The Scarlet Letter

The game of basketball was a big winner today, because this guy lost his job and will likely never coach at a significant level again. Nor should he. He’ll be branded for life for this, and deservedly so. And I’m all for second chances, mind you, but anyone who does something like this needs another line of work. The fundamental covenant of education – that a school environment provides a safe place for young people to learn – seems to have been forgotten here by all the supposedly responsible adults. And some vulgar, bullying boor throwing around racially tainted and homophobic slurs has no place being on the payroll of the State University of New Jersey, nor anywhere else for that matter.

And frankly, the cowardly Rutgers A.D. who didn’t fire him on the spot needs to go too. Hiring Mike Rice to coach the basketball team was his first big hire at the school, you see, and he didn’t want to eat the slice of humble pie with a side of crow that comes with admitting you fucked up. Suspending him for three games? Really? What a joke. His judgment has clearly been compromised, and he has no business continuing in his position, either.

You can understand why the kids never said anything, as the deck is stacked against them. A school can revoke your scholarship, make it difficult for you to transfer. It’s a shitty system in need of reform. Frankly, I think the kids in this video show amazing restraint. If one of them had popped this jerkstore in the mouth, it would’ve been understandable.

Rutgers’ basketball program has been a mess for years, the coaching position occupied by a revolving door of lunatics fired for all sorts of bizarre and unprofessional behaviours. But whomever the Scarlet Knights hire next, it can’t be any worse than this … can it?

Pain in the Astros

Baseball season is here, and IN PLAY LOSE is curious about the season opener tonight simply because it may be the only time all year the Houston Astros are not in last place. Then again, they could lose to the Texas Rangers at Orange Juice Park tonight, drop to last and stay there all season, which is a far more likely result.

Here is the 2012 Astros in a nutshell. (The best part of that video is when Nats' announcer F.P. Santangelo is literally rendered speechless at what he has just seen.) They finshed 2012 with a record of 55-107, a robust 42 GB the Cincinnati Reds. And the 2013 version may be even worse, if that is possible. The 2013 Astros have a team payroll lower than what the Yankees are paying Alex Rodriguez (which also speaks as to why the Yankees are a mess this year, but that is for another blog). The Astros have also switched leagues and been dropped into the AL West, which looks like it could be the toughest division in baseball this season, what with the über-loaded California Los Angeles Angeles of Garden Grove Anaheim, the talented-if-neurotic Rangers, the sneaky A's and what looks to be a resurgent Mariners team. (Yeah, I know. I'll believe it when I see it.) It's not outside the realm of possibility that the Astros could challenge the 1962 Mets' 40-120 for the worst record in modern day history. I don't have any ill will towards the Astros, and I applaud the return to their traditional colours, but this team is gonna be jawdroppingly bad this year. Patience, maalox, and strong drink had better be in large supply in Houston this year.

There will be plenty of good seats available.

A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

I chronicled the misfortunes of the New Mexico Lobos in my previous post here on IN PLAY LOSE, and today the Good Guys from Albuquerque have a new problem on their hands: namely, replacing coach Steve Alford, who signed a new 10-year contract a matter of weeks ago and then promptly bolted to UCLA.

Such is the nature of the Cult of the College Basketball Coach, which is one of the most toxic, noxious curiosities in American sports.

Alford said that he was extremely happy in Albuquerque, of course, but that this opportunity fell in his lap and was just too good to pass up. Which is rubbish, of course, because it was common knowledge that now ex-UCLA coach Ben Howland was in trouble this season, and it was going to take some real positive NCAA results to salvage his job (and 20-pt. losses in the first round to Minnesota do not count as "positive results" in Westwood). If you think someone who has a job you want is gonna get fired, you definitely keep your eye on that job. When you sign a new deal like that and then bolt immediately for 'greener' pastures, you just look like the selfish, self-absorbed fraud that you really are.

But this is pretty common, unfortunately, in a strange sport which makes no sense – a sport where players make nothing and turn over every few years while the small men with Napoleonic complexes and control issues become icons, become larger than life and larger than the institutes of higher learning whose principles they supposedly are there to uphold. Don't demand loyalty and commitment from players and A.D.'s and then flaunt the fact that the rules don't seem to apply to you. That's just lame and disingenuous.

I'm skeptical of this whole series of moves, as I believe that hiring a coach interested in themselves more than anything else leads to generally negative results. For all of his good work in the 505, Alford has shown himself to be an opportunist just like seemingly everyone else in his chosen field. Sure, it's a business, but don't pretend you're something that you're not. Being treated like a rock star ultimately means not needing to be accountable for your actions a whole lot of the time ... unless you start losing, of course, and UCLA's definition of 'losing' is a lot different than at most other places.

Where it goes from there is anyone's guess, of course – it all comes down to recruiting and procuring talent, of which there is an abundance in Southern California. UCLA has been rife with turnover and incohesion of late – several guys who Howland ran out of Westwood ended up at New Mexico, interestingly enough, and there is hope Alford can keep those kids home.

And I should point out that I'm not about to go "boohoo, poor New Mexico" here, since they should've known what they were getting into when they hired Alford in the first place – he had a sub-stellar run at Iowa (another school with notoriously unrealistic expectations) and then went about slipping out of Iowa City about the time the natives started getting restless. This is how this game is played. You poach someone from another school and then try to figure out some way to keep them if they're any good. Loyalty is a no-way street. If you hire an opportunist who looks out for #1, you shouldn't be surprised when they look out for #1 at your expense.

And I put the word 'greener' in quotes before because it's debatable whether or not UCLA, at the moment, is really a better job than New Mexico. The Bruins just fired a coach who went to the Final Four three straight years. With 11 national championships comes unrealistic expectations – particularly at a school notorious for being stingy with the purse strings when it comes to the athletic budget. For all the history of the place, Pauley Pavilion is a pretty average facility, and for all the success over the years, the L.A. populace views UCLA hoops with a surprising amount of indifference. (I'd rather have 18,000 hoops junkies piled high in The Pit any day.) New Mexico may have bombed out in the NCAAs but they essentially have their entire roster back next year, so a new coach will have the opportunities to win in a hurry. I'll be curious to see who they hire.

In Play Lobo

It wouldn’t be the NCAA Tournament without a choke by the New Mexico Lobos, who are quite possibly the most successful college basketball program that’s never won anything. It was considered a massive upset for the #3 seed Lobos to fall 68-62 to the #14 seed Harvard Crimson in the 1st 2nd round of the NCAA tournament, but if you know anything about New Mexico, you know that the Lobos never win in the NCAAs. The first article I randomly opened about the game started with the line “New Mexico must be cursed.” No argument here.

New Mexico is a state full of basketball fanatics and their two D-1 universities both consistently make the NCAA tourney. (As opposed to football, where the two schools are often laughably bad.) New Mexico State has a pretty impressive tradition – 20 NCAA appearances, including making the Final Four in 1970, and the Aggies were always Jerry Tarkanian’s biggest nemesis during UNLV’s glory days of the late 1980s. New Mexico State is one of those places filled with JC’s, foreign players, and transfers from other schools, and so the teams are radically different from one year to the next and fluctuate wildly. (This year they had something like 5 Canadians, including a 7’5” center of Indian descent.) Nowadays, the Aggies play in the lower-level WAC and are perpetually seeded like 12th or 13th and make a quick exit from the tournament.

As for the Lobos from New Mexico, well, they’re a source of considerable angst in the Land of Enchantment. They’ve got a passionate fan base that borders on fanatical and play in one of the sports most iconic venues, The Pit, which is, in fact, a pit. It’s dug into the ground and you walk down the stairs from the entry to your seats. The place is loud, deep, and intimidating for opponents. Between the 18,000 maniacs in the stands and the 5,000 ft. elevation in Albuquerque, the Lobos have a considerable home court advantage. They’ve been verging on being a powerhouse at the sport for decades.

And they always blow it.

I heard quite a few commenters asking in the run-up to the tourney if this was New Mexico’s “year.” Well, no, because it’s never their year. If there was ever “their year” is was this team in 1978, which then promptly, inexpicably lost to Cal St. Fullerton in the first round of the NCAAs. Love the clothes in those pictures and the scores of those games. Holy crap, a team that could actually shoot, which is such a foreign concept in contemporary college basketball. But the Lobos weren’t particularly interested in playing defense, and it caught up to them.

That, right there, is one of the biggest single chokes in NCAA history. All they had to do was beat Cal St. Disneyland and they got to play in the Sweet 16 on their home court. Norm Ellenberger, the coach of that team, had his career came to a dubious end:  

The turning point in Ellenberger's career came with "Lobogate," a lurid episode involving forged academic transcripts, payments made for bogus junior-college credits to keep players eligible, and other devices permitting individuals entirely lacking academic credentials to be represented as college students while playing on Ellenberger's team. The episode began with an FBI wiretap on the phone of a prominent Lobo booster, recording a conversation in which Ellenberger arranged with assistant coach Manny Goldstein to transfer bogus credits from a California junior college to the office of the UNM registrar. Subsequent investigation turned up a manufactured college seal from Mercer County Community College in New Jersey, along with blank transcripts and an extensive record of previous forgery … Ellenberger managed to remain popular in Albuquerque even after the Lobogate scandal decimated the Lobo basketball program, forced him to resign as head coach, and left him with criminal liability. An NCAA investigation into Lobo recruiting practices found 57 rule violations, and Ellenberger himself was convicted on 21 counts of fraud two years later. His restaurant ventures continued to do well, but he was never able to return formally to a major head coaching position.

