cash the cheques, since in the end, there is little genuine incentive to be good. The aforementioned Mariners recently sold for over $1 billion in spite of having never achieved much of anything on the field, while the single-worst franchise in the NBA, the Sacramento Kings, recently fetched a $600 million price tag at sale. Salary caps and revenue sharing have created something of a cost certainty in the endeavor, meaning that, from a financial standpoint, the incentive to actually be good doesn’t necessarily exist, and there are little to no consequences for being bad.

The single-entity American professional leagues are a far cry from European soccer, of course, where leagues are essentially loose amalgamations of vast numbers of clubs grouped into strata and tiers. Whereas being terrible on the field in North America can make you quirky and charming and cute, in Europe, if you suck, they just tell you to go away. Relegation is ruthless and merciless: if you fall below the line, down you go to the lower league, regardless of status or pedigree. This past season in the English Premier League, two of the three clubs which were relegated – Newcastle United and Aston Villa – rank, in terms of revenues, among the 10 largest soccer clubs in Britain and the 20 largest clubs the world. Aston Villa had never been relegated since the EPL was founded in the early 1990s. Newcastle, meanwhile, found £70 million in the bank accounts to spend on new players back in January in a desperate attempt to avoid the axe, and their net-spend this season was the second-largest in Europe. Didn’t matter. Newcastle finished 18th while Aston Villa finished dead-last, the two clubs running through multiple managers while trotting out ill-conceived lineups of players with cartoonishly large wage bills and remarkably small attention spans. Both clubs will have to hit the reset button this coming August, coping with tighter budgets while enduring one of the more grueling leagues on earth, the English Championship, formerly known as Division Two, where the season is 46 games long and most every club has a chip on its shoulder. Welcome to the mess.

And the third club going down to Div. 2, the one that finished 19th in the EPL? That would be my beloved Canaries of Norwich City. Sigh. One of the wordsmiths at Football Weekly said it best when calling this result a throwback to Great Britain’s coal mining past, with two clubs from the industrial north descending into the underworld and taking some Canaries with them. Whereas the British press has heaped scorn and hurled vitriol towards Newcastle and Villa for their largesse, bombast and general, across-the-board incompetence, it’s been a little different when it comes to Norwich City.

Quite simply, the Canaries weren’t any good.

And it was at this exact moment here, when Canaries centre back and club captain Russell Martin attempted the worst back pass in the history of the sport, that it truly sunk in for me that the season wasn’t going to be okay.

This particularly awful play, in which Martin inexplicably gifted a goal to Liverpool’s James Milner, was part of an epic collapse by the Canaries on Jan. 23 which saw the Canaries race to a 3-1 lead after 54 minutes, only to then yield three goals in the next 21 minutes to find themselves down 4-3. The Canaries then tied it at 4-4 in stoppage time, only to lose on an Adam Lallana goal on literally the last kick of the game in one of the wildest, wackiest games anyone has ever seen in the league. The 5:4 defeat has earned plaudits in the press for being the best game of the entire EPL season on account of its sheer entertainment value, even if it was something of an error-strewn mess. But when you wind up 19th and you are sent down to Div. 2, that’s little consolation.

And Norwich were perpetually praised for their effort this season. Unlike the trio of other clubs mired in the relegation battle – Villa, Newcastle, and Sunderland – who were often vilified for being gutless, spineless, and acting like cowardly quitters, the Canaries always put up a fight. This fighting spirit was best embodied in a game against Chelsea, where a nasty coming together in mid-air left one Norwich player with four missing teeth and another with a bandage wrapped around his head, having stepped off the pitch momentarily to have a gash in his forehead stapled shut. The walking wounded played on regardless and played their asses off that day, but the Canaries lost nonetheless, a 2:1 defeat to the Blues in which the winning goal was scored by Chelsea striker/shithouse extraordinaire Diego Costa, who was about two yards offside at the time that he scored – an infraction that was blatant and obvious and yet the referees missed it. An unsurprising turn of events, really, because if Norwich didn’t have bad luck this season, they would’ve had none at all.

And this team had no luck whatsoever. They were constantly on the wrong side of the official’s decisions. They were only awarded one penalty all season, and few of those awarded against them were truly deserved. They lost 2:1 to Leicester when Jaime Vardy flopped in the box and got awarded a penalty for it. They had their equalizing goal in their season opener against Crystal Palace – a gorgeous overhead kick by Cameron Jerome (more on him in a minute) – overturned for a high foot even though the Palace defender was nowhere near the ball. The officials have been remarkably unkind to Norwich this season.

A large factor of luck is timing, of course, and Norwich had none of that, either, losing more points in the closing moments of matches than I can ever remember seeing before. The Liverpool loss came on the last kick of the game, and a goal by West Ham on the game’s final play turned a Norwich win into a 2:2 draw. Norwich lost two other games – at Leicester and at Manchester City – on goals allowed in the 89th minute. Simply seeing those four games out would’ve resulted in 5 more points in the table – the exact final margin this season between themselves and 17th place Sunderland. This team seemingly invented ways to lose, and then when it came to the end of the campaign, a rash of serious and season-ending injuries struck the most important members of their defensive core. The Canaries felt cursed at times. They just could not catch a break.

