Nothing Rhymes With Orange

The U.S. national team recently defeated Costa Rica 1:0 in Denver in one of the more bizarrely entertaining soccer games I’ve seen of late, owing to the several inches of snow which fell during the game. I wholeheartedly approved of this, as this was a qualifier for the World Cup, and one of the most important things you can do is maximize your home-field advantage, since points are at a premium. The Americans said afterwards that they’d selected Denver as the site for this game to prepare them for the high-altitude conditions of Mexico City, where they were due to play a few days later, but snow in the Rockies is always a possibility in March and no one in the American camp was particularly bothered at the decidedly un-Central American weather conditions. The Ticos somewhat half-heartedly protested the game after it was over, of course, which was summarily dismissed by FIFA. They had nothing to lose by protesting, wouldn’t have been doing so if they’d salvaged a draw, and they have been subjecting opponents to oppressive heat and torrential rains on the plastic parking lot of a pitch in their former home stadium for years, so they know well how this meta-game is played. (Although the Ticos now have a lovely new national football grounds, with real grass and everything, but it’s too early to tell if their well-accepted home-field advantage from the previous pitch has transferred over.)

The drama and intensity of World Cup Qualifying makes up for the fact that the football can be somewhat ragged at times. These are essentially all-star teams, after all, most of which are hastily arranged in the moment and have little time to prepare. And every region of the world takes on unique characteristics during this process. Pretty much the same 6-8 teams are always battling for the 4 positions in Asia, as the drop off in quality is substantial and leaves you wondering how it is that these countries with massive populations somehow cannot find 11 quality footballers among their ranks. African qualifying is wildly unpredictable, as there are always issues regarding finances, politics, and other sources of internal strife among federations which often undermine the talent on the pitch. Just fielding an XI is sometimes a bigger African challenge than getting them to play well. The South American tourney is, quite simply, the toughest tournament in the world – 16-18 games played in hostile environments and challenging conditions (the most infamous being the 12,000 ft. of altitude in Bolivia). In Europe, the random draw almost always results in a Group of Death (resulting in a very good team being bounced), a Group of Bad (where an overrated team’s true colours are revealed and some obscure, marginal side earns a place), and a Group Where Everyone Shows Up Drunk which makes no sense at all. Europe also features an alarming number of REALLY BAD TEAMS who are there to be pummeled so as to pad the goal difference. Heaven help you if you lose to Luxembourg or the Færœ Islands, that’s all I’ve got to say on that front.

All of this ultimately funnels to the World Cup which, in 2014, is happening in Brazil. Perhaps the most apt description of Brazil comes from Franklin Foer in the book How Soccer Explains the World: “Brazil is the bizarro version of the United States. It’s the fantastically vast, resource-rich, new-world culture that didn’t become a global hegemon.” There has been slow but steady progress in the nation over the past two decades, and this tournament, along with the 2016 Olympics in Rio, is a chance for the nation of Brazil to show off some newfound confidence and swagger, to announce it is ready to take its rightful place among the big players in all international arenas, including those far larger than the massive Maracanã (which is saying something, given that the 1950 final at Maracanã was played before a crowd of 199,854).

There is a general sense in the sport that while the spectacle of a Brazilian World Cup will be magical, the tourney itself is likely to amount to little more than a coronation as the Brazilians capture their 6th championship on their home soil. Some of their strongest challengers don't think they stand much of a chance. The fact that the Brazilians are such overwhelming favourites to win on their home soil is really not that much of a bother, as it’s generally accepted in every nation on earth not named Argentina that the Brazilians play the best football. The idea of the Brazilians lifting the trophy after triumphing in the final at the Maracanã seems almost to be in keeping with the natural order of things, a fitting end to to a showcase of the sport in the nation that cherishes it the most.

But this is IN PLAY LOSE, where we care about teams that do not succeed. And if it has been written in the stars by the Football Gods that Brazil will triumph in Rio de Janeiro in 2014, surely the Football Gods would also write in the stars that they will defeat, in that final, the most worthy of adversaries. An opponent that will bring the act of losing to its highest levels of elegance before succumbing to their inevitable fate.

That would be the Dutch.

