That Was Some Week That Was

Baseball is stupid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closer, But No Cigar

OPENING Day, 1992, and I’ve got a ticket in what would become my favorite place to sit when attending games in the Giant Concrete Mushroom Fungus, which is in the third deck in the right field stands. Right field is where the action was in the Kingdome. The Mariners had embraced their position in baseball as that of an absurdist theatre piece, a franchise which had learned to laugh at itself and, as such, their response to a magazine declaring a seat at the top of the third deck in right field in the Kingdome to be the worst single seat in all of major league baseball was to paint that particular seat a different color and immediately bestow it something of a cult status. You wanted that seat. If you’re going to sit in the third deck in right field, and be 8½ miles from home plate, you may as well go all-in and be as far away as possible. The seat was in demand, and someone was usually sitting in it even during games the Mariners didn’t sell out – which were most of them, in fact. The Mariners could count on seven sellouts during the season, Opening Day and the six games when the Toronto Blue Jays were in town, for which 40,000 people from Vancouver would come down for the weekend and turn the Kingdome into a de facto home field for the Jays. Otherwise, you had plenty of choices, but I always made it a point to head for the third deck in right. Once you went to enough games, you got to know some of the other section dwellers pretty well, making for some shared experience, and when you sat in that part of the Kingdome, it only seemed like it was a long ways away, because the Kingdome was something of a launchpad, and left handed hitters would whack home runs off the façades of the second and third decks in right pretty frequently during the season. Hitting the ball into the upper decks in left field, however, was a much more impressive poke. That was rarified space for the likes of Mark McGwire. If someone hit one up there, you would have to tip your cap even if it was the opposition doing it. When you sat in the third deck in right, you had a far better chance of getting yourself a souvenir than you may have originally thought.

On Opening Day, we’ve got reasons for some optimism up in the third deck in right. The Mariners are coming off their best season ever and they have some really nice young talent. They’ve got Ken Griffey Jr. in center, coming off a year where he hit .327 and established himself as the best all-around player in the game, they’ve got one of the best hitters in the game at third in Edgar Martinez, they’ve got smooth and slick fielding Omar Vizquel at short. They’ve traded for the power bat of Kevin Mitchell and while the price was steep – three starting pitchers going to the Giants – the front office has earned some trust by winning a few trades in recent years, in particular fleecing the Yankees for starting right fielder Jay Buhner in exchange for Ken Phelps, and also getting an impressive haul of pitchers from the Montreal Expos in exchange for Mark Langston – one of whom is one the mound tonight, a gangly fireballer named Randy Johnson who has the potential to be pretty good.

But there is also cause for concern among the third deck dwellers in right. There is ill will between the fan base and ownership, whose response to the best season in history was to fire the manager, Jim Lefebvre, who made it happen and replace him with Bill Plummer, a move best explained in this conversation I had at the time with a couple of Seattle media members at the time:

“If they fire Lefebvre, who would want this job?”
“I guess Bill Plummer is the front runner.”
“Bill Plummer? That stiff who coached third base?”
“That would be him, yes.”
“If the Mariners hire him as a manager, if means they’re not serious about staying in Seattle. That’s a move to strip the team down and make them as unwatchable as possible.”

Indeed, the franchise’s future is mirky and uncertain. In August of the previous year, owner Jeff Smulyan had outlaid his plan to relocate the franchise to Tampa Bay in a meeting with his creditors at Security Pacific Bank in an effort to stave them off, only to then have an anonymous bank employee steal the notes from the meeting and fax them to the Seattle Times. One of the reasons going to Opening Day in 1992 seems like a good idea is that you’re not really sure there is going to be an Opening Day in 1993.

The Mariners are playing the Texas Rangers to open the 1992 season and the Rangers can’t pitch, which has been a theme with that franchise for the entirety of its existence, and the Mariners jump all over them. Randy Johnson is alternately wild and wonderful, but the offense is giving him plenty of runs and plenty of margin for error. It’s 8-3 in favor of the Mariners going to the top of the 8th inning and when you see such prowess on the first day of the season, you feel as if everything is going to be OK.

And then the bullpen took over.

The top of the 8th lasts for approximately 9 hours. Four Mariners relievers combine to yield 9 runs on 7 hits and 3 walks, and when the fourth of those relievers, the ordained ‘closer’ Mike Schooler, gives up a 3-run bomb to pinch hitter Gino Petralli to give Texas the lead, I start to get the sinking suspicion that everything isn’t going to be OK after all. Sure, it was only one game, but I just knew that this team was going to be bad.

The Rangers won that game 12-10, swept the opening series of the season and the Mariners were in a full-on tailspin for the rest of the year, going 64-98. And Petralli’s 3-run shot was just the tip of the iceberg, as far as woful bullpen performances would go that year: of the seven home runs Mike Schooler would give up in 1992, four of them would be grand slams, which tied the Major League record. He bore the brunt of the scorn and ridicule, but his cohorts among the arson squad which composed the Mariners bullpen were nearly as culpable, inexplicably squandering one lead after another as the season become more and more dire. Like most everything that I dislike about baseball, it can be attributed to having been subjected to a steady stream of Mariners games when I was younger, and since this blog serves as an outlet and an opportunity for me to vent about deep-seated frustrations, I thank all of my readers who, so far, have put up with this 1,200-word act of exorcism.

I hate bullpens.

And in particular, I hate super specialized bullpens of the present day in baseball. I hate endless pitching changes and hyper fixations on match-ups, and I cannot fathom why it is that the conventional wisdom has reached the point that every team in baseball is so dependent and reliant upon their bullpen, and in particular, upon their closer – a position of importance which, quite frankly, shouldn’t be that important. In the regular season, with the dependence upon bullpens, bullpen management makes for boring baseball games. In the postseason, it makes for yet another area of the game where managers can completely screw things up – which is precisely what happened in Tuesday night’s AL Wildcard game in Toronto, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

There have always been relief specialists in baseball, of course, but the game wide fixation on the vital importance of the closer truly started coming into focus in the late 1980s. Like most bad ideas in baseball, this one seemed like a good idea at the time and like most bad ideas in baseball, it came from Tony Larussa, who pared back and crafted a very unique and specific role for pitcher Dennis Eckersley – the role we’ve come to know now as a “closer.” Closers pitch one inning – the 9th – and usually only do so if their team is ahead. They may pitch the top of the 9th of a home game if the score is tied, but rarely enter a game with the score tied on the road. It’s a preposterously pigeon holed little niche, but all games are copy-cat games in nature, and if something seems to work, everyone else is going to do it. And since the A’s were winning games by the truckload in the late 1980s, and Dennis Eckersley had a 0.61 ERA, thus rendering all games seemingly over when you trailed the A’s going into the 9th, by god everyone needed a closer! (Never mind those pesky details like having three frontline ace starters and a deep, powerful lineup and all that.) Certainly, Eckersley was wholly impressive in his time, just as Mariano Rivera would come to be wholly impressive in his time, and this is not to dismiss what they’ve accomplished so much as to question the importance in the first place.