Both schools in the state have had their run-ins with the NCAA over the years. The state of New Mexico is definitely off the beaten path, and recruiting has definitely been done on the fringes. For as much as people love the game there, the state itself doesn’t produce a whole lot of Div. 1 talent. Still, the home court environment and the fact that the team is perpetually successful make it an easier sell to a kid than it could be.

I lived in New Mexico during a particularly galling era of the late 90s, when the Lobos had some of their most talented teams ever, led by future NBA first-round pick Kenny Thomas, and yet they’d get into the NCAA tournament and pretty much just forget how to play (while Utah, their fiercest rival in the new Mountain West, was going so far as actually reaching the NCAA final in 1998). The Lobos were coached by Dave Bliss back then, and using the word ‘coached’ seems like a stretch, because come crunch time in a close game, they always looked completely disorganized. Bliss was a strange guy whose career came to a terrible conclusion after he'd taken the job in Baylor, having left New Mexico, in part because his team's constant underachieving in the NCAA's had become such a source of frustration around the campus and the fan base. A hallmark of his coaching career, be it at New Mexico or at SMU before that, was churning out team after team that should’ve been better than they were, as his ability to recruit top talent was neutered by his inability to maximize it.

The Lobos are now coached by Steve Alford, who I pretty much hated when he was a player, but he’s done remarkably well in his tenure in ABQ so I have to give him some props. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been able to find the right spell to cast to undo the voodoo curse that is the NCAA tournament. It's bizarre, really, how this higher level of failure can continually perpetuate itself when the players turn over so quickly – what happens in 2013 has no real connection to 1978 of 1998 at all, of course. But once that culture of failure takes hold (and make no mistake about it, losing in the first days of the NCAA's yet again will be construed as a failed season in The Land of Enchantment), it can be absolutely impossible to shake and span generations.

My immediate response to watching the Lobos gag vs. the Crimson and make an early exit from the tournament was to look at the calendar and confirm that it was a day ending in Y, which is about as newsworthy. I do have a fondness for the Lobos, since I consider New Mexico a sort of home state of mine, and I was certainly interested back when I was working the sports desk at the Santa Fe New Mexican. I definitely want them to do well. But until they can win both games on the first weekend of the tournament, I cannot take them seriously.

March Badness

As a primer for both the NCAA tournament and a long blog to come in the coming days about a school dear to my heart that loses like none other – the Cougars of Washington State University – I offer up this gem from the first round of the 1994 NCAA Tournament:

Fast forward to about the 9:00 mark to see the Cougars dumbly gag this one away. It was a ridiculously talented team possessing 2 future NBAers (one of whom also went on to play Major League Baseball) and a third guy who eventually became the leading scorer in school history. This result therefore constituted a gross underachievement.

This story doesn't have a whole lot of happy endings. This was Kelvin Sampson's last game as coach of W.S.U. He then went onto Oklahoma, where his team reached the Final Four but he ran afoul of the NCAA, then moved onto Indiana, where he ran so far afoul of the NCAA that there is currently a show-cause order against him – which is essentially a way of blackballing him from taking another college coaching job. He seemed to leave a mess whenever he left, and the W.S.U. program disintegrated over the course of the next 7-8 years.

Meanwhile, Tony Harris, who was W.S.U.'s best player and leader and who missed the free throw and committed the needless foul 35 feet from the basket with :05 left in the game and then flung the ball wildly at the basket at the game, went onto play in the NBA but then this happened in Brazil. Such a circumstance has always made it hard to approach this particular W.S.U. choke job with the necessary amount of humour.

What the fax is going on?

Many thanks to IN PLAY LOSE follower Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod for passing along this little bit of incompetence from the world of the NFL. It's one of the more baffling contract snafus of recent memory, involving defensive lineman Elvis Dumervil of the Denver Broncos. Or, at least, he used to be with the Broncos. Read on from this link from Yahoo! football guru Michael Silver:

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/nfl--what-the-fax--elvis-dumervil-contract-snafu-could-shift-balance-of-power-in-afc---002225119.html

Who the hell uses fax machines anymore? I've always HATED fax machines. They always struck me as proof positive of my assertion that the more humans perfect technology, the more technology acts like humans – for better and most certainly for worse, and fax machines always act like idiots. Fax machines just aren't the mood a lot of the time. They break for no apparent reason, just DON'T FEEL like working sometimes, and the number of important docs I've had come out sideways on wrinkled, crumpled paper are too many to count. One of the finer moments of my professional existence occurred at a Credit Union where I was a temp when my boss instructed me to help him gravity test the fax machine and we promptly threw it off the balcony of a 3-story building. It pleases me to report that gravity was working that day.

Jeez, couldn't Dumervil's agent just quickly snap a bunch of instagrams of the contract's pages and email them? There's no precedent for that, but its better than sitting around getting busy signals on one end and PC – LOAD LETTER error messages on the other.

The LOSE apologizes for hibernating longer than the Chicago Cubs here. We'll get it going at some point here soon. There always seems to plenty of time for losing, but maybe not enough time to write about it.

King of My Personal Belgium

The reason there has been nothing but crickets here the last couple of weeks is that the LOSE has been working a couple of jobs simultaneously, striving and straining to make a couple of deadlines (which happened to be on the same day) and managing to make neither (though failing to make said deadlines, as it turned out, had very little to do with anything I was doing).

Along with my Hero of the Week, I will occasionally crown various citizens of my personal Belgium as royalty for the week. As has been stated before, I feel a kinship to the Belgians, who live in the most successful failed state in history and manage to cope with the lunacy through dabbling in absurdism and drinking lots of beer.

This week's King of My Personal Belgium earned his honour by finding a unique solution to a time-old dilemma here in Brussels San Francisco, which is having to move your car early in the morning. They're very concerned with making easy money through parking tickets keeping the streets spiffy here, which means streetsweepers come charging weekly and the weasels from the Department of Parking and Transportation ticket pretty much any parked vehicle that gets in the way. So the other day, we're driving down César Chávez St. and we see a guy hastily stagger out of his house, dressed in slippers and a robe and needing to move his car. He jumps in, starts it up ...

And drives it over the kerb and parks it on the sidewalk.

Now that is the sort of out of your mind the box thinking that will earn you nobility in this little failed state in which I live. I hereby declare Mr. Fuzzy Slippers Parking on the Sidewalk to be King of My Personal Belgium for the week.

We'll get back to our more regular schedule of losing here in a few days. Between now and then, I can hopefully get some shit done.

To Right the Rudderless Ship

We go long-form here with our entries at the LOSE, as I spend quite a bit of time thinking about what it is that I want to say. I just wanted to mention here before we get going with this particularly long entry that there will be some factual errors from time to time, as I tend to write a lot of this stuff off the top of my head. And since my brain is mush, I’ll almost certainly get some stuff wrong. So if I’m factually inaccurate, I appreciate it if people point it out to me and I will gladly make correction(s) to the error(s). We regret the errors.

“We regret the errors” read the slogan on the back of my jersey on the last softball team I ever played on. The worst softball team in the history of the city. going 0-10 and losing most of our games by scores like 30-0 and 29-2. We were called The Corrections and we did a lot of regretting as the season went along.

It’s early February, and that means that pitchers and catchers report to Arizona and Florida for the start of spring training in a couple weeks. Welcome news if you’re a baseball fan. And if you’re a baseball fan in the Pacific Northwest, that also means it is time to stock up on the Excedrin, the Maalox, and probably a few bottles of Jack Daniels in preparation for the season that lies ahead.

Losing at baseball is a natural fit here for the LOSE blog, simply because there is so damn much of it. Even when you’re good, you lose a lot, because the margin between teams is so small. Consider last year, when the local club spent the equivalent of 2½ months’ worth of days losing. 2½ months! That’s a lot of failure. Take something that you like to do and suck at every day for 2½ months. Try it. I bet you’ll be sick of it. Yes, the local nine endured the equivalent of 2½ months of failure. 2½ months of me and KC covering our eyes or lamenting what we’re hearing on the radio or reaching for the bourbon.

And we had it good here in San Francisco. We got to have a parade at the end of season and everything.

My Giants heritage dates back to one of my first baseball watching experiences, which was back in 1976 when we first were living in the Bay Area. I actually remember it quite clearly, because the orange team was playing the blue team and I annoyed my dad when I pointed at the screen and said “I like THAT team. They’re wearing orange.”

He was not amused. The blue team was the Dodgers and my dad is a Dodger fan. I’m sure, at this point, he was wondering what he had done to have the cruel fate befall him of a Giants-loving son. Clearly this child was demented. But I just knew instinctively, from a young age, that rooting for the Dodgers was a wrong which needed to be countered. 

And when I moved to San Francisco in 2000, I rekindled my long-lost love for the orange-and-black. It’s been pretty remarkable, seeing a team I like actually win two World Series – and not just over the course of my life, either, but twice in three seasons! With all of this winning, I don’t really know what to do with myself.

But it’s not really that much winning, is it? It’s just a little bit more than everyone else. That’s part of what makes baseball fascinating, really. The difference between winning and losing is so minute that failure is inevitable. The whole game is about failure, in some ways, because in almost all situations the team with the sticks in their hands is at an enormous disadvantage. I mean, the .300 hitter is a superstar in baseball – the guy who FAILS 70% of the time! You have to come to accept that a fair amount of failure is going to happen. If a particular game stinks, you can just play another one tomorrow.