And I have already accepted the fate, me being the owner of six iterations of Oranje jerseys which I keep in my closet, and former owner of one of these beauties from 1988:

Having already gone through their once-every-decade meltdown during the 2012 Euros, the Oranje are doing what they generally do in World Cup Qualifying, which is ANNIHILATE THEIR OPPONENTS. Unlike a great many teams with a propensity for playing scared vs. the Brazilians, the Dutch are never intimidated and almost stubbornly so. They won’t have any problem stepping into the ring in Rio and getting in a few good swings of their own in the World Cup Final. And sure, I’m sort of just glossing over the other 30 teams in the tourney here in foretelling this Brazilian-Dutch final, but it really cannot end any other way. If Brazil are the greatest champions in sport, their triumph should necessarily come over sport’s greatest also-ran. Just as nothing rhymes with orange, no one takes losing to the levels of the orange-clad footballers from the Netherlands.

Just as the Football Gods have already decreed a Brazil-Oranje final for 2014, so too did they decree the final of South Africa 2010, when the two must frustrated footballing nations on earth both found themselves in the final and pitted against each other, with the ascension to the realm of immortality that comes with being crowned World Cup Champion necessarily coming at the expense of the other. Spain v. Netherlands was about a half a century in the making, as during that time the two nations have often found themselves allies in the struggle for European footballing supremacy against the Germans and Italians, sharing ideas as countless hordes of Dutch players flocked south to be employed in La Liga. The unique Spanish passing game, in fact, has its roots in ideas brought to F.C. Barcelona in the 1970s by Johan Cruijff, Holland’s greatest football ambassador. And the Dutch lost, of course, losing 1:0 in O.T. to a great Spanish side which has also won the Euros in 2008 and 2012, and which can legitimately make the case for being one of the great teams of all time. Prior to 2010, the Spaniards and the Dutch could both lay claim to the least-desirable title in sports, the Best Team Never To Win A World Cup. After 2010, there is no longer any room for dispute as to who carries that moniker.

Despite a half-century of creating some of the games greatest players, sharpest coaches and grandest statements of style, the Dutch have won only one major championship, the 1988 Euros. They are thrice losers in World Cup finals, twice having lost on their opponents’ home turf. And when they don’t lose in the final, the Dutch still make a memorable exit – their losses in epic matches with Brazil in the 1994 Quarters and the 1998 Semis were the best matches of those respective tournaments; their losses in the Round of 16 to the West Germans in 1990 and Portugal in 2006 have become notorious for their nastiness, the latter match producing something like 20 yellow cards and three ejections while the former match produced this unsightly display but also moments like this. And again, that 1990 tussle was probably the best match of the tourney (and it speaks volumes about how bad Italy 1990 was as an event when the best match involves guys spitting on each other).

The Dutch were among the favorites in 1990, possessing two European Players of the Year up front in Gullitt and Van Basten among their stunning collection of talent, but they made an early exit from the tourney through a mix of bad play and also some genuinely bad luck. They were placed in a Group of Death, drew their first three games (one of which owing to a marginal late penalty awarded the Egyptians), were level with Ireland on points, goal difference and goals scored, and wound up playing the Germans in the Round of 16 through the drawing of lots.

But bad luck seems to go along with their penchant for occasionally horrible displays of self-destruction, none worse than the semis of the 2000 Euros in Rotterdam, on home soil, when the Dutch drew 0:0 to 10-man Italy and missed five penalties on their way to being bounced in a shootout. The shootout is the bane of the existence of the Oranje, a crapshoot of a way to end a game in which the Dutch inevitably roll snake eyes.

It’s easy to like the Dutch, because the football they play is so damned good. They are purveyors of some of the most aesthetically pleasing football out there, and are zealously proud of this fact. (It is routinely written into the contract of Dutch managers that their teams must play elegant, attractive football.) Lots of goals, lots of movement, with the constant threat of a goal from seemingly anywhere on the pitch hanging over their opponents. It’s a style that is both entertaining and ruthless. The Dutch were also-rans in the sport until the 1960s, when the counterculture bastion of Amsterdam spawned a revolutionary approach to the game which came to be known as Total Football, a virtual wheel of moving parts and precision in which players can interchange – defenders attack, attackers drop back, etc. – and the flow of play is dictated by figuring out and proceeding to exploit your opponent’s weaknesses. It’s a devastatingly effective system in that it destroys much of your preconceived notion of what players at certain positions on the field can do.