The now-accepted definition of the “save” in baseball first came to pass in 1960, long before this strange infatuation with the importance of the bullpen had developed. In 1960, teams entering the 9th inning of a game had a .947 winning percentage. In 2013, in the era of closers and hyper specialization of bullpens, teams entering the 9th inning had a .945 winning percentage. No discernible difference. Move it back an inning and juxtapose once more: teams entering the 8th inning with a lead in 1960 won .899 of the time. In 2013, they won .897 of the time. (Sorry, I don’t have any more recent stats saved up anywhere.) So, in essence, nothing has changed, save for the endless numbers of trips to the mound by the managers in the late innings. The end results are basically the same, but the ways in which those results are being achieved have changed – ways in which are ultimately migraine-inducing. As baseball has seen the shift towards 12- and 13-man pitching staffs, with all sorts of left-handed specialists and right-handed specialists and the like, all that it’s really done is invent new things to do badly.

And I hate bullpens. I hate them. Nothing is more infuriating to the baseball fan than the blown save. The blown save ruins your day. It ruins your night out at the ballpark. Almost every long losing streak nowadays involves multiple games your team should’ve won in which your bullpen blew the save or blew the lead. Bad bullpens drive you to drink, they drive you to drugs and drive you to seek therapy. And what’s weird about it all is that this has become baseball orthodoxy. As a manager, you must have 7-8 guys in the pen, and you have to use this particular guy in this particular situation. But why is that, exactly? Why are you, as a manager, putting so much faith in a group of players who, on a base level, aren’t very good?

Because the truth is that if relievers were any good as pitchers, they’d be starters. At some point in their careers, all relievers were deemed to be lousy as starters and moved into the pen. Starters need a varied repertoire of pitches, they need to know how to pace themselves and, most importantly, they need to actually pitch with their heads. The NL wildcard game between the Giants and the Mets was a master class, taught by Noah Syndegaard and Madison Bumgarner, in the art of pitching with the head. Syndegaard established the corners early, figured out where the fringes of the umpire’s strike zone were located, and continued working those edges while throwing 98 mph. Bumgarner, meanwhile, went all fastballs the first time through the lineup, pounding the Mets hitters in on the hands, and then he changed to a steady diet of wicked off-speed stuff. Mets hitters were guessing all night, were off balance all night, while the Giants hitters were swinging and missing at basically unhittable pitches that they knew they had to swing at. It was an elegant performance by both of them and it was incredible to watch.

Relievers don’t do any of that. Relievers are in the game for 10-15 pitches at most. They generally have one thing they do well – or one thing that they’re asked to do well, anyway. They’re 1-note players with simplified repertoires. And it’s not so much a case that relievers aren’t very good so much as they are fickle. One year, they’re missing bats and striking everyone out; the next, they’re expendable. The Seattle Mariners’ 2014 bullpen was among the best in baseball. The same group of guys, in 2015, were so bad that every single one of them had been traded or demoted to AAA by season’s end. At the heart of the success of the San Francisco Giants – winners of three World Series since 2010 – lies an incredible stroke of good fortune, which was to stumble upon a core of four relievers who were consistent and who ranged from good to great for six years, which is pretty much unheard of. Here in 2016, that fortune has run out, as the Giants bullpen blew 32 saves this season. 32 saves! That’s several fifths of whiskey’s worth of blown saves. My liver hates the Giants bullpen right now.

There is some actual theory behind the steady stream of relievers. The first time a hitter sees a pitcher during a game is, statistically, the at-bat in which they are likely to do the worst. This has been born out by the numbers of the game forever, as there is a large increase in batting average during the second and third at-bats against a starter. Hence the need for a starter to think through the game and pitch with the head. So instead of having a tiring starter go through the opposing lineup a third time, you start bringing in reinforcements, you bring in fresh arms and that works great.

Until it doesn’t.

And the reason that it doesn’t is that relievers aren’t very good. Basically all forms of bullpen management work until they don’t. You can run 5-6 guys out of your pen, all of whom throw 96 mph and try to just overwhelm the opposition, but eventually hitters start squaring those guys up when they figure out the pitcher’s delivery and figure out they’ve nothing else to throw. Everyone in baseball can hit 96 if it’s flat and they know it’s coming. And relievers get so specialized over time – fixating on doing one thing and one thing only – that they tend to be awful at other aspects of the game. A lot of them can’t field their position worth a damn, nor can they hold runners on worth a damn. If they don’t do that one thing and one thing only well, they’re as good as scrap.

Have I mentioned that I hate bullpens? Bullpens are fucking useless. Bullpens ruin lives. They ruin entire seasons and more. The greatest team you don’t remember were the 1997 Mariners, who set an MLB record for home runs and total bases and had four of the greatest players in the history of the game at their respective positions on the roster in Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Randy Johnson, and Alex Rodriguez (the one silver lining of that horrible season I mentioned at the start was the #1 pick in the draft, which was A-Rod). That team won only 90 games and was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, even with all that firepower and star power, because their bullpen blew 27 SAVES! Their bullpen was so horrid that, at the trade deadline, the Mariners traded three of their better prospects – outfielder Jose Cruz Jr., catcher Jason Varitek, and pitcher Derek Lowe – to the Blue Jays and Red Sox, respectively, for dead weight late inning relievers Mike Timlin and Heathcliff Slocumb, who weren’t any good and simply poured more gasoline on the fire. (The Varitek-and-Lowe-for-Slocumb trade is, without question, one of the worst trades in baseball in the past 25 years.) In the contemporary era, the worst offender have been the Detroit Tigers, who have as much as wasted a golden generation of great talent due to their complete inability to get anyone out consistently after the 6th inning.

And if you don’t have anyone in the bullpen who is any good, then why are you putting them in the game? This is the part I don’t get. If your bullpen is trash, running those guys out there who fail far too often feels turns the game into a Greek tragedy. I know there is more emphasis on things like pitch count and innings management with starters now, but I’m not entirely sure what that’s accomplishing. Guys don’t go out and through 150 pitches in a start any more, but guys are also generally in better all-around physical condition, thanks to advents in sport science over time. Now, I’m not saying you should burn out your starters and run them into the ground. I just don’t understand why there is this sense of dependence in baseball upon guys who, at a base level, aren’t necessarily very reliable. The deemphasis on the role of the starter seems to me to be less steeped in data and science more steeped into kowtowing to what’s become conventional wisdom which, quite honestly, should probably have never become conventional wisdom in the first place.

And this isn’t to say that every reliever totally sucks, of course. There have been masters of the craft, to be sure. Eckersley was brilliant at what he did. Mariano Rivera was brilliant at what he did, and if you have a guy who is that good at that one particular thing then by all means, use him. But Eckersleys and Riveras don’t grow on trees. If you don’t have a guy like that, then don’t play the game in the manner which requires having a guy like that. Do something else!

And to be more specific here, if you have a guy in your bullpen who actually knows what he is doing, then why on earth are you waiting until you have the lead in the 9th inning to put him in the game? This is the part of bullpen orthodoxy which has never made any sense to me. Every year, you’ll see some bad team at the bottom of the standings who’s got a closer on their roster who is, by most available metrics, a better pitcher than his compadres in the pen, but doesn’t seem to get in many games because his team is losing a lot. What good is that? That’s a waste of talent. Get him in the game! Put him in the game in the 5th, or the 6th, which is when your bad team is likely blowing a lot of leads. Will guys who aren’t very good blow the games later on? Maybe, but your best chance to win is by winning the inning that’s in front of you, a notion which seems obvious, doesn’t it? Am I missing something here?