The Giants of 1976, as it turned out, were not particularly good, finishing 28 GB of in the NL West of the eventual World Series champions, the Big Red Machine from Cincinnati. And when my family returned to the Pacific Northwest in 1977, I discovered a brand new baseball club waiting there to capture my attention, a new franchise that played in an awesome domed stadium in Seattle. The Seattle Mariners were born and I became a fan, since they were the local team and they were easy to follow.

Boy, was that ever a mistake.

The Mariners made some headlines this past week, agreeing with pitcher Felix Hernandez on a 7-year contract worth $175,000,000. “King Felix” is, at 26 years of age, one of the brightest stars in the game. You can count on one hand the number of pitchers in baseball who are his equal. He has already won a Cy Young award, and did so on a team that lost 101 games, mainly because it possessed the worst offense in the contemporary era of baseball. The team has generally been terrible throughout his entire career – and was generally terrible before his career, for that matter – and the speculation for years has been that Felix would leave Seattle via free agency, and that the Mariners would be forced to trade him to the damn Yankees the highest bidder, to try and recoup some sort of value before he walked. At the same time, there are risks involved. Pitchers break down, of course, even a horse like King Felix who seems impervious to throwing 200 innings every year. It’s a huge investment on their part, with no true guarantee of success.

But the Mariners ultimately had no choice in the matter. They simply had to sign him. Along with being one of the most phenomenal pitchers in the game, Felix Hernandez is also steadfastly loyal to the only organization he has known. He is a team-first guy who loves the city and who has never, ever complained about the fact that the team around him has pretty much sucked. In short, he’s the ideal guy to build a championship franchise around. Superstars of that magnitude don’t come along that often, and letting one slip away can be disastrous to any franchise – but to a franchise like the Mariners, it may have been a blow from which they’d been hard-pressed to ever recover. It’s one thing to be a bad team, but it’s another to do what the ownership of the Seattle Mariners has somehow done in the past 18 years, which is to take every ounce of a city’s good will and squander it, waste it all and leave the fanbase indifferent at best, and antagonistic at worst.

Other than the nights that King Felix is pitching, the hallows of Safeco Field are generally dormant. Plenty of good seats are available. After finishing last in the AL West in seven of the past nine seasons, the Mariners average attendance has plummeted by more than 50%. It’s been a remarkably bad run, and given the history of the club, that’s saying something. Because by any definition, the Mariners are one of the worst franchises in the history of professional sports.

Only the San Diego Padres have a lower all-time winning percentage than the Mariners, but at least the Padres have played in a couple of World Series during their own substandard existence. The Mariners have never been, one of only two franchises that can say that (and the Nationals seem poised to bust out, so the M’s will likely soon be on the clock all by themselves). They’ve had only four playoff appearances and something like 10 winning seasons in their history. They started off their tenure by rolling off 14 consecutive losing seasons – not exactly a great way to ingratiate yourself to the fan base. They were run on the cheap throughout the 1980s and put up one dreadful season after another, to which the fans responded by either staying away in droves – it wasn’t out of the question for the M’s to play before 4,000,000 empty seats during a season at the cavernous Kingdome – or sitting in embarrassed silence. You could go to a game against the Cleveland Indians in September with 5,000 of your closest friends and actually hear baserunners and the 1st baseman talking to each other on the field.

There would be some flashes of hope from time to time – they’d put some young talent together that would overachieve and be around .500 at the All-Star Break, but then would come some roadtrip of death in August during which they’d go 1-8 or something. Usually that involved getting swept by the Twins at the Glad Bag in Minneapolis and/or getting swept by the Royals when it was 140° on the field in Kansas City. So hope of another season would dissipate, and the following year they’d almost certainly be terrible as whatever young talent they had would suddenly regress. The August swoon was almost like clockwork. You could count on it like the swallows returning to Capistrano.

There was finally some hope starting in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, as the Mariners timed it well and happened to be abysmal just at the right time twice to land #1 picks in the draft in years when future Hall of Famers were available – Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez. They’d also finally made some deals in which they hadn’t been completely fleeced. Not only was the ownership cheap in the 1980s, but the front office was incompetent. It doesn’t make for a very good combination. But starting with the Jay Buhner-for-Ken Phelps trade which became the stuff of Seinfeld episodes and then landing a young Randy Johnson from the Expos, there was some hope for the good ship Mariner, which was skippered by new owner Jeff Smulyan who had big, big plans.

Big plans in Florida.

Smulyan was leveraged to the hilt, and had borrowed heavily to acquire the team. And during a meeting at Security Pathetic Pacific Bank, he outlined his plans for the Mariners – he would trigger an escape clause in their lease at the Kingdome and relocate the franchise to the shiny new Florida Suncoast Dome in St. Petersburg.

Now, Tampa had long been the hammer that owners used to blackmail cities into building new ballparks – “build it or we’re going to Florida.” But Smulyan believed that the Kingdome wasn’t a viable ballpark, nor did he think that people in Seattle really cared a whole lot about the club, because attendance had always lagged behind the rest of baseball.

But could you really blame them for not showing up? Other than the bizarre ritual of the Cubs fans in Chicago, who continually pack Wrigley Field despite the team being wretched for a century and seem to think it’s hip and cool to suffer, bad teams aren’t going to generate a whole lot of interest. And the good folks in Seattle, quite understandably, had never shown a whole lot of passion for a franchise that was consistently a loser.

So Smulyan had this plan in place, which he’d laid out at a high-level meeting, and then came one of the greatest bits of corporate espionage in history – somebody at the bank, who happened to be a baseball fan, took the confidential notes from this meeting and faxed them to the Seattle Times. I’m not sure who the Emerald City’s version of Deep Throat is, and I’m not sure that (s)he has ever been identified, but they should have their number retired and fluttering in the rafters, as they probably did more to save the Seattle Mariners franchise than anyone else.

From what appeared to be the franchise’s darkest days came a series of stunning events – given 45 days to come up with a buyer, the city coddled together a bunch of business execs, backed by the head of Nintendo in Japan, to come up with $100,000,000 to buy the club. Even so, the ballpark issue had to be addressed, and the taxpayers of King County were having none of it and voted down a tax increase to pay for it. It was an understandably intellectual position taken by a notoriously overly-intellectual city. Had I still lived in King County at the time (I had drifted down to Olympia), I would’ve voted YES, but I can certainly understand why people voted NO.

But then ... the Mariners STARTING WINNING. Down 13½ games in the standings in August to the California Angels in 1995, the Mariners went on this weird, strange, insane hot streak. They won games in ways you didn’t think possible, and you’d want to go to the Kingdome just to see what else ridiculous could happen. They would crush teams, they come from behind, they would get shutdown relief pitching from journeymen washups, the would have strange heroes (or should that be Strange heroes, since Doug Strange was always delivering key hits), or the most unfathomable guys do the unexpected and lead to conversations such as this:

“Did Vince Coleman really just hit a grand slam or am I high?”
“Both.”
“OK, just checking.”

The Mariners came all the way back to tie the Angels by season’s end, then they beat the Angels 9-1 in a hastily arranged 1-game playoff in the Kingdome, a game which turned on a bases-loaded, wormkilling dribbler from Luis Sojo down the first base line that eluded the first baseman at clanged around in the bullpen, at which point the Angels made mess of it in the field and, when it was over, all four runners had scored! It was yet another ludicrous outcome in a ludicrous season, and the fans were going mad as hatters.

But the “REFUSE TO LOSE” Mariners didn’t stop there. They then beat the Yankees 3-2 in a 5-game playoff that was one of the greatest playoff series in baseball history, a series featuring 15-inning games and 6-run comebacks and all sorts of madness and mayhem, culminating in the franchise’s signature play in the bottom of the 11th of Game 5:

The Double, as it’s known. I never get tired of watching that. I  have a tendency to post the highlights of some of my favourite moments in sports, just because there’ve been so damn many awful ones. I don’t need to see highlights of the Mariners losing to the White Sox for the 863rd consecutive time. I saw the highlights of the other 862, and I suspect that they weren’t a whole lot different.

And even though the exhausted Mariners had nothing left in the tank, and lost the ALCS in 5 games to the powerhouse Cleveland Indians ... yes, that’s right, I just said that ... Seattle had suddenly became a baseball town. Seattle loved the Mariners. The  team’s wacky ride had captured the public’s imagination. And even though King County had originally voted down the stadium proposal, politicians in Olympia then jumped on the bandwagon and picked up the slack, forking over something like $500,000,000 for the construction of Safeco Field, a gorgeous new ballpark right next door to that ugly concrete mushroom fungus called the Kingdome, whose days were now most definitely numbered:

I was actually somewhat sad to see it go. The Kingdome actually had a seat at the top of the third deck in rightfield that was painted a different colour, having been declared “the worst seat in Major League Baseball,” because it was so damn far from home plate. But for a zany fanbase for a franchise which had become (in)famous for it’s absurdist promotions – from things like Funny Nose Glasses Night to Randy Johnson Dyslexic Jersey Night (he had changed from 51 to 15 to try and stem a losing skid) – obtaining that seat became almost a badge of honour. And even though it seemed MILES away from the field, it didn’t actually seem like a stretch that Jr. could hit one up there. Because the Kingdome, for being an unsightly mess of a place, was the ultimate hitters park.