A good way to explain this to an American audience is to use a basketball example: whereas most teams have a 7’0” big man underneath and a 6’2” point guard out front who passes and stays out of the fray, how would you defend a team with five guys who were all in the range of 6’4” to 6’8” or so, all of whom could shoot, pass, and rebound? Such versatility would potentially negate any advantages your team had, since it would create a mismatch somewhere on the floor. (And if you look at the makeup of some of the championship college basketball teams over the years, you notice how quite a few of them are built this way.)

The Oranje game requires multifaceted, versatile players all over the field and breeds creativity, but is also quite cerebral (“Football is played with the head,” as Cruijff has famously said), so the Dutch bring the football fan an intellectual satisfaction to the game as well – not only do they have more talent than the opponents, but they often seem smarter as well.

Too smart for their own good, sometimes. Smartest Guy in the Room sort of smart. The Dutch are often undone by internal bickering and dissent, the management of their XI akin to managing 11 lawyers. And in a system where everyone can be an attacker, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Dutch seem to have trouble developing defenders. Why play defense, when scoring goals is much more fun? If you could put 11 forwards on the field, the Dutch would’ve won every World Cup since 1974.

Ah, yes, 1974. I don’t need to go into that much detail about 1974, since the final in Munich between the Dutch and West Germany has been written about more than any other football match in history, and quite possibly any other sporting event. All you really need to know is that the (over)confident Dutch strode onto the field in Munich, kicked off, connected a dozen or so passes, earned a penalty, and scored to go up 1:0 before the Germans had even touched the ball. And after that opening salvo – the most dominating, terrifying first three minutes in the history of the sport – they then proceeded to lose the game 2:1, complete with a disputed German penalty thrown in to add some conspiratorial angst to the mix. You have to comb through the annals of history to find a team as great as the Dutch squad of 1974 that came up short. The closest thing to the Oranje were the Hungarians of 1954, the undisputed kings of the sport at the time who inexplicably lost 3:2 in the final in Bern to … West Germany, a team whom the Hungarians had poleaxed 8:3 earlier in the tournament.

“Football is a game played by two teams of 11 players in which the Germans always win.”
– Gary Lineker

The Germans are, of course, the game of football’s greatest villains, the dasher of many a nation’s dreams of glory. They and the Italians both, in fact, the two sides having won seven World Cups between them and done so in ways their detractors would decry as dishonorable. And by “detractors,” I mean the four other great footballing nations of Europe – England, France, Spain and, yes, the Dutch, all of whom have developed decided national identities to their style of play over the decades and generally refused to compromise those principles for the sake of a result – meaning, of course, they often wind up losing, and usually to either the Germans or the Italians. This notion of what is honorable and not is somewhat ridiculous, of course, the implication being that both teams cheat. According to the narrative, the German “steely resolve” is little more than physically bludgeoning their opponents, while the Italians suffocate you with defense, counterattack, take dives, work the refs, and bait the opponents into conceding free kicks and penalties, and both teams will play all the angles to get the desired result. While there is certainly some evidence to that effect (most notably this disgraceful performance from 1982), neither side would be able to succeed at the highest levels without the talent to back it up. They may come off as unlikable in the process, and seem perfectly OK with doing so, but you cannot deny the results in the most results-oriented of businesses. And whomever started the melee in Germany-Netherlands 1990, or France v. Italy in the 2006 final, you sure as hell cannot argue that the Dutch or French didn’t contribute. Such principled sorts should have known better, don’t you think?

Pretty much all principles of decency went out the window in 1978 for the World Cup in Argentina, one of the uglier sporting events of all time as it was played out in a nation ruled by a military junta, a lot who are easily on the short list for Worst People in the History of the World that desperately viewed an Argentine victory in the tournament as a stamp of their legitimacy as a ruling body, and went to extremes to try to do that. The higher echelons of sport have always been filled with scofflaws and scoundrels, but 1978 took that to entirely different levels. (There is an excellent chapter on this event in the fabulous book Soccer Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper, a book which also does well to explain various aspects of Dutch football neurosis, including the national catharsis that was the 1988 Euros victory over their German rivals.) Even with Cruijff’s absence, the Dutch were a terrific side and worked their way into the final where they faced the hosts, who had scrambled their way to the final with a bit of alleged Peruvian assistance:

