The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Don’t get too cocky, Chicago. You still have the Bears.

“You need stuff that sucks to have stuff that’s cool.”
– Beavis and Butthead

IT ISN’T hyperbole to suggest that Wednesday night’s World Series Game 7 between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians will go down in the annals of baseball history as the most memorable game of all time. Given what was at stake, given the two clubs involved and their tortured histories, given the massive audience – it was the most-watched baseball game in the past 25 years – and given the drama which unfolded over the course of 10 innings and more than four hours, you’re not likely to ever see a game quite like it again. The Cubs’ 8:7 win over the Indians in 10 innings was one helluva roller coaster ride, with twists and turns and huge momentum swings all over the place. When it was over, the Cubs were so spent that many of them were completely overwhelmed emotionally and were decidedly subdued in their celebrations. It was gripping theatre and incredible drama.

And the game itself was something of a mess. The Cubs won in spite of Joe Maddon’s repeated managerial gaffes – seriously Joe, what the hell was that bunt on a 3-2 pitch? – and Terry Francona didn’t have his best night, either. The Indians continued the clownshoes approach to outfield defense which had cost them in Game 6 and also got a runner picked off. The pitchers for both teams were running on fumes, missing their spots, and generally ineffective, with the difference being Chicago’s batters hit ’em where they ain’t a bit more often than the Tribe’s. You could hardly say this game was particularly well played.

But that’s often the case with these sorts of games. Mistakes are part of the game. Hell, they ARE the game in a lot of cases, in that the team who makes the fewest mistakes winds up winning. Every game comes down to mistakes, in the end. You just hope that the last mistake isn’t the one that kills you. (Run the damn ball, Seahawks!)

Perhaps the most memorable baseball game of my lifetime – the Red Sox v. Mets in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series – ended with a wild pitch and a routine grounder rolling between Bill Buckner’s legs. People forget just what a comedy of errors that entire game was. It was a preposterous mess filled with mistakes, mess-ups and managerial malfeasance. Had that been a spring training game, or some meaningless mid-summer game, both teams would’ve taken the game film out back and set it on fire in the dumpster. The circumstances, however, made it memorable and magnificent.

It’s easy to confuse a great game with a great quality of play. You don’t need the latter for the former. Oftentimes, it’s something outside the realm of “great play” which makes the game memorable: sometimes it’s a big mistake at the wrong time, sometimes it’s one moment of individual greatness, sometimes it’s a terrible decision by an official. If everything goes well and everything goes according to plan, the game itself is actually not that interesting a lot of the time.

I’d actually been thinking of writing this Lose post for quite some time, and watching that terrific and exciting game between the Indians and the Cubs has spurred me to act. Here at In Play Lose, we often talk about stuff which is done poorly – but I don’t think I speak often enough about stuff that’s done really well. Or, if not really well, stuff that has become memorable to me for a variety of reasons.

The first sporting event that I ever attended was a football game in Berkeley in 1976 between Cal and Washington State, and I barely knew the rules of football, and I still remember how Cal jumped out to a 23-0 lead before W.S.U. rallied … it was 23-8, and then 23-16, and then the Cougars scored late to make it 23-22 and went for the 2-pt conversion and the win, and my dad and I were seated in the end zone where the Cougars were attacking and I can remember the whole play developing, as WSU QB Jack Thompson dropped back to pass, looked to his right, had an open receiver in his sights and … got sacked. Cougars lose by a point. (I found this crazy old silent video of some of the game action on YouTube.) Now, neither of those teams were any good at all, but that was A GREAT GAME of football in that it was tense and dramatic, which is ultimately what you want. The beauty of sports is that they are ultimately unscripted and unpredictable. You have no idea what it is that you’re going to see.

So I started thinking about all of the various sporting events I’ve attended in the past 40 years, trying to think about what were the best events that I’ve seen in person. Not on TV, mind you, but actually in person, because as much as I enjoy watching games on TV, I find the live experience to be so much more satisfying in that you share a common experience with those who are seated around you and the atmosphere in the arena adds to the experience.

But touching on all of the really good sporting events that I’ve attended strays from the mission of this blog, which is document and contemplate and pontificate about losing. Well, in keeping with the epigram of this blog, if I’m going to celebrate the great events that I’ve attended, I would also do well to recollect the truly terrible events that I’ve attended as well. You do, in fact, need stuff that sucks to have that’s cool, and I’ve seen a lot of stuff that sucks over 40 years.

Here then is my good, bad, and ugly list of sporting events that I’ve attended in my lifetime. You will find that the definitions of those three are somewhat mutable and flexible – sometimes it’s due to circumstance, sometimes to quality of play. This was a fun list to put together, brought back a lot of good memories (and some bad ones), and required a variety of digging about the archives. And to qualify this further, I will say here that nothing on either the “bad” or the “ugly” side of the ledger will involve a team that I was rooting for actually winning the game, because this is In Play Lose here and we’re all about the Lose. I can say, without a doubt, that the worst pro football game I have ever attended was at the Kingdome on Nov. 14, 1993, a 22:5 win by the Seahawks over the Cleveland Browns which featured only 450 yards of offense, two safeties, a fumble returned for a TD, and a QB duel between the illustrious Rick Mirer and Todd Philcox – the latter having gotten the job when Browns coach Bill Belichick rage cut Bernie Kosar earlier in the week. This game was absolutely dreadful. Even for a fan of bad football, this one was tough to take. But the Seahawks won, so the desired outcome had occurred – but we’re not interested in desired outcomes here. I’ll take an ugly loss over an aesthetically pleasing win any day. Anyway, permit me this ambling down Memory Lane – even though some of these memories are rather fuzzy, and some feel like really bad dreams.

NFL
The Good: I have to be honest here: I’ve been to pro football games in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, and I’ve never, ever been to a game that was any good at all. The team I’ve seen in person most often – the Seahawks – were terrible when I lived in Seattle in the 1990s. I went to a smattering of games and they were all pretty dismal.
The Bad: Since I’ve never been to a good one, you can imagine I have several bad ones to choose from. Two stand out in particular.
My one venture to a game at Candlestick Park, on Nov. 28, 2004, certainly was dubious – the Dolphins and the 49ers had the two worst records in the league, and the game was an error-strewn affair, with the 49ers fumbling on five straight possessions in the second half on their way to defeat. The box score lists the attendance as being 66,156, but about 25,000 of those fans were dressed as empty seats. And you’ve not really had a truly miserable sporting experience until you’ve been to Candlestick at a time with a number in it on a day ending in Y. My girlfriend at the time was a Miami supporter, so we were sitting with the other Fins fans on the side of the Stick that was out of the sun, and I was wearing about five layers of clothing in order to combat the constantly swirling winds, but then I’d go down to the concourse to the concession stands, which were in the sun, and I instantly started roasting. It amazes me that people put up with that shithole of a stadium for as long as they did. When I went with five other friends to the very last sporting event played at Candlestick – a friendly between the U.S. and Azerbaijan in the run-up to the World Cup – I told everyone “bring a coat” even though it was about 80° in San Francisco that day. People thought I was kidding. “I’m serious. Bring a coat.” They were all grateful that they took my advice.
But the Seahawks 19:0 loss to the Raiders at the Kingdome on Oct. 18, 1992 simply cannot be ignored, because this is the only time I’ve ever cheered about an offensive holding penalty against my own team. The Seahawks went 2-14 that season and were so injury riddled that 3rd-stringer Stan Gelbaugh started most of the games at QB. This was the most lopsided 19-pt. game in NFL history, because at no point did I ever think Seattle was going to score. And it’s not like the Raiders were any great shakes, either: probably half of their meager yardage total came in the 4th Quarter when the Seahawks D was out of gas. Anthony Smith of the Raiders got four sacks against the Seahawks sieve of an offensive line, and after whiffing on a block on the previous play against Smith which resulted in a sack, the Seahawks OT promptly got beat again by Smith and just went for the full-on takedown. It was one of the best form tackles I saw all year. Sure, it cost them 10 yards but at least kept Gelbaugh standing upright and we cheered, as this constituted progress.
The Ugly: My trip to New Jack City in Landover on Nov. 23, 1997, was particularly absurd. The game between the Redskin Potatoes and the Giants wound up a 7:7 tie, and that final scoreline should indicate to you just how inept this game was. Oh, I guess you could call it a “defensive struggle” since there were 6 turnovers and 11 sacks. What made this game infamous was Potatoes QB Gus Frerotte concussing himself after head-butting a wall following his 1-yard TD run. I’m about 6 miles from the field where I’m sitting, which is the norm in that cavernous and soulless stadium, and none of us could figure why Jeff Hostetler was suddenly on the field and Frerotte was out of the game, and then a guy a row back who was listening along on the radio told us what happened and myself and the others in my section all just looked to one another in stunned silence, dumbstruck and incredulous.