And the Mariners set offensive records in the Kingdome’s dying days. With a top flight front office team – GM Pat Gillick and Manager Lou Piniella – they accrued so much talent in the late 1990s that they could make ill-advised deals at the trade deadline and still absorb the losses to their farm system. Not that it was much consolation at the time, of course – the dreaded Jason Varitek-for-Heathcliff Slocumb deal of 1998 still ruffles the feathers (but you’re welcome, Red Sox, for the M’s providing you with your captain and spiritual leader of your World Series winners) – as the Mariners still couldn’t break through and win the big one, but the franchise was on the rise and the attendance levels SOARED. The fans packed the new Safeco Field, a gorgeous park with a retractable roof and the Mariners continued to build.

How much talent did this team have? The 1998 Mariners had three legit Hall of Famers (Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, and Randy Johnson) and arguably a fourth (Edgar Martinez). Over the course of three years, they traded Jr. to the Reds, traded Johnson to the Astros, and A-Rod left in free agency. And after each departure, the team got better. This culminated in a remarkable 2001 season, during which the Mariners won 116 games, tying for the best record in history.

... aaand then they lost in the ALCS. To the damn Yankees. Sigh. They picked the wrong time to have a bad week. Sabermetric stat nerds who pollute permeate the baseball fanbase have attempted, over the years, to discount and discredit playoff performances. They argue, in essence, that it’s such a small sample size of games, as opposed to a 162-game season, that the results of the playoffs are far too easily affected by seemingly random events. This would be all fine and good, of course, were it not for the fact that this supposedly random and small sample size of games is ultimately what comes to define a franchise. There are no banners fluttering over stadia proclaiming “we had the best Wins Above Replacement in 2001.” You’re judged by winning championships. It’s what players play for. It’s what they want in the game most of all.

It was a huge disappointment when the Mariners lost to the Yankees in the fall of 2001, but the future should’ve been bright. Here was a wildly successful team with 3,000,000+ in attendance, a bright new star in Ichiro and a legendary local hero in Edgar Martinez. How could anything go wrong?

Sigh.

The Mariners are owned by a consortium of local entrepreneurs. The original money behind the deal came from Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo, who lives in Japan and has never gone to see the team he owns play (not even when they played two games at the Tokyo Dome last year). Nintendo USA was HQ’d in Seattle, one of the many cutting-edge companies that boomed in the area in the 1980s – companies such as Microsoft, Costco, the oft-forgotten McCaw Cellular (who had a lot to do with those cute cell phones we all carry around now), and Starbucks. (Boo! ... but we’ll get to Mr. Schultz when we talk about the Sonics) Execs from a good number of local Fortune 500s bought into the Seattle Mariners, and the deal, from the get-go, has always been framed as being somewhat of a public trust. It was good for business to be seen as a good corporate citizen, and baseball fans in the Northwest were justifiably thankful to finally have solid local ownership (Mr. Yamauchi may have put up the money but his son-in-law, the president of Nintendo USA, had the actual voting rights on the Mariners’ board) who had saved the franchise.

But about the only thing the ownership of the Mariners has done in the past 12 years is remind people that they saved the franchise. And even though the Mariners had a good run of success from 1995-2003, they did nothing of note before that and have been a disaster ever since. The Manager’s position has been a revolving door since Lou Piniella left, and Pat Gillick’s replacement as GM, Bill Bavasi, was arguably one of the worst GM’s in history, letting the farm system wither while repeatedly signing over-the-hill and past-their-prime players to bloated free agent contracts. Players who frequently came to be despised by the fans for their underperformance, but such is the nature when you overpay for players – with huge salaries come huge expectations, and failure inevitably breeds contempt.

And, for about five years or so, from about 2003-2008, the Mariners seemed to make one awful signing or acquisition per season. Almost without fail, these were hitters, some of whom essentially got booed out of Seattle, and some of whom deserved it.  But as much as you can blame Bill Bavasi for this, there was a bigger issue at play, an issue which came up when Bavasi made the seemingly logical move of giving a huge contract to Dodgers’ free agent 3B Adrian Beltre, who’d had a monstrous, MVP-caliber season the year before, and has resumed have monstrous, almost MVP-caliber seasons in Boston and Texas since. But during his five years in Seattle, Adrian Beltre was about a .275 hitter who’d launch majestic fly balls that would crash back to earth and land in the leftfielder’s glove. Surely, a hitter this good shouldn’t be that mediocre for the course of five years of his career, should he? How the hell is that possible?

It’s possible at Safeco Field, which, unlike the Kingdome, is a hitters graveyard. It’s a retractable roof stadium that management leaves open most of the time, even when it’s cold. The ball doesn’t carry and most fly balls hang up in the moist Seattle air and simply drop to earth. The dimensions are long, there is also a lot of foul territory, and the moist Seattle air means the grass grows thick, which is also bad news for hitters as it slows ground balls down. All of those factors, when combined, make for a terrible place to hit, and the Mariners have been hitting terribly for a decade. And the fact of the matter is that it’s always been a terrible place to hit. Hitters have been loathing Safeco Field since it first opened. It may be a good place to watch a game, but it’s a lousy place to play.

Now, you never quite know how a ballpark will play until you actually start playing in it. You can speculate, you can guess, but you can never be quite sure. But the fact is that the Mariners organization played a large part in designing this park, as the place was essentially customized for them. So someone gave the go-ahead for design and construction of a park where offense now goes to die. This coming off the heels of a stretch of winning Mariners baseball in the 1990s defined by home runs and record-setting offense. The whole franchise was geared towards offense back then. So, essentially, by building this pitcher-dominated park, the ownership of the organization did well to kill off the franchise’s greatest strength!

And you can work around park-related issues, of course. The Giants play in a park that’s also heavily in favour of the pitchers. The Giants solved that problem by building a championship pitching staff through their farm system (and having a superstar catcher behind the plate certainly helps). Other than Felix Hernandez, the Mariners organization hasn’t done a great job developing pitchers, either. It hasn’t really done a great job of anything other than coming up with more Ichiro bobblehead promotions, while the outfit on the field has seemed to play basically almost ironically at times, their ineptitude more infuriating than amusing.

Now, the 116-win season of 2001 is still fresh enough in everyone’s mind that management and a few apologist fans can say “the 2001 Mariners didn’t have trouble hitting.” But that’s because the 2001 Mariners didn’t have trouble hitting anywhere. How else do you think they won 116 games? But with transitions in management, incompetence settled in. The farm system dried up, shrewd trades ceased, the only way to acquire was to overpay and with it comes the perils of overpaying. It didn’t take long for the M’s to completely disintegrate. Three seasons after winning 116 games, they found themselves in last place – a position they’ve generally held ever since.

But the ownership saved baseball in Seattle, don’t you know? Never mind that that happened almost 20 years ago, which is two generations of players ago. And did you know they won 116 games in 2001? That was 12 years ago, for goodness sake.  Sure, the franchise has managed to maintain profitability (which, to the corporate muckety mucks is really all that matters), but who really cares? It’s not the fans’ money to make, anyway – but it was the taxpayers’ of the state who ponied up $500,000,000 for the ballpark. What do they get out of the deal? They get a bad team on the field! So much for that notion of ‘public trust.' It was only a feel-good public trust when the club was winning and the fans were excited and prospects were bright. Now that they’re losing all the time, well, it’s a business, you know? And the business needs to stay financially viable.

And with years of neglect and decay comes shrinking fan support. The organization’s response to this over the years has been, well ... they haven’t really done anything. In fact, most of their moves seem to backfire, be they on the field or in the court of public relations.

Case in point being their currently stated opposition to the proposed building of a new arena on a tract of land near to Safeco Field. They make a nuanced argument, saying it will disrupt traffic patterns, etc., etc., while completely missing the bigger picture – this is a city whose sports fan psyche was damaged greatly when the Sonics moved to Oklahoma City. A new arena likely means not only The Sacramento Kings a new NBA franchise and possibly The Phoenix Coyotes a new NHL franchise for the city, but it would help heal those wounds, which ultimately benefits every sports franchise in Seattle. Taking such a stance comes off as petty, tin-eared, and lacking any sense of the larger civic issues. But that’s how the Mariners roll these days. They are a franchise who often seems like a rudderless ship adrift. The team which seemingly could do no wrong a decade ago can not hardly get out of their own way.

And now Edmonton disease has settled in, and on top of that comes what can now be known as the Adrian Beltre factor: a great hitter goes to Seattle, can’t hit for shit, leaves and goes elsewhere and starts hitting again. So, Mr. Big Bat Free Agent, why would you go to Seattle? Why would you take a big contract and get booed mercilessly when you hit .264 and all of your towering fly balls die in left field? Why would you play for a last place team in a cold, northern city in front of 25,000 empty seats? Such is the dilemma of the Seattle Mariners, a Siberian outpost of a franchise known for having a lousy park, lousy management, and lousy results on the field.

And when I watch a Mariners game on television, all that I notice are the empty seats. Seats which were once filled with vibrant, excited, enthusiastic fans. The fans are skeptical, cynical, and unwilling to except the crap put forth as product on the field. Like I say, they’ve lost 50% of their attendance in the past decade through a combination of mismanagement and poor performance. The new front office regime has pleaded for patience as they’ve gone about rebuilding the farm system and trying to reëstablish the talent pool. A wise move, of course, since no free agent in their right mind would ever want to play there. The only hope for the club is to grow from within, to develop a core group of players to build around.