The most significant example of alleged match-fixing occurred in the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. This was more than just a football competition, it was all that kept the ruling military junta from losing power, and thus Argentina had to win.
Come the last match of the semi-final stage, they needed to defeat Peru by four goals to reach the final rather than arch-rivals Brazil. Peru were a useful side but, after an Argentine team-talk from which the goalkeeper and substitutes were barred, Argentina won 6-0 after Peru hit a post in the opening minutes. Shortly afterwards it is alleged that Argentina shipped 35,000 tons of free grain - and probably some free arms - to Peru, and the Argentine central bank unfroze $50m in credits for Peru.
– The Independent 

And the Dutch lost, of course, 3:1 in O.T. after very nearly winning in regulation, a Dutch shot hitting the woodwork in the game’s dying moments. One can only wonder what might have happened in Argentina if the home side hadn’t prevailed. (More than a few theorists have noted that the junta survived the loss to the Brits in the Falklands War but couldn’t survive La Albiceleste losing to Belgium in the opening of the 1982 World Cup, a defeat which triggered the side’s hasty early exit from the tourney.) The result of the 1978 final also gave the Argentines a rather dubious reputation, one which stayed with them for more than a decade. For all the brilliance of Maradona, his greatness can never be separated from the "Hand of God," and their unsightly march to the 1990 final through a series of goalless draws and wins in shootouts certainly didn’t help.

The argument put forth by the purists, of course, is that teams such as the Germans, Italians and Argentines cheat because they cannot compete on a fair playing field. If they really have so much talent, they shouldn’t have to resort to dirty tactics to win. I would like to agree with that sentiment, being a loyal supporter of the Oranje and loving the way the Dutch play the game, but I think it’s somewhat misguided. And I’m also getting to the point where I’m tired of glorious losses.

I think I reached that point in 1998, actually, in the epic loss to Brazil. The Brazilians had a stunning array of offensive talent but a weak central defense, a susceptibility to strong center forward play easily masked since teams were so afraid to attack the Brazilians, fearful of being exposed to the Brazilian counter. The two sides that had thrown caution to the wind – Norway and Denmark – had big forwards who dominated the games up front, the results being a shock Brazilian loss to Norway and a near-death experience in the Quarterfinals vs. the Danes. Well, the Dutch figured this out, of course, and lobbed cross after cross after cross into the Brazilian goalmouth, only to have opportunities go awry for one reason or another. It was a fast and furious game which ended 1:1, and the Dutch inevitably lost in a penalty shootout, and got to watch on TV as the French employed much same strategy (albeit with their fleet of midfielders in the key roles) and waxed the Brazilians 3:0 in the final. That was a beautiful game, that semifinal, one of the more stunning matches I can recall, and the Dutch were heartbroken in the end. I’m all for beautiful football, of course, but at some point you have to stop trying to play beautifully and start trying to win the game. Style be damned.

And the international football media skewered the Dutch side of 2010 for it’s occasionally un-Oranje performances on their way to the 2010 final, as they showed a penchant for physical play and played at a much slower pace than is their norm. Yet there they were on the game’s grandest stage, and they had a plan for the ball-hogging, pass-happy Spaniards, a plan taken from the Swiss and the Americans, of all things – the two sides which had most recently defeated the reigning European champion Spaniards. The Dutch came out and knocked the Spaniards around. They were physical, overaggressive, playing the body and skirting the edges. (And in truth, they got away with some pretty nasty fouls which warranted red cards.) They wanted to frustrate Spain, knock them off their game, and then try to spring a counter with Robben, their swiftest player, on the square and hopefully unfocused Spanish defense. And it worked perfectly, of course … until Robben missed. Well, he was saved by Casillas, the Spanish goalkeeper, but he should have done better with the chance. From that point on in the game, there seemed this sense of inevitability to the proceedings, a sense that they’d let the Spaniards wriggle off the hook and that defeat would eventually follow.

So not only can the Dutch not win when they play their game, they apparently cannot win when playing someone else’s game. They come up short in some of the sport’s most hostile environments, on neutral ground, and, in the case of the 2000 Euros, on home soil as well. And it’s always memorable, it’s always noteworthy. Never a dull moment. After years of watching this, I have come to conclude this is how it is meant to be.