Hyper specializing and minute bullpen management has just created more opportunities for managers to screw up – and managers already have far too much to do already. And this gets exacerbated in the playoffs, of course, when the situation dramatically changes – the series (and, thus, the season) is short, the stakes raised. This isn’t some July road trip to Kansas City and Minnesota. The situation, and the urgency with which you need to win postseason games, will often require that you do things differently. You can’t succumb to orthodoxy at that point.

The Orioles are going home early, in part, because for some nonsensical reason, they didn’t want to put Zach Britton in the game on Tuesday night in Toronto. Zach Britton is their closer, of course, and he pitched so well in that role this season – an ERA of 0.54 – to actually merit some discussion as a Cy Young candidate. (But only some discussion. No relieve pitcher should ever win the Cy Young, ever.) Orioles manager Buck Showalter never put him in the game – using six different relievers instead over the course of six innings – because it was never a “save” situation.

Wait … what? This is the ultimate “save” situation. You have to save the season! If he’s your best guy, Zach Britton needs to be in that baseball game on Tuesday night – and he certainly has to be in the game in the 11th inning when Ubaldo Jimenez gets in trouble. If he’s that good, he needs to be out there. I give the Indians manager Terry Francona props for not bowing to conventional thinking the other night in Game 1 against the Red Sox. His best guy in the pen is Andrew Miller, and Andrew Miller was in the game in the 5th and the 6th and into the 7th inning, when the game was teetering on possibly getting away from them. Waiting for later doesn’t do you any good.

But managers mess this stuff up horribly in the postseason. “Not a save situation,” was the reason Cards manager Mike Matheny gave when asked why his closer was sitting next to him in the dugout when his season ended in 2014. The Giants have been the benefactors many times over in recent years of managers making dumb decisions with their bullpens, most notably in this instance in 2012, which is one the most soul-killing moments I’ve ever seen in baseball, a moment from which the Cincinnati Reds franchise has never recovered.

And put yourself in Reds manager Dusty Baker’s shoes in that game. Think about the situation. It’s a do-or-die game, you’re already losing the game 2-0 with one out in the top of the 5th, the bases are loaded, your starter can’t get anyone out, and coming up to bat is Buster Posey, the MVP of the National League. This is as high a leverage situation as you’re ever going to find yourself in. You simply must get this guy out. The best guy in your pen is your closer, Aroldis Chapman, who throws about 104 mph, the ultimate strikeout pitcher at a moment when the strikeout would be key. Sure, you want to save him for the 9th inning, but what good is it to wait? Do you put Chapman in the game in the top of the 5th inning? Now, you may have reasons to keep him in the pen – you might trust your starter to induce a double play, you might have a guy in your pen who has been effective against Posey in the past (which, interestingly, Chapman is not), or whatnot – but if you’re managing the Reds, don’t you at least think about this possibility? It may seem like out-of-the-box thinking, but this is what’s required at this time of year.

Have I mentioned that I hate bullpens? We’re up to nearly 4,000 words already in this entry and like hell I’m stopping now. Another thing about bullpens I don’t understand: when your closer goes bad, why do you leave him out there? Look, some stiff reliever comes into the 6th and walks the first two guys, and the manager yanks him - and with good reason, because he’s bad. But a closer does that in the 9th, and you leave him out there even though he’s clearly not got his good stuff, because some days even the best guys don’t have their good stuff. Why is that? I never get that. I see so many of the blown saves occurring because for some reason, this one guy is supposed to finish the game for good or bad or whatnot. DON’T DO THAT!

I wonder where the game is going to evolve from here. The logical move, it would seem, would be for a club to shorten the bullpen and lengthen the bench, stacking it with more specialist hitters in order to counter specialist pitchers. Seeing Miller in the game in the 5th inning for the Tribe brings me back to an idea which seems much more useful to me, which is the idea of developing relief pitchers who aren’t specialized but who are actually good, and are thus able to enter the game at any time and in any sort of situation. The counter to that idea would be that you’d rely too much upon that guy and burn him out, so obviously, the solution would be to develop more than one of them, and if you look at really good relief pitchers from previous eras, that was exactly what they would do. It wasn’t uncommon for the Rich Gossage or Rollie Fingers types to be out there at any point in time that you needed them.

If nothing else, I wish for fewer pitching changes which kill the rhythm and the flow of the game. September baseball is particularly insufferable, when you have expanded rosters. (I believe the Giants had 19 men in their bullpen at one point this September. Good lord.) Why go through this pedantic exercise which, as the numbers show, ultimately isn’t making a significant difference in performance? Set up your bullpen however you want, and you’re still going to win games you lead in the 8th and the 9th inning the same amount of the time, so get away from reliance upon defined roles and specialists who are apt to flub. As spectacular as closers may seem to be, they’re ultimately best known for their spectacular failures. (I hadn’t watched that Gibson home run in years and it still gives me the creeps, but at least I found a video with Vin Scully doing the call, because Vin was the best and The Lose wishes him all the best in his retirement.)

And for god sake, don’t put Mike Schooler in the game, like, ever.

The N Stands for Knowledge

MY ONLY true interest in college athletics, at this point in time, stems from my morbid curiosity in athletics done badly. Growing up watching this team in action will do that to you. I’m not at all interested in watching college football, and I only casually watched WSU’s typically low IQ performance last week in a 31:28 loss to Boise State last weekend. I was curious to see if WSU’s refusal to kick a chip shot FG when they were down 17, going for it instead and getting stuffed, would ultimately come back to haunt them (note final score), and I was amused to watch Boise State do everything in their power to lose the game by throwing two interceptions in the final 4:00 of the game instead of trying to milk the clock. With the advent of spread offenses in college football that can seemingly move the ball and score at will has come a propensity for slacking off in some of the other areas of the game where attention to detail is paramount. Why worry about clock and game management? Just score some more!

And that is precisely the reason why college coaches who advocate these sorts of offensive schemes make terrible coaches at the professional level. Such schemes ultimately only work when you have vastly superior talent at your disposal in 90% of your games – which, in the NFL, is pretty much never the case. You never go into an NFL game with such dominating man-for-man advantages that you can simply gloss over the making of mistakes and sweep them under the rug. Recruiting is pretty much the only thing that matters in college athletics, which is why you shouldn’t take any of the bluster and bombast that surrounds high-profile college coaches with any sort of seriousness. That people do take them seriously, of course, is puzzling to anyone who objectively looks at a sport like football or basketball, since the overall quality of play is a giant step down. That college coaches wind up being revered and idolized is … well, we’ll get to that in a minute …

I’m not interested in college football on the whole, and not particularly interested in watching any sort of football at all, but I can’t help myself and I sneak a peak sometimes, since my love of bad football has been well documented, and this is In Play Lose, where everything worth doing is worth doing badly. And while I’m not interested in following the game very closely, I will certainly be on the lookout for some of the worst plays of the year.This was a nice effort on the part of the University of Nevada against Notre Dame, the classic case of forgetting where you are on the field – and doing so in front of a large national television audience to boot:

Umm, you’re doing it wrong ...