NBA
The Good: I’ve posted about this previously here on the blog, but the single-best sporting event that I have ever attended was on Apr. 28, 1992, when the Sonics defeated the Golden State Warriors 129:128 in Game 3 of their Western Conference playoff series. The Warriors were one of the great offensive teams in the history of the league, but the Sonics upset them 3-1 in this series and beat them at their own game. (Shawn Kemp’s ultimate act of posterization in Game 4 became the series’ most iconic moment.) In this game, the Warriors shot 56% and lost, because the Sonics shot 61%. The defenses weren’t even all that bad, per se – it was just a case where the offenses for both teams were incredible and were completely unstoppable. And there was no relief in this game. It was just a relentless onslaught from both teams. At one point in the fourth quarter, the Sonics built a double-digit lead, and then the Warriors probably wiped that lead out in about two minutes. The Sonics broke the tie in the final minute with a 3-point play by Kemp on the most insane fast break I’ve ever seen and wound up winning by a single point. People were literally falling all over each other in the stands when Kemp dunked that lob from Payton, jumping up and down in a frenzy and completely losing their minds. I’ve never been so exhausted from watching a game before.
The Bad: Pretty much from the moment this game began on Apr. 6, 1993, I had a bad feeling about it. The Sonics weren’t playing with any intensity, and the 7-64 Dallas Mavericks were playing with urgency. You watch a game like this one unfurl and you think to yourself that at some point, the team that actually knows what it’s doing is going to get it together and clamp down on these guys and force some turnovers and go on a run and blow that awful team away. It never happened. What I remember the most about this game was coming to a strange point of acceptance that the Sonics were about to lose, on their home floor, to one of the worst teams in NBA history, and being remarkably okay with this fact when the game was over. Dallas was the better team and deserved to win and, hey, my team had a bad night. It happens sometimes. And it’s weird to look back at these old NBA box scores and realize just how much the league has changed in 20 years. The 3-point shot was a novelty back then, and the pace of play was incredibly slow. This is why I get really, really bored with every pundit and analyst who talks about how the game was so much better in the era of the Jordanaires. It wasn’t. The game was becoming pretty dull and growing extremely predictable and uncreative. 
The Ugly: What on earth was I thinking?

MLB
The Good: I’ve been to some great baseball games in my life. I was fortunate to see Chris Bosio pitch a no-hitter in Seattle. I went to two Mariners playoff games in 1995, and I also went to the impromptu AL West playoff game between the Mariners and the Angels, a 9:1 win by Seattle in which Randy Johnson threw a 3-hit complete game and a tight game wound up being blown open by Luis Sojo’s ridiculous Little League grand slam. I say this game was “impromptu” because the Angels played a night game against the A’s the evening before, they had to win to force a playoff, and the game went on forever, and the result of this was people waking up in Seattle on that Monday to discover that the Mariners were a) playing that afternoon in the Kingdome, and b) tickets were on sale now. The whole affair was hasty and cobbled together and that extra spontaneity made it memorable.
As I was saying before, what constitutes “good” varies dramatically: it can represent a high quality of play, it can represent an amazing atmosphere, etc. The “best” baseball game I’ve ever attended took place on Oct. 22, 2012. It seemed, at first, like it was a beautiful night for some baseball – if only the St. Louis Cardinals had bothered to play any. It was Game 7 of the NLDS between the Cardinals and the Giants and, early that afternoon, I was at my office down in Palo Alto and I got a text message from The Official Girlfriend of In Play Lose: “Section 330.” Kismet! And it was a scramble to make it to Phone Co. Park for the early start time, and I didn’t make it until the top of the 2nd inning. The Giants pushed two runs across in the bottom of the 2nd, and then all hell broke loose in the bottom of the 3rd, as the Cardinals kicked the ball all over the place and the Giants scored five runs, three on the weirdest play that I have ever seen on a baseball diamond:

Only Hunter Pence could do something that weird.
From that point onward, it was basically a party with 41,000 of my new-found friends. And as I said, it was a beautiful night for some baseball, right up until it wasn’t:

It started pouring down rain in the top of the 9th inning, the storm coming seemingly out of nowhere. The field was barely playable, but the game quickly ended as the Cardinals hitters swung at most everything, just wanting to get the game over with. We slogged back to the BART station, a 45-minute walk in an absolute downpour, chanting “Beat Detroit!” along with 30,000 other joyously happy people. We were completely soaked and we both threw our ruined shoes straight into the trashcan. Now that right there, that was a good day.
The Bad: I’ve been to so many bad Seattle Mariners games in my life that I’ve lost count. They all run together. So we’re going to pivot here and go in a different direction.
During a dark time in life when I was living in western Colorado, a Colorado resident. From a sporting standpoint, you could do far worse than be in Steamboat Springs, Colorado in 1998. The Broncos won the Super Bowl, which put everyone in a good mood; Steamboat is actually closer to Salt Lake City than it is to Denver, and I wound up spending a lot of time in Salt Lake City, where people there were pretty excited about the Utah Jazz reaching the NBA Finals, and also the University of Utah reaching the NBA championship game; and 1998 also meant the Winter Olympics were going on, and Steamboat Springs has produced more Olympians per capita than any other city in America. So while a lot about my life in western Colorado sucked – don’t ask me to go into the details – at least I had some pleasant diversions.
And then I’m in Denver in late April and I like Denver, it’s a really nice city and I am always happy to go there for a little while. And hey, look, the Rockies have a series against the Cincinnati Reds at Coors Field and that would be fun. So I make the decision to try and become a Rockies fan, and so I go to the game and it’s a cool ballpark and I’m having a good time and the Rockies are up 4-3 after six but then Kile runs into trouble on the mound in the top of the 7th and can’t get anyone out and here comes the arson squad that is the Rockies bullpen to throw gasoline on the fire and the 7th inning takes about two years off my life. The Reds score eight runs in the 7th, three more in the 8th and four more in the 9th and win 18:7. Yeech.

Just another day at Coors Field

The Ugly: And I’ve also bought a ticket for the game in Denver the following day as well, where the Reds proceed to score 5 in the 1st, 4 in the 2nd, and single runs in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th, meaning that I’ve now seen Rockies pitchers contrive to yield 27 RUNS over 8 consecutive innings of baseball spread over two days. I was no longer a Rockies fan.