And given their place in footballing history, it would only stand to reason that the Oranje would step into the ring vs. the Brazilians next summer, be the most worthy of adversaries and ultimately lose. I can see no other possible outcome. (Unless, of course, the Oranje somehow get paired with the Belgians along the way, who annoy them and irritate them and always find a way to thieve points from them.) So it has been written, and so it shall be. The great unknown will come in 2018, when the event is hosted by Russia, who possess one of the game’s most dominating home-field advantages but who also are one of the game’s great underachievers. All bets are off on that one. In the meantime, I will gladly dress in orange and hope they can buck fate just this once. Hup Holland! Now win the damn game already, would you?

Opportunity Lost

So for those of you that do not know, I work for an auto racing magazine, one specifically dealing with classic, historic, and vintage cars. We have a good guy who comes in and does some part-time work for us named Don, who takes a proof off the wall with an advertisement of cars for sale on it.

"I used to have one of these," he tells me, pointing to the page. "In fact, for all I know, this might actually be my old car."

The car he's referring to is this:

This is a 1938 BMW 328. A beautiful and very rare automobile. Don had bought one in Germany after WWII and had it shipped stateside.

"What ever happened to that car?" I asked Don.

"I sold it in the mid-1950s. I got $1200 for it. But obviously, I should've held onto it," he says with a shrug. "Opportunity lost, I guess."

This 1938 BMW can now be yours for $550,000.

Sonicsgate

The LOSE is keeping a close eye on the goings on surrounding the future of the wobegone Sacramento Kings. I have been restraining myself from commenting on this until it all plays out, as there are a variety of issues which pertain to this blog, and are definitely relevant to this blogger as well.

Full disclosure here: I used to be a Seattle SuperSonics season ticket holder.

That being said, I no longer live in the Pacific Northwest, have lived in Northern California for more than a decade, found the Chris Webber-era Kings teams to be a joy to watch and wish well for, thought they got royally jobbed by the officials in the playoffs vs. the Lakers, and felt as if the Kings missed a golden opportunity to dominate the psyche of Northern California basketball fans, given how pathetic the Golden St. Warriors have been.

So my position on the Seattle v. Sacramento tug-of-war over the Kings is nuanced and we'll get to that in another post.

In the meantime, the following video is required viewing for all loyal followers of IN PLAY LOSE. This is an award-winning documentary about the clusterfuck that led to the Sonics being relocated to Oklahoma City, and all of the clusterfuckers who participated in it. Not only does it prevent me from having to go through the whole sordid history myself (because I'm inherently lazy), but it's best of familiarize oneself with the how-to's of franchise relocation – a primarily North American phenomenon which is madder than hatters. So pay attention folks. Class is in session:

To Coug

“When you go to Washington State, you learn to live with disappointment.”
– Don James, former Washington football coach

In the Quarterfinal of the Pac-10 Pac-12 tournament in Seattle, the women’s basketball team from Washington State University lost to Stanford. This is not news. Were the Lady Cougs to defeat Stanford, not only would it be newsworthy, but it would explain that swarm of locusts descending from the skies. This is because the Lady Cougs have never beaten Stanford. Never as in never, ever. Their all-time record vs. the Stanford women is 0-55, the most inglorious of losing streaks at a school where losing streaks are commonplace.

And while the Good Gals season was coming to an end with yet another loss to Stanford, over on the men’s side of things, the Cougars managed an upset victory over UCLA at home that same week. The Cougars had lost 19 straight to UCLA at home prior to that, a skid which was absolutely confounding – while there have been up-and-down times on the hardwood in Pullman, during that period the Cougars have generally been pretty good, making 3 NCAA tournament appearances and even reaching the Sweet 16 in 2008. They just couldn’t win.

As bad as that skid was, it pales in comparison to one of the more remarkable skids in school history – having lost the first 47 times they played UCLA in Los Angeles. 47 times! Now, granted, UCLA won 11 national titles during that stretch, but the Cougars have generally been competitive on the hardwood over the years. The streak took on a life of its own after a while, as the Cougars would often times put up great showings at Pauley Pavilion, only to lose by 1, or by 2, or in OT, or do something absurd like blow a 23-pt. lead in the final 7:30 of the game. When they finally broke through and won at Pauley, head coach Dick Bennett probably could have run for mayor. The record against the Bruins in L.A. is now 2-54, if you’re keeping track. (And when you’re 2-54, you almost cannot help but keep track.) Dick Bennett also managed to rid the school of another box of Kryptonite as well in his 3-year tenure as head coach, a 38-game drought against Arizona that had dated back to mid-1980s.