But here at In Play Lose, our favorite quote may be the Sartre quote which serves as the epigram for this blog – “in football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team” – but probably the second most favorite quote would be one from Louis Pasteur: “luck favors the prepared mind.” And just as luck favors the prepared mind, it also favors the prepared players. If you have to ride your luck to get by, you’re probably not good enough to belong there in the first place.

West Ham’s 94th minute goal, which I mentioned previously, was particularly ill-timed, but it also came on a free kick after a dimwitted foul gave the Hammers one last opportunity for a set piece, and the Canaries made a mess of it:

Score level, game over. West Ham 2:2 Norwich, and two points are lost.

Down a goal to Manchester City at the Emirates despite playing a terrific game, the Canaries finally caught a break in the 86th minute, when current England goalkeeper Joe Hart suddenly developed lettuce hands and dropped a routine cross at the feet of Jerome – a chance not even he could miss, and he tapped it in to level the score. But three minutes later, former England keeper John Ruddy gave it right back with this wandering, wayward effort resulting in a spot kick for the Citizens:

Man City converted the ensuing penalty. Game over, Man City 2:1 Norwich, another point dropped. Sigh.

Luck isn’t enough. You have to make your own luck and, more importantly, not put yourself in a position where bad luck might bite you in the ass.

After winning the richest game in soccer last May, and earning their promotion to England’s top level, it was always going to be something of a struggle for the Canaries to stay up in the EPL, given the size and the stature of the club compared to the others. This is the nature of the beast. The competition at the highest level of the sport is fierce and intense and vicious, and unlike here in the U.S. where you can just go on being terrible in perpetuity, once you reach the EPL, you have to get it right. You don’t get a second chance.

And to give you an idea what “getting it wrong” actually looks like, consider the squad composition of a club like Norwich City. During the international breaks, when players were released to play internationally, as many as a dozen of the Canaries were wearing their national team colors. Five Canaries are on the rosters for teams playing in the Euros this summer, while two more were in the starting XI for the Dem. Rep. Congo team with finished third in the African Cup of Nations. So in the grand scheme of things, we’re hardly talking about a bunch of stiffs here. These are literally world class players.

But it’s a matter of scope and scale. When you venture into the English Premier League, you’re talking about trying to compete in the biggest, richest, most balanced and most competitive league on the earth. EPL clubs spent over £1 billion on acquiring talent this past season. The wage bills at top clubs runs as much as £200 million. The talent level is so high that even high-calibre players like those Norwich employ can come to look like bushers in a Sunday pub league.

And soccer is a sport where the margins between success and failure are damningly small. In basketball, where there are sometimes more than 100 possessions aside and the points flow freely, the difference between good and bad is obvious. But failure in soccer drives you insane after a while, because you’re always so close to being successful. It’s easy to look through the catalogue of failure that was Norwich’s season – 22 losses, 7 draws, and only 9 wins – and find so many instances where one play here or there going a different way would have radically altered the outcome. Good teams make their own luck and find ways to get results, while bad teams squander chances and are ultimately punished for their shortcomings.

And Norwich had plenty of shortcomings this past season, starting with the fact that the defense was dreadful and error-prone:

The goalkeeping left a little to be desired as well:

I have no idea what the hell the goalkeeper was doing on that play. 

But the biggest culprit of them all was the offense, which dried up when the club needed it most – failing to score in five of their last six games – and ranked among the worst in the league. The club’s top scorer, Dynamo Kiev loanee Diumerci Mbokani, managed only 7 goals all season, with is putrid. The offense sucked, and this is where the Philosophy of the Fringe comes into play.

Every year, the fringe clubs in the EPL have to figure out how they’re going to play in order to gain enough points to stay up. Staying up is all that matters, and whatever works, you go with. Some clubs will go for the all-defensive approach. West Brom is the worst of the lot. West Brom are absolute garbage. They park the bus every game, play for 0:0 and score the lion’s share of their goals on set pieces. They’re absolute crap to watch, their fans don’t really like watching it, their players don’t seem to like playing it, yet here we are at the end of the season and West Brom have eked out enough 0:0 and 1:1 and 1:0 results to stay up. Two other clubs who are staying up, Sunderland and Watford, have less talent throughout their squads, on balance, than Norwich does, but both clubs had top-calibre strikers up front who could find the net in times of need.

From the get-go, Norwich wanted to be aggressive, to attack and play a possession-based passing game, and while it could be quite attractive to watch at times, it doesn’t do any good to play that way if you have strikers who couldn’t score in a whorehouse:

That was Cameron Jerome contriving to somehow miss an open goal against Leicester, which is something he did about six times this season.

Jerome scored 20 goals for Norwich last season, when the Canaries earned promotion, but hit the net only three times this year. He is what American baseball fans know as a classic AAAA player, a guy who is terrific at lower levels but, when advanced to the highest level and thrust onto the big stage, always seems to come up short. He’s had a journeyman career, bouncing about an assortment of yo-yo clubs that move between divisions.