NHL
The Good: Along the way to an unlikely appearance in the Stanley Cup finals in 1994, the Vancouver Canucks fulfilled the ambition of a good number of my Canadian friends, which was to beat the hell out of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Game 3 of that series is noteworthy because of a line brawl late in the game, after which the Canucks scored again to further rub Toronto’s nose in it, and Game 5 is notable because it went to double OT, but Game 4, on May 22, 1994, was probably the tensest and most intense game that I have ever seen, because it was 0-0 deep into the 3rd period. It was a tight, defensive, somewhat claustrophobic game and the tension ratcheted up with every minute that passed. The game was balanced on a knife’s edge and the crowd would just sort of surge collectively to the edge’s of their seats with every rush up ice. So much nervous energy, so much anxiety.Finally, at 17:35 in the 3rd period, Cliff Ronning broke the deadlock with a goal to give the Canucks the lead and you could feel the wave of jubilation rushing over the crowd. I’ve never felt such a palpable, collective sense of relief. The vibe stayed with me, a rush of endorphins and a tingle in the central nervous system that just sort of lingered on for several days.
The Bad: This one was horrible. On one of my two trips to see a Canucks game against the L.A. Kings at the Fabulous Forum, the Canucks got beat 9:1 by the Kings but that really wasn’t the story. No, the story was that the night before, the Canucks players were sitting on their team plane on the tarmac at LAX when a plane crashed nearby. Suffice to say, the players were shellshocked, and it was pretty obvious that they just flat didn’t care a whit about the game. There was also a crazy backstory to this game, in that it was the first game coached by Pat Quinn – whom the Canucks had basically stolen from the Kings several years earlier, and paid a steep price for it – but none of that really mattered in light of what had happened at the aeroport the night before. And it was a weird atmosphere at the game. The fans didn’t really get into the game, as it felt almost like a scrimmage out there at times, since the Kings were basically playing against a group of ghosts.
The Ugly: I went to see the Canucks play the Washington Capitals in one of the Caps’ last games at their old building, the Capital Centre in Landover, on Nov. 4, 1997, and it was probably the most lopsided 2:1 hockey game that I’ve ever seen. It should have been about 10:1, actually, but Kirk McLean stood on his head in goal for the Canucks, who were on a long losing streak at the time and all throughout this game, I was saying to the guy next to me, “Pat Quinn is getting fired after this game.” Sure enough, he was. Quinn had built the Canucks from one of the worst teams in sports up to being a game away from winning a Stanley Cup, and now in 1997 they were completely disintegrating: they’d dumbly signed Mark Messier as a free agent that summer, who was useless, and there was complete disunity and discontent in the team, and then the Canucks replaced Quinn with Mike Keenan, who was also useless and lasted only into the middle of the following season, and Pavel Bure then demanded a trade in the offseason and vowed never to play for the Canucks again. It was sad to see this team which brought me quite a bit of joy completely collapse before my eyes.

Soccer
The Good: The beatdown at Carrow Road on Jan. 21, 1990, was thorough and systematic. The final score was only 2:0 but it very easily could have been more. Norwich City F.C. were one of England’s best teams, having led the First Division for most of the season prior, only to falter down the stretch and wind up finishing in fourth. The Canaries played attractive football that was creative and geometric and dynamic, and they ran all over their pathetic, inept opponents on that day.
“Norwich were absolutely brilliant. That was the best performance by any side I’ve seen since I joined United. They certainly reached a peak today. But that effort from my side was not acceptable. I know there is a distinct lack of goal threat from us. That was certainly a low for my lot today and there is absolutely no excuse.” – Alex Ferguson
Yes, that Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United, who got walloped by Norwich that day in a game that was nowhere as close as a 2:0 scoreline would indicate. United were abject and atrocious in this game, which was their 10th straight without a win and they were hovering just above the drop zone. And the Yellow Army at Carrow Road were yukking it up at United’s expense, since mighty Man U was six kinds of crap, and that Ferguson guy was obviously a shit-for-brains who couldn’t coach and would soon be out of a job. Suffice to say, Sir Alex figured it out.
The Bad: It was appropriate that this game took place at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, because El Tri were absolute pants. We had a great time going to the Copa América Centenario matches this past summer, and the atmosphere for the Mexico v. Chile quarterfinal on June 19, 2016, was truly electric: 70,000 fans, with about 68,000 of them wearing the green of El Tri. Among our watch party assembling in the South Bay for this game was César, the Official South American Correspondent of In Play Lose, who had also brought along his dad, and after about 2 minutes – during which Alexis Sanchez absolutely roasted the El Tri right back and his pinpoint pass almost resulted in a goal – the Official Father of the Official South American Correspondent of In Play Lose leaned over to his son and said, “Chile is going to win and it isn’t going to be close.” And in the first half, Chile were great. They were absolutely great. Alexis was making all the plays up front on the left and some of his touches were just exquisite. Come halftime, Chile are up 2-0 and we’re in line to get a beer and a Mexican fan comes up to Phonerz and I, asks if we’re Chilean, and we point out that we’re Americans and, thus, not the enemy combatant in this game, and he shakes his head and says, “we suck.” And El Tri completely collapses and capitulates in the second half, giving up two quick goals in succession while I’m still standing in line to get a beer, and after Chile makes it 4-0, someone in line smashes a trash can, at which point security moves in and the kiosk selling beer immediately closes, which pissed me the hell off. But Mexico’s matador defense continues on and soon it’s 5-0, and then 6-0, and then 7-0, and by this point the El Tri fans are openly mocking their own team with chants of “Olé!” as they go chasing the ball while the Chileans play keep away. Security had been heightened for this game, as authorities were wary of possible crowd trouble – a threat I didn’t take all that seriously, as I’ve been to Mexico games before and there’s never been an issue that couldn’t be attributed to anything other than people having had too much to drink – but nothing takes the sting out of a crowd and diffuses a situation quick like a systematic beatdown. We like to give El Tri some shit from time to time here at In Play Lose, but it’s good-natured razzing and I’m generally a fan of what they do. But this game was, without question, one of the most shockingly awful performances by a team that I have ever seen.
The Ugly: there is no ‘ugly’ because soccer is ‘The Beautiful Game’ … *foolishly makes trip to White Hart Lane* … uh, OK, so maybe there are ugly soccer games after all.

NCAA Football
The Good: I went to a small Div. III school, the University of Redlands, and in my freshman year, the football team won one game – and it was the best ending to a football game I’ve ever seen, because they were losing to Pomona-Pitzer 27-24 and, on the last play of the game from around midfield, the QB flung a Hail Mary pass towards the end zone … which came up about 10 yards short of the end zone, and there were two Redlands receivers down there, one behind the other, along with three Pomona DBs, and the front guy jumped for the ball and got crunched by the defenders early, and the official down there reached for his flag to call pass interference, saw the other Redlands receiver jumping up and down in the end zone with the ball, and signaled a TD, having been so fixated on calling the pass interference that he hadn’t noticed a) the ball had hit the ground; and b) the Redlands guy behind the pass interference melee had gone down to one knee to field the ball, which meant he was down on about the 5 yard line. Touchdown, game over, we win 30:27. So not only did the Redlands football team only win a single game that entire year, but they cheated in order to do it. My heroes.
The Bad: Back in the days when Washington State knew what they were doing (and I should point out that those days have returned, given that Wazzu beat Arizona 69:7 this afternoon), it was fun to venture either to Berkeley or Palo Alto to mingle with W.S.U.’s chapter of Bay Area alums and see The Good Guys beat up on Cal or Stanford. But it was more morbid curiosity which led me to do this on Nov. 1, 2008, venturing down to Palo Alto in the driving rain to watch W.S.U. get beat 58:0 by Stanford. This was absolutely, without question, the worst football team that I have ever seen. Given that the Cougars had already lost games that season 66:3, 63:14, 66:13, and 69:0, only giving up 58 against Stanford constituted progress. I didn’t stay for the end of it, because I was soaked.
The Ugly:  The 1985 Washington State team had a dazzling array of future NFL talent, including a future Super Bowl MVP at QB, but negated this talent with perpetually brain dead play on the field, including two games where they committed seven turnovers, and it was after the Cougars coughed up yet another winnable game, losing 21:16 to Arizona State on Oct. 26, that Spokesman-Review columnist John Blanchette coined the verb “to coug,” which has since became a staple in northwest sports vernacular.