But this is how it seems to go at Washington State, where losing is an art form taken to the extreme.

Buoyed by their win over the Bruins, the Cougars then played the dreaded Husky scum from the University of Washington in the first round of the Pac-12 tournament, and it was a game in which the Cougars got way behind, put on a furious rally, and wound up losing by 2 points, thus bringing an end to the season. This would go down as a good effort, were it not eerily similar to their 2-point loss at home to eventual #1 Gonzaga earlier in the year. Or eerily similar to 4-5 other games this year. In fact, come to think of it, I’ve been watching that exact same game for 30 YEARS NOW.

To give you some idea of my connection to that school, my father was a professor there for 25 years, and I basically grew up around that campus. I was taking classes there while I was in high school, and the campus was always a fabulous resource, be it the library or the gyms or as a source of summer employment. It’s actually a really outstanding institution with some top-class programs, most notably the journalism and communications departments – you take classes in the Edward R. Murrow Building for a reason. Famed sportscaster Keith “Whoa Nellie” Jackson is also an alum, and you pretty much cannot watch a local news telecast in the Western U.S. without seeing a W.S.U. grad somewhere on the screen. So even though I’m not technically an alumni, I feel more of a kinship to that university than some of the graduates. I’ve made it a point in the past to go to some of the Bay Area alumni gatherings for football games against either Stanford or Cal. An action which, of late, has been rather dismal and downright embarrassing and has grown decidedly unappealing.

The last time I did so was in 2008, in a downpour “down on the farm” and W.S.U. lost to Stanford 58-0. Considering that 2008 football team was the first team in NCAA history to give up 60+ points in a game four times in one season, 58-0 constituted improvement. With everything that I was saying before about the basketball program, it should be pointed out again that the basketball team has actually been pretty good most of the time. The footballers, meanwhile, are in the midst of a 5-year-run which has seen them go 12-49. A particular wretched stretch of bad football never seen at a school where bad football has been far too common over the history of the program.

“It was an autumn day made for football, if only WSU had played some. Cloudy and highs in the 60s. That's the outlook, respectively, for the Cougars and their opponents.”
– Bud Withers, Seattle Times

When things go bad at W.S.U., they really go bad. Before Dick Bennett arrived as the basketball coach, the program endured a four-year stretch where they went 9-63 in Pac-10 play. The women’s team hasn’t been worth a damn in about 20 years, and have put up a couple seasons where they accrued records like 2-25. It’s said at schools like UCLA that they never rebuild but simply reload. At W.S.U., rebuilding is a step-up from cratering, and the landscape of the athletic program has more craters than the moon.

W.S.U. faces some inherent disadvantages when it comes to competing on the playing field. Success in athletics requires procuring talent, first and foremost, and recruiting to the school is pretty damn difficult. Washington State University is barely within the state boundaries, located in the small town of Pullman some 270 miles east of Seattle and 8 miles from the Idaho border. Now, it’s not a bad place at all. It’s a nice college town, and with 30,000 college kids in the area it is always pretty lively. (The University of Idaho is located 8 miles away in the border town of Moscow. Maybe it was due to living in a town named for the Russian capital that U. of I. grad Sarah Palin got the idea she could see Russia from her house. But I digress.) But it is remote. It’s not for everyone. You have to enjoy the outdoors and enjoy a certainly easygoing pace of life.

And indeed, W.S.U. could go on beating on the Idaho Vandals and such seemingly at will if they chose. But instead, W.S.U. competes in the Pac-12, which is the single most successful athletic conference in history. (And I should point out that the school isn’t just competing for athletes, but also professors and students and money and everything else. College sports are the greatest fundraising and marketing tools a university has, which is a part of why they’ve perpetuated for all these years.) UCLA has won 100+ national titles alone. Stanford, Cal, and U.S.C. are consistently ranked among the top all-around athletic programs in the country. W.S.U. is basically competing against big city schools from California, Seattle, and Phoenix and, particularly in the case of the University of Nike down in Eugene, big MONEY schools as well. It’s just always going to be a struggle. It takes pretty determined coaches to make programs work at the university.