But the two dumbest plays of the season so far have both involved Clemson special teams, one where yet another player dropped the ball before crossing the goal line (we’ve been over this already) last week, followed a week later by this doozy where a South Carolina State kick returner in the end zone tossed a live ball back to a referee, resulting in a Clemson touchdown when they fell on the loose ball. As I explained to someone on facebook, the only way this play could’ve been made any more absurd is if he’d actually tossed it forward to an official instead of backward, since the backward toss makes it a live ball, but the forward toss would be an illegal forward pass (this is how I know this rule), and since it occurred in the end zone it would be a safety. And more safeties are a good thing for the football absurdist, since conceding two points (like the Nevada Wolf Pack above) generally involves doing something incompetently. And we need more safety anyway, and it’s good to know that the NCAA and the NFL have been paying lip service to emphasizing player safety recently.

Oh, wait, was that cynical of me? Was I being skeptical? What would make me so?

Oh, that’s right. It’s because Penn State exists.

Oh, yeah, and because Baylor exists as well.

Or more to the point, not only am I’m cynical about two institutions of higher learning, but I’m utterly disdainful of the sorts of people who put forth the kind of crap that I just posted in those two images above. And this Saturday in State College, Pennsylvania, we got to see one of the ugliest scandals in the history of college sport be glossed over and trivialized, as Penn State felt the need to go about trumpeting the achievements of former head football coach Joe Paterno on this, the 50th anniversary of his first game at Happy Valley:



Seriously, just listen to that crap.

And yes, I understand that when Penn St. alums throw out the line that “JoPa built Penn State,” it’s not entirely wrong. I understand that Penn St. was thought of as a lesser college in a shitty backwater town, and that over his nearly 50 years at the helm of the football team, the university piggybacked off of the football team’s success, and the accompanying prestige and notoriety that it brought, to grow, over time, into a major research university. And yeah, all the stuff in that video about his players’ academic achievement are certainly legitimate accomplishments.

But you know what? It’s all blood money.

Joe Paterno employed Jerry Sandusky for 33 years, and every court document filed in the string of lawsuits against Penn State has suggested that Paterno, and other Penn State higher-ups, knew far more about what Sandusky was doing than they led on in public. That people were aghast an appalled when, for once its history, the NCAA did the right thing and slammed the Penn State football program is disturbing. (Of course, the NCAA went all chicken shit and reversed its course, but we’ll deal with those cowards in a moment.)  Quite honestly, the Sandusky incident begs the question as to whether Pennsylvania State University should exist as an institution at all, seeing as how the institution clearly had failed to live up to the absolute, single-most important principle of any academic institution, which is to provide a safe place for young people. This is what is appalling, people. You would think that people with ties to that institution would be aghast by this.

And, apparently, you would be wrong.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people? Are your precious memories of the Saturday’s of your youth spent going to football games on campus really that important? Is your pride so shallow that you can just overlook the sorts of crimes committed on the watch of guys like Joe Paterno? Because let’s get one thing straight here: Joe Paterno employed Jerry Sandusky all that time because Jerry Sandusky could help him win. His job was to win football games. Period. For him, and for his bosses at Penn State, it was win at all costs, even if it meant looking the other way while the most utterly unspeakable of crimes were being committed. All of that other stuff about academic achievement and fundraising and the like that came on the back of football success means absolutely, positively nothing if you sell your soul doing it. But what we’ve seen time and again in America is the willingness of supposedly smart and well-educated people to sell their souls and subjugate themselves to the Cult of the Coach.

People pay lip service to the need to reform college athletics in this country, but it will probably take court rulings in order to truly make that happen. Any sort of genuine reform, given the current set-up, is impossible. You’d like to think that scandals like we saw at Penn State, or with Art Briles at Baylor, or, hell, at Baylor the first time would do the trick, and people would get fed up with this kind of thing and start reassessing their priorities. But instead, we still have stooges and slavish devotees like the ones who took out those advertisements above, and so long as that attitude persists, no reform will ever occur. And that attitude originally emanates from the deified coach of a football or a basketball team.

You want to know what it will take to truly reform college athletics? Fire all the coaches. I’m serious. Fire them all. Fire every one of them. And then fire the athletics directors who hired them, and you may as well fire a few university presidents while you’re at it, since given the directions in which higher education has trended in recent years, it’s not entirely clear they have any real grasp of what their instutions’ educational mission should be, either. But on a day to day basis, coaches of college athletics are the worst. They’re the absolute worst. You won’t find a more selfish, self-serving, self-absorbed profession in the entirety of America, a group who cares about nothing save for their own success and only truly cares about a player so long as (s)he can help them win.

But you can understand the mechanics of how this occurs. After all, students – and student athletes – are transitory in nature. They come and they go, they spend four years or maybe five at a university and then they’re gone. The institution just continues on without them. A highly successful coach at an institution is in the spotlight for years, for decades, and the institution they represent is right there in the spotlight with them.

“Joe Paterno won 409 games at Penn State.” Well, if you want to get technical and semantic about it, Joe Paterno didn’t win any games. He stood on the sideline as a football team won 409 times. And if you just think I’m being a smartass, listen to the tone of any losing college football coach on any given Saturday, most of whom will find ways to blame the kids for the loss:

“The offensive team wanted to run the ball, wanted to run the ball in. I think if the players believe they can execute a play, isn’t that better than believing they can’t execute a play?”
– Connecticut football coach Bob Diaco, after his team’s horrible clock management in a loss to Navy

And I don’t want to hear anyone tell me how such-and-such-a-coach at such-an-such-a-school is different. Fundamentally, they aren’t. They care about the kids only if they help them win, and if they don’t, they jerk their scholarships, and if they want to be a real dick about it, they prevent the kids from being able to transfer to another school. The very fact alone that the NCAA is able to restrict freedom of movement on transfers (which is now also the source of litigation, like most everything else in the NCAA’s business) strikes me as being fundamentally incompatible with a good number of supposed American principles. Coaches are control freaks and want to control everything, and then they suddenly no nothing at all when reports of academic fraud or the presence of strippers on recruiting trips start popping up. Nope, they knew nothing about it! Nothing at all! Bullshit. In the end, it’s really not in their interest to care a whole lot about the kids who pass through their programs, since they’ll leave one way or another and more kids will pass through after that. And quite honestly, a lot of them are just jerks. They are jerks and they act like jerks to their players. What’s also astonishing is that we’ve so systematically brainwashed ourselves into thinking college coaches are somehow reputable that we permit our young people to essentially be abused by them, the attitude being that somehow the kid should “stick it out” despite the abuse. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with people?