NCAA Basketball
The Good: Given that it was a record-setting game, it’s somewhat surprising that it’s so hard to find more info about it online. I went to a couples of basketball games at the Gersten Pavilion, on the campus of Loyola Marymount University, including this one, from which I found this snippet on a website about Gonzaga basketball:

That doesn’t tell the half of it. Loyola Marymount were setting records during this period of time. It was the wildest, craziest variation of basketball imaginable. They led this game against the Zags 61-50 at halftime, and each team scored 86 points in the second half. The 172 points is an NCAA record for most points scored by two teams in one half. The spectacle was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen on a basketball court.
The Bad: I actually found this article from the archives of the Spokane Chronicle detailing a truly awful game between Washington State and Arizona which had to be moved to an auxiliary gym because of a power outage. Arizona was building towards a Final Four team a season later – their entire starting lineup wound up playing in the NBA (not including Steve Kerr, who was hurt and out for the season) and their backup point guard was Kenny Lofton, who played CF for the Cleveland Indians – while W.S.U., meanwhile, was abysmal that season. Whatever electricity could be garnered from having a sellout crowd in such an intimate atmosphere was negated pretty much from the opening tip, the spectators being rendered to sitting in embarrassed silence during the course of this 37-point smackdown.
The Ugly: The meanest, nastiest, most competitive, most cynical college basketball game I have ever seen was also the lousiest in terms of quality of play. The first round of the NCAA West Regionals was at W.S.U. in 1984, and #1 ranked Georgetown came all the way to Pullman along the way to winning a national title, but they almost didn’t make it out of Pullman, because they got pushed around and beaten up by S.M.U. on Mar. 18, 1984. The game was brutally slow, overly physical, and neither team could throw it in a lake. S.M.U. was ahead 24-16 at half, and when Georgetown finally got the lead late in the second half, they went into a four corners, all-out stall – this was before the shot clock had become the rule – which brought boos cascading down from the crowd. Patrick Ewing wound up tipping in a missed FT late and the Hoyas won 37:36 to advance, but the whole experience was decidedly unpleasant.

Other Random Sports
The Good: On a whim, I went to see the All-Blacks play Barbarians in 1989 in London at Twickenham, which is the sport’s Valhalla. New Zealand won the match by 21 points to 10, and I was pretty much hooked on the game. It gets no better than that. (And now I am seeing here on the wire that today in Chicago, Ireland beat the All-Blacks for the first time in 111 years of trying. Yet more proof that Ireland is cool, as if we needed more evidence of that.)
The Bad: I’ve attended two college baseball playoff games in my life, both of which were ridiculous. In the first, Washington State played Arizona, who would go on to win the national championship and whose best player at that time was current Cleveland Indians manager Terry Francona. Arizona batted around in the first inning … and the second inning … and the third inning … sigh … the final score was 22:14, and the only reason it was even that close was because the Cougars scored 10 runs in the bottom of the 8th inning – an impossible late game rally which, honestly, felt like it might just go on forever.
My second college baseball playoff game was in 1991, in the Div. III days at Redlands. I was good buddies with one of the guys on the baseball team and they were hosting local rival Cal St. San Bernardino in a playoff game, and so I wandered over to the diamond to check it out – and wandered back after an inning, because I didn’t need to see any more, not after San Bernardino scored 18 runs in the inning. That one didn’t end very well.
The Ugly: I got so annoyed on a trip to a horse track – having gone 0-for-9 and not won a cent – that for the final race of the day, I said to hell with it and bet on a horse named Garage, who was a long shot of 100-1 … and who finished about 100 lengths behind the horse who finished second to last. Garage was huffing and puffing down the final stretch long after all of the horses had finished and after some had even left the track. Seriously, slugs move faster than that thing did.

This was fun. It made me happy and made me laugh, just thinking about this. Laughter is life’s best medicine and, at the moment, I could use a few laughs.

Losability: Your Cheap and Available NBA Preview

JaVale McGee is now on the Warriors. This brings me joy …

THE LOSE has been counting down the days until the NBA season gets going. No, seriously. I have been. Every time the Giants bullpen blew a save in September, I would tweet out how many days it was until the Warriors season opener. Suffice to say, I put this out in cyberspace a lot, and most of my followers probably hate me now – except for the Dodgers fans, who think it’s hysterical, but the Dodgers are trash and so I don’t really care what they think.

OK, focus here Lose … basketball!

It’s time for one of the more fascinating seasons in the league’s history to commence. The casual fan might think that it’s not particularly fascinating, seeing how, on paper at least, there is Cleveland and there is Golden State and there is everyone else. Aha, but it’s all of that “everything else” which interests The Lose, of course, because this is a blog where we like to chronicle and pontificate upon that which is done badly. And given the muddled middle class the league at the moment, and given the truly horrid franchises the league continues to drag behind them like tin cans tied to the bumper, and given the bizarre ways that the NBA conducts its business, this NBA will almost certainly give me plenty to write about.

And in a year where it seems so clear-cut from the get-go – the Cavs and the Dubs are enormous favorites to win their conferences and meet in the NBA Finals for the third straight year – the question then becomes how the other 28 teams prepare for what could, in theory, be a lost season. Do you tank? Do you go young? Do you look for a chink in the armor of the big guns and then try to make a move at the deadline which could possibly give you a shot in the playoffs? Do you simply lower your expectations?

And remember here, nothing is preordained. Nothing is set in stone. There hasn’t been more of a stone-cold lock to win a title, going into the playoffs, than the Golden State Warriors were a year ago, but then Steph Curry slips and falls in a pool of Donatas Motiejunas ass sweat in Houston and injures his knee, and the dynamic of the entire NBA playoffs suddenly changes. While the NBA is the most predictable of major sports in terms of which teams are going to dominate, having so few players involved in the game also means that you’re only a few injuries away from being in the dumpster.

I give you my Losability preview of the 2016-2017 NBA season, with teams ranked in my customary order, which is from the least likely to the most likely that they’re going to wind up being written about on this blog during the course of the season – for reasons good, bad, or otherwise. There are basically three reviews you can write in the critic biz – “it sucks” “it rocks” and “it’s boring” – and the worst of all is the third of those. Be brilliant or be terrible, but whatever you do, don’t be boring.  Those teams which are gravitating towards the bottom of this list fall in the third category – but sometimes for good reasons, of course, since a stabile and consistent franchise free of drama can make for a successful season even if it doesn’t make for very good copy.

The NBA season starts on Tuesday night. Here are my Losability rankings from worst to first with reasons why. Do the things listed here, and some hack with a laptop in the Bay Area is going to feel free to take shots at you:

30. Washington Buzzards Wizards: because really, who cares?

29. Denver Nuggets: because I don’t know anything about this team at all, and they are arguably the most uninteresting franchise in all of sports.

28. Charlotte Hornets: because they are a solid and steady team that will plod along and will probably have a decent season, all of which is good, but they aren’t terribly interesting.

27. Milwaukee Bucks: because in spite of running out Greek Freak at the point, an idea which I love, whatever hopes this team had of being good pretty much died when Khris Middleton got hurt, and I simply can’t subject myself to watching a team who can’t shoot go about not shooting on a nightly basis.