And, of course, there are better jobs available elsewhere for coaches which pay better and offer more prestige, so W.S.U. is almost always used as a stepping stone by coaches. This shouldn’t be a surprise, of course – I personally view coaches as the most selfish bunch of egomaniacs on the earth, almost all of whom spend more time caring about their bank balances more than anything else – but about the time a coach gets a program succeeding at a high level at W.S.U., bigger schools come with their chequebooks open. Because after all, if you can be successful at Washington State, you can probably be successful anywhere. So when things start going well with any particular club – for example, the men’s basketball team rising to prominence and reaching the Sweet 16 a few years ago – there is a certain inevitability that there will be a coaching change (in that case, Dick’s son Tony Bennett, who had taken over from his father, promptly bolted for Virginia) and that lack of continuity just adds to the problems.

[For some reason, W.S.U. seems to be a fertile ground for recruiting coaches to the state of Iowa. They lost a football coach to Iowa State, a basketball coach to Iowa, and also their most successful coach of their volleyball program moved on to Iowa as well, although she gave up coaching so as to watch her son play college basketball. And since it’s March Madness season, you might remember the kid because he likely busted your bracket in the office pool:



Yeah, that kid.]

With losing, however, comes humour, albeit gallows humour a lot of the time, and the Zzu Crew are a patient bunch who tend to take defeat in stride. Quirky places like Pullman also tend to attract some quirky people – thus the school has a long history of colourful characters who are quick with a quip and able to find comedy in almost any situation. (Don James of the Huskies used to complain that he was a “2,000 word underdog” when it came time for the Apple Cup press conferences.) One of whom, Jim Sweeney, died recently and suffered through an inglorious 26-59-1 stint over eight seasons as head football coach but always left them laughing, although his last game with the school was no laughing matter at the time.

This particular game in 1975 is (in)famous because the Cougars led 27-14 late in the fourth quarter over their hated rivals, the Husky scum from Washington, and they decided to run the score up a bit. Then this happened:

No Apple Cup ever had a wackier windup than the 1975 renewal at Husky Stadium. With 3:01 remaining, Washington State held a 27-14 lead and seemed on the verge of a significant upset. The 3-7 Cougars also had the ball on the UW 14-yard line, staring at fourth and one, and needed only a field goal to clinch the contest. WSU coach Jim Sweeney initially ordered a run, but his players wanted to pass. Sweeney, in what would become a classic blunder, reluctantly acquiesced. After the snap, WSU quarterback John Hopkins threw toward his tight end, but Washington’s Al Burleson stepped in front of him and intercepted the ball.
After two steps, Burleson was on his way to a 93-yard touchdown. After the Husky defense held, Washington got the ball back with 1:58 left and WSU clinging to a 27-21 lead. With the Huskies positioned deep in their own territory, UW quarterback Warren Moon, playing only because of an injury to starter Chris Rowland, launched a “here’s-hoping” bomb in the direction of wide receiver Spider Gaines, running free behind the Cougars’ secondary.
Moon badly underthrew the ball, and a trio of Cougar defenders converged at midfield to intercept it. But WSU’s midfield committee botched the job. The ball bounced off WSU’s Tony Heath and ricocheted into the arms of Gaines, who ran into the end zone for a 78-yard touchdown. Steve Robbins’ extra point gave the Huskies an improbable 28-27 victory, which led to Sweeney’s resignation.
– Sports Press Northwest

"When we scored 52 and beat Washington (in 1973), they gave me a lifetime contract. After that (1975) game, they had me declared dead."
– Jim Sweeney

This game did more to cement a notion which has become common vernacular in the Pacific Northwest – the verb “To Coug,” which means to blow a game when victory is almost certain, and usually in the most incomprehensible fashion imaginable. The phrase itself became infamous after this game, when aghast Spokesman-Review columnist John Blanchette penned a column in response to yet another absurd loss in a lost season. (The key play in that game is at the 25:53 mark of the video, where WSU recovers an Arizona St. fumble on the 4-yd. line, only to have to wiped out due to having 12 men on the field.) He said in that column that he was looking for: "a word, a phrase, even, to sum up this misbegotten football season at Washington State University. To Coug. Verb intransitive."

It’s this aspect which drives fans crazy. Because while it’s one thing to just be lousy, and lose repeatedly in contests where success seems scantly possible, what’s even more crazymaking is constant underachievement. Losing is still losing, of course – the desired final result having not been achieved – but it is the ways in which losing occurs that come to define you over time.

And regardless of the talent level on the field or on the court, Washington State somehow seems to screw it up in the end. For years, W.S.U. had one of the most dominant track & field programs in the country, a program that churned out future world record holders and Olympic medalists. Yet every year, come time for the NCAA championships – the one meet that mattered the most – the Cougars would finish 2nd or 3rd, unable to live up to billing as meet favorites. I watched an astonishing number of football games in the 1980s in which talent-laden squads would lose do stuff like gain 675 yards in a game and lose because they turned the ball over 7 times. The level of talent and aptitude on the team seems simply to raise the magnitude of the implosion, in the end. Every year bracketeers look at the NCAA tourney and say “look for an upset on the 5-12 line.” Well, W.S.U. was the original 5-12 upset in 1980, when one of the best teams in school history lost to 12th-seeded Penn in the first round of the newly-expanded tourney. (And this was a 48-team field, mind you, so losing to a 12 back then was particularly embarrassing.) One of the school’s biggest sporting achievements of all-time – reaching the Final Four in 1941 – also led to a rather ignoble record – Worst Shooting Pct. in the NCAA Championship Game – that lasted for nearly 70 years (until that masonry display by Butler vs. Connecticut a few years ago).

The school's athletes also seems cursed on the injury front. The basketball team of 1982-83 was a contender for the league title and was led by Guy Williams, who was 6'9" and could play all five positions on the floor. He was leading the Pac-10 in scoring and rebounding when he tore up his knee in a game at Eugene, never to play for WSU again. Pitcher/1B John Olerud had arguably the greatest single season in college baseball history in 1988, batting .464 as a hitter and going 15-0 as a pitcher. He then suffered a scary brain aneurysm in the offseason. He recovered, of course, and had a pretty successful major league career, but his Coug days were more or less over at the point.

I could go on and on, give one example after another. The members of the Zzu Crew have been putting up with this stuff for decades. But it’s not all bad, of course. Like I say, Pullman is a quirky sort of place, and everyone associated with the university makes it a point of not taking themselves that seriously. (The Far Side creator Gary Larson is a W.S.U. alum, after all.) There is good humour to be had, and no one stays too mad about defeat for all that long. And the school’s particular peculiar challenges make it a ripe place for innovators and unorthodox thinkers in the coaching ranks. Football’s spread offense, all the rage at every level of the game, has roots in the Palouse – long before it was trendy, W.S.U. coaches Dennis Erickson and then Mike Price had the field spread wide and the school’s long lineage of top calibre quarterbacks throwing the ball all over the place. On the hardwood, W.S.U. was a perfect place for Dick Bennett, whose teams played suffocating, claustrophobic defense like none other and gave the school instant credibility – teams would circle that game with the Cougars on the schedule and absolutely, positively dread it. You have to do things a little bit differently at W.S.U., take some risks and be creative. When it works out, the rewards – however fleeting – can be joyous. The huge numbers of W.S.U. alums assembling in the Bay Area for football games during the Golden Age (3 straight 10-win seasons from 2000-2002) made the games in Berkeley and Palo Alto seem like home games. And the 1998 Rose Bowl, which was W.S.U. first trip to Pasadena since 1931, was one of the most sought-after tickets in the game’s history, as something like 400,000 requests for W.S.U.’s allotment of 40,000 seats.

And I had vowed that if the Cougars ever made the Rose Bowl, I would fire up the BBQ. And so there I was on Jan. 1, 1998, grilling up a lobster and a couple of Porterhouses in -8° temperatures in western Colorado while watching the game through the screen door.

And it was a great game, of course, and one with a fitting end: W.S.U. losing. And not just any sort of loss, mind you, but a controversial loss – the Cougars hurrying to the line of scrimmage at the Michigan 25 yd-line, trailing 21-16 to the #1 ranked Wolverines; QB Ryan Leaf spiking the ball to stop the clock with :02 left …

Except the clock didn’t stop and ran to :00. Game over.

W.S.U. has been waiting to run that last play of the game for 15 years now.

“I got a commemorative Rose Bowl watch. It runs two seconds fast.”
– Mike Price

My Hero of the Week and Probably Every Week

RIP Roger Ebert. I think The Onion says it best of all.

When I first started dabbling in journalism two decades ago, I started by reading about 200 of his reviews and said to myself that I wanted to write as well as he did some day. And I still do.

See you at the movies, Roger ...

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.