Fire all the coaches, and fire the ADs who employ them while you’re at it. Asking the NCAA to reform itself is sort of like asking the inmates running the asylum to go back into their cells and throw away the keys. That reform will never willingly happen, since everyone involved in the NCAA is, first-and-foremost, worried about protecting their own self-interests. Because in the end, none of those aging, graying administrators on the sidelines or in the suits really give a damn about the welfare of the student athletes beneath them, all of whom are essentially unpaid labor in the industrial complex. The only reform will come when a court eventually rules that athletes have to paid – which I suspect is a matter of when, and not if, at this point. And quite honestly, so long as you have people writing big cheques to the university like those people who put their name on the Baylor ad in a Texas newspaper pictured above, none of this will change, either, since about the only person a college coach feels beholden to is the person who finances their livelihood.

But don’t think I’m going to let the kids off the hook here. No, no, no, no, no. I’m not doing that at all. And I’m going to preface this by saying that I do think there is value in athletic scholarships, and that there are quite a few kids – most of them, actually – who make the most of the opportunity to get their higher education. But then you have the kids who behave like this (names of persons and institutions withheld, since these examples are anecdotal in nature, but told to me by people who have no reason to be dishonest about it):

• I know someone who was a psychology professor at an institution with a major college football team. Towards the end of a semester, a student comes to her office to talk about his grade – which is nothing new, of course, and college professors have been subjected to students lobbying about their grades for generations. This particular student is on the football team, and he earned a B in her psychology class. He questions the mark she has awarded him and asks if she can change it. She says no, that he’s done good work, B-level work and that she can’t give him an A. But that’s not what he’s after. He wants her to lower his grade. He wants her to give him a C.
What is this madness?
The reason for this is that, due to a quirk in the way the rules worked pertaining to an athletic scholarship, a student athlete would be eligible for a continuation of certain types of funding if they were on academic probation, and thus needing to go to summer school to make-up for this sort of deficiency – and going to summer school, of course, also made it possible to partake in the football team’s rigorous “voluntary” summer conditioning program. Like a good number of the kids on the football team, this one comes from a poor background and doesn’t have a whole lot of money, so trying to get himself placed on academic probation was the only way he could think to get the funds needed to hang around the campus all summer and work out. Points for creativity, I suppose, but the idea that a kid was actively attempting to make his academic standing look worse in order to find a way to further his football prospects for the fall is absolutely absurd. And if you think that he was the only kid who had figured out this loophole, you’d almost certainly be mistaken. And now for something less humorous …

• I know a woman who worked in the academic counseling center at a large university, and in her division, they were responsible for the tutoring and the academic counseling of members of the school’s football team. One particular player was notorious difficult to deal with – a guy who happened to be a star, an All-American and a potential top NFL draft pack. One of their counseling sessions got particularly contentious, as he refused to provide his classwork, and when she pressed him for it, he informed her that he didn’t have to answer to her, and that she was nothing to him, and that he could bash her head against the wall if he wanted, at which point he stormed out.
Charming.
And he was right, of course, because he was going to be an NFL millionaire in a matter of months. What did he care what some stupid tutor told him? Going to class didn’t matter. He was just going through the motions and killing time until he could turn pro.
Now, of course, guys like that aren’t all that bright. And she also had the ear of the head coach, since it’s her job to keep his prize possessions eligible so he can win football games, and after one phone call, the coach then told this knucklehead to get his ass back to the counseling center. So he did so the following week, albeit begrudgingly, and he walked into her office to find a pair of linebackers from the football team standing in her office, neither of whom he got along with – it seems that if you’re a knucklehead in one area of life, it’s likely you’re a knucklehead in many of them – both of whom informed him that he was going to turn in his paper to her, and continue turning in his papers to her in a timely or regular fashion, or he was going to have to deal with the two of them. She had decided to meet Mr. All-American on a level that he could understand: hired goons. But this was ultimately the lengths to which she had to go. It took both a stated and implied threat of retaliatory violence to get the guy to ultimately comply. And she was doing him a favor, for fucksake. Keeping him eligible means keeping him on the field, which gives him more opportunities to show off his skills for the scouts.

• Another woman I know attended a small, liberal arts university which happened to have a Division I basketball team. We were talking about campus life at this school and she mentioned a particular residence hall on campus.
“Incoming students make the classic mistake of living there,” she said with a roll of her eyes, “because it’s the vacation dorm, and the basketball players move in during the holidays, and then when kids come back from your vacation, they find out that all of their stuff has been stolen.”
And I remember her tone when she told me about this. There was no outrage in her voice. Instead, there was an intonation that this was just business as usual at this school, and that it was just one of those inconveniences that you just had to deal with – the implication being that once your stuff was gone, it was never be to seen again.

Now, what do all of those instances have in common? The kids figured out what they could get away with. Which is what kids do. Kids are smart, clever, and play every angle. Kids can also figure out which people do and don’t give a shit about what they do – and in the end, of course, coaches don’t give a shit about what they do, so long as they keep turning up on the field.

And you can take that attitude to the extreme, and far too many athletic programs have done so. There is no greater example of this – and no more galling an example – than the mess that has taken place in the football program at Baylor, as school administrators turned a blind eye to reports of football players committing sexual assaults against other students. Indeed, Ken Starr lost his presidency and Art Briles lost his job as a football coach because not only did they not take corrective steps when such allegations surfaced, but they were in fact hostile to those making the allegations. Former Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden has joked about the good old days, when all you had to do was call up the county sheriff when one of your football players got in trouble with the law and you could sort it all out, but there is far too much truth in that. You may not get paid to play when you’re a student athlete in America, but far too many of them have discovered a perk: being above reproach and above the law. College kids get in trouble with the law for lots of reasons, of course – mostly because they are young and dumb and do stupid things – and college athletes aren’t different in that regard, but one thing which has been shown far too often to be true is that college athletes get into trouble with the law because they know that they can. So long as they are the BMOCs on campus and treated as such, why let pesky things like the rule of law and civil society get in the way? And I feel pretty comfortable in saying that is not what institutions of higher learning should be teaching its students.

And there is a pretty good way to put a stop to that sort of nonsense. Pay the players. Make them employees of the marketing department, which is essentially what they are now apart from the ‘pay’ aspect. You’re an employee and you’re meant to carry yourself in a certain way. Fuck up and you’re fired. But, of course, that would have to be collectively bargained, and that would mean schools would also have to deal with things like long-term insurance benefits for their student athletes who broke their bodies in the name of the university during the course of their careers, and they would then open themselves up to state labor laws and tax laws and all of that sort of thing – all of which the NCAA desperately wants to avoid. Universities claim they don’t have this sort of money to pay all of their student athletes, which is curious, given that they seem to have millions on hand to pay the coaches:

Can you tell that I hate this damn system?

And for all the supposed good it does, in terms of profile and prestige, which is then theoretically supposed to translate into alumni donations, there are certainly countless examples where that isn’t the case. Hell, Washington State’s athletic department is crap, and has been crap for years, but it hasn’t prevented the university from raising enough money to build a new medical school and the most cutting-edge wine school in the world. (Although admittedly, having one of the school’s highest profile athletes of all time also become a budding vintner certainly helped on that last one.)