But growth means growing pains and the natives are getting restless. The Mariners have restocked the farm system the past 4 years to the point where it's considered one of the best in baseball. There is potential there, but potential is a fancy word that means "you haven't done anything yet." They attempted to make some offseason moves to bolster the offense, but whiffed repeatedly and wound up trading for two guys (Mike Morse, Kendrys Morales) with big bats but also injury issues who are also in the last year of their contracts – guys who, of course, will likely leave next year if they have decent seasons, because why would you keep playing in a ballpark, and for a team, which will stunt and stifle your success?

But after years of stubbornly refusing to adjust the ballpark, the management finally capitulated and decided to move the fences in this year and try to make play fairer. The 2012 club seemed to be genuinely psychologically affected by the place, as the home/road splits of every offensive statistic were among the most skewed in baseball history. Watching them put up 21 runs in a game in Texas, then come home and hit .165 as a team on a homestand was absolutely maddening. Not only have they been bad, but they've been boring, which is about the worst possible combination in what is an entertainment industry.

The one thing the M’s fans have which truly brings them some greater joy about the game these days is watching Felix Hernandez – one of the great pitchers in this pitcher-dominated era – take to the hill every 5 days. Letting him get away would’ve been a P.R. disaster.

And P.R. disasters can be hard to overcome. The three pitchers the Mariners acquired when they traded Randy Johnson won quite a few games for the M’s, and certainly won more combined than Johnson did on his own in Houston and then Arizona. But no one cares about that, because Randy Johnson was one of the greatest pitchers in history! And the 116-win Mariners got to sit at home in 2001 and watch Randy Johnson win Game 7 of the World Series for the Arizona Diamondbacks. How on earth could you ever trade a guy like that? There were reasons, to be sure, and maybe even good reasons – in the case of Randy Johnson, they thought he was getting old and didn’t want to give him a big new contract. (It turned out he pitched well into his 40s!) But valid reasons can look awfully bad in hindsight in the ultimate results-oriented business.

And in hindsight, the Mariners really are terrible, and have been terrible for most of their existence. A  good 10-year run which led to prosperity and a shiny ballpark has fooled a lot of people into thinking the club has been better than it really is. There is hope for improvement in the win column this year for no other reason than that realignment has given them 19 games with the Houston Astros this season. But they’re up against two big-money, glamourous franchises in their division – the Texas Rangers and the California Los Angeles Angels of Rancho Cucamonga Anaheim – and a third franchise – the A’s – which is just so damn much smarter than they are. In a game in which the margins between winning and losing are so finite, and all it takes is winning an extra game a week over the course of the season to tip the balance, the only excuse for such prolonged losing is incompetence. The game is fundamentally about a 50-50 proposition. You have to really screw it up to fail so much for so long.

But at least everyone involved had the good sense to keep King Felix around for seven more seasons. when you’re fan support is hemorrhaging this quickly, and you’ve created such ill will, you might have to overpay that star player of yours, the one who fans actually want to watch. It’s usually worth it, in the end. Perhaps he’ll get injured or lose another couple mph on his fastball, lose his effectiveness at an early age. It could happen. It could also happen that, as he enters his prime, King Felix takes his stunning talents to unprecedented levels. Either way, the Mariners organization showed to baseball, and particularly their own fans, that this decade-long Voyage of the Damned may finally be ending. It’s far too early to tell, but perhaps they’re making progress in righting this rudderless ship.

Score More Points

IN PLAY LOSE was reminded today, in the aftermath of the Super Bowl, of a conversation I once had on the sidelines during my ill-fated attempt at coaching basketball. I had just pulled a player from the game who had committed her 4th foul, a ticky-tack over-the-back foul on the rebound after she had taken an ill-advised shot:

her: that was a bad call
me: yes, but you took a bad shot and put the referee in a position where they weren't going to give you a break

Now, in truth, the official in that particular basketball game had eyesight slightly worse than Mr. Magoo, but the point was that my own team was making a hash of it out on the floor. You don't get to blame the officials if you don't make the plays necessary to win the game.

My rooting interest in the Super Bowl came mainly from the fact that I live in San Francisco. Civic pride. In theory, a Seahawk fan shouldn't want the 49ers to win, since they're in the same division, but that rivalry has never felt real to me. My developmental years of watching football came when the Seahawks were still in the AFC West, so I grew up hating the Denver Broncos, loving the fact that the 'Hawks would torment the Raiders, and facepalming as they lost in Kansas City 84 consecutive times. I wanted the 49ers to win because I live in San Francisco, and would've enjoyed seeing the collective mood of the city rise into a state of jubilation. That's happened twice with the Giants winning the World Series since I have lived here. You cannot help but get caught up in the groundswell of enthusiasm. I think the bigger reason that I wanted to win is that the Ravens are one of the single most annoying teams in all of professional sports, and have been so for the entirety of their existence in Baltimore. A bunch of loudmouths and blowhards. And I am sick of the Ray Lewis retirement tour. Honestly, I would rather see a class guy like Tony Gonzalez go out with a ring than someone like Lewis. Just shut up already.

But back to the game. 4th & goal, 2:00 left, the 49ers trail 34:29. The QB Kaepernick throws a pass into the end zone, the WR Crabtree is rather clearly grabbed by the Ravens CB ... and there is no flag for defensive holding. Quite honestly, it was a terrible call. And I will admit I wanted the 49ers to win, but I'm not a diehard homer by any stretch of the imagination. In my opinion, it should've been a flag. But none was tossed, the Ravens took over, killed the clock and took a safety to win 34:31.

It was a lousy call, in my opinion. And in all honesty, I thought the officials were generally terrible throughout the game – not because they egregiously screwed up, but more because they just simply couldn't keep up with the speed and the intensity of the game. They seemed overmatched. The game was physical, chippy, and occasionally threatened to boil over, and the zebras just sort of seemed lost out there. Officiating wound up being a huge sideshow in the NFL this season, what with the replacement refs at the start of the year making a mess of everything, and I found the crew entrusted with managing this most important of games to be substandard.

And I'm all for letting the game be decided on the field of play and not by arbiters, but I don't believe in swallowing whistles come crunch time. A foul is a foul, a penalty is a penalty, and should be called as such regardless of time or score or circumstance.

That being said, the 49ers put themselves in an unenviable position to begin with by squandering opportunities in the red zone and turning the ball over and letting a guy run 109 yards with a kickoff virtually untouched right down the middle of Market St. to start the second half and FOR GOD SAKE HOW COULD YOU LINE UP OFFSIDES ON THE FIRST PLAY OF THE FUCKING GAME? It's one thing to be winning the game and get jobbed by a bad call with little or no recourse. (Witness 'Fail Mary' in my previous blog about the Seahawks.) It's another to make a mess of things and reach times of desperation and hope the stripes will bail you out – which is exactly where the 49ers found themselves at the end of the Super Bowl.

And football officials usually have far less damning effect than in basketball – where you essentially award a team free points at the foul line and force players into foul trouble – or in soccer – where a single goal via an awarded penalty can be all you need to determine the outcome. There were 130+ plays from scrimmage in the Super Bowl, and the officials certainly got a few wrong, but so did the players.

So, in short, the 49ers should score more points next time. And maybe tackle someone. The bad call didn't cost the 49ers the game. They did a fine job of costing themselves.

Edmonton Disease

It would figure that my favourite hockey team is one that has never won anything.  I became a Canucks fan for life in 1982. I was living in Seattle at the time and the cable system included BCTV and CBC British Columbia, which meant a steady diet of Canucks games on Wednesday and Saturday nights. The Canucks were a maddening, underachieving team that year who got insanely hot at the end of the season and benefited from some of the most improbable upsets in NHL history to make a run all the way to the Stanley Cup finals, where they got waxed 4-0 by the juggernaut, 4-time champion New York Islanders. But they fought the Isles pretty good and were unlucky to win the first game of the series. They showed themselves well and I was hooked for good.

Which means I’ve now waited 30 years for them to hoist the cup and it still hasn’t happened. Sigh. Why do I do this to myself?

When I moved back to the eastside of the state of Washington, I kept my Canuck allegiance through the 1980s even though the state’s drysiders were much more inclined to follow the two teams in Alberta. And understandably so for several reasons – the Spokane TV stations went up into Alberta; the city had much more of a connection to the Canadian cities on the plains than the stylish, cosmopolitan metropolis on the B.C. coast; and the surprisingly sophisticated Eastern Washington fan base (Spokane has always been a great minor league hockey town) knew a good product when they saw it and unlike the Canucks, the two teams in Alberta were actually good.

Which is a gross understatement – the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s were probably the greatest assemblage of hockey talent in history, winning 5 Stanley Cups, and about the only team in the league who could keep up with them and play them even was the Calgary Flames. If I had to pick one to begrudgingly support come playoff time, it was the Flames because I hated the Edmonton Oilers, mainly because Gretzky toyed with the Canucks for the entirety of his career, racking up more points vs. Vancouver than against every other team. The Canucks were completely hapless in those days, in the midst of 17 consecutive losing seasons, more known for their zany mustard-coloured jerseys than anything they did on the ice, and Gretzky would skate circles around them and make them all look like buffoons.