26. Toronto Raptors: because this team should probably be higher on this list, since weird stuff happens in the playoffs that’s worth commenting on, and at that point in the season I’ll probably wonder if they’re ever going to try and run an actual play on offense, but until then they are going to plod along and win 50-55 games and wind up being the second or third seed in the East so carry on.

25. Detroit Pistons: because at some point this year, I’m going to be subjected to watching Andre Drummond get hack-a-shaqed and shoot 25 goddamn free throws in a game, at which point I’ll go on a frothing rant about the NBA needs to fix this stupid quirk in the rules.

24. Orlando Magic: because when your season will be declared a success if one of your guys wins the slam dunk contest during the All-Star break, there isn’t a whole lot to get excited about.

23. Dallas Mavericks: because this savvy, veteran team and its savvy, veteran coach are capable of just about achievement, good or bad, without it really surprising me – be it through playing great team ball and becoming a playoff team or be it through turning into a MASH unit and winding up in the lottery; because Dirk has to age out at some point; because at some point Mark Cuban is going to realize he spent $94,000,000 on Harrison Barnes and have his worst case of buyer’s remorse since The Benefactor.

22. Utah Jazz: because this is another team which is going to be steady and carry on, and appears ready to take the next step, but they won’t be all that exciting going about it; because should my belief that the Jazz will wind up in a 4/5 matchup with the Rockets in the first round of the playoffs come to fruition (which also thus puts them in line to play Golden State in the second round), then they become really interesting to me, so talk to me in April.

21. Indiana Pacers: because someone should explain to me how Larry Bird can say he wants this to be an “up tempo” team while hiring Nate McMillan to be coach, since Nate’s teams in Portland and Seattle played at some of the slowest paces in the league.

20. San Antonio Spurs: because they probably would’ve been about 31st on this list until I started hearing all of these rumblings about possibly trading LaMarcus Aldridge, which would be dumb; because this team will be good-to-great, like they always are, and be ruthlessly efficient in their systematically suffocating bad teams into submission, which makes for turning off the games early and going and doing something else; because they looked old and slow by the end of last season, and the problem is that old and slow guys don’t get any younger nor any quicker.

19. Portland Trail Blazers: because these guys were a helluva lot of fun last year, and I appreciate their general conceit that the best way to defend the opposition is just to outscore them; because Evan Turner and Festus Ezeli? Really?; because they wildly overachieved last season, which is awesome, but they were also extremely fortunate last year in terms of health; because this season might be a case where they are a better team but it doesn’t necessarily translate into victories.

18. Memphis Grizzlies: because “Grit & Grind,” which is the identity of this franchise, seems pretty stale; because this was a great starting lineup in about 2013; because they used 28 players last year, and most of their best players are likely to wind up on the injured list again; because if they stay healthy, they still have Marc Gasol and Randolph and Conley and they could do some stuff, but probably not that much.

17. New Orleans Pelicans: because no team in the league is more dependent upon one guy; because that one guy, Anthony Davis, is always injured; because they replaced a bunch of dudes who could shoot but couldn’t defend with a bunch of other dudes who, quite honestly, I’m not sure what they do or what value they bring; because at some point, I should probably write about the fact that, as much as I love me some Pels, my trip to Milk Shake Arena last January convinced me that this is the least viable NBA franchise and I wonder, at what point in the future, they start looking to greener pastures.

16. Minnesota Timberwolves: because I love me some KAT and would take him on my team in less than a second; because Coach Thibs has got a tough job ahead of him here, insofar as he has a ridiculous collection of young talent with no real experience and he’s going to have to manage expectations, since you could make a case for them winning anywhere from 35-50 games that’s valid and the natural tendency is to verge towards being wildly optimistic and hopeful when you haven’t won a damn thing in over a decade; because one way or another, they should be fun as hell.

15. Atlanta Hawks: because it seems like 100 years ago that this team was the #1 seed in the East; because I remember when Dwight Howard was in the NBA; because replacing Teague and Horford in your lineup with Schröder and Howard makes me go “hmm;” because the basketball gods have a cruel sense of humor and I can totally see this team winding up in the 4/5 matchup in the East playoffs, winning it and earning a chance to yet again be embarrassed off the court by the Cavaliers.

14. Miami Heat: because the luster of the Pat Riley era in Miami has been tarnished somewhat now that LeBron and D-Wade are gone, and Chris Bosh is soon likely to be gone, and none of them have a whole lot good to say about it; because we’ll see just how great a free agency destination this really is now that you have a bad roster and you’ve turned over the keys to the franchise to Hassan Whiteside; because all the talk is about the future of the franchise, since in the present, this team could be dreadful.

13. Brooklyn Nets: because Linsanity!; because name me one other player on this team; because name me one guy on this team anyone would want; because maybe they can final get through the Five Stages of Grief about all of the draft picks they’ve given away to the Celtics, because the picks aren’t coming back and they need to just get over it; because unlike in many seasons, when teams are really bad because they’re tanking to try and get the #1 pick, the Nets will actually be trying and still be really bad.

12. Los Angeles Lakers: because I suspect this team will put the fun in dysfunctional, what with all of the strange goings-on behind the scenes involving the Buss family fighting over the ownership and the possibility of a triumphant return of the Zen Master in the future; because getting rid of Byron Scott and the blowhard bombast of Kobe is addition by subtraction; because in Luke Walton’s first season on the bench, the on-court product is going to be bad, but everyone knows it and no one seems too bothered by it, so long as Russell and Ingram show some improvement; because this team just might tank at the end of the year to try and protect their draft pick, but that’s to be determined.

11. Phoenix Suns: because I like some of the pieces here, particularly Devin Booker, but I have no idea how many puzzles they go to; because the combination of promising young talent that doesn’t fit, and seasoned vets who don’t fit, should make them an interesting player come trade deadline time; because I have no idea what the hell they are going to do on the court, but I doubt much defense will be involved, and I also doubt many Suns wins will be involved; because so long as your team is owned by Robert Sarver, you’re liable to do something stupid as an organization which will end up in this blog.

10. Cleveland Cavaliers: because the Cavs somehow find a way to invent drama in their organization, even when they are on their way to a championship; because they may as well take most of the regular season off, since it doesn’t matter what their seed is going into the playoffs, and their biggest problem this season is going to be with managing the boredom, which leads me to a fascinating team which could possibly benefit from the Cavs’ general state of inertia and ennui and sneak up on them in the standings …

9. Boston Celtics: because at some point, having 84,000 draft pricks stockpiled has to actually translate into some good players; because it’s likely to happen this coming summer (Thanks Nets!); because I love me some Al Horford on this team, and I think they’re going to be a pain in the ass to play against; because someone make a damn shot!; because if the Cavs take a lot of the season off, which they might, and the Celtics put it all together, which they might, and maybe the Celtics are able to use some of those 84,000 draft picks and finally swing a deal at the trade deadline, then … wait, no, the Celtics can’t challenge the Cavaliers in the East, can they?

8. Houston Rockets: because wow, the offense is going to be amazing; because wow, the defense is going to be awful; because in Mike D’Antoni’s system, I expect James Harden to put up MVP numbers; because I think this team will win a lot of games this season, particularly at home, simply because they’ll be impossible for teams to prepare for on short notice; because conversely, I think the Warriors might put up 150 on this team, and the Clippers might put up 140 on this team, and it will be wildly entertaining; because unlike last season, they don’t seem to hate each other – yet.

7. Los Angeles Clippers: because having both Chris Paul and Blake Griffin in their contract year could either be a really good thing or a really bad thing; because their first four – those two guys + DeAndre Jordan and J.J. Redick – is good enough to beat 28 of the 29 other teams in this league all by themselves; because there are 300,000,000 people in this country but for some fuck knows why reason the Clippers can’t find one of them capable of playing the three; because as much as I like Doc as a coach, I hate him as a GM, and when the most successful thing you did in the offseason is give your son a larger allowance, it doesn’t impress me; because reaching the Western Conference finals, which I believe is the Clippers’ ceiling, will feel like both a success and a failure, which would be a uniquely Clippers sort of accomplishment.