This system is screwed up. It’s preposterous and it needs to go. My guess is that won’t happen, at least not so long as middle-aged boosters keep propping the whole thing up with their dollars, university administrators continue masquerading their marginal universities as being major ones, and the self-perpertuating blowhard hype machine that is the NCAA media – ESPN being the worst of the lot – keep deifying grumpy, small-minded control freaks walking up and down the sidelines. It needs to go, but that is not happening any time soon. We appear to be stuck with this mess, so remember, kids, that Joe Paterno built Penn State, and also remember when you’re in Lincoln, Nebraska, that the N on the side of the helmets stands for ‘knowledge.’

Trying to Live

I WAS going to write something on Sunday, something intended to be long and hopefully be profound, but I didn’t. Instead, I went and played scrabble in Berkeley, and played quite badly at that. I played like an ass. I haven’t played that badly in ages. Were it not for some fortuitously good timing and the drawing of some extraordinarily good tiles, I wouldn’t have been able to muster the 3-3 record that I did. Finishing even-steven, much like in football, can be looked at with nuance. There are good 3-3’s and bad 3-3’s and this was one of the latter, because it should have been a whole lot better given what I was drawing. There are also boring 3-3’s, which is most of them, in fact. But I was OK with my 3-3 and I was happy for the distraction, the game itself actually feeling like a distraction and a diversion for the first time in a while.

I like it when that happens, to be honest. I’ll admit, however, that my ethos and approach to the game of scrabble is vastly different than many of the people I know. I’m different from a lot of scrabble players, in the sense that they try to shrug off the games where their opponents draw all the good tiles, and completely fixate upon the games in which their own mistakes cost them. I’m completely the opposite. I absolutely, positively hate it when someone draws the bag on me. I hate it. I can’t stand it. The reason for this is that it doesn’t feel like a game, at that point, because I’m not playing the game. I’m sitting there and watching the other person play – and, quite honestly, I have better things to do than watch someone play solitaire. And I sure as hell don’t want to pay for the privilege of watching this – which is precisely what you’re doing when you pay some entry fee for a tournament and then sit there and watch your opponent play. It’s a pointless activity, a waste of my time, and nothing pisses me off more than someone wasting my time.

But losing because I make mistakes? Sounds OK to me. There is cause and effect there, there is action and reaction and it all makes sense. I lost two games on Sunday as a direct consequence of making utterly stupid plays. Terrible plays. Migraine-inducingly terrible plays. Just awful. And that’s perfectly fine, because I got what I deserved. Mistakes are correctible the next time around. Getting the bag drawn on you is not correctible, because there aren’t any tiles left and the other guy drew all the good ones. It’s just a waste of an hour.

Or waste of a half-hour, anyway, since I tend to play a lot faster than other people and my games end really quickly, which I’m perfectly fine with as well. It has been suggested, with some merit, that I occasionally play too fast, and cost myself because of it. And that’s probably true, but what’s also true is that if it’s taking me a long time to play, it isn’t going very well, and having extra time doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m using it. If it takes me five minutes to make a move, I’m probably spending 4½ of those minutes thinking about what I’m going to make for dinner, or thinking about what I need to do for work, or wondering when and if the Giants will ever win another damn game. It’s not about time, but tempo. I know the pace I like to play, I know the rhythm and the pace of the logical progressions that I make, and I’m far better off keeping a quick tempo than I am laboring over every goddamn possible play. I keep the pace quick to keep my mind sharp, to keep myself focused and in the moment. And in that moment, it’s perfectly OK for me to feel like the world is ending because I have EIIIOOU on my rack. Having EIIIOOU on your rack is, on balance, a good life problem to have. You can’t exchange most life problems. You can’t, at worst, play most of your life problems through an R to make OURIE for 5-10 points. Real life can wait while I figure out what to do with all of these fucking vowels …

I started playing scrabble competitively because I thought it would be a useful outlet, since I’d always been absurdly competitive by nature, and I thought that it would help me concentrate and serve as a fun distraction. It stopped being a fun distraction when I started getting good at it, because with aptitude comes expectations. I’ve always hated losing. And I mean hated losing. I still do, but nowhere near as much as before – if I did hate losing as much as before, I wouldn’t be able to write a blog that’s all about losing, after all. Scrabble is all that matters in the 30-50 minutes that I game lasts, but I hated losing so much that the game wouldn’t end, and I’d often lose the next game – and possibly the one even still after that – because I was still fixating on losing the previous one. But that generally doesn’t happen any more. If you’re angry about losing, you can fail to see the humour in it. Success is actually quite ordinary and mundane. No one ever laughs about everything going according to plan.

Although I never outwardly expressed this sentiment at the time, I started playing scrabble because I thought it might be good for my mental health. At the time, I was about as down as I (thought) I ever was, and it seemed like an activity that would be good for me. And this has generally been the case, in fact, notwithstanding this tournament, where I’ll admit that I came unglued and, come to think of it, this tournament wasn’t very good for me either, but I was quickly able to laugh about it, and anyone who saw me throwing stray beer bottles or smashing my metallic clipboard into a U-shape in the vastly empty parking lot of a casino during one assorted summer/winter Reno vortex or another probably questioned my sanity as well, and probably wouldn’t be wrong in doing that. But in general, it’s been good for me. It grounds me and keeps me in the moment (a moment I’d probably enjoy more if scrabble weren’t full of pointlessly rigid decorum and, more to the point, ninnies obsessed with that pointlessly rigid decorum, all of whom seem to think you need pin drop silence in order to muster up enough concentration to find a bingo and none of whom have probably ever tried to sink a free throw at the end of a basketball game with a gym-full of people screaming at you, coming to discover in that moment that the noise makes no difference and that, in fact, you concentrate even more because you’re motivated to shut those motherfuckers up who are sitting in the stands). (Wow, that was a long parenthetical.)

Playing scrabble has fundamentally been good for my mental health. Losing at scrabble hasn’t, but at least now, it no longer seems to impact me in quite the same way. I guess it’s funnier now, since I’ve reached the point where I’m good enough at the game, and attuned enough to it, to better understand which lost games were actually winnable – which means realizing that I screw up a lot of the time, which maybe wasn’t so apparent in the past. Of course, this doesn’t make the times I get bagged the least bit more tolerable. Nothing will. It’s not the way that I’m wired, nor will I ever be. I consider the possibility of being bagged from time to time as an acceptable risk.

I didn’t lose any games on Sunday because I got bagged. I lost three games on Sunday because I played like a dolt. But I’m glad that I was focusing on playing scrabble, albeit badly, and enjoying going after the tournament was over for pizza and beer as God intended and the best gelato I’ve had outside of Italy with my friends and with The Official Spouse of In Play Lose. Necessary steps, as I’ve become a bit too introverted of late, a bit too immersed in my own world, and getting out did me good. I have a tendency to completely detach and to disengage when it isn’t going very well. This has a lot to do with why I haven’t been writing here at In Play Lose, by the way. It feels less like writers block and more like I had lost my voice. Call it mental laryngitis, if you well.