I mention all of this because tomorrow night the Canucks are playing the Edmonton Oilers and I will likely tune in. My my, how the tables have turned over time. The Canucks still can’t win the big prize, but they’re consistently one of the top clubs in the sport and they are also a moneymaking machine, routinely listed at or near the top of the financial table among a sport with some persistently-struggling franchises. Their insanely loyal, cheesehead-style fan base not only sells out every home game but often travels en masse, filling up thousands of otherwise empty seats in arenas in the NHL’s Sun Belt climes like Anaheim and Phoenix. The Edmonton Oilers, meanwhile, are showing some improvement this year, having assembled a good collection of talent through one of North America sport’s time-testing strategies for doing so – being terrible for half a decade, and simply having so many high draft picks that you can’t help but amass some good players after a while. Other than 2006, when the Oilers reached the Stanley Cup finals after one of those fluky sort of runs you see in the NHL playoffs, the franchise has withered and dried up over 20+ years. Gretzky took his game to the bright lights of L.A. in 1988, but the team still had enough talent to win a Cup in 1990. Since then, however, it’s been pretty destitute up on the prairie, and the franchise has given birth to a very important concept that we must explore here in IN PLAY LOSE, a concept that an astute Canadian sportswriter whom I cannot recall the name of labeled “Edmonton disease.”

It was much, much easier back in the 1980s to maintain a powerhouse franchise in the NHL, and in a lot of the other sports as well, as player movement was still tightly controlled by the clubs. But with new collective bargaining agreements and the growth of free agency in sports, it’s become far more difficult to do so. In three of the major professional sports in North America, there are salary caps in place which set minimum and maximum amounts franchises can spend on players. The leagues like to spin this as a way to promote competitive balance in the league, holding up Major League Baseball and the big European soccer clubs as an example, wherein the Yankees and Man United and Réal Madrid can supposedly just spend their way to winning championships. This argument is, of course, nonsense. It is a smokescreen. The fact is that salary caps are put in place to make sports franchises more profitable, and to protect owners from themselves. These are a bunch of bazillionaire egomaniacs we’re talking about here who own professional sports franchises, and given the chance to plunk down $100 million on a player, they would do so in a heartbeat if they thought it would give them a chance to win.

Now players can benefit from salary caps as well – if a CBA states the players are entitled to 55% of the gross revenues of the league, for example, and the gross revenues of the sport’s franchises goes up, then their salaries go up as well. Indeed, the average salaries have skyrocketed across professional sports in the past three decades. And free agency allows for greater player movement after a certain number of years, thus eliminating team control and creating some interesting challenges for clubs – after your club has spent 5 years accruing talent to be competitive and win, you some how have to figure out how to pay for it and keep a team together.

And yet with salary caps come limitations on how much clubs can spend on players. Caps are there to hem in ownership. Over time, the net result of this is that the offers for available free agent players are basically the same across the board. Clubs may have finagled some extra $$$ here and there which they can throw at a player, but basically a free agent in the NFL or the NBA or the NHL is going to get similar sized offers. If dollars aren’t the only issue, then other factors can come into play, such as quality of life. Hence Edmonton disease, which is a principle based on a very simple question: if you, an NHL player, has a choice between playing in New York or L.A. or Edmonton, then why would you stay in Edmonton?

Edmonton disease actually runs most rampant in the NBA, an entity in which glitz and promotion has long been forth by the league as being far more important than the actual product on the court. The NBA is a marketing machine, selling their superstars and the most glamorous of franchises. The list of glamour boys shifts a bit here and there from time, but the NBA’s love list includes the Knicks, Celtics, 76ers, Bulls, Lakers, Suns, the Heat and Magic down in Florida, and these days you can toss in a couple more franchises – the Brooklyn Nets and the L.A. Clippers – who’ve done little more to deserve it than be located in Brooklyn and L.A., a pair of franchises which have been so utterly incompetently run over the years that, had they not been located in big markets, they almost certainly would’ve been relocated. (It should be pointed out, in fact, that sheer incompetence can negate inherent quality-of-life advantages. As an example, I give you the Golden State Warriors. But after defying the laws of averages, probability, and quite possibly the laws of physics in being so bad for so long, they now have some terrific young players and grand future plans, so maybe there is hope for the W’s after all.)

So, OK, budding NBA superstar. You’ve plied your trade for 6 years with ... let’s just pick a franchise here for sake of argument ... with the Indiana Pacers, who would love to keep you and can offer you $75,000,000 over the next 5 years. But so can the Brooklyn Nets, and wouldn’t you love to sell your own personal brand in a big media market like New York City. And the Phoenix Suns can offer you $75,000,000 as well, and you’ve been going to every year in the dead of winter and it’s 80° and you can get out on the golf course on your day off in Arizona. You’d love to live there in the sun, wouldn’t you? Jeez, you have it pretty good there in Indianapolis, to be sure, but it’s awfully cold and you’re a young guy and there’s a lot more to do in a place like New York or Phoenix.

And if you’re the Indiana Pacers, of course, you’re realizing that it’s going to be very, very difficult to keep your budding NBA superstar. You may, in fact, be able to offer him more money than anyone else (a caveat in the NBA which can have some drastic long-term consequences, of course, since overspending to keep your free agents will eventually mean having to pay less to the rank-and-file), but there are other factors at play which you cannot hope to compete with. And this is not to slag on Indianapolis or Edmonton, both of which I’m sure are nice cities. But where your franchise is located becomes a prime selling point, and a place like Edmonton can never, ever hope to compete.

And when you look at the NBA, for example, there are a number of franchises which seem completely, utterly hopeless. The NBA used to like the idea of being the only game in town, and enjoyed setting up shop in places like Sacramento and Charlotte where they could control the entertainment market place. But those are the exact franchises which, ultimately, struggle to compete. A pecking order is established and player movement invariably follows that order. If you’re at the bottom of that order, you’d best enjoy whatever success your team may have, because it isn’t likely to last very long.

(Some would go so far as to suggest that in the NBA, the league offices actively root for some franchises to succeed at the expense of others, and go so far as to rig the game in the favour of those franchises and their superstar players. One particular owner, Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, went so far as to yell something like “YOUR GAME IS FUCKING RIGGED!” at NBA Commissioner David Stern during the first Miami-Dallas NBA final and amass a pretty substantial fine for during so. I wish to believe that isn’t the case, but we will touch on those conspiracy theories at another time, when we delve deeper into the plights of the Seattle SuperSonics and the Sacramento Kings.)

You can vaccinate your franchise against Edmonton disease to a certain extent, but you need some help. Perhaps the greatest example of this in pro sports is the San Antonio Spurs. A large reason for their success is dumb luck, of course – the Spurs happened to be terrible and have the first pick in the draft twice when David Robinson and Tim Duncan were available. Not only did they dumb luck their way into two great big men, but they were two quality individuals with team-first professionalism and a far greater interest in winning than personal spoils. The Utah Jazz, Detroit Pistons and Houston Rockets have done much the same thing, putting together long track records of success and generally being lauded for their professionalism. After all, players want to make money, but players also want to win championships, and they’ll gravitate to places where that latter aim can be realized. The Spurs have also been light years ahead of the rest of the NBA in the use of so-called Moneyball concepts – savvy spending on players deemed suitable for their system through advanced statistical analysis. Their former assistant GM, Sam Presti, has taken his laptop with him to his job as GM in Oklahoma City, where he appears to have also lucked himself into getting to build a franchise around Kevin Durant, who is the exact sort of loyal, committed superstar you need to build around if you’re running a franchise far from the bright lights of New York and Hollywood and your club is going to stay competitive.

In all sports, the single most important thing your franchise can do is hire a competent GM, because the GM’s job, first and foremost, is to procure talent, and do so at times when your franchise may face some inherent disadvantages. The teams which are successful, year after year, are usually the best run and smartest run. This is especially true in the NFL, which for years has used tools like the schedule to actually attempt to foster competitive balance, and yet the Patriots and Steelers and Packers are always vying for the super bowl while the Arizona Cardinals are always 5-11 and the Detroit Lions are doing things like this:

Worst play in NFL history, committed by the worst team in NFL history.

The point here is that some sports franchises will find themselves at severe disadvantages when it comes to the acquisition of talent – and, perhaps more importantly, the act of keeping that talent around. Now, the patterns for how Edmonton disease strikes are not the same in every sport. Vancouver was infamously labeled ‘Siberia’ during the woebegone days of the NBA’s Grizzlies, yet it’s a choice destination for hockey players – loyal fan base, the team is always good, it’s a chance to come home to Canada and yet not need a snow blower to get out of your driveway in the morning. Guys will gladly sign on to play for the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Penguins, two perennial powerhouses, yet no one in their right mind would be crazy enough to sign on to play for the Pirates. Yes, the Pirates are a baseball team, and baseball has no salary cap, which means that teams can spend as much as they want on wage bills. But the same rules apply, and a franchise such as the Pittsburgh Pirates, which hasn’t had a winning season in over 20 years, is always going to be picking from the leftovers.