6. New York Knicks: because one way or another, this team will force its way into the headlines; because whatever upside this team has after adding Noah and Rose in terms of their ability, the downside that comes from adding two guys who are perpetually injured is far, far greater; because the sooner they realize this is now Porzingis’ team, the better off they will be, but that ain’t gonna happen so long as Carmelo Anthony is there; because why is Kurt Rambis?; because I’ll be curious to see how Jeff Hornacek works under Phil Jackson, seeing as how he managed to nearly get the Suns into the playoffs a couple years ago with not-very-good talent; in that same vain, because I wonder if Hornacek will dare to junk the sacred Triangle offense – and if he does so, if it means that Phil is soon to be headed out the door.

5. Philadelphia 76ers: because it’s Year 1 of the post-zombie apocalypse era in Philly now that Sam Hinkie is no longer in charge of this franchise, and now that the ponzi scheme that was ‘The Process’ has collapsed, the roster Hinkie left behind is one helluva mess; because already Ben Simmons has broken his foot and Nerlens Noel is having “minor” knee surgery (of which there is no such thing), which sucks but also sort of solves, in the short term, the dilemma of how you possibly find enough minutes and enough space on the floor for Simmons and Noel and Okafor and Embiid and also Dario Šarić; because Embiid has looked great in short bursts in the pre-season, but is his conditioning anywhere close to being good enough to get through a whole season after being out for more than two years?; because at some point, the 76ers have to make some deals, since all of those big guys cannot possibly coexist, and it’s those deals which ultimately will determine where this team is going.

4. Chicago Bulls: because my God, this has to be most mismatched collection of talent that I’ve seen since those Mike D’Antoni Lakers teams; because you’ve added Rondo, who can’t shoot, and Wade, who can’t shoot, and also Michael Carter-Williams, who can’t shoot, and that right there are three of the bottom 10 in 3-pt FG% among active players with over 400 attempted treys, and all of them need the ball, and so does Jimmy Butler; because with all of the talk about Fred Hoiberg being “a college coach,” he now has essentially a college-type roster with a bunch of dudes who can’t throw it in the ocean; because it seems like Hoiberg is being set up to fail, which is weird, since it’s the guys who hired him who also assembled this roster.

3. Oklahoma City Thunder: because for fucksake, NBA media, stop it with this bullshit “boo hoo OKC got screwed” narrative that’s been cropping up all summer; and also because, for that matter, stop making it seem like Russell Westbrook did something other than simply maximizing his value when he signed that contract extension this summer, which is what he should do and which ultimately doesn’t have anything to do with the Thunder; because christ the media following this team are a bunch of babies; because when you see Westbrook’s usage rate this year, it will become crystal clear why Durant didn’t want to play with this dude in his contract year; because prognostications about this being a 50-win team and such are entirely based upon wishful thinking, since a lot of people don’t like the way that Durant bailed on them and want to pretend that they can still be good without him; because I don’t think they’ll be very good without him and I don’t really like this roster minus KD and Ibaka, even though I do love me some Steven Adams.

2. Sacramento Kings: because welcome to hell; because where do begin?; because oh yeah, we should probably begin with the fact that the owner comes off as a condescending twerp who is full of shit, and it doesn’t matter how tricked out your new building is, so long as you have a guy like that at the helm of the organization, your team is never never ever going to be any good; because I can’t understand why, after putting up with the constant ownership squabble going on behind the scenes in Memphis, Dave Joerger decided to commit career suicide by taking this coaching job; because not only is the present dire, but years of wasted draft picks combined with upcoming draft picks lost in bad trades make the future look even worse; because I suspect that they’ll be stubborn instead of being prudent, and won’t make inroads into trading Boogie Cousins when they really should do so, because they live in denial in Sacramento and they think they’ll somehow be able to convince him to re-sign and not leave when his contract expires.

1. Golden State Warriors: because, quite simply, this team is going to be great – but we won’t know just how great until the springtime.

Don't Take the World Serious

Party like it’s 1948

FROM the standpoint of The Lose, there are two dream World Series matchups. One would be the Washington Nationals against the Seattle Mariners, because it would be the first time both clubs had reached the Fall Classic. And the other? The Chicago Cubs vs. the Cleveland Indians – two franchises who’ve contributed greatly to the definition of modern failure in American sports. And now that the Indians have done away with the Blue Jays in the ALCS, and the Cubs taken care of the Dodgers in the NLCS, that second matchup has now come to fruition.

Be still my foolish heart.

I have a strange reason for my rooting interest in this World Series, one not based in any sort of reality at all, but entirely based upon a work of fiction – a work of fiction by me. In this novel that I published back in 2014, the main character is from Cleveland and he’s a big Indians fan. There is a scene in the book that takes place during a game between the Indians and the A’s on Aug. 16, 2013 at the Oakland Coliseum. The book was written intending for it to be happening in real time during the summer and fall of 2013, and a major event had occurred in the story on Aug. 15, and going to the Indians game the day after was the perfect way to launch the next phase of the plot. Later on in the story, I also folded in a Cavs game and a football game between Michigan and the Akron Zips, whom I had no idea would playing when I started writing this story about a guy from Cleveland who went to Akron and who has a sister who went to Michigan. (So, of course, they needed to wager on that game.) Three chapters of the book take place in Cleveland, and in keeping with my real time plot line, I made sure that, when he is sitting in a bar and his brother is watching a Browns preview show on the TV that I got the upcoming opponent correct, which was the Chiefs.

And, of course, I have written about Cleveland on this blog before.

So yeah, I am down with Cleveland. I am so down with Cleveland that the idea of Cleveland winning a championship softened considerably the blow of the Golden State Warriors losing the NBA Finals this past summer. But it also bears pointing out that, in this fictional world of mine which stars a loyal Cleveland Indians fan, that particular fan also has made a conscious choice not to wear anything with a Chief Wahoo logo on it. His particularly peculiar ethnicity is something of a running gag throughout the novel – no one really knows his true ethnicity, and he delights in the fact that no one can ever figure out where the hell he came from – and someone whose ethnicity is impossible to define also doesn’t like the club’s defining of an ethnicity using an awful caricature. And it pisses me off, because this is a franchise whose contributions to breaking the color barrier in baseball haven’t really gotten enough play: the Dodgers broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson in 1947, but the Indians took that barrier and stomped all over it once and for all by winning a World Series the following season with Larry Doby in the outfield and Satchel Paige in the bullpen, and as often happens in sports, shifts in thinking often change when it becomes you can no longer compete and no longer win – perhaps it’s not the right reason for change, but the end result is nonetheless correct. So the Indians winning a World Series in 1948 with black players on the team – in what also happened to be the first World Series televised by a national network – was actually a huge deal, but then the franchise blunts this legacy almost entirely by continuing to trot out this ghastly logo. Get rid of that damn thing already.

So now we’ve got the Indians in the World Series in a year where everything seems to be going Cleveland’s way, but of course it can’t all work out because this is Cleveland we’re talking about, after all. Tuesday was going to be a festive day in Cleveland already, since it’s opening day of the NBA season and the Cavs get their rings and get to hoist a championship banner into the rafter of The Q, but instead of getting to focus all of the attention on that, now you also have Game 1 of the World Series going on at the same time, so that attention naturally gets divided, and all the while you also have the Cleveland Browns limping towards an 0-16 season, having already used 6 QBs while going about confirming its status as the worst franchise in all of North American professional sports. It can never be too good in Cleveland. There is always a caveat.