I felt, at first, a pressing need to write on Sunday, the 11th of September, about the fact that it’s the 10th anniversary of what I call The Day That I Tried to Live, which also happens to be the 15th anniversary of the day in our history that we’d all like to forget and wish never happened. These anniversaries seem to resonate more this year because of the numbers 10 and 15, but why is that? What is this fixation and fascination that we have with multiples of the number five? Me being 10 years on from that day isn’t necessarily any more relevant than the 9th or the 11th. The memory of 9/11 is no less terrible 15 years on than 14, and will still be as equally terrible 16 years on. (Oh yes, insert important note here: if you think I’m trivializing the memory of 9/11, then go and reread the paragraph about 9/11 in that blog post of mine from a year ago about my connection to the deaths and despair. I felt it too, just like many others did, and I think I have the right to remember it in my own way, and if you have a problem with that, well, get stuffed.) It’s not some milestone, this anniversary number that is a multiple of five. It’s not special. We should take back the zeros and the fives, just as we should take back the 11s.

But instead of writing about my mental health, which right now pretty much sucks, I decided instead to go and play scrabble, which also pretty much sucks but which is OK to get lost in every now and again, and whatever world of anxiety I sink into over the board will inevitably dissipate and disappear once the game is over – unless I get bagged, of course, which will still piss me off. But why is that exactly? From what does this thought and sentiment stem? This is where my mind goes when I’m thinking about all of these sorts of things, looking for the broader connections which may, or may not, exist. And I was pondering this today as I was out walking, which is something that I like to do on Mondays, when I will walk for as much as 7½ miles, usually accompanied by the sounds of one of my bass-heavy playlists thumping through the earbuds of my iPhone, and I will walk 7½ miles in spite of the fact that my right foot hurts.

And the fact that my right foot hurts, and pretty much all I hear is the bass in every song, explains a lot about my hatred of being bagged.

Ask me for my most vivid memory of my childhood, and the first thing that comes to mind is a night in either late 1976, or early 1977 – I don’t remember which, I just know that it’s the winter time – that I was so sick that I wound up in the Kaiser hospital in Walnut Creek. I remember I had a very nice and very young doctor who had a Japanese name, and it was probably about 3:30 a.m., and for some fuckknowswhy reason I remember that I had a 100° temperature – and I also distinctly remember the gross, slimy, disgusting feeling of having blood and pus and slime slithering down the right side of my face, because my ear drum had ruptured.

Trust me, that’s not a good feeling. I don’t recommend you experience it. It’s happened to me twice, in fact – the same damn thing erupted a few years ago when I was brutally ill on a day I had to take a 5½-hour flight from Baltimore to the Bay Area. I walked into the E.R. with blood running down the right side of my face:

Doctor: What seems to be the … (pauses and looks up from the chart) … umm, ick …
Lose: Umm, yeah …

And pretty much ever since that moment when I was 7 years old, my hearing has been fucked up and weird. I knew something was wrong then, and have known it ever since. I simply tell people that I’m deaf in my right ear to simplify things, but it’s not exactly that. Even so, I generally try to stand on the right of anyone that’s important so I can actually understand what they are saying. If I stand on your left and you speak, it’s gibberish. If I stand on your left and you speak without facing me, I likely won’t hear you at all. I’m also essentially tone deaf, as anything outside of a really low range just sounds like a muddled mess, which means that I could never really play music, because I could never really figure out how a tone was supposed to sound in the first place, and that always annoyed me when I was younger, because I’ve always loved music, came from a family of musically-talented siblings, and felt as if I could never truly contribute to that particular realm. Pretty much the only part of any song that I pay attention to is the bassline and the drum. Literally, all of that other stuff is just noise to me.

It’s not all bad, of course. Being the rock critic who could never play an instrument made for some interesting interviews with musicians over the years, since we would wind up mostly talking about the creative process required to write good songs. I had one particularly loud boss who sat directly behind me and used to yell at me, and so I would simply angle my chair to the right and their words would then dissolve into a dull yet manageable roar – at least until they figured out what I was doing, and would shout, “don’t you turn your deaf ear at me!” which would always make me smile, because I knew I had just won that small battle in a continual war. But really, it sucks most of the time hearing a bunch of gobbledygook.

And it was a fluke. Of course it was a fluke. It’s a random moment in time where life went off the rails. There was no way to expect something like that would ever happen. Nothing that I personally did, when I was 7 years old, contributed to the ensuing 40 years of hearing loss. I’ve adjusted, of course, almost to the point where I can say “it is what it is” and actually mean it (since most people who say “it is what it is” wish that it wasn’t what it is), but if I think real hard, and try to sift through the fog and the haze and the miasma that is my memory, I can almost – almost – remember what it was like to be able to hear out of both ears.

But one thing I can no longer remember – which pains me to say – is a time when my right foot didn’t hurt, which is really saying something, because back when it didn’t hurt, I could run like a gazelle and jump over buildings. It’s been almost 27 years now since I completely obliterated my right ankle, destroyed it and rendered it basically useless. And I walk almost 7½ miles on it out of spite, because every time I walk on it, my foot hurts. It hurts and it’s more or less hurt for 27 years, and the natural act of changing my gait over those 27 years to account for it has led to bad knees and a bad back and a bad neck … hell, that whole spinal column fucker is fucked up beyond, and again, you adjust to it over time, you come to terms with it.

It was a fluke, it was not the norm, one random moment in one basketball game out of who knows how many I played where it all went catastrophically wrong. That I had no access to the sort of medical care necessary to treat the injury was bad timing. I’ve never held the physicians who treated me in any sort of contempt for that, even though some have suggested that I probably should. I was forced to accept that “it is what it is,” and I can intellectualize that point and accept that point – up until that moment when, for yet another day now for nearly 27 years, my right foot starts to ache, at which point all of my logic and sense and understanding go right out the goddamn window.

And after nearly 27 years of this, I truly cannot remember what it was like to have two functioning feet. Memories of running free and easy all seem like abstractions to me. They no longer seem real. It’s as if it never happened and I just made it all up.

Now, in hindsight, of course, I can be hyperrational about it and say that the simplest way to have prevented this sort of injury was to never play a sport in the first place. Because guess what? Sports are bad for you. They are. If you play any sport competitively, and do it competently at some sort of decent level, you’re going to wind up getting hurt. This is why I find most discussions about the relative violence of football to be somewhat curious: the alternatives, while maybe not scrambling your brain, don’t exactly leave you feeling all spiffy. Watching any Olympic broadcast from Rio this past summer was like making rounds in a surgical unit, as the commentators rattled off every athlete’s endless string of injuries, a good number of them completely gnarly. But of course there is a disconnect. You don’t get hurt every time you pick up a ball. Hell, most of the time, the workout feels great. It’s that one goddamn time that does you in, that one moment out of the ordinary where maybe you plant wrong or step on a guy’s foot or some dumbshit thing like that. It’s the strange irony of sport, really, in that we know that eventually we’ll get beat up doing it, yet we keep doing it anyway until the injuries inevitably settle in.

And bad stuff happens to all of us, of course. We all have our shit. Mine isn’t necessarily any worse than anyone else. That’s not the point. The point is that I don’t like situations which I cannot have at least a minor amount of control – an innate feeling, one that’s ingrained in me, and has probably been innate and ingrained since birth, because one of the other pesky life details of mine, which has been out of my control for most of that time, and which I’ve been trying to cope with and manage and manipulate and run away from and ultimately had to figure out how to accept, is the fact that almost certainly since birth, I have been mentally ill.