This was made painfully obvious this offseason in baseball for one particular franchise, the Seattle Mariners. (And after watching that unwatchable club for most of my childhood, you can damn well bet there will be more on them in the future.) The Mariners are, by any definition, one of the worst franchises in the history of professional sports. They play in a northern, cold-weather city, and play in a ballpark that is a hitters’ graveyard. They are desperately in need of an infusion of offense into a franchise whose offense has been historically bad in recent years, and offered up 4 years and $100,000,000 to Josh Hamilton – who then received 5 years and $125,000,000 from the California Los Angeles Angels of Yorba Linda Anaheim. Now, the Mariners could’ve come back and offered 5/$125m as well, but Hamilton’s agent would’ve likely just dialed up the Angels and said “give us 130 and we have a deal.” The Mariners were simply there to drive up the price tag, but were never a serious threat to sign the best available player on the market.

The Mariners then reached a deal with Arizona to swap for the Snakes’ outfielder Justin Upton, who then promptly vetoed the trade – turns out he has a no-trade clause in his contract that specifically lists he cannot be traded to the Mariners! This is done by his agent, in part, to up his trade value – the Mariners very clearly being a team which would want to trade for him – and after finding out what the M’s were willing to deal to get him (which was A LOT – 4 players including some of the gems from their farm system), Upton had a better sense of his market value.

But this does nothing to help the Mariners, a franchise desperately stricken by a grave case of Edmonton disease. They still need hitters and cannot seem to land one. But when you’re an awful team in an awful ballpark where hitters go to die, you’re going to have this happen. In recent years, there has been clamoring among the Seattle press and the fan base for the owners to “spend more money” as if that’s a foolproof way to success. But in order to buy, you also need someone who is willing to sell. To anyone who wants to argue the Mariners have been unsuccessful because they’ve been cheap, I would ask the question, “why do you think anybody would ever want to play for the Mariners?”

Now these patterns can change over time, of course, but the notion that there is a level playing field is ludicrous. Sports is fundamentally a marketplace, and some buyers and sellers are at inherent disadvantages. This is true in all agorae, in fact, be it cities vying for pro sport glory or convention biz or tourism dollars or what have you. Some cities are at a disadvantage, simply because of their size or location. Others have a stigma attached to them over time – witness poor Cleveland, who couldn’t even keep native son LeBron James from taking his talents to South Beach. And after almost every dimwitted trade in the NFL, NBA or NHL, the GM who got bamboozled will say “this frees up salary cap space,” which is the limpest excuse of them all, because what good is it when there is nothing to spend it on?

And in the case of the Edmonton Oilers, you’re left with a once-proud franchise with permanently limited resources, an inability to keep talent intact and attract willing new talent. They’re perpetually rumoured to be picking up stakes and moving elsewhere, which is a travesty for the fans, who love the game but don’t want to put up with forking over a whole lot of money for a terrible product. (Owners can only get away with that particular dynamic in Chicago.) Now, since I grew up hating the Oilers, I would like to say that I enjoy seeing them suffer. But the franchise is a shell of what it used to be, so the days of Gretzky and Messier and Kurri and Fuhr are just old stories at this point, ghosts from the past. They’ll inevitably show, during the course of the game with the Canucks on Monday night, all of those championship banners from the 1980s fluttering in the rafters of the whatever-the-hell-it-is-now-named-but-was-once-called Northlands Coliseum. Banners which, 2+ decades on, are starting to look a bit tattered and frayed.

You May Already Be a Winner

The LOSE is back after a vacation, and after recovering from a vacation, because New Orleans was all that was advertised and then some. After that much food and that much alcohol and that much general abuse, my body seems to have responded by declaring a wildcat strike. I’ve been a little slow going here, and am only now just getting back up to speed.

This blog is an act of non-fiction, as such you should always remember that everything here is true, including the lies. Most especially the lies, in fact. But all stories, be they fictional or not, should have a compelling character at the center of it. Which we don’t in this case, since all we have is me, but we’ll pretend and see what comes. The main character of IN PLAY LOSE ventured to New Orleans not just to party like it’s 1999 but also to compete, and I found myself in a dangerous predicament that I’m decidedly unaccustomed to.

I was winning.

For those of you who don’t know me, let me explain my competitive pastime and passion: I play scrabble. I’m really good at it. I’m currently ranked about 56th in North America (although that number will drop slightly after my incompetent display at the Best of the Bay tournament this past weekend). So relatively speaking, I’m pretty good.

But what does that mean, actually? It means that, to be candid and somewhat boastful for the moment, I’m pretty much better at the game of scrabble than most people are good at anything. In the world, there are a very, very, VERY small number of people who are demonstratively better than I am. So, in that sense, I’m really good at this game.

But how good you are is relative not only to the general population but also to those who dare enter the same arena. The 12th man on the worst team in the NBA would mop the floor with the bushers playing pickup ball at the community center. Put him on the floor at the Staples Center or Madison Square Garden and he’ll most likely seem like he has no idea what he is doing. And for all of my relative aptitude at the game of scrabble, I’m also one of the least successful players of my level. I have won quite a few of the few shorter, 1-day tournaments we hold around the Bay Area, but I’ve never won a larger, multiple-day event in the more than 9 years that I’ve been playing.

Now, to be honest, this fact doesn’t really bother me that much. I’m not someone who wants to let a showing in one particular tournament define me. Regardless of whether you win a multiday (which has never happened for me), or you go 1-17 and finish last (which has ... sigh ...), you still have to play the next event. It’s a continous process, it’s open-ended and fluid by nature. Attaching too much weight or stock or value to one event doesn’t really make much sense. The game is still the same. (Shorter tournaments are much more susceptible to volatility and fluctuation, both in terms of the outcome of the game being affected by distribution of tiles and players getting a hot hand. A longer tournament mitigates some of those circumstances a bit, but not entirely.)

And I went to New Orleans mainly for the purposes of having a vacation and a party with some good friends of mine in a city I’ve always wanted to visit. The tournament seemed like little more than an excuse to do so, and my reward for spending 7½ hours cooped up in a cramped hotel meeting room playing a board game would be to have the opportunity to step outside the front door of the hotel, which was conveniently located on Bourbon St., and step into the veritable feast for the senses that is the French Quarter. Going into the tournament, I was far more intent on getting myself several platters of oystyrs on the half-shell, a Central Grocery muffuletta, and a Sazerac to swig than I was in winning the tourney. I had deëmphasized the tournament in my mind to the point where the actual results seemed somewhat irrelevant and caring about the result was a waste of energy. I was going to keep the tourney in perspective.

But then that stupid winning thing started happening, and I found myself starting to care. It’s really impossible not to care – you don’t get to be one of the best on the planet at something by not giving a shit. This is a competitive endeavour I’m talking about here, and one thing I’ve found to be true across the entire spectrum of competition is that those who are the best absolutely, positively hate losing. It’s pretty easy to detach and disengage from a tourney where you’re 8-8 after two days and have no hope of winning the thing. Success breeds pressure, it breeds expectations. The more that you win, the more important that it becomes that you win the next one.

So I got the hot hand on the first day of the Crescent City Open, took over first place after the 6th game and then found myself sitting at Table 1 for the 8th and final game of the day. (For non-scrabblers: the lower the table number, the better you’re doing in the event. I’ve been on the other end of that as well. At a tourney in Dallas, I was so bad on the first day that my table had an unlisted number and was located somewhere near Fort Worth.) I was so unaccustomed to being in this position that I couldn’t find my name in the standings or the table assignments posted on the wall. It didn’t even occur to me to look up at the top of the page, where the leaders’ names were printed.

And on the second day of the tournament, I lost a few games but so did everyone else, so I spent the majority of my day at Table 1 and finished the day with a 13-3 record, in first place overall and closing in on winning the biggest tournament of my career. It was a blast and I was having a great time, I was playing great and making good decisions and putting myself in position to win time and again. Playing the game in a style that I feel comfortable with, controlling the board and finding a good tempo to all that I was doing. But I wouldn’t go so far as to label it being in “the zone,” per sé. I’ve been in “the zone” on the basketball court before, where you get so focused and dialed in that pretty much every shot you chuck in the general vicinity of the backboard seems to somehow find the bottom of the net. “The zone” is surreal and somewhat otherworldly by nature, an altered state of higher consciousness. But this tournament didn’t feel like that all, actually. The New Orleans scrabble tournament, in fact, felt surprisingly normal as it was taking place. It felt – gasp! – like I actually knew what I was doing.

But it was a combination of factors – not the least of which being a food hangover from eating a steak the size of my head at Besh Steakhouse on Sunday night – which led to me waking at 4:15 a.m. on Monday morning, being hit with an enormous streak of angst, and struggling with physical discomfort for hours on end. The worst thing that excessive stress does to me is trigger migraine headaches. It also leads to enormous pains in my upper back which can sometimes last for days. I woke up on Monday and I was a complete, utter wreck. And the reason for this is obvious, of course – I wanted to win the tournament. Or, more appropriately, I didn’t want to lose the tournament. And there is a big, big difference between the two.

Like I said before, I’ve never one a multiday tournament before. The closest I’ve ever come before was at a tourney over Memorial Day weekend here in the Bay Area. It game down to the very last game, as myself and another woman were tied with 15-3 records. The game went very badly, as she got more than her share of the good tiles at the right times. This happens, of course, and scrabble is very much a game about managing chaos. You never have an idea of what you’re going to draw out of the bag, and all you can hope to do is prepare how to handle what does. And in this particular game, I was getting crushed and the game was growing short. I finally played a bingo and some other stuff to get within 70 points or so late in the game, to give myself at least a chance of winning, and out of the bag came KOOOSTU.

Blech. That rack is terrible.