And about those Cubs, who’ve now reached the World Series for the first time since 1945 and haven’t won the damn thing in 108 years. I’ve always had something of a disdain for the Cubs, who are a uniquely North American sporting phenomenon in that the franchise has spent much of those 108 years actively marketing and monetizing failure. No team fails as successfully as the Cubs do. Historically, attendance has increased in seasons when the team’s performance has plummeted. The entire narrative of the franchise has been that of a team that is “cursed,” with Bartman and the billy goat and all of that other nonsense, when in reality, they were generally terrible for most of those 108 years and ownership was perfectly happy with that. From a business standpoint, it makes twisted sense: if the team is wildly profitable regardless of on-field results, then why bother to invest in the product?

And there has always been this collective sense of masochism among the Cubs faithful. It was explained to me by a native Chicagoan, in the aftermath of the White Sox winning the World Series, that a lot of Cubs fans she knew had started out being Sox fans because the Sox were generally good, but had switched allegiances to the Cubs when they got older and more affluent and moved uptown. The chance to go to Wrigley for a game was an opportunity to channel their inner Rimbaud and revel in their angst while also trying to pick up chicks, as the atmosphere was something akin to a frat party booze cruise. Winning or losing didn’t seem to actually matter. In fact, winning could often be seen to be getting in the way. Were this Europe, of course, the Cubs would’ve been relegated decades ago and would be trawling about the lower leagues in irrelevance; instead, the Cubs are a multi-billion dollar bonanza.

In ripping the Cubs, of course, I must admit that I was really impressed by the reaction of the Cubs fans to their team reaching the World Series for the first time since 1945. There was a pervasive and remarkable sense of awe about it, an enormous sense of relief. Having been here in San Francisco for the end of a couple of enormous droughts – the Giants winning a World Series for the first time in 56 years, and the Warriors for the first time in 40 – that sense of relief was palpable and pervasive in both cases, a feeling that’s hard to describe and almost certainly impossible to replicate. It really does feel like a collective reward for a community having stuck it out for so long.

Long-suffering fans, of course, tend to develop appropriately good senses of humor about it all, and so you have to make it a point to mock them whenever possible. I once penned lyrics for a song called Cleveland mocking the Indians and set to the tune of Paul Simon’s Graceland. A particularly absurd tug-of-war developed, meanwhile, during the famous McGwire vs. Sosa home run chase, since we had some Cubs fans in the newsroom of The Santa Fe New Mexican, which is where I was working at the time, and we would rotate assignments nightly and you could rest assured that any time the Chicagoan was working the sports desk you’d have a giant photo of Sammy Sosa in the newspaper the next day – which actually got somewhat irritating and was soon widely ridiculed by the other staffers, one of whom was from St. Louis and always made a point of saying “the 9-time World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals” in the presence of the Cubs fans. Whenever I was on the sports desk, I’d try to get Ken Griffey Jr. in the paper – if you remember, he was in that home run chase for a large part of the season as well – and we finally reached the point of annoyance with these Cubs fans where the ultimate in newsroom chicanery came into play, which is to mock someone in-house by printing out a fake page: one with a huge picture of Swingin’ Sammy Sosa swingin’ for the fences with the headline SOSA: ‘I SPIT ON BABE RUTH’S GRAVE.’ If you scrolled through old copies from those days of mine at The New Mexican, you might find more than a few photo captions written in the form of haikus …

It’s somewhat unfortunate, of course, that one fan base’s collective lifelong angst is going to be relieved at the expense of another’s. The proper resolution for this series, it would seem, would be for the series to be tied 3-3 and have Game 7 called off because of the early onset of winter in Cleveland, making the baseball impossible due to heavy ice and snow settling in for months. If you think that scenario is utterly ridiculous, consider that Game 4 of the 1988 Stanley Cup finals between the Edmonton Oilers and Boston Bruins was never completed. Or maybe Game 7 will just never end. They’ll play for days on end, and Andrew Miller will throw 53 innings of scoreless relief and strike 155 batters out in the process. The late author Bill Kinsella (who was a friend to many of us in the scrabble community) has a marvelous novel entitled The Iowa Baseball Confederacy about a game involving the Chicago Cubs in the early 20th century that lasts for more than 2,000 innings. When you fail as frequently as these two teams, it just lends itself to letting the imagination run wild. Oh, and speaking again of fiction and the imagination, everyone should go back rewatch the film Major League, which has become a vital cog in the Cleveland faithful’s identity over time and which, interestingly, was given a 1-man tribute in 2014, on the 25th anniversary of its release, by David Ross, who will be catching in this series for … the Cubs … it just gets better and better ...

And, of course, the fans of whichever side wins will no longer be cute and charming and quaint. They’ll instantly become annoying and irritating and “the worst.” We kill our idols in sports, of course, and as soon as the downtrodden become powerful, they become the enemy. I’ve seen this first-hand here in San Francisco. I’ve seen this one a few times online: “Giants fans are THE WORST.” Yeah, right, like you gave two shits about Giants fans prior to 2010. Warriors hate is even more wonderful. One of my favorite tweeters routinely rounds up and retweets an assortment of scathing critiques of the Warriors and their fans, which is totally awesome, since you would have never heard that spoken during the 40 years prior to the Warriors winning an NBA title, during which time the franchise was something of a dumpster fire. Becoming a scourge because your team is successful is, on balance, a nice problem to have.

I’m going to root for the Indians, but not that fervently. In truth, I don’t really care that much who wins the World Series, and in a lot of ways, I’m not really sure that it matters. In the end, I think that baseball, as a whole, wins out in this particular World Series, because this series is very much a celebration of the loyalty of longstanding fandom. The role of the fans is very easy to downplay in the big business of sports, particularly as the revenue emphasis has shifted away from gate receipts and towards TV money, but if the fans didn’t exist, then ultimately neither would the games themselves. The players themselves have no connections whatsoever to Billy Goat curses or to Joe Table blowing the save in Game 7 against the Marlins. To the players, all of that stuff is ancient history, and it has nothing to do with them. Players come and go over time, but the fans are constant and, as such, the historical narrative of the franchise is a constant as well. This is gonna be fun. Sports are fun, they bring people together and are joyful and are best when not taken too seriously. The sun will, in fact, rise over Chicago or Cleveland the day after the World Series is over, and at that point, you can start building up the optimism again. There’s always next year, of course, and pitchers and catchers will be reporting for spring training sooner than you realize.

What a Glorious, Glorious Mess

We’re so screwed …

THE OFFICIAL Spouse of In Play Lose suggested that we go out for burgers and beer and catch the end of the Seattle-Arizona game at a local watering hole appropriately named The Phoenix. They were midway through the 4th Quarter at this point, and I hadn’t been watching the game, nor had I been the least bit bothered by this fact, since by all accounts online it wasn’t a particularly good game.

Which is putting it kindly. To be fair, the defenses were incredible for both teams, but …

When I had last looked at the stats online, with the game well into the 4th Quarter, the Seahawks had amassed a total of 3 first downs and 83 total yards. Their offense had run 28 plays the entire game up to that point, as opposed to Arizona’s 62. Yet they were only trailing 3-0 because they’d blocked a field goal and also stuffed Arizona on 4th down. Somehow, they were still in the game.

And if there were any team in the NFL I’d expect to find in a 3-0 game late in the 4th Quarter, it’d be the Seahawks, who have the best defense in the league and who have given up the fewest points in football in each of the past four seasons. They’ve invested heavily in their defense, which is loaded with some of the game’s best talent on that side of the ball: Earl Thomas, Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor, Michael Bennett (the last two of whom are hurt at the moment).