Coming to be 47 years old and alive, when by all rights I probably should have been dead long ago, has led me to be fairly straight forward about it, almost to the point of being blasé. “Oh yeah, so, I’m nuts, and certifiably nuts at that. Meh, whatever. Pass me the Tabasco.” But as someone who believes, first and foremost, that knowledge is power, I’ve been attempting quite a bit, over the past year or so, to piece a great deal of my memory back together, as a fair amount of it has seemed to vanish deep in the fog. And that leads to asking myself a lot of strange questions, most of which center on being mentally ill: When was I first aware of it? When did I first resist it? First reject it? Make the first attempts to cope? How was it that I coped? How could I have possibly done so much coping and not croaked in the process? What stupid things did I do this time? What stupid things were done to me? Whom did I trust and what was I thinking when I did that? It goes on and on, it’s a seemingly never-ending process and it wears me out sometimes. I’ve spent the past year slogging through my own personal morass, and I think I’ve spent the past couple months feeling stuck in the mud. And there is really no good time to do that, of course, unless you want to take a month off from your life and spend $14,000 and check yourself into a mental hospital, which I don’t particularly feel the need to do again.

But the overarching theme in all of that introspection is a sense of powerlessness, one which ran rampant through the entirety of the first 37 years of my life, and one which I always lacked the right vocabulary to express. You know something is wrong but don’t know what, nor do you why, but you see the way other people act, see how they interact, and feel like it’s not possible for you do that and be that way. You don’t have any idea why that is and it drives you (even more) nuts. And then a few other really awful things happen along the way, just as awful things are wont to happen to some people, but it feels like piling on because you’re already all screwed up to begin with. Sometimes college is a disaster. Sometimes marriage is a disaster. Sometimes you lose a job. This can happen to people for all sorts of reasons but those all sorts of reasons don’t matter when you know, deep down, that there is something that’s just not right about the way you’re wired – in that context, you lose the job and have the bad marriage and the like because you’re shit. Duh. That was hard. This is how it’s meant to be. You’ve been shit since you the day you were born, so why would those situations be any different?

This is where my mind has gone for years, of course. There was always a sense of fated failure to all that I undertook. I felt as if I was star-crossed, luckless, hard done by. Pfft. Whatever. I don’t believe in any of that shit any more. And in making the efforts to understand my own mental illness, get a grasp on it, learn to control and manage it, and then start giving it big noogies, perhaps the best part of it has been to actually feel like I’m gaining some control, because not having any sense of control – indeed, never feeling like control was even possible – is part of what nearly led me to turn up dead. And again, this in no way excuses any of the dumb and stupid things I’ve actively partaken in over the years. Sure, I screwed a lot of stuff up when it comes to relationships, careers and other life choices. But I can learn from those mistakes. I can come to terms with those mistakes. It’s the mistakes seemingly made for me which I’ve never, ever been able to handle.

And having the bag drawn on me in scrabble is a mistake made for me. It’s not what I’m there to do. It’s not the reason why I’m playing the game of scrabble. And now it would be a good time to also point out that I don’t particularly enjoy drawing the bag on my opponents. Winning is certainly better than losing, of course, but I’m someone who has always hated losing more than I’ve enjoyed winning. I’ve always tried to be gracious in victory, since if my opponent is like me, they probably hate losing – and let’s be honest here, at the peak of any competitive endeavor, every competitor hates losing to some extent. They may not all show it in the same way, of course, but if you tolerated losing so easily, you wouldn’t have taken so many steps to try and minimize its occurrence.

The biggest problem with having bad ears and a bad right foot and a bad back and a bad neck and all that jazz is the fact that, after about 10 years of attempting to follow a course of mindfulness and contemplation, I feel as if my mind is, on the whole, in better shape than it’s ever been – but my body is a wreck, and so I cannot really enjoy this sound mind and healthy spirit to its fullest. And this makes me sad, of course, because so much of the first 37 years of my life feels like a life wasted, and now I’ve got a head that actually works relatively well, and the body seems to not want to comply.

And it’s strange to generally be so calm. I’ve still not quite gotten used to that. I used to be all over the place, and it could be fun sometimes, especially when I was feeling extremely creative and the stars would align and give me some acute sense of clarity and vision. I don’t really get that burst of creative energy any more. Instead, I have to go about somehow inventing that energy for myself and managing it, allowing it to burn slowly instead of wildly blazing and going about scalding the hillsides. In the past, I’d sort of be hanging around and waiting for that ZING! of inspiration to arise, and then when it came, I’d just go nuts and roll with it come hell or high water. That doesn’t work for me anymore.

As a result of this general state of calm which has descended upon me, my previously interminably slow creative process – made slow by the fact that I could never finish anything, given that I have the attention span of a gnat – has now gotten even slower. I’ve got probably 2,000 pages worth of drafts of unfinished novels on this laptop, and 100 pages of In Play Lose ideas which never got past the first paragraph. For fucksake, Lose, FINISH SOME STUFF!

So bear with me here. I’ve been feeling something of a mess for the past couple of months, and trying to figure out where to go from here. I feel like I’ve had some mental setbacks, but this is going to happen from time to time. There is no cure for mental illness – nor for most other diseases, for that matter. You have to learn about them, learn to manage them and control them. It’s an ongoing process you must commit to, but one which is also prone to occasional burst of suckage.

And I appreciate, and am humbled by, the fact that a good number of people have sought me out over the past 10 years, across a wide spectrum of life, who are trying to learn to cope with depression or anxiety or other aspects of mental illness and have asked me for advice and guidance. It pleases me, knowing that I am a useful resource for others. I’ve become a passionate and tireless advocate on the mental health front, and I’ll always try to be helpful when I can.

But I definitely need to play more scrabble, given that deciding to make a go of playing it was probably one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. I met my wife and most of my best friends playing scrabble, I’ve taken on roles of leadership and responsibility I would have shied away from in the past, and I managed to follow a process all the way through – starting off knowing nothing at all, making the efforts to learn and improve, and then continuing to make those efforts and actually getting really, really good at it over time. Or at least I thought I was good at it before yesterday but nah, I’m still terrible. But that means I can still get better at it, right? Learning is cool and improving is cool.

But I don’t want to get too good at scrabble, because it would ruin my well-crafted life persona. After all, I’m the guy who can be a pretty good player on his day but who ultimately never wins anything at that stupid game, which sucks in the moment but is probably a good thing on balance, since none of you would want to read a blog called In Play Win. That would just be boring. One thing I learned long ago in the criticism business is that there are three basic reviews: it rocks, it sucks, and it’s boring, and the third one is the worst of them all.

Crickets

THIS is just a note to all of the loyal, faithful readers of this blog around the world: I have not forgotten about you. It was always my intention to take a hiatus this summer, since there really isn’t that much going on during that time, but it’s gone on a little longer than I would have liked, owing to the fact that I’ve had a number of professional obligations which took precedent, some other creative projects that I needed to get moving on, and, quite honestly, because I appear to have developed a bad case of writers block which I’ve been unable to shake.

Fear not, however, we’ll work through all of these “technical difficulties” here at In Play Lose World HQ and return with new Lose here in the autumn months. Thank you for your patience and always remember that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.