And then my opponent put the word COLA on the board with the C on a TWS, in open space, and I had to do everything in my power to keep my eyebrows from arching straight off my forehead and launching into orbit, as I envisioned just how many cookouts I could have with the money I won after playing COOKOUTS for 95 points and I came back to win this game and win the tournament ...

And then she picked the tiles up and plays them somewhere else on the board and hits her clock. Sigh. That one stung a bit, to be close and fall short and very nearly have the miracle I needed to win fall from the sky.

The other time I was in position to win a multiday tournament was in San Luis Obispo and I was 10-1 with 5 games to go ... and promptly lost four out of the last five. There is a word for this sort of inept finishing, and that word would be “choke.” Because sometimes in scrabble you do, in fact, have games that you just can’t win, because you draw bad tiles and your opponent plays all the good ones, but not as many as games are truly unwinnable. Most of the time, it comes down to making mistakes, of which I made a boatload in that particularly disastrous series of games. It was a choke.

We all make mistakes, and the people who make the fewest mistakes are generally the ones who win. As the competition level is raised and the margin for error grows smaller, the mistakes aren’t always as obvious. Either that, or they’re exacerbated because they look so stupid. Think of the dropped pass in football, or the missed layup in basketball, or the routine grounder that goes between the shortstop’s legs. You’re thought when you see that sort of thing is “what the hell is wrong with that guy?” Mistakes do come in all sizes.

But all competitions are about who makes the fewest mistakes, in the end. And I’ve come over the course of playing 9 years to accept the fact that rarely do I lose because of bad luck. Most of the time I lose because of my flurry of incompetence. And the last thing I wanted to have happen in New Orleans was to succumb to my own propensity for self-destruction. I wasn’t afraid of losing. I was afraid of choking.

So I tried some visualization techniques to try and relax, somewhere during my 2nd or 3rd shower on this morning. At first I just repeated to myself, over and over, “I’m going to win today.” I would sometimes even say it aloud, and I mumbled it a few times while wandering alone about the French Quarter in the early hours. “I’m going to win today ... I’m going to win today ... but what if I don’t ... NO! STOP THINKING LIKE THAT! I’m going to win today.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to actually win, what the moment would be like and how I would react. Tried to picture it in my mind. But it all felt like an artificial construct. And “I’m going to win today,” was soon replaced with, “don’t blow it.”

And since my mind has an innate aptitude and ability for conjuring up worst-case scenarios, I’m then thinking about what will happen when I go 0-4 on Monday in New Orleans and blow the tournament and finish completely out of the money entirely. It could happen, you know? I’m playing some of the best players in the world, after all. They know what the fuck they’re doing and me? Me? I’m just a hack. I’m the guy who throws all the parties and jokes and clowns around, who is popular with the other players and isn’t afraid to laugh at himself. But no one takes me that seriously as a competitive player, and why should they? I’m really not that good!

Welcome to the vortex that is my mind.

The games start at 9:30 a.m., and by 9:15 I am a complete mess. I’m so stressed out that I can feel a migraine headache coming on. At any moment, I expect to feel a twinge over my right eye which will then explode into a seering sort of pain which can sometimes render me near blind. My neck and my back are killing me, this dull and constant ache which never abates. So much for being free and easy in The Big Easy.

I’m going to win today ... I’m going to win ... Oh, fuck, but what if I lose? It’s going to be so disappointing, and I’m always coming up short and it will be just another one of those times where I wasn’t quite good enough. At least I’ll have a good story, because all tales of woe and failure ultimately seem funny over time ... just don’t choke, don’t blow it. Lose because Jesse draws the fucking bag on you, which he only does on days that end in the letter Y. But what if I go 0-4 and gag on it? Especially because of all of the people that are rooting for me ... wait ...

I’d been posting status updates on my facebook page, and the response from friends elsewhere to news that I was leading the tournament in New Orleans was somewhat overwhelming. I had over 100 different people liking my statuses, or commenting, or sending me private messages or emails or texts, all of which told me that they were cheering for me, that they were following along with the standings online, and that they were all hoping I would win. And I really took that to heart. So many different people had wished me well, had been excited to see me succeeding. And I realized then that the reason I was so worried about losing was that I didn’t want to let them down.

Which is silly, of course. None of these people were going to see me any differently whether I went 4-0 or 0-4 on the last day of a scrabble tournament. It wasn’t going to change their opinion of me. Regardless of the result, you have to wake up the next morning and go on with your life.

And some people claim that they don’t care what people think, that all that matters to them is fulfillment of their individual goals. They want to win and be on top above all else. Well, OK, but guess what. That isn’t me! I don’t want to be that cold, calculating, win-at-all costs persona. I don’t want to be that narrow. I throw great parties. I make people laugh. I space out and do stupidly maddening things while playing scrabble, the sorts of things Top 50 players in North America shouldn’t do, but then miraculously scramble and still manage to win a lot of games in spite of myself. That’s just me. It’s who I am. I’m a spaz and a flake and a goof.

And people like that about me. In the moment, winning the tournament would feel great and losing would be an enormous downer, but it wouldn’t fundamentally change the way that I am. Nope. I’m one of the Good Guys who wears the white hats, and not one result was going to change that. In the end, being one of the Good Guys is more important to me, and I took the 100+ well-wishes from a wide cross-section of people – from scrabble experts to people who’ve never actually played a game of scrabble in their lives – as a life affirmation.

And so, when I sat down at 9:20 a.m. to prep for my first game of the day, I wrote across the top of my scoresheet, “you’ve already won!”

And I didn’t win, in the end, as if it really mattered. I went 2-2 on the last day to finish 15-5 and I wound up in 3rd place. The games that I lost didn’t go my way. Of course, in the moment, I was pissed when it became clear I wasn’t going to win. Who wouldn’t be pissed? We’re competitors, damn it. The game is fun, but winning is even more fun. The hardest part of it was playing three of my four games vs. three of my better friends on the planet, all of us knowing what knocking each other off would mean. It’s better sometimes to have an unknown enemy to whom you can assign all sorts of negative qualities and attributes, make them into some sort of evil beast who must destroyed for the good of all humanity. We love to beat our friends, just not as much when there is something on the line.

I didn’t win and it bothered me and then my head exploded into a full-on migraine which made it extremely difficult to do anything other than crawl under the blankets in my hotel bed. But after a good 2½ hour nap, two huge platters of oystyrs and a couple Jack Daniels on the rocks, I was fine. It was all good. Win or lose, I was still in New Orleans with my girlfriend and a bunch of great friends of mine, playing a game we’re all really good at and having a great time. What’s not to like about that?

I’ll win one eventually. Or maybe I won’t. I don’t know. It really doesn’t bother me that much. And, of course, having had such a great tournament in New Orleans, I promptly played another tournament this past weekend as was godfuckingterrible, reverting to my wildly inconsistent form which has plagued me in scrabble and pretty much everything else for that matter. The tournament this past weekend was the Best of the Bay championship tournament, which is also an excuse to have a day-long dinner party. I’m all about the parties. We all won, because we all got to eat and eat a lot.

And I would rather see a friend of mine win, which is what happened in New Orleans. The Good Guys win! And as a footnote to that San Luis Obispo debacle I spoke of earlier, I may have choked in the individual event but it wasn’t all bad. It was a California team tournament, North v. South, and we clobbered those clownshoes from the South. And we made a point of celebrating afterwards at a seafood joint in nearby Pismo Beach:

Yeah, that tourney turned out pretty well, didn’t it? In play EAT!

Hero for the Week

The LOSE has needed a few days to recover from the vortex that was New Orleans, where there wasn't a whole lot of losing going on ... well, maybe apart from my dignity ... but there was just enough losing to make it noteworthy in this blog, and I will get to that here at some point this weekend.

But it's time for the Hero for the Week, and this week it is Anouk, who lives in Montréal and whose birthday is today. She is ... uh ... a number of years old. I don't remember.

Anouk is my hero of the week because she is my soul sister and fellow loon, and when I first met her we were both acting as if we were the biggest losers on earth, but we've both been winning ever since in one way or another, and she reminds me from time to time (and hopefully I remind her) that not only does being crazy not have to suck, but it's really the purest way you could ever hope to be. And who cares if other people think you're nutters? The joke will always be on them.

So here's to my Hero for the Week. Happy Birthday, Anouk, and were you here, I would have made you go to the grocery store with me just for old times' sake.

Laissez les bon temps roulez!

In Play LOSE is headed to New Orleans for a few days, the original reason for this trip being to play some silly board game 20 times over. But this is a vacation, first and foremost, and the results of the actual games don't really matter all that much.

To guard against caring, myself and several others have reinstituted our Kangaroo Court, and we shall fine each other freely for any acts of whining, compaining, or excessive caring about scrabble. Whatever fines are collected with be spent on festive beverages at the end of the tourney.

I have no expectations for the tournament itself, not having played a long event since April of last year. My hope is that I've forgotten how terrible I am at this game. But if do something particularly dumb and loseblogworthy, it may appear on this blog. The subject of losing at this game is something I've become quite an expert about over the past 9 years.

I think I also need a Saints hat, always having had a soft spot in my heart for the Saints, the club having developed a reputation for being lovable losers in the first 30+ years of their existence.

Laissez les bon temps roulez!  It's time for some fun. And a whole lot of liquor. I may lose at scrabble but I am going to win at life, although I may need some serious detox when this weekend is over ...