But the Seahawks also have an offense which is absolutely terrible. The Seahawks’ dilemma on the offensive side of the ball is, in my opinion, somewhat emblematic of the struggles I am seeing throughout the league as a whole – only in the Seahawks case, there is still enough overall talent in the squad to overcome most of the problems.

The Seahawks got to be one of the best organizations in football through scouting and player development. They beat the bushes looking for players and found gems all over the place. Other than Thomas, who was a #1 pick, most of their best players have been acquired later on in the draft. Being lower-level draft picks means they signed for cheap as rookies, meaning the Seahawks had money to spend on even more good players they found and developed. They won a Super Bowl through accruing an enormous stockpile of young, inexpensive talent on both sides of the ball. But young players who grow up to be stars ultimately have to be paid like stars. You can’t pay Russell Wilson like a 3rd round draft pick forever.

The Seahawks have chosen to invest heavily in their defense, and done so at the expense of their offense – and in particular, in their offensive line, which is a complete mess and can’t block anyone. It doesn’t do much good to invest $100m in Russell Wilson if you can’t keep him standing upright. Their offense line has been atrocious the past couple of seasons, and only seems to get worse. They could get away with it when they still had the now-retired Marshawn Lynch in the backfield, since Lynch was the best in the game at running behind his pads and being his own blocker, but now they have no running game to speak of and the normally fleet-footed Wilson’s been beat to shit as well and can barely move. The Seahawks one good drive in this entire game was ultimately stymied by holding penalties on consecutive plays – which, in the bigger picture, is probably an improvement over letting Wilson get clobbered two times more, but in the moment is utterly galling. I hate this team’s offensive line.

I mentioned in my last post, after watching that abysmal Broncos-Chargers game, and after watching some of that terrible Colts-Texans game last Sunday night, how I think the quality of play in the NFL isn’t very good – and the reason that is, I suspect, is entirely due to roster churn. In the NFL, when you have a 53-man roster and a salary cap to work with, you have to make choices how you’re going to spend your money. You have to pay your stars, of course, because they’re stars and you need them in order to succeed, but the trade-off is trying to pay less down the roster. The Seahawks, for an example, have an enormous number of rookies on their team this season, and they aren’t alone in that. Young players are cheap and available, but young players also make a lot more mistakes, and there is no opportunity to build any sort of continuity with all of this turnover. Football is, first and foremost, a game of attrition – at some point in time during a season, you’re likely going to need everyone on your roster other than your 3rd QB to make a contribution. This isn’t like other sports, where you can just bury young players deep on the bench for the whole season. Everyone on the squad needs to play, and often needs to play a lot, and more inexperienced players mean fewer cohesive units, which means more mistakes, which means the overall quality of play suffers across the league.

And where this is most evident, of course, is on special teams, which is usually composed entirely of said youngsters alongside a few return specialists and the obligatory flaky kickers. We saw some doozies today on special teams in the NFL. The 49ers gave away a possession against those pewter pirates from Tampa Bay with this rather remarkable return in a game seen by dozens at The Pants down in Santa Clara:

Meanwhile, the Jacksonville Jaguars – the league’s closest equivalent to the Sacramento Kings – did somehow contrive to let the Oakland Raiders punter, who fumbled a snap, run 30 yards on 4th-and-24:

Which brings us back the Arizona Cardinals, who are getting ready to punt with 4:45 left in the game right about the time I sit down with a Harp and order a burger at The Phoenix. The Seahawks offense has been inept, and basically all they need to do is play good defense and be sound on special teams and they’ll sneak out with a 3-0 win. Ugly? Sure, but they all count the same, in the end.

So, of course, the Cardinals get the punt blocked.

And what’s worse, the Seahawks don’t even have the block on. They were playing for the return. They block the punt because one of their guys just basically pushes an upback right into the Arizona punter while everyone else is running down field to set up a return. Had the block been on, this likely would’ve been a Seahawks TD. As it were, the lone other Seahawks guy in the general vicinity comes up with the ball at the Arizona 30 yard line. And this is inexcusable from Arizona. The blocked punt is one of the single worst plays to give up in football, because of the field position and momentum swings. You just can’t do that.

But it’s the Seahawk offense we’re talking about here, and they do nothing at all. But their kicker Steven Hauschka somehow wobbles a long field goal through the uprights to tie the score. Hauschka has generally been a good kicker in his career but he’s had some particular problems in games in Phoenix. Apparently, it’s not a great surface for kickers – it’s a weirdly unique surface that actually gets rolled out of the domed stadium after games. In any case, the score is now 3-3 and it’s off to OT, at which point the game gets preposterous.

The teams swap FGs on the first two possessions in OT, so it is 6-6 and now it is sudden death, but you really feel like Arizona is going to win the game because the Seahawks defense is gassed. They have been out on the field for almost 90 plays and over 46 minutes and the Cardinals march to the 1 yard line but the Seahawks manage to stuff the Cards there and then, after a delay of game, on come Arizona kicker Chandler Catanzaro to win it with a 24 yard FG. A gimme. A chip shot. A piece of cake …

Doink! Off the upright. No good.

Earlier in the game, the Seahawks had blocked a FG by having LB Bobby Wagner time the snap and jump over the center into the backfield, which is a legal play so long as you don’t use the center to gain any sort of leverage. Wagner did it again on this kick at the end of the game – you can see it really well on the slo-mo replay from field level and imagine how unnerving this is for a kicker, because the ball is being placed down and there’s an opponent right in your face! So Catanzaro gets spooked, shanks the kick and the score remains tied, and a tie in this situation is as good as a loss for Arizona, since they are 1½ games behind the Seahawks in the NFC West and desperately need a win. They’ve literally kicked this game away.

And the Seahawk offense then marches down the field in what is as much as garbage time, since this game still being tied is playing with house money and since the unit is still somewhat fresh, seeing how they’ve scarcely been on the field all night. They get down to the Arizona 10 with :10 on the clock and on comes Hauschka for a 28-yard chip shot of his own …

… and he misses wide left. Good snap, good hold, no pressure. Hauschka just spazzed.

What the actual hell is going on?

I don’t think you’ll see a weirder game in the NFL all season. This game ends 6:6, pretty much like it was meant to be. Ties don’t happen very often in the NFL – and usually when they do, it means that both teams probably deserved to lose.

Amazingly enough, I’ve actually been in attendance for an NFL game which ended in a tie, which happened in 1997 at New Jack City in Landover, a game which ended 7:7 between the Redskin Potatoes and the New York Giants which was most notable because Potatoes QB Gus Frerotte scored on a 1-yard run, ran out of the end zone in excitement, head-butted a wall and concussed himself and had to leave the game. I was actually saving mention of that game for a piece I’m working on about the worst sporting events I’ve ever seen, but tonight’s nonsense in Phoenix demanded being blogged about and, thus, that nugget of a night back in 1997 needed to be unearthed.

This was a truly terrible game tonight between two of the league’s supposedly better teams. As terrible as the NFL has been about, well, almost everything, it’s always been a league that does try to figure out ways to improve the game and make it better. They were the first to add replays, they’ve adopted rule changes when the balance tilts too much towards the offense or the defense, etc. But from what I’ve seen so far this season – which, admittedly, isn’t much – the overall quality play in the NFL seems really, really poor right now, which goes a lot father towards explaining why the ratings are down than any other excuses like elections or hurricanes or discontent with guys protesting the national anthem. The game just isn’t very good right now.

But for the last 5:00 of the 4th Quarter, and the 15:00 of OT, this was bad football at its finest. Inept offense, woful special teams, strange coaching decisions, penalties, along with a few moments of brilliant defense to remind you how the game is actually supposed to work. What a glorious, glorious mess this was. I’ve not enjoyed such an awful display in ages. It almost makes me want to watch more NFL … almost, but not quite.

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.