And what’s alarming about the club’s roster is that virtually every player on the squad has been relegated twice if not thrice in their careers. It’s an entire team of AAAA players – guys who are really pretty good and on the cusp of being great, but who then strike out at the highest level. After the club was relegated in 2014, they kept the core of the club together, believing that 2014 was simply a blip on the radar, an act of underachievement after two successful EPL seasons before it. That they promptly bounced back up to the EPL after a season in Div 2 showed such that such thinking possessed some merit, but now that they’ve been tossed out on their asses once again, perhaps 2014 wasn’t an underachievement after all. The talent level just isn’t good enough, just as it wasn’t good enough before, and all of those players are simply older now and still not good enough.

Norwich tried everything this season. They tried to be open and attacking and they lost. They tried to be stout defensively and they lost. Manager Alex Neil tried every sort of shape and tactic and lineup he could think of, and none of them worked. Neil was the youngest manager in the league, and his inexperience showed at times – the EPL being a difficult place for a manager to receive on-the-job training. The game everyone points to as the the gaffer’s biggest gaffe was a ridiculous, 6:2 loss at Newcastle in which he made attacking substitutions in order to chase the game and his defense got cut to ribbons on the counter, after which the team pretty much abandoned the attacking identity they had sought to create. It was something of an overraction to a fluky sort of game: Newcastle had six shots on target and all six went in; Norwich, meanwhile, hit the woodwork twice, had a shot cleared off the line, and the referee missed a blatantly obvious penalty, which means that the score very easily could have been 6:6! Weird stuff happens sometimes in football, and there is no need for rash decisions after only one result.

Neil was always trying to find the balance, and never could quite get it right. Having said that, it’s hard to be successful with so little talent to work with, and the club did him no favors by acting overly cautious and being unwilling to spend much in the transfer market. Norwich is a tough sell to begin with since, while it’s a charming and pleasant little city, it’s decidedly rural and decidedly not cosmopolitan. The passionate and forgiving fan base can certainly win a player over, but you have to get the player there first in order for them to realize it. Neil has hinted in the post-mortem that the recruitment endeavor, and some other behind-the-scenes machinations at the club, contributed greatly to this season’s failure. Norwich’s club chairman David McNally responded to a tweet from an outraged fan calling for his resignation by tweeting back that he’d just submitted it. Neil has been retained and will be given a chance to manage his way out of this mess, but McNally departing was inevitable, because no matter how good of a job he’d done in balancing the books during his seven-year tenure, the mandate from the club’s board was clear: stay in the EPL.

If anything, Norwich have been too nice when it comes to competing at the highest level, not wanting to be quite so ruthless. In contrast, Watford came up at the same time as Norwich, completely turned over the roster, signed a dozen new players, cobbled together a successful season in which they avoided relegation, and then fired the manager anyway. Norwich are generally happy with being a small club, but they really can’t make the “we’re a small club” excuse for being so bad this year, since Leicester City – a club of similar size, who was even more of a longshot with the bookies than Norwich at the season’s start – just went out and won the goddamn league, for heaven’s sake.

And in the Wild West capitalism of international soccer, when you finish second to last in the EPL, you aren’t rewarded with the 2nd pick in the draft. You get sent to Division 2, you get your budget slashed by about £125m, you have a host of transfer requests turned in by players who don’t want to play in Div 2, you take a hit on the sale of any of those players since everyone knows that you need to sell and have guys who want to be sold, everyone takes a pay cut and usually there are job losses. It’s a mess you do well to avoid, and while an infusion of £130m for a season in the EPL provides something of a cushion as you fall, it’s a tricky situation which can be disastrous financially if you get it wrong.

But we Norwich City faithful are a patient lot, and the fans just roll with it whenever the club gets relegated – which, unfortunately, happens quite often. The Yellow Army isn’t about to go and burn down the stadium or do something similarly stupid. They’ve been bounced out of the EPL four times now, and yet they find a way to eventually turn it around and get back to the first division. It’s a case study in managing one’s expectations.

I’ve made it a point this past season to renew my interest and follow them more closely, and if nothing else, having them out of the EPL will be better for my sleep schedule, since I won’t be getting up for 4:45 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. kickoffs. I’ve sat back and watched this train wreck of a season with a fair amount of intrigue and amusement, frustrated with the constant run of defeats but only truly outraged on occasion.

Like that. What the hell was that? That was the single-dumbest goddamn play in the entire dumb goddamn season, a two-footed challenge from behind against a defenseless Stoke City player standing idly at the sideline. What the hell is wrong with you? I can live with not being very talented and having to work hard to get results, but the mistakes are what drove me nuts. So many mistakes, so many individual errors here and there which, collectively, amounted to a colossal sort of collapse. I spent quite a while going through game tape and culling all of these gifs, and this dimwitted, red-card earning tackle in a 3:1 loss at Stoke is the only play that actually made me angry.

But the rest of it? Ultimately, it’s all good for a laugh. Yeah, this team was terrible and there is no two ways about it. I’ll certainly drink to that. Laughter and strong drink continue to be the two best medicines.

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: