National League Least

This blog entry is just an excuse for a silly baseball .gif

NO ONE has ever accused Jeffrey Loria of being indecisive. Once he decides changes need to be made with the Miami Marlins, it’s damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. That his “fire, ready, aim” approach to running a Major League Baseball franchise actually resulted in the Marlins winning a World Series in 2003 should gall every baseball fan to the core. More often than not, of course, MLB’s greatest shyster comes off looking like a buffoon. His club crashes out and Loria’s response is simply to slash and burn, often stripping the payroll of the club down to among the lowest in the majors, with predictable results. Loria is something of a pariah to his fellow owners, as well, having mooched off the MLB’s revenue sharing while crying poor mouth, all the while profiting handsomely from it while he was also going about conning and bilking local politicos into ponying up an estimated $2.4 billion for the atrocity that is Marlins Park – a facility built in keeping with the club’s owner in terms of bombast, tackiness, and artifice.

Quite a few baseball writers I read, and think highly of, made it a point in the preseason of picking the Miami Marlins to be in the World Series at season’s end. The Lose was quite skeptical of such predictions. Yes, the Marlins had developed a nice nucleus of talent during their latest foray into the badlands, but I could think of 5-6 NL clubs off the top of my head with more talent, so the Marlins even making the playoffs seemed like it would be a challenge. But also, the Marlins’ history of rash, and often irrational behaviour, led me to think that the organization wouldn’t make the sorts of moves necessary in-season if/when it started not going so well. This is an organization that signed every free agent imaginable in one off-season, stunk the following season, and then traded every single player they had signed the previously signed. This is the organization that once gave away a starting outfielder to a pennant contender (who promptly was the NLCS MVP) and demoted another to AAA because of his twitter feed. When push comes to shove in Miami, stupidity takes over and the operation folds up like the house of cards that it is.

And it wasn’t going so well here early in the season for the Marlins, but it was the sort of run-of-the-mill bad start that a lot of teams go through. The offense was struggling, there were some injuries on the pitching front, the Marlins were a few games under .500 but it’s nothing you can’t overcome with a few good weeks strung together. Patience should have been the order of the day in Miami – but Jeffrey Loria doesn’t do patience. After all, he’d invested a fortune in this club in the offseason! He’d signed Giancarlo Stanton to the richest contract in MLB history! (A contract which, like everything else Loria does, withers under scrutiny.) Nope, it was time for some swift, decisive action – firing manager Mike Redmond, whom he had just hired a season ago – and then compounding the disaster by instilling GM Dan Jennings in the position.

Jennings has a long track record of success in the player development area. He is part of the reason why the Marlins aren’t even more of a disaster on a regular basis. On the managerial front, however, he can point to working with a high school club in Alabama 30 years ago. That’s it. The excuse put forth by the Marlins is that Jennings knows the organization, and its players, better than anyone since he’s the one who assembled the cast. What’s more likely the reason is that the notoriously stingy Loria is still paying two former managers – Redmond and the mercurially loquacious Ozzie Guillen – and didn’t want to pay for a third. This bit of cheap chicanery is straight out of the plotline for a Disney movie. There hasn’t been a stunt in Major League managerial hirings quite like this since the day that Ted Turner hired himself to manage the Braves.

And while I don’t necessarily think you have to have a résumé lined with managerial and coaching experiences to qualify for the job, there is a huge difference between the on-field and the off-the-field, day-to-day operations of a professional sports franchise. One of the reasons why so many collegiate coaches fail in the pro ranks, for example, is that lower-level success entirely depends on talent development. But in the pros, everyone has talent, and the contribution of a coaching staff involves much more tactical acumen and more efficient human resources management. It’s a long season, and you have to manage your personnel appropriately to get through it.

The role of an on-field manager was famously discounted in Moneyball, where Billy Beane seems to call all the shots, but you haven’t seen Billy Beane put on a uniform and try to run the clubhouse, now have you? Over the course of a season, the in-game tactical moves of a manager may seemingly not matter much – I think the WAR value it’s been calculated at falls in the 1.0-1.5 range – but no sport on the planet lives within the margins of error quite like baseball, where the difference between a great team and a terrible one is one more win a week over the course of a season. Both the Nats and the Cards were done in, in part, by the Giants in the playoffs because Bruce Bochy managed circles around his inexperienced foes, both of whom made horrible decisions with their pitching staffs at critical junctures. The job does matter, and not just anyone can do it.

It’s also a craft, and a good number of guys have put in the time to learn that craft. Loria’s hiring of Jennings makes a mockery of that craft, and some of its proprietors have been none too amused.

And neither are the Marlins players amused, apparently. Their response to this move was to promptly go into an 8-game losing streak and fall into last place in the NL East. Professional athletes who have no respect for the coaching staff generally respond to it by finding a way to get them fired (that shift in authority, and inability of an individual to adjust to it, being another reason why so many lower-echelon coaches fail at higher levels). Good luck with that, now that the guy who should be doing the hiring and the firing is holding down both jobs. They are professionals being subjected to the Mickey Mouse whims of their front office. And I had the same opinion about Stanton signing that mega-contract to play for the Fish that I did when Redmond took the manager’s position a year ago: if given your druthers, why on earth would you ever agree to work for these guys?

Instead of vying for the playoffs, Florida’s Fish are threatening to do something I didn’t think possible this season – dislodge the Philadelphia Phillies from the National League basement. The Phillies are so devoid of talent that Jeff Francoeur is starting in the outfield. Phillies GM/Captain of the Titanic impersonator Ruben Amaro, Jr., meanwhile, struck this understanding pose when asked about growing disconnect among Phillie Phaithful:

“They don’t understand the game. They don’t understand the process. There’s a process. And then they bitch and complain because we don’t have a plan. There’s a plan in place and we’re sticking with the plan. We can’t do what’s best for the fan. We have to do what’s best for the organization so the fan can reap the benefit of it later on. That’s the truth.”
– Ruben Amaro Jr., Philadelphia Phillies GM

Jeez, Ruben, why stop there? Why not just say that all the fans should get a job? Philly sports fans may be irascible, but they are also loyal, knowledgeable, and surprisingly patient. Look at what they’ve had to put up with. The Phillies have lost more games than any team in the history of sports, the Flyers haven’t won a Stanley Cup in 40 years, the Eagles have never won a Super Bowl, and the 76ers have devolved into an assault on the senses. And apparently, ‘the plan’ in Philadelphia involves taking a 101-win team in 2011 and razing it to rubble over the course of four years. You should always be wary of GMs on bad teams who talk about ‘the plan.’ Usually, that means they have no idea what they’re doing. But bitching about the fact that the fans bitch is usually a good way to get yourself fired – as if there weren’t already plenty of reasons for the Phillies to do that, anyway.

Now that Kevin Towers has been axed in Arizona, Amaro has shot to the top of the list of Guys In Pro Sports Whom I Wonder Why They Still Have a Job. Amaro came along at the tail end of the Phillies’ build-up to winning a World Series, to which he responded by handing out some wonderfully large contracts to players like Ryan Howard in appreciation for their outstanding careers – a sentiment you can understand, of course, but the problem was that the Phillies were already among the oldest teams in the league when they won the World Series, and that core of talent was never supplanted by any youth. (The Phillies’ drafts over the past decade have been atrocious.) Burdened with old, past-their-prime, broken-down players with immovable contracts clogging up the payroll, the Phillies have continued working from a position of weakness, doing dumb things like trading away potential cornerstone Hunter Pence for pennies on the dollar because they didn’t want to pay the luxury tax thanks to all of the dead weight on their bloated payroll.

What both Loria and Amaro share is a delusion that just because their teams won World Series championships on their watch, it means that the two of them know what they are doing. The Florida Marlins more or less lucked their way into winning in 2003, while a whole lot of the organizational building in Philadelphia happened under the auspice of former GM Pat Gillick. Now, winning titles does give you some cred, and also gives you a little leeway when it comes to keeping the fans happy, but only to a point. It’s not 2003 any more, nor is it 2009. You’re always judged in sports by what you do now. Championships matter, of course. The old adage “flags fly forever” is certainly true, and I’m going to like seeing that third championship banner flying out in center field in a few weeks when I go to see the Giants play the Mariners at Phone Company Park. But just because the flag is flying, it doesn’t mean you can wrap yourself in it.

A Nice £130m Problem to Have

On The Ball, City!

TODAY’S playoff at Wembley, between my beloved Canaries from Norwich City and Middlesborough F.C., was dubbed “The Richest Game In The World” – the intrigue in a match between the 3rd- and 4th-place finishers in the English League Championship coming from the veritable pot o’ gold awaiting the winner: promotion to the EPL, and the £130 million in TV broadcast revenues that come along with it. The Good Guys were in control of the match throughout, scoring twice in the first quarter of an hour to take control and ultimately winning the game 2:0 to return to the EPL after a 1-year absence, joining A.F.C. Bournemouth and Watford among the ranks of the newly-promoted.

The Lose has always been a believer in the concept of promotion and relegation, because it keeps clubs on their toes and prevents teams from dogging it. In North America, you have franchises like the Chicago Cubs, who’ve made losing a profitable art form. You’ve also seen the rise of deliberate, systemwide tanking in the NBA and NHL so as to try and secure coveted draft picks. The Philadelphia 76ers have basically written off three seasons in some sort of master plan that I cannot quite figure out. They were horrible the last two years, and will likely be horrible again this coming season, and if you’re a basketball fan in Philly, why would you ever go back to watching that team? It’s easy enough to lose in sports without actively trying to be bad. With franchises in scarce supply, with revenue sharing and salary caps and booming TV rights, money is aplenty in American sports no matter whether you win or lose. In fact, there’s never been a better time to be bad. The Houston Astros played some of the worst baseball in Major League history, and then played even more, all the while drawing 0.0 TV ratings, yet somehow seem not the worse for it.

This is not the case in England, where your budget shrinks by about £128 million the moment you get relegated from the EPL. Promotion to the top flite is, therefore, a massive accomplishment. And with the infusion of £130 million into your budget comes the question of what to do with it – which is a question that’s harder to answer than you might think. Two of last year’s promoted sides were quickly relegated, both of which offer up cautionary tales as to what not to do. Queen’s Park Rangers were so desperate to get into the EPL again that they were carrying a club wage bill in 2014 as large as some of the EPL’s top sides – running up enormous debt and doing some curious accounting in the process. Promotion shielded them from some scrutiny – after all, the EPL plays by a number of its own rules – but now that QPR has collapsed in a heap, finishing last and being taken out with the refuse, they may have to answer for some of their spending habits to officials from the English FA. Burnley, meanwhile, took the money from their promotion and stashed it away, spending far less this season than any club in the EPL and getting the results to prove it. They too are going back down to the English League Championship once more, but a year’s worth of EPL TV money will cushion the blow.

And Burnley’s one-and-done EPL act is nothing out of the ordinary. Fans want their team to do whatever is possible to win, of course, and it’s hard to sometimes look at bigger pictures – especially since the bigger picture is, in essence, that it’s probably impossible to win. There are 92 professional football clubs in the four tiers of the English league, and many of them are perfectly content carrying on in the lower ranks. It’s a business that’s both frighteningly competitive and frighteningly expensive. There are plenty of clubs which will knock it about every Saturday before 5,000 diehards in the lower echelons whose boards of directors have no real drive nor ambition, nor financial incentive for that matter, to do much more than that. Moving up a level can often take you far, far out of your comfort zone.

Perhaps this dilemma has been best chronicled, in recent years, in the late Joe McGinniss’ wonderful book The Miracle of Castel di Sangro: A Tale of Passion and Folly in the Heart of Italy, the story of a small, backwater Italian soccer club which almost inexplicably rises up to Italian Serie B – the 2nd-highest level of Italian football – at which point they are immediately and woefully out of their league. Players need to be paid, stadia financed, and with a rise in level comes an increase in scrutiny of the club’s affairs. It becomes apparent rather quickly that everyone involved in the club off the pitch were perfectly happy trawling about in C1.

Over time, many clubs have found that comfort zone and are perfectly content never to deviate from the norm. While there is a core of élite clubs dominating the EPL year after the year, English football also has its share of solid yet unspectacular performers – the Stoke Citys and the West Broms and what have you – who fill out the ranks and define success by Top 10 finishes and by occasionally nicking a game here and there from the bigger sides. And there are also a few clubs like Norwich City who bounce up and down between Divs 1 and 2 on a regular basis to such an extent that their fans, while not necessarily liking it, do possess a certain sense of realism about their expectations. Success is modest and fleeting when you’re not one of the big guns. Earlier this season, the pairings in the always nutty FA Cup saw mighty Manchester United traveling for a match with a 4th Division Cambridge United side. Cambridge held on mightily for a goalless draw to force a replay at Old Trafford – and the gate receipts for a match at 67,000-capacity Old Trafford were enough to cover the club’s entire budget for a year. The 0:0 draw, therefore, constituted a great triumph on many levels, and being inevitably hammered by Man U in the replay meant little. When you’re not one of the big players, you have to change your definitions of success. You pick your spots and make your own meanings. So having the opportunity to descend en masse at Wembley on a Bank Holiday (as 86,000 City and Boro fans chose to do) took on an enormous importance which, in the grander scheme of things probably shouldn’t exist – after all, this was a 3rd-place playoff we’re talking about here, yet the Canaries and their fans celebrated as if they’d just won the Champions League.

The £130 million that comes with it complicates matters. Norwich’s relegation were actually something of a surprise, as they were expected to be much better in the 2014 season, but three years of EPL money, combined with some sound fiscal policy, had allowed the club to remain essentially debt-free. As a result, they were able to keep the core of their team together and not have to resort to the sort of massive sell-off of players many failed EPL sides face in the face of crippling debts. (The QPR fire sale should be starting at any moment now.) Norwich City are a pretty savvy club with a fan base that is both loyal and patient, so it’s unlikely the Canaries are going to do anything rash. Most likely, they’ll be pretty cautious going forward, trying to keep the nucleus together and add a few good buys here and there, hoping to eke through next season and build from there.

And for the other invitees to the big party, this is somewhat unsure territory. A.F.C. Bournemouth has already said they aren’t going to use their infusion of cash to upgrade their meager, 11,700-seat home football grounds, opting instead to spend it on ‘club infrastructure,’ and there have also been some whisperings that A.F.C., who’ve never been to the EPL before, perhaps have run afoul of Financial Fair Play regulations in a similar fashion to QPR (though maybe not quite so spectacularly). Watford, meanwhile, are well-known throughout England for talent development – beat the bushes in search of players, buy low and sell high – but that sort of approach often doesn’t translate very well in the big-money world. It’s similar to the Moneyball dilemma in baseball, where the A’s analytics-based approach worked really well until other clubs like the Red Sox took the same sorts of approaches and backed it with big budgets. Whatever angle you think you’ve discovered to make your EPL team good, Arsène Wenger has probably already thought of it.

So for a day, the Good Guys from Norwich City F.C. get to celebrate and be kings of the world and roll around in a gigantic pile of English pounds. And then, once the hangover has subsided … well, good luck Canaries. We’re all gonna need it.

WEAK!

The natives are restless in Oakland

TO the buzzard points!

• We start off this week’s buzzard points with the Buzzards themselves, who played some inspired basketball in the NBA postseason this year. Paul Pierce made one confounding late game shot after another while John Wall soldiered on with five displaced fractures in his hand. (Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!) The Buzz managed to go out of the playoffs in one of the more excruciating ways imaginable over the past few days. With the series tied 2-2, D.C.’s Wiz gagged away a 4th Quarter lead in Game 5 down in Atlanta, losing to the Hawks by one at the buzzer. Last night, in Game 6, they fell by three points when Paul Pierce’s game-tying trey came about 0.05 seconds too late and was waved off. They went toe-to-toe with the Hawks, who sprinted to the best record in the East this season but who suddenly look very, very beatable. Save for a handful of plays here and there, there was very little difference between the two.
This came on the heels of their ice brethren, the Capitals, completing yet another postseason collapse, blowing a 3-1 series lead to the Rangers and losing Game 7 2:1 in OT at Madison Square Garden. Since 2010, the Caps have a 4-11 record in playoff games where they have a chance to eliminate an opponent. Astute Friend of the Lose, and excellent Canadian, Matt 'Muffin' Tunnicliffe has pointed out that the Caps are singlehandedly responsible for 18% of the blown 3-1 series leads in NHL history. It’s really sort of hard to label this series a choke, however, since the games in this series were all so damn close, but in the end, a rather star-crossed franchise couldn’t come through when it mattered. Both D.C. clubs had the chance to pull the upset, but neither could seal the deal.

• Everyone involved in Deflategate is getting what they deserved. Most of the arguments put forth decrying the punishment set down by the NFL – a 4-game suspension for Tom Brady, a loss of a 1st- and 4th-round draft pick, a $1m fine – are lame and disingenuous. This falls under the guise of cheating, and most every sport on the planet which doesn’t involve going around in a circle in a motorcar is going to be inclined to come down hard when it comes to cheating. The integrity of the on-field product is paramount, first and foremost. Without that, there is no game at all. The NFL has been a bit slack in its enforcement until late, but they’ve made a point this off-season of dinging pretty good both the Cleveland Browns (for sending texts among coaches in-game, which is a big no-no) and the Atlanta Falcons (for pumping artificial crowd noise into the Georgia Dome). Now, you can take issue with the methods and motivations of the league in suddenly deciding to do these sorts of things, and claim that some selective enforcement is going on, but a good way to avoid this entirely is not to cheat in the first place!
Seriously, most of the Patriots’ mustered defenses sound like excuses made by teenagers caught smoking in the bathroom, and have been delivered with similar aplomb. “Deflating the footballs a little bit is not that big of a deal.” Really? OK, then, so why do it? “Every team in the league is cheating.” And I’m sure that everyone else on the freeway was going 80 when the cop happened to pull you over. It doesn’t mean you can get out of paying the ticket. When has that been an acceptable defense in, like, forever? “They only did this because it’s the Patriots.” Well, yes, in fact, that part is true. The NFL dinged New England extra on this one because they view the Patriots as repeat offenders, having already nailed them in 2007 for Spygate and considering the Patriots to generally be disdainful of the rule book. The Pats have done it to themselves when it comes to that last bit. Their reputation precedes them.
So the Pats get what they deserve, but the NFL also gets what it deserves because no matter what decision Roger Goodell makes in this case, he looks stupid and his judgment and integrity are in question. And he’s set himself up for this, having so badly mishandled the Ray Rice situation a year ago. “Tom Brady gets 4 games for a deflated football, and Ray Rice gets two games for beating his wife senseless? Are you kidding me?” Now, juxtaposing those two cases is foolish, because you’re dealing with two separate issues, so people really shouldn’t be making those comparisons – and yet they are, and it’s entirely the fault of the league, and the stooge running it. This is why, were I an NFL owner, I would’ve pushed for Goodell’s ouster amid the fallout from the Ray Rice incident. From now on, everything that Roger Goodell says and does is going to be judged in accordance to his hare-brained decision-making process in that case. Everything. He has tarnished The Shield he so dutifully swore to protect.
As I said at the time, the best thing that could’ve happened to the NFL last February was to have the Seahawks win the Super Bowl, so that you didn’t have to deal with an entire follow-up season where your defending champion is considered to be tarnished and tainted by large swaths of your viewing public. But at this point, the NFL deserves no such favours. It’s a complete mess and a P.R. disaster for all involved, and deservedly so.

• And I’ll follow this up with a point about Tom Brady’s “legacy.” He doesn’t give a shit. Players don’t care about that. They care about it 20 years from now. In the here and the now, players care about winning. I’ve heard and read so much drivel about what this does to his “legacy” and I couldn’t give a shit. Legacies and myths are made up by those who watch the games, not by those who play them.

• As much as The Lose lampoons the NBA for all of the weird decision-making that goes on in the league’s front offices – a strange mix of fuzzy logic, marginal accounting practices and dubious math – the game itself can be pretty remarkable. The NBA playoffs have been terrific so far, in my opinion. Well, some of the Eastern Conference games have been pretty ugly, at times, but that’s simply following the form from the regular season. There’s been lots of good stuff in the West, and the drama and competitiveness has been compelling across the league.
These NBA playoffs feel like something of a strange new world, since the old guard have fallen by the wayside. Of the 8 teams reaching the second round of the playoffs this year, none has won an NBA title in the past 17 years. And with the new blood has come new ideas. The boring era of isos and 2-man games and backing down into the paint has given way to deep threes, movement of and off the ball, and the high post pick and roll. The NBA, at its best, has always offered up athleticism verging on dance, but now you’ve added a heightened cerebral component to the game as well. The NBA has become mathematics in motion. It’s space age stuff and it’s great to watch. Well, I think it’s great, anyway:

Thanks Phil. Did you try to dial that tweet up on your rotary phone? You’re showing your age a little bit, there.
This modern NBA is a little weird to me, I have to admit. It’s taken some getting used to. Perhaps the oddest bit has been attempting to think of the Clippers as anything other than a joke and laughingstock. As long as I’ve been watching this game, the Clippers have been terrible. What have you done to my Clippers? Who are these impostors?
Fortunately, the Clippers decided to chalk one up for the nostalgic set Thursday night in Game 6 of their playoff series against the Houston Rockets. Given a chance to end the series, the Clippers resorted to their losing ways of yore as they took a 19-point lead late in the third quarter, and then proceeded to blow it. They got outscored 40-15 in the 4th quarter to a Rockets team that had James Harden sitting on the bench for the entire period.
All props go to Houston for their inspired play, and also to coach Kevin McHale for realizing he had a hot lineup on the floor and rolling with it while Harden sat beside him. Harden was 5-20 from the field at that point, and with each of his misses – often forced shots amid stagnant offensive sets – the Rockets’ collective life essence seemed to further ebb away. His absence seemed to free up his teammates, who played loose and free in the 4th Quarter, playing as if they had nothing left to lose.
As opposed to the Clippers, who ceased to play entirely.
Seriously, Clippers, what are you doing? The Clips didn’t defend, and they completely froze up on the offensive end. There’s more movement among statues at Forest Lawn then there was to the Clips offense. The Clippers stopped playing. Simple as that. They punched their own tickets and tried to run out the clock. And once Houston got close, the Clippers had nothing left in the tank. They are wholly dependent upon their starters to make things happen (all you need to know about the state of the Clippers’ bench is that 67-year-old Hedo Turkoglu has been getting playoff minutes) and they seemed as worn out as they were stunned by the end.
We’ve seen some remarkable rallies of late – the Seahawks v. Green Bay comes to mind, along with the Royals vs. the A’s in the AL playoff. A trio of World Series crowns have helped lessen the sting of the memory of the Giants’ Game 6 collapse vs. the Angels in 2002, but it’s never fully gone away. Professional athletes are the most competitive people on the planet, and when they throw all caution to the wind and play with abandon, they do, in fact, have the talent to pull off what seems impossible. This is why you never, ever take your foot off the gas pedal.
I still remember, nearly 20 years later, how angry Michael Jordan was when his Bulls got throttled by the Sonics in Game 4 of their NBA championship series. The Bulls had a 3-0 lead in the series, didn’t show up for Game 4, and were down 30 in the 3rd Quarter. His teammates lolligagged and Jordan was mad. Sure enough, the Sonics won Game 5 as well and Jordan got T’d up in the process. Suddenly, they had a series on their hands again. We’ve seen several times now in recent years in baseball and hockey how a 3-0 series lead turned into a 4-3 series loss (most recently by those gagmasters, the San Jose Sharks, against the Kings). It doesn’t happen often, but once is too often. Never give the opponent another chance. Ever.
Now the Clippers have to win a Game 7 on the road, which has happened only 17.6% of the time in NBA history. The Clips-Spurs series was one of the best 7-game series the league has seen in years, and the Clips-Rockets is maybe one of the most confounding. Houston looked deader than doornails after getting blown out in Game 4, but now L.A.’s defense has been awol for two games and their lack of depth is catching up to them. Even if they defy the odds and win Game 7, I’m not sure the Clips have enough in the tank for going seven more run-and-gun, high-octane, first-team-to-120-wins matchups with the Warriors. Having to play a nervy and needless Game 7 certainly doesn’t help matters.

You can actually pinpoint the second when the Grizzlies' hearts rip in half ...

• Seriously, when is the NHL going to stop it with this Arizona nonsense? It’s clear this is unworkable. Why they insist on continuing to stubbornly bang their head against that well is beyond me. You’re only as good a league as your worst franchise. Get it out of Arizona and somewhere it belongs – and no, Las Vegas isn’t the answer. (And for some more amusement along these lines, here is a fun story from The Guardian about the ill-fated Cleveland Barons, the last team in the major American professional sports to fold during the season.)

• This blog is not about politics, although politics is probably the ultimate contact sport of them all, but The Lose will make a point here of saying that in two of the biggest elections of the year – Israel and Great Britain – it was apparent to me that the side with the better political athletes prevailed, even when it wasn’t entirely clear they would do so. The side which could better anticipate the voting trends, and then adapt to the conditions on the ground, won out. This should be a warning to all of my leftward-leaning Canadian friends, whose fall election is shaping up to be one of the better 3-way duels since the final scenes of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Know who the real opponent is and figure out how you need to beat him.

• The thrill is gone.

RIP B.B. King. Few people could match your talent, your work ethic, and your class. You were one of the best. You and Lucille just keep on playing …

Honolulu, Belgium

MYSELF and The Official Wife of IN PLAY LOSE are back from our glorious honeymoon in Tahiti, which is a wonderful place and all of you should go immediately. But this is IN PLAY LOSE, of course, and you don’t want to hear me regale with wonderful stories of a joyous trip to the beaches and the food trucks of the South Pacific (although you can look at the pictures, if you like). No, you come to this corner of cyberspace to hear about madness and absurdity and failure. I know my readership by now. I know what they like. So to that end, I give you this week’s nominees for ruling my own personal Belgium.

And who knew all of the capital of said Belgium was Honolulu? Our first flight arrived at HNL from Fa’a’a at 5:20 a.m. on Sunday morning. It was already somewhat odd to me that the aeroport in Tahiti is basically dormant all day, only to then have all three flights leaving the island – to HNL, LAX, and CDG – leave within 20 minutes of each other starting at 11:30 p.m., resulting in a pile of humanity in the waiting area the likes of which I haven’t seen since a weather delay at O’Hare. And it was certainly strange to arrive at HNL at 5:20 a.m. to find the immigration desk staffed by one person to serve a flight of well over 100 people. But this is HNL we’re talking about, an aeroport which is an absurdist mess. Our flight home was scheduled for 1:30 p.m. in the afternoon, meaning we had 8 hours to kill. Seems like a good idea to go into Honolulu and hang out at Waikiki, right?

The nominees for ruler of my personal Belgium from among the extensive list of candidates during the 8-hour vortex that was Waikiki:

• The cab driver who insisted on driving us to the Moana Surfrider Beach Resort, even though we said we just wanted to go to the beach. He asked if we were staying there and we said no. He said, “you must be hungry so I will take you to a restaurant,” and dropped us off at the Moana, anyway.
• Every single cab driver after that who wouldn’t pick us up later that day at the Moana Surfrider Beach Resort unless we checked first with the concierge. Why do we need to check with the concierge? We want a damn ride! Just take us to the aeroport! Sure, there is some sort of arrangement going on here whereby the cabs and the aeroport and the hotels work together, but one cabbie said to us, “you go check in over there,” pointing to the cab stand and the concierge, and promptly drove away from us with his door open. Just give us a damn ride, already.

• The guy who walked up to KC on the street and said, “so, Miss, can I have my heels back?”
• The guy taking his pig on a leash to Waikiki.
• The cabbie who did eventually pick us up to take us back to HNL and tried to convert me to religion. Which religion is unclear. It may have been more than one. At first he sounded like an evangelical Christian and by the end he was talking like a Muslim. If we’d travelled any further, I may have wound up Hindu by the end of the trip.
• The two Israeli women arguing in front of us while we were eating lunch in the aeroport. A woman and her mother, in fact, the daughter being the mother of three squirming sons of her own. What were they arguing about? Whether or not to feed the 3-year-old an avocado. For 20 minutes. “You should smoosh it up for him.” “Mom, it’s too late for that.” “Give to me, I smoosh it.” “Mom, you should’ve smooshed it an hour ago.” “Is he hungry? I smoosh him an avocado.” I’ve never heard the word smoosh uttered so frequently. It was as least 100 times, maybe more. The whole thing had an air to it of “I have spent the past two weeks you and I’m sick of your shit,” at which point (fill in the blank) is a good reason for an argument, but this just went on and on while KC and I calmly went about contributing to the destruction of all roosters by eating our Lahaina Chicken Company roast bird. The daughter said probably a dozen times that it would take to long to smoosh up an avocado for her son. During the 20 minutes they were arguing, she could’ve smooshed up about a dozen of them. Meanwhile, the kids are squirming about, the dad is in line at the Burger King, they’re supposedly late for their flight but it’s not too late to argue about an avocado. I hope I never reach a point where someone pisses me off to the point where I just want to argue about stupid shit for the sake of arguing. Oh, wait, I play scrabble, where we argue about stupid shit all the time.
• The two clownshoes TSA guys who rerouted the security line at least 10 times while we were in it, one of whom made up for being clueless by simply acting like an asshole. He was the type of guy who responded to confused foreign travelers who didn’t speak English by simply saying it louder. HNL has maybe the most confoundingly bad set-up I’ve ever seen for security, due mainly to the fact that the place has obviously outgrown itself and can’t handle the volume of travelers. The labyrinth changed shape 10 times, and no one had any idea where they were supposed to go, and none of the other TSA agents seemed to know, either.

Worthy nominees all, and I could go on. At first, I thought that maybe it was just sleep deprivation and jetlag, but no, everyone in Honolulu is nuts.

Meanwhile, up at the front of the enormous security line, the agents handling the screening kept giving out contradictory orders – what you do/don’t have to take out of your bags, whether you do/don’t have to take off shoes, whether you do/don’t have to put things in bins. Now, I’ve generally found TSA agents to be good natured and trying to do a good job, and maybe this was just a case where they were overwhelmed by a volume of travelers which snaked in a myriad of directions and ran out the door and down the sidewalk, but it was a hopeless mess, and our King of Belgium for the week handled this situation in a curious way. The Zia Sun tattoo on this guy’s calf shows him to be a native of New Mexico, which means he’s used to stuff that doesn’t make any sense to begin with, and he received about three contradictory sets of instructions as he approached the conveyor belt and metal detector, which clearly annoyed him. At which point he took off his shoes, took off his shirt, took off his shorts, threw all of his clothes on the conveyor belt and walked through the metal detector wearing only his boxers. It was so surreal that no one knew how to respond. The agent on the other side of the metal detector just stared at him in stunned amazement. It was the damnedest thing I have ever seen at an aeroport.

That guy wins at life for doing that. He is King of My Personal Belgium for the week.

What's Weak This Week

Haven’t we been saying this about NCAA officiating for years?

DUKE sucks, and other news. To the bullet points:

• Never invite Duke to the party. Duke drinks all your beer, they hit on your girlfriend, and then they spill the Doritos all over the floor. They are a walking buzzkill. Duke ruins everything.
Seriously, is there a bigger downer in sports than Duke winning an NCAA basketball title? They won their 5th such title last night, a 68:63 victory over a Wisconsin team who blew a 9-pt. second half lead and proved, once again, that it’s hard to shoot, pass, or even dribble when you’ve got your hands around your own throat. Part of why Duke is so disliked is that their many triumphs at the game always seem to come at the expense of a team that’s potentially far more transcendent and a story line that’s far more compelling. The 1991 Blue Devils beat a previously undefeated UNLV team that was arguably the best single team in NCAA history that didn’t win the championship. The 1992 Dukies beat the Fab Five. In 2010, Duke beat Butler, who carried with them the hopes of mid-major schools and everyone who likes to root for the underdog. This year, Kentucky’s quest for 40-0 – and Wisconsin’s exacting revenge on the Wildcats for a 1-pt. loss in the Final Four a year ago – provided a far more compelling, engaging sort of storyline. But instead, we get Duke winning it all. Again. Bleah. A Duke championship is kind of like eating those grey leftovers in the fridge which don’t taste very good – completely unsatisfying.
I probably have less contempt for Duke than many college basketball zealots (most notably the guys over at Slate, who couldn’t help writing story after story after story this spring about how much they loathe the Dukies), and I still have a fair amount of it. If for some reason, I was mysteriously named Head Basketball Coach tomorrow at East Central Enormous State University, not having a clue what to do in that position, and I had the choice to contact one active coach and say, “hey, what the hell should I do?” Mike Krzyzewski would be that guy – in part because I think he would be the one most likely to respond and most likely to be honest and encouraging about it. His track record at both the college and international level speaks for itself. And in amid the absurd arms race that is college sports in America, Duke is still playing in an 9,000-seat overgrown gym of a facility where everyone’s nuts. That right there should make them more likable than they are, as they’ve chosen retro charm and hardboiled home court advantage over some colossal on-campus colosseum.
If it weren’t for the fact that they’re so damn smug, they’d almost be worth liking.

“Thank you very much, for reminding me of the reason why I left Duke … Never being considered a part of your posh group of yuppies really hurts me to the heart.” – Elton Brand

Jalen Rose, in a documentary for ESPN about the Fab Five, put it even less glowingly, in describing his feelings at the time he was playing for Michigan:

“For me, Duke was a person. I hated Duke and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke don't recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.” 

Now, Rose later clarified that he was referring to his mentality at the time that he was at Michigan, and that he no longer believed that to be true, but his sentiment – that Duke is a bastion of spoiled rich kids who always seem to get their way – is one which is commonplace among those who follow college basketball.
And with that claim comes one that Duke always seems to get the breaks, particularly from the officials. For years, Duke has made far more free throws than their opponents have even attempted over the course of seasons. Now, that’s the sort of stat that can be coached to achieve, of course, through solid defending and taking the ball aggressively to the basket, but given that referees can so heavily influence basketball through the calling of fouls and awarding of free throws, this area is rife for conspiracy theorists. The 2001 Duke championship was particularly dubious on the officiating front. The Maryland fans were so angry after their Final Four loss to Duke that year that they made a point of showing up for the Duke-Arizona final and actively booing Duke throughout the game (which is something of a breach of etiquette at the Final Four, a grand spectacle where the 60,000 fans in the domes are generally disengaged from the game happening 1,000,000 miles away from them). Sure enough, a few crucial decisions went against Arizona in crucial times during the course of that final.
Just as a few crucial decisions went against Wisconsin last night, most notably the image I posted above from about the 1:30 mark of the second half with Duke up by five, where a ball deflected off a Duke player and went out of bounds, the zeebs awarded the ball to Duke, looked on the replay, and still awarded it to Duke, who promptly went down and nailed a trey and put the game out of reach. It was a terrible call, plain and simple. The officials blew that one at a critical juncture of the game. Deliberate? Doubtful. Incompetent? Most certainly. But that’s the sort of thing that always seems to go the Blue Devils way. If it happens often enough, it stops feeling like a coincidence.

• Having said all of that, let’s be honest about this: Wisconsin blew it. Wisconsin didn’t make shots down the stretch, and, far worse, they didn’t run their offense. Whereas Kentucky were cynical in their exploitation of the nature of the modern college game, Wisconsin were the most successful purveyors of it, doing so with a cerebral approach that had the versatile players and the shooters to back it up. Wisconsin played at the slowest pace of any major team in the country this season (as measured by offensive possessions per game), but also had one of the most efficient offenses. And being patient and methodical on offense was also a great way to play defense – the actual Wisconsin defense was meh, and turned out to be meh down the stretch against Duke, but it’s harder for the other team to score when they don’t have the ball that often.
Wisconsin’s defense wasn’t very good at all towards the end of the game. Duke made some shots, but the shots shouldn’t have been there to make. The Badgers, meanwhile, looked incoherent at the offensive end. They seemed to forget how to play down the stretch, forgetting what got them to the championship game in the first place, and once behind, they really had no idea how to play catch up in a hurry, wasting time and achieving little while doing so.
And speaking of playing in a hurry, I do think that Wisconsin generally needed to play faster earlier in the game. Duke was playing a junky, gimmick defense in the first half – a modified matchup zone with one guy guarding no one in the paint, and the other four players switching on every pass and giving the appearance of playing man – which the Badgers couldn’t seem to figure out. Trying to run a set for :35 against a defense you can’t unlock is just an exercise in futility.
This is where I think Bo Ryan got outcoached: your strategy has to be determined by what you’re seeing unfold on the floor. Not letting that Duke defense get settled in, and also getting the ball to Kaminski around the free throw line and running the offense from there, would’ve been far more productive that taking the bait and having guards constantly driving to the hoop and getting their shots constantly swatted by the Duke floater. Being outcoached by Coach K is no shame, of course. Coach K has 1000 wins for a reason. But it was ultimately really annoying to watch this game and see the Badgers let a very winnable game slip through their fingers.
Or off Duke’s fingers, as the case may be. I did think that the officials were terrible in this game, and particularly brutal down the stretch, when a whole lot of marginal whistles blew which went the way of Duke. But I also think Wisconsin needed to score more points, had plenty of chances to do so and misfired.

• The needless, pointless renovation by the Chicago Cubs of Wrigley Field seems to have taken a turn for the disgusting, as there were only two functioning restrooms for all of 35,000 fans in attendance for the Cubs opening day game with the St. Louis Cardinals. Faced with the prospect of waiting for 30 minutes to use the shitcan, Cubs fans got, well, creative:

No, that isn’t beer in those cups

This is absolutely inexcusable. The Cubs also have no grandstands in the outfield, as their renovation of Wrigley is wofully behind schedule and won’t be finished until June. But hey, they did manage to install that giant Jumbotron screen in the outfield – which no one wanted, and which will almost certainly block the view of the game from some of the buildings across the street, a place where entertaining tenants have been selling rooftop seats to watch the games for years now, much to the Cubs irrational annoyance.
Any justification that the Cubs can put forth about why they are going about annihilating one of the unique sports facilities on earth is completely, utterly lame. The Cubs are one of the most valuable franchises in all of sports – Forbes recently pegged them as the 5th-most valuable franchise in baseball, worth $1,800,000,000 – so any argument about the need to increase revenue falls pretty flat. Sure, the facility was not up to the standards of other ballparks when it comes to amenities for players, and the ownership can argue that it hinders their ability to attract top talent, but the reality is that the Cubs haven’t lost because of Wrigley. They’ve lost because they are the Cubs, the most incompetent and lazy franchise in American sports, the club whose entire bogus narrative is predicated on being lovable losers and who’ve fed off, and profited from, that mystique for years. And saying that all of these renovations will ‘improve the fan experience’ is rubbish, as well – the fans seemed to like venerable old Wrigley Field exactly the way that it was.
This all comes down to greed, pure and simple. It’s a case of giving people what they don’t want at a price you think they should pay. Whatever the Cubs think they’re accomplishing through this renovation, ingratiating themselves to the fan base doesn’t seem to be all that important.

• Meanwhile, in Miami, the Marlins reminded all of us, on baseball’s opening day, that their use of the justification of “improving the fan experience” in their billion-dollar gouging of Dade County for a new ballpark was a crock of shit on. There’s a lot of rain in South Florida, see, and it keeps fans away, which is why they needed a retractable roof … which they left open, during a thunderstorm. Yes, there was a rain delay in a ballpark with a roof. The Marlins are apparently as incompetent as they are disingenuous.

• With their 2:1 OT victory over the L.A. Kings on Monday night, the Vancouver Canucks got a little breathing room in their quest to make the playoffs, opening up a 4-pt. lead over the Kings in the standings. It was a must-win for the Canucks – and the fact that it was a must-win at all speaks to just how stupid the NHL is.
If you were to look at the NHL from a straight won-loss record, the Canucks (46-34) are 2½ games ahead of the Calgary Flames (43-36) and 6½ games ahead of the L.A. Kings (39-40). Why are we even talking about the Kings at this point? They should be out of it, right? Yet in the standings, the Canucks are 4 pts. ahead of both Calgary and the Kings (97-93).
This is because the worst thing that the Canucks do as a team is not lose games in overtime. They’ve only picked up 5 of the infamous “loser points” all season, tied for the lowest in the league. The Kings, meanwhile, are the masters of losing in OT, having done it 15 times this year. So even though they are a sub.-500 team, they’ve got 10 extra points on Vancouver in the standings and, before the Canucks won on Monday, were threatening to knock a team that has 7 more wins than they out of the playoffs. As it is, they may knock out the Flames, who’ve only picked up 7 loser points all year. And as Nate Silver pointed out recently, it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened with the Kings.
This is completely asinine. The Kings have been doing half-assed, laze about routine for years now, doing just enough to get into the playoffs. That they’ve won two Stanley Cups doing so only further trivializes the regular season. But the league trivializes the regular season all unto itself by settling games with a trick show shootout and awarding loser points. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there are 3 available points in an OT game, but only 2 in a game that is decided in regulation, so if the score is tied late in the 3rd period, it behooves you to be conservative and play for the OT – which is basically happening now, as the 3rd period of deadlocked NHL games has all the excitement of a slow dance. Players will fully admit that they’re playing for OT – and why wouldn’t they do that? It’s the right course of action, since an OT game is worth more for everyone involved.
The Lose has said before that you should bring back the tie to the NHL, believing that there is nothing wrong with it. I’m not sure why it is the league thinks it’s so important that every game has to have a winner when the sport is necessarily low-scoring and, thus, deadlocks are inevitable. I think using the shootout to decide is garbage and I don’t believe the NHL’s contention that fans actually like it. It’s a gimmick and it cheapens the game. While I don’t necessarily agree with the assessment of 538 in that article linked above – that you should just play until there is a winner – it would be better than this nonsense the NHL currently has. The fact that teams are ultimately being overly rewarded for what amounts to playing not to lose a lot of the time, for losing some games but not others, or for winning what amounts to a glorified lottery, and that this is costing teams playoff spots, should call into question everything about the way that league conducts business. The game is already in something of a dead ball … er, dead puck era, anyway, one which owes in part to a lack of imagination and creativity both on the ice and behind the bench. You can’t legislate imagination into the game, but you can certainly stop actively discouraging it.

• Tanking in hip in the NHL these days. It’s the new teal. It’s been hip in the NBA for years, and Gary Bettman has finally brought one of the NBA’s most obnoxious tendencies over to the NHL after all this time. There are two elite prospects available in the draft this year, and several teams – the Buffalo Sabres and Arizona Coyotes – have gone into full on 76ers mode this season, trying to be as horrible as possible so as to try to strike it rich in the NHL draft lottery. (A third team, the Edmonton Oilers, are almost as bad as those other two while actually not trying to tank, which is saying something. The Oil are just flat out terrible.) The fans in Buffalo have gotten into the spirit of the affair, actually cheering against its own team as the Sabres went about winning a game against Arizona a couple of weeks ago. The whole situation is embarrassing, and I’ve read a whole bunch of stories in the press coming up with suggestions of how to change the lottery system to prevent this from happening.
And I have a simple solution to that, which is the same for the NBA. Get rid of the lottery entirely.
The problem with tankers in the NBA and the NHL is not the 1-2 teams which are awful and will clamor to get the first pick. It’s all of the other not very good teams which will sort of informally tank along the way. The NBA lottery proved yet again last year, when Cleveland had less than a 2% chance of landing the top pick but did so regardless, that you’re better off, as a not very good franchise, hoping to strike it rich than you are trying to compete for a low playoff spot. (This doesn’t hold quite so true in the NHL, where #8 seeds have won the Stanley Cup before, and where the low-scoring games make upsets possible.) The low percentage play is better than the no percentage play. Again, it’s a cynical application of mathematics. In both the NHL and the NBA, there are far too many teams that just give up along the way. That goes against the spirit of the game. Too many teams have benefitted from this sort of cynical thinking to discourage others from following suit. The only way to put and end to it is eliminate the lottery once and for all.

• Have I mentioned that myself and The Official Wife of IN PLAY LOSE are going here in a matter of days?

Have I mentioned that? I wasn’t sure if I did. Just checking.

IN PLAY LOSE FTW!

Why The Lose? Your One Sentence MLB Preview

Baseball season is upon us, but it’s an odd-numbered year, so I don’t care as much as I should. We have an thing for even-numbered years around these parts, as you know:

A coveted San Francisco address

ODD years tend to be years in which the Giants don’t hit, get a whole bunch of people hurt, and generally go about retooling after the roster has been picked at by the other 29 teams in the majors. Winners are always a hot commodity, of course, which is one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to repeat as champions in any sport. Guys who win championships and then become free agents have a way of winding up being grossly overpaid the following seasons and, when you win the title, your club is immediately the target of everybody else, so pilfering players takes you down a peg. The Giants lost 3B Pablo Sandoval to free agency, Hunter Pence broke his arm in spring training, and I have no idea how this team is going to score any runs. Who cares? There is yet another brand new flag flying over at Phone Co. Park which we can admire all season long. Flags fly forever. And if there are consequences for winning down the line, so be it.

Baseball is the losingest of all games, of course, which is why it’s a favourite subject matter here at IN PLAY LOSE. Even élite teams lose two months’ worth of games over the course of a summer. And the game has something of a clockwork element about it even though the game doesn’t have a clock. Your team sucks today? Try again tomorrow! If you enjoy the pace and the rhythm of the game, you can find something to like about it on a daily basis, even if your team sucks. And trust me when I say that. I grew up watching the Seattle Mariners in the 1980s. If that team didn’t kill your love for the game, nothing will.

With the start of the season comes prediction time, of course – but since this is IN PLAY LOSE, we have to do things a little bit differently. Today we present our 1-sentence preview in which I explain why it is that, come Dec. 31, I might actually be writing about your favourite team in the context of winning The Lose of the Year award. This is not a prediction of who will be the best team, although I will probably mention that. This is also not necessarily a prediction of who will be the worst team. Certainly, bad teams are more likely to be blogged about than good ones, but failure encompasses more than just day-to-day failure. The epic chokes, the woeful underachieving, the poorly constructed roster – all of that is great stuff. Predicting the epic choke is impossible, of course, but we can look at some clubs and get the sense that, if/when the moment comes where they could rise above it all, they still would be more likely to fall on their faces than not. As such, a team is just as likely to be LOSE fodder if they are good as they are if they are bad.

And since I have a short attention span, I’m going to keep this quick. One sentence and one sentence only. Here is your IN PLAY LOSE baseball preview, ranked in order from least likely to most likely to be fodder for the blog. Do these things, and some hack in San Francisco will make fun of you:

30. Baltimore Orioles: because I’m generally high on the O’s, probably more than I should be but it’s served me well the past few years, yet also realistic about their chances and, thus, not really surprised by anything they do, good or bad.

29. New York Mets: because the Mets aren’t going anywhere, are likely to be improved, but whatever inevitable Big Apple-centric drama unfolds around them isn’t going to do anything to make them particularly relevant.

28. Houston Astros: because they’ve graduated from being historically awful to just being bad – improving, but still bad – and just being a run-of-the-mill bad team isn’t going to get you much press.

27. Milwaukee Brewers: because, well, there isn’t really that much of note about this team, according to IN PLAY LOSE official Wisconsin correspondent, Steve ‘Team Cheese’ Drumwright: “the good thing is that they didn’t really lose anyone in the off-season, but the bad thing is that they didn’t really lose anyone in the off-season.”

26. Arizona Diamondbacks: because hating on the Snakes was so much easier when GM Kevin Towers was making dumb trades and mouthing off about his players in the press and Kirk Gibson was inciting beanball wars, but now that Tony Larussa has come in and ‘analyzed’ every aspect of the organization – and promptly fired everybody – the Snakes will still likely be really, really bad this year but maybe one of the most inexcusably poorly managed franchises in sports finally has some hope.

25. Kansas City Royals: because getting red hot and playing really well for a couple of weeks in the playoffs, while commendable, doesn’t change the fact that this was a pretty average team who lived on a very thin margin last year, and the law of averages would suggest your bullpen isn’t going to be perfect and having no power in the lineup will come back to get you, meaning some regression from the World Series appearance is likely in order.

24. St. Louis Cardinals: because while I wonder if this team’s reputation preceeds it, as I’m not particularly crazy about their offense, the Cardinals do have a seemingly endless supply of good young arms and a culture of winning and they will probably find their way into the playoffs like they do every year, but not be particularly flashy and/or noteworthy about it.

23. Texas Rangers: because while they deserve a mulligan for last year’s injury-ridden disaster of a season in which Dr. James Andrews should’ve been put on the payroll, all of the injuries masked the fact that the Rangers were due for a serious slide to begin with, and Yu Darvish’s injury this spring might mask that fact a bit more, but I do think that lack of talent is going to be more of a problem than lack of healthy bodies this year in Arlington.

22. San Francisco Giants: because odd year bullshit.

21. Cleveland Indians: because I don’t think I’m going to need to say much about this team, which is going to be really good.

20. Cincinnati Reds: because how can you explain the fact that, over the course of three years, this team has gone from being so good to not very good at all, other than to think that Buster Posey killed the franchise’s collective will to live back in 2012, from which they have not ever really recovered:

Greatest gif in baseball history

19. Minnesota Twins: because the Twins have to go somewhere on this list, and any time you’re #19 on one of these you’re neither good nor notable, but if the Twins are the 19th-best team in baseball at the end of the year it will constitute a damn miracle.

18. Toronto Blue Jays: because they are entering the 18th year of the 5-year rebuilding plan in Toronto, during which the good ideas haven’t worked, and the bad ideas haven’t worked, and this year’s plan involved improving the pitching staff by trading for more hitters, which means nothing the Blue Jays do when they inevitably underachieve will be a surprise, but it will likely be somewhat entertaining nonetheless.

17. Pittsburgh Pirates: because I wonder, if the Pirates make another quick exit from the playoffs, if amnesia starts to settle in among Bucs’ faithfuls, who will start being annoyed at their team not winning championships and forget how godfuckingterrible this team was for two decades.

15/16. Seattle Mariners/Washington Nationals: because quite honestly, I don’t expect to be writing at all about either of these teams unless it’s in the context of doing something stupid which costs them the World Series, which is where I think both of them will be at the end of the year, as the two franchises who have never been to the biggest of shows both finally get there, and do so in the same season. But I get two sentences here because this is two teams we’re talking about at once, so I will say that Nats were done in by their own sloppy play last year, along with Matt Williams having Bruce Bochy run circles around him, and I would hope they’ve learned from their mistakes while, in the case of the Mariners, well,  haven’t I already written enough about the Mariners already?

14. San Diego Padres: because going on a ‘bright shiny object’ buying spree, where you grab every good-looking player available and ignore their ample downsides, rarely pays off.

13. Chicago White Sox: because see #14.

12. Miami Marlins: because the Fish rot from the head, and you should never take anything seriously that Jeffrey Loria says or does.

11. Colorado Rockies: because I really do think this is the most hopeless franchise in all of sports, and doubt they will ever be able to develop a functioning pitching staff – even if they were to bottom out with the worst record and get the top pick of the draft and draft a stud pitcher, her would be spooked to the point of being ineffective after two seasons at Coors Field – and because they look to be almost as dreadful as last year, when they played .200 ball for about three months, and because you wonder at what point Tulo and Cargo just say “trade me, damn it,” in an attempt to salvage their careers before advancing age and injuries finally do them in.

10. Tampa Bay Devil Rays: because they’re still the Devil Rays in my book, damn it, which was a cool nickname, and because I look at a team with a new front office, new manager, one good player, and no offense, and see the worst team in the majors, even worse than #9 …

9. Philadelphia Phillies: because at some point this year, The Lose should write up a piece about the long-term costs of success and whether or not they are worth it if/when you happen to win a championship, which I believe that they are, and it will almost certainly be in the context of the Phillies enduring a 100-loss season featuring a lack of talent and players from their championship heyday who are now old, slow, and injury prone and whose contracts make them immovable.

8. Detroit Tigers: because The Lose is quick to scold those who waste opportunities, and the Tigers’ formula for success – 1-dimensional power offense and great starting pitching – hasn’t been as successful as you think and just doesn’t translate in the playoffs in this bullpen-speed-defense-and-details era of modern baseball, and yet the organization refuses to address its greatest needs and, as a result, the Tigers’ collective star is starting to lose its luster.

7. Boston Red Sox: because I’m not sure what’s more comical, the idea of having Hanley Ramirez in the outfield or signing Hanley Ramirez in the first place, and because I’m not sure why Panda’s running his mouth and bad mouthing his former employer after seven years of both adoration and patience by the bay – neither of which is going to be prevalent in Boston if he doesn’t perform – and because this team, as constructed, has an air akin to a great big, bloated balloon which is due for a popping.

6. California Los Angeles Angels of Oxnard Anaheim: because this team has bats, but has question marks with arms, gloves, feet, and between the ears, and have probably spent worse than any team in baseball in recent years, if not all of sports, setting them up for an even greater sense of disappointment.

5. New York Yankees: because A-Rod heading back to the Bronx promises to be as awkward as a blind date at the Jr. Prom.

4. Chicago Cubs: because it’s the Cubs, of course, and because I suspect the expectations are too great and patience and perspective in too short a supply for a promising team that needs a little time to jell.

3. Oakland A’s: because ridiculing the Moneyballers for their feel good, indie sort of failures is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, and while there is a possibility that this latest reinvention of the A’s by Billy Beane turns out to be OK – it is the A’s, after all – this club looks to have far more downside than up.

2. Atlanta Braves: because this team hasn’t looked to be this bad since the 1980s, and while I am not an advocate of schadenfreude, if there is ever a club that deserves it, it’s this self-important franchise with its fair weather fans and obnoxious tomahawk chop.

1. Los Angeles Dodgers: because as I said on Dec. 31, 2014, if you took out Clayton Kershaw from that team last year, it really wasn’t very good, and while they made a flurry of moves in the offseason, I think that those moves are lateral in nature if not a step back and have made them slower, older, and more brittle, and given the enormous expectations that come with the enormous payroll, this cannot possibly end well and it will be wildly entertaining if and when it doesn’t.

This Game Sucks. That, and Go Kentucky.

IT SHOULDN’T be a surprise that reports are now surfacing about Kentucky head coach John Calipari 'desperately wanting' to return to the NBA. He really does have nothing to prove any more at the NCAA level, having mastered the arts of both fully understanding the absurdity of the college game and then applying that knowledge to its most absurd ends – the application which, the way things are going, is likely to result in Calipari winning his 2nd national championship at Kentucky in 4 years, and seeing his team put up a 40-0 record in the process, which is the best in the history of the sport.

Calipari has, of course, mastered the art of recruiting in the so-called ‘one and done’ era. For those who don’t understand this, the NBA decided a few years ago that it no longer wanted to be drafting kids straight out of high school. The reasons for this most likely have to do with quite a few of those kids – *cough cough Kwame Brown cough cough* – not working out so well after much was expected (and invested). While some élite teenage talents have opted to join the D-League, or maybe play abroad for a year, the vast majority of them venture off to play college basketball for a year, or maybe two, before heading off to the NBA.

Now, this makes a mockery of the whole naïve idea that players are actually playing college basketball for the purposes of going to college. A lot of them are, of course. The vast majority of them, in fact – a fact the NCAA is happy to point out in its continued insistence that it is little more than a corrupt cartel of an organization. But if you’re considered a can’t miss, über-prospect, about all you need to do is maintain a barely passing average for a semester of meaningless freshman classes without ever declaring a major. Then you play out your season, declare for the draft, and who really gives a shit how you do in that English 101 class at that point? It’s ridiculous to think these guys give two shits about going to class – and that’s not to blame the kids either, because if you were in the same boat, isn’t that exactly what you would do as well? I know that I would. What’s the point of going to a school if the school isn’t going to help you in your chosen profession? Why even make the pretense?

Now, since these kids are going to check out as quickly as they possibly can, a good number of the control freaky coaches in the world don’t really want to recruit them. But not John Calipari. Like I say, John Calipari pushes everything to the extreme. He’s taken two previous schools – UMass and Memphis –to the verge of national championships, and had the Final Four appearances of both of them vacated for improprieties which, while not directly attributable to him, speak to a rather casual regard for rules of eligibility put forth by the NCAA. And you can decry the rules and think they’re dumb – heaven knows that I do – but you should at least attempt to follow them. But with one-and-done players in college basketball’s midsts, how can anyone take any sort of enforcement seriously. We all know those kids are only there for a year and then they’re out. Again, why even make the pretense?

So, instead of shying away from uncoachable, unapproachable, one-and-done kids who’ve checked out from the beginning and are counting down the days before they can leave (a nonsensical stereotype, by the way, but one put forth by any number of college basketball apologists in the media, most of them former coaches), John Calipari goes the other way and, essentially, recruits a whole team’s worth of one-and-dones every single year. It makes sense, actually, if you want to win in college basketball – it stands to reason that guys ticketed for NBA stardom have the best talent, so why not just gather up all the best talent available? Which is precisely what he’s gone about attempting to do. Not always successfully, of course – the year after he won his first NCAA title, his next one-and-done iteration was being one-and-doned in the NIT by Robert Morris. Great talent often has great egos, and it can be quite a challenge to get said talent to play together as a team, imploring upon them the idea that success of the team will pay off greater dividends down the road in their individual, professional careers. Even though his reputation proceeds him, and his is a problem most coaches would die to have – having what seems to be too much talent to actually manage – Calipari deserves some credit as a coach for being somewhat able to convince these guys of the value of being selfless on the court.

Great coaches also anticipate the trends of the game, and this year’s iteration of the mercenary army from the Bluegrass State is perfectly suited to go 40-0 because they are so big, and so athletic, that they completely swallow up the defensive end of the floor. Kentucky’s guards are in the 6’5”-6’7” range, and the frontcourt starters all verge on 7’0” in height. And this is another area of the game where Calipari has pushed it to the ad absurdum. To beat Kentucky, you have to shoot over them. But this is college basketball in 2015, a game in which nobody can shoot.

If you tuned into the last 2:00 of the games in the first four days of the NCAA tournament, you got some fantastic finishes and, in the case of LSU and Baylor, some truly stunning collapses. Five games were decided by a single point, two games went to OT, and eight games were decided by four points or less – and that was just the first day. It was pretty gripping and dramatic stuff. The first two days of the tourney are full of wild upsets involving weird teams from weird schools in weird cities you’ve never heard of, which makes for great viewing. But as The Lose has said before, the NCAA tournament offers far more in terms of theatre than it does in terms of actual quality basketball. Some of this is owing to stage fright, of course. Nerves take over, and players respond to stepping onto the game’s greatest stage by becoming tentative, playing not to lose somewhat instinctively. This is always going to be the case. These are just kids, after all, and the pressure of the moment turns out to be far greater than what they were expecting. The quality of play somewhat naturally tends to regress.

Problem is, the quality of play in 2015 is regressing from a level that was already lousy to begin with. Tune in for the last 2:00 of a game on Thursday and you got high drama. Tune in during any of the other 38:00, and what you got to watch was abysmal. But this is simply more of the same, as the entire game of college basketball was abysmal the past season. This article from Seth Davis of SI back in February outlines the games many problems. Not only do I agree with the proposed solutions in that article – a shorter shot clock, a widening of the lanes and broadening of the arcs to create more space – that article also accomplishes two things I’m wholly in favour of: 1) putting the blame solely where it belongs for this mess, which is on the coaches; and 2) debunking myths about the quality of today’s players. The second ‘problem’ often being spread by the perpetrators of the first problem, of course, since coaches are self-preservationist by nature and quick to blame the kids, albeit often in vague and veiled terms.

The game of college basketball is slow, overly physical, dull, and decidedly unimaginative. In the past, it has always been the breeding ground for radical innovation, as creative coaches have used ideas to attempt to one-up each other and overcome disadvantages in recruiting. Now we have cookie cutter CEOs in pinstripes patrolling the sidelines, none of whom dare be the least bit imaginative in their trade. There are far too many teams with lots of unrefined athletes that seem to do no phase of the game well except for playing defense, albeit through the most physical and cynical means possible. Hey, coaches, here’s a good idea – you have some talented guys here, so how about if you, oh, you know, teach them how to shoot and run a functioning offense?

I mean, seriously here, can anybody shoot? UAB shot .347 from the floor in the first round of the NCAA tourney, while Butler shot .333 from the floor – and both those teams won. Teams shot 32% from the 3-point line on the first day of the tourney – which means that, at that low of percentage, it’s basically no longer worth it to attempt the shot for the sake of trying to get that extra point. Yet 30% of all shots attempted that day were from beyond the 3-point arc, which means that 20% of the shots taken that day were fundamentally terrible ideas.

And see, that right there is bad coaching. Bad coaching means assembling a team that cannot adjust and go to Plan B when Plan A isn’t working. Why are so many teams so stubbornly sticking to plans that don’t fundamentally work? It is the equivalent of bashing your head against a brick wall – and there were certainly of loose bricks being tossed around, enough to build entire new gymnasia. Because in this day and age, with the defenses the way they are, and with the rules the way they are, attempting to win a game entirely through half court play is, mathematically, a losing proposition. If you’re shooting 42% from the floor and 32% from three – the totals from the first day of the tourney – you’re making it really hard to win. Here’s another novel idea – RUN! Why doesn’t anyone run a fast break? Seems to me a good way to change some of those horrible numbers would be to get some buckets in transition and, come to think of it, isn’t a good way to combat a stingy defense to beat it down the court and score before they have a chance to set up? But that would require actual imagination and encouraging players to take some risks. We can’t have that, now can we? Next thing you know, the kids might actually be having fun on the floor.

This is why I say you should fire all the coaches. Their tactics are unsound, their approaches illogical, and their players certainly don’t seem to improve, which is a waste. I think there is an enormous segment of the college coaching fraternity that is actually disinterested in their teams trying to run an offense – because teaching offense is actually hard, and requires thought and technique, whereas coaching defense is all about dogging your players to give it that old college try.

But the old college try ain’t gonna work against Kentucky. One of the prototypical contemporary college basketball teams – Cincinnati – took on Kentucky in the 2nd round and decided to try and beat them basically by being physical and tenacious and overly aggressive at every turn. The one problem with that was that they forgot to put the ball in the basket. They shot 31% and threw up some of the single 3-point attempts more likely to land in the front row than in the basket. You need to be able to SHOOT to beat Kentucky.

The game has been trending this way for years now, and the sharpest coaches in the game – guys like Louisville’s Rick Pitino, Florida’s Billy Donovan, and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim – have come to realize that the best way to win is just squelch the life out of the other side with a stifling defense. Offense? Meh, they’ll figure it out. Just figure out how to score 40 and hold the other guys to 38. And this year’s Kentucky squad takes defense to the ludicrous end. Their opponents shoot .355 from the floor for the season. The Wildcats are a flat-out mismatch for contemporary college basketball offenses. They’re likely to go 40-0 this year by simply suffocating their opponents and running just enough of a function offense on the other end of the floor. They’ll go down in history as a bastion of perfection during a period of time when the game was as imperfect as it’s ever been. Their offense is, well, enough. That’s really all it needs to be. Given that teams are so terrified to try and play a transition game against Kentucky’s collection of thoroughbreds, the games turn into these slow, dull, insufferable marches into futility. It’s boring and it’s bad, and Kentucky is seeming almost unbeatable.

And you know what? Good. Let them go 40-0. I think this team, as constructed by Kentucky, is genius. It’s cynically, perfectly constructed to take advantage of the sorry state of the game of college basketball. Hell, I hope Calipari comes back with a whole new team of one-and-dones and goes 40-0 next year. Let him win 100 in a row. The NCAA, as currently constructed, is a travesty to begin with and verges on being an illegal operation, but people love their college sports, by gosh – including me, or I used to, anyway. I didn’t even bother filling out a bracket this year, which is the first time that’s happened in 30 years. I’m completely disgusted with the shamateurism of the “student athlete” as defined by the NCAA, and also completely disgusted with The Cult of the Coach that goes right along with it. But what ultimately leads to change in sports is not anyone questioning the morality or legality of the enterprise. No, it happens when people get bored. And watching Kentucky win all the time, and do so in the most boring fashion imaginable like they are doing now, would ultimately turn into must-miss TV.

Next up for Kentucky is West Virginia on Thursday night in the Sweet 16. Go Kentucky. Win and win and win some more, and make a mess and a mockery of this whole stupid enterprise. I doubt I’ll watch. If I want to see bricklaying and guys moving at half speed in disorganized patterns, I’ll go out to California Avenue during the work day and watch the construction.

Quick Misses

Robert Indiana was off by a letter

NO time for an intro. To the buzzard points!

• Think your team is having a bad year? Parma F.C. is have a worse one. The club currently sit bottom of the table of Italian Serie A with only 10 points from 23 matches, and have had to postpone their past two matches because they are broke. Their home match with Udinese was scrapped because the club couldn’t afford to pay for the electricity and security at their home football grounds. Faced with playing a game behind closed doors in a browned-out stadium, players from both clubs balked. This past Friday’s match with Genoa was postponed as well – there was no money available to pay for the travel and lodging. The players were planning, at first, to drive to Genoa in their own cars, or hitch a ride on a coach hired by some traveling club supporters, and a $22,000 advance from a sponsor appeared to have been hastily arranged to cover the costs. But the players finally decided they’d had enough, and threatened to strike in protest of the failure to have the club’s tenuous, and quite ludicrous, financial situation resolved.

Parma F.C. are Friends of The Lose. These guys are awesome. These guys need some love.
That, and a paycheque. Pay them, for heaven’s sake!

Parma F.C. are on their third ownership group already this season. They qualified for European play last season, only to be denied their place (and the accompanying revenue such games generate) because the owner had failed to turn over payroll taxes in a timely fashion. The club was sold to a Russian-Cypriot conglomerate, which then flipped it to an Italian businessman who purchased the club for €1 after he agreed to pay off €100 million in club debt – which, of course, hasn’t happened. Yes, somehow the Italian FA allowed a guy to waltz in and buy a club for €1. To the surprise of absolutely no one, whatever money was  supposed to be there hasn’t turned up. An administration hearing is set for Mar. 19, club property has been seized for auction by local authorities, and the players haven’t been paid all season.
Read that again. The players haven’t been paid all season. The Italian Players Association are, suffice to say, not amused. All Serie A games are starting 15 minutes late this weekend in protest. One of the golden rules of The Lose states that in any dispute involving soccer players and wages, the players are always right. The game is a bastion of shysters and would-be kingpins and tycoons. Far too many owners have far too many delusions of grandeur while being wofully undercapitalized as they attempt to compete in an arena where the cost of doing business is often determined for you by the actions of other clubs. There are megaclubs which serve as idle playthings for the preposterously rich, for whom money is no object, and even some of the game’s most storied clubs have wound up drowning themselves in red ink while vainly attempting to keep pace – the most notable in that category being Rangers, who have spent the past three seasons working their way back up through the Scottish league system after going bankrupt and being relegated to the fourth division.
It’s all an utterly impossible mess which can’t possibly end well – although sadly, for Parma F.C., there is precedent in this, as they were under administration from Italian authorities from 2003-2007. The club was a beacon of attractive play in the otherwise defensive and grey Serie A of the 1990s, winning several European trophies at the time, but their fate was inexorably tied to their parent company Parmalat, the Italian dairy conglomerate that decided to try their hand at derivates trading and other fraudulent acts and wound up becoming the largest bankruptcy in European history.
Amazingly, the club’s players have tried to maintain some sort of professionalism and dignity through all of this. Given all they’ve had to put up with this year, it’s somewhat remarkable Parma has taken any points at all, much less 10. Actually, they took 11, but the club was docked a point for not paying the players. Pretty stiff penalty, that one. No wonder the players blamed the Italian FA’s “lack of interest” in refusing to play this weekend. Pay the players! Seriously. Pay these guys already, and/or let them find work elsewhere. They’ve more than fulfilled their contractual obligations. The FA says they can’t do anything until the club enters administration. In the meantime, other Serie A clubs have contemplated trying to find a way to run the club for the rest of the season, in part because having a club go out of business in the middle of the season makes a mess of the standings and the schedule. Pay the players! Free Parma F.C.! Enough of this nonsense.

• And now for something completely different, I give you the New York Knicks:

The actual ESPN play-by-play of this was “Alexey Shved misses 6-foot.” Note absence of the words ‘shot’ and ‘pass.’ I’m not sure what this was, but the likes of it has never been seen in an NBA arena before.

• I’ve never seen so many confounding, head-scratching trades all at once as I saw at the NBA’s trading deadline. I would have better luck explaining Quantum Physics than I would trying to explaining all of those deals. The Warriors wisely made no changes at the deadline, as their front office brass likely got on the phone with some other NBA GMs, decided that everyone on the other end of the line was cuckoo bananas, and promptly put down the phone and sent all the ensuing calls straight to voicemail. Deals in the NBA are almost all inherently, laughably lopsided in this day and age, given that the considerations are almost entirely driven by cap and contract considerations, and thus deals are being made from a position of significant weakness. It was pretty apparent that a good number of franchises involved in the wheeling and dealing were doing so for the purposes of essentially giving up on the season. It speaks to just how cool the game of basketball is that so many fans will still actually turn up to watch games even though their team has basically decided to throw in the towel.
From a financial standpoint, I know that the league is doing fine, and the product on the floor this year has been pretty good (and from a San Francisco viewpoint, it’s been remarkable), but from a competitive balance standpoint, the NBA model is broken and has been for years. But I don’t know what the answer is. History has shown us, time and again, that the coveted #1 pick in the draft is really, if ever, a panacea, and so many of the league’s franchises seem interminably mired in this “Wait ’Til Next Year” mentality which is never proven out. But being an 8-seed in the playoffs isn’t much better than being a 25-win team. Unlike their winter counterpart, the NHL, where you can seemingly luck your way into winning the Stanley Cup, you can’t do that in the NBA. Remember another Rule of The Lose: the lower the score, the easier to pull the upset. You can’t park the bus in front of the rim. Your fatal flaws get exposed mercilessly in the NBA on a minute-to-minute basis. If you’re bad in the NBA, you’ll lose and lose and lose some more.
In the end, as much as I’m enjoying watching the Warriors pound people into submission on a regular basis, I just find it impossible to invest that much of myself in a product where so many of the entities seem to have little interest in succeeding. (Not the players, mind you, but the organizations who employ them.) Not merely attempting to assemble a winning club and failing at it, mind you – Warrior fans endured about 30 years of that – but not even attempting to put forth a legitimately competitive product. There is this air of artificiality to it. Fake fun. As fake as all of the bells and whistles which go off constantly in an NBA arena in an effort to keep you entertained. Hey, I have an idea. WIN THE DAMN GAME! I think winning is pretty entertaining, don’t you?

• Read this article. The Lose believes analytics are an important part of the business of sports, and using data and a logical approach can pay long-term dividends. The Lose also believes that most of the amateur stat nerds who dominate the conversation on sports message boards don’t understand that you cannot take the laptop with you out onto the field. You can put players in positions to better succeed through analytics, but those players better have some fucking talent to begin with. The Philadelphia 26ers can be branded analytics darlings all they want, but all Sam Hinkie has done in his tenure as GM is create a sub-replacement level roster with a sub-salary floor payroll which only does one aspect of basketball well, which is lose at it.
And I never quite understand what stat nerds think the point of the sport is that they actually follow. The objective is to win. I came across an amusing argument on a Seattle Mariners fansite the other day, where they were revisiting an off-season trade where fan favourite/WAR darling/constantly injured OF Michael Saunders was shipped to Toronto. (The impetus for this discussion being that Saunders had just torn up his knee at spring training by stepping on a sprinkler head in the outfield.) A stats disciple made a point on there where he said the process involved in trading Saunders to the Blue Jays for pitcher J.A. Happ was a bad one – even though the trade is presently slanted heavily in the Mariners favour with Saunders hurt, and that he “would rather have GOOD PROCESS = BAD RESULTS instead of BAD PROCESS = GOOD RESULTS.”
Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. I want good results regardless of good process, bad process, dumb luck, miracles, acts of God or anything else. The objective is to win the game, and ultimately win the last one of the season after which they give you a shiny trophy and you get to have parades. If all we cared about was assembling a team on paper with the biggest WAR, we wouldn’t care a whole lot about watching the actual game, now would we?

• As I mentioned previously, The Lose is a worldly individual and I find the ICC World Cup of Cricket to be quite entertaining. Most of the excitement in the 14-team tourney so far has been generated by the ‘associate’ nations participating – Ireland, Afghanistan, UAE, and Scotland – winning a few games and scaring the dickens out of some of the established nations in the process. The minnows should enjoy it while it lasts, since the International Cricket Council, in a move laced with greed and protectionist interests, is actually contracting the tournament the next time it occurs four years from now. This doesn’t make any sense from a competitive standpoint – the minnows have been entertaining and mostly competitive, whereas a lot of the games between established sides have been awful blowouts.
But this excellent New York Times article explains what’s going on: it’s far more important to keep Indian viewership, and Indian sponsorship dollars, flowing in than actually attempting to grow the game worldwide. I’ve labeled this similar phenomenon in the soccer world The Zusi Effect. When Graham Zusi’s headed goal against Panama saved El Tri’s ass a few years ago, he also saved League MX and the Mexican FA literally millions of dollars in sponsorships and broadcast rights which would’ve been lost by El Tri failing to qualify for the World Cup. From a financial standpoint, it would’ve been somewhat disastrous for Mexican soccer. They owe Graham Zusi more than he probably realizes.
Cricket is suffering from a Zusi Effect – depending entirely on the well-being of one particular team, and having them do well – and that’s the sort of loser thinking which ultimately dooms you. Even in a small group of nations like the 10 in the highest ranks of cricket, there is bound to be some ebb and flow, some give and take, and sometimes you’re just not going to win because others will be better. It’s the nature of most competitions. Not even the American basketball team has been immune to that over the years. And not even a self-contained entity like the NFL is content with having only a small marketplace – hence their constantly having games in London. (Which folks across the pond keep attending, even though they’ve been fed a steady diet of the Jacksonville Jaguars.) Sure, India’s cricket market is massive, but India’s market for everything is potentially massive. If they could ever develop some good footballers there – and with 1.2 billion people, the odds surely are in their favour – the place seems like a potential gold mine. And the beautiful game has always had a curious way of chip-chip-chipping away at a nation’s collective sporting psyche. It may take a few years, or even a few decades, but if FIFA wants it, eventually football starts to take hold.
For as many shots as I’ve taken at FIFA, they knew years ago that developing untapped markets was the key to further growth. The more good players there are, and the more good footballing nations there are, the better the game is as a whole. Their efforts at development included holding their most sacred event in a trio of baseballing nations – the U.S., Japan, South Korea – all of whom have now asserted themselves as legit footballing nations with strong domestic leagues that have produced a few world-class players. Rugby’s gotten in on the act as well, planning on holding their World Cup in Japan in 2019 and looking to grow the game in places such as the U.S., a huge nation where there is room for almost any sort of sport or pastime to thrive on some level or another. Given that the U.S. lost to New Zealand’s All Blacks 74:6 last fall in Chicago, the rugby folks clearly have a ways to go, but 61,000 turning up at Soldier Field for that match shows the potential interest to be there.
There is a big difference between being self-interested and short-sighted, with the foundations of failure very often rooted in the latter. And while there is and has been an abundance of graft, corruption and political in-fighting in institutions such as FIFA and the IOC, such behaviours are often far, far worse in smaller institutions, where there is a smaller pie and thus more incentive to be crooked. It’s best that the I.C.C., and entities in general, to continue striving for expanse, rather than simply turning inward and trying to protect that which (they think) they still have.

• Non sporting note here to close: RIP Leonard Nimoy. On the booze cruise that was the original Starship Enterprise, Spock provided the Shakespeare. His was the eye and the voice of the poet, the soul of the philosopher. It was the ethos of Spock which was at the heart of the rebirth of the Star Trek franchise many decades later, for it was that character – with his honorable characteristics of reason, humility, and grace – which truly resonated with people. Leonard Nimoy’s on-screen creation – a character founded within his own background and life experience – was proving it was cool to be smart half a century ago, and for that, we should all be grateful. He lived long and prospered. He has been, and shall always be, our friend.