Talentless in Seattle

Your Seattle Mariners

“An object at rest tends to stay at rest. An object in motion tends to stay in motion.”
– Sir Isaac Newton

“A team that’s bad tends to stay bad.”
– not Sir Isaac Newton

THE postmortems on the Seattle Mariners’ lost 2015 season started being written sometime around the middle of June, when the team slumped its way through a 2-9 homestand and permanently lost contact with the leaders in the American League. The Mariners are one of only two franchises in baseball to have never made the World Series. If/when the Toronto Blue Jays reach the playoffs at the end of September, the Mariners will inherit the distinction of having gone the longest of any franchise in the league without reaching the playoffs, not having been there since 2001. Mariner fans are patient to a fault, fatalist in nature and also somewhat absurdist. They’re used to 90-loss seasons in Seattle, having endured far too many of them over the course of 40 years. Run-of-the-mill bad years are to be expected there. But 2015 this was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be the year for the Mariners. (And it wasn’t just the locals who bought into the hype.) As such, the M’s flailing about 10 games behind the Houston Astros in the standings and reduced to going through the motions for the last few months of the season feels seems all the more depressing.

And the fact that it’s the Astros at the top of the standings makes it sting even more. Yes, the laughingstock Houston Astros, who turned in arguably the worst 3-year stretch in baseball history from 2011-2013, becoming the first team in MLB history to lose more than 105 games in three consecutive seasons. The Astros have stockpiled an impressive array of young talent through the draft in recent years, and that collective talent has exploded onto the scene in 2015, arriving earlier than expected. (I personally thought the Astros would be bad this year and good the next.) When Jeff Luhnow arrived to take over the GM position in Houston, he was handed a 100-loss team, the worst farm system in the majors, and a fan base so disengaged that the Stros were drawing 0.0 ratings on their local television broadcasts. But he also brought with him the know-how and philosophy of player development from the St. Louis Cardinals (and apparently also brought some of his passwords from St. Louis as well). And if you’re going to rebuild an entire organization from scratch, there is no one better to copy than the Cardinals. For all of the hype and the talk about the Oakland A’s and so-called Moneyball – their unique approaches to overcoming inherent financial disadvantages in baseball – time has shown us, in fact, that the modest middle-class franchise in St. Louis’ methods have proven even more effective.

And calling St. Louis “middle class” is based upon economic realities of the game, of course, having nothing to do with pedigree – the Cardinals have won more World Series championships than any other National League club. From a revenue standpoint, the Cardinals cannot ever hope to compete with the Yankees and the Dodgers and even their fiercest rivals, the Cubs. So the Cardinals haven’t even bothered to compete in that arena, and simply gone about cranking out one MLB talent after another. MLB free agency was always something cost-conscious franchises feared in the past, but in truth, it has been proven to frequently be fool’s gold – in signing free agents, you’re rewarding them for past performance, but most free agents are at or past the point in their careers where their skills begin to decline. As contracts increase in value necessarily, the end result, in essence, is a bad investment that simply gets worse over time. As terrific and beloved as Albert Pujols was in St. Louis, you can bet your bottom dollar the Cardinals are glad they aren’t on the hook for that 10-year, $254 million deal Pujols signed after 2011. No, that would be the California Los Angeles Angels of Costa Mesa Anaheim picking up that tab for Pujols, who can barely move (he hit into a 6-5-3 force out earlier this year – don’t ask) and is but a shell of the player he once was.

The aforementioned Mariners have a few potential albatross contracts of their own. In an effort to win now, they went all in on Nelson Cruz, which has proved a wise investment this season – seriously, if the Mariners were worth a damn, the guy would win the MVP, and he deserves some consideration anyway, as he’s been that good on a team which is that bad. They opened up the chequebook a year ago and splurged on Robinson Cano for 10 years and $240 million, and still owe over $100 million to Felix Hernandez and Kyle Seager – and part of the Mariners struggles stem from the fact that those three players I mentioned, while being pretty good this season, haven’t performed at the superstar levels expected of them. And they need to perform like superstars for the Mariners to be successful, because the rest of the roster has been, well, not very good at all. And seven years into the tenure of GM Jack Zduriencik, there is no excuse for that franchise, and the organization as a whole, to be as bereft of talent as it is.

Zduriencik’s arrival after the 2008 season was supposed to represent a new era in Seattle baseball, as he brought with him a track record of scouting and player development successes from Milwaukee. (Although a rather scathing article by Geoff Baker, the former Mariners beat writer at the Seattle Times, suggests that résumé was somewhat embellished.) The Mariners had been run into the ground by his predecessor, Bill Bavasi, whose disastrous 5-year tenure saw one ill-advised free agent signing after another, a 90-game winner becoming into a 100-game loser, a loving fan base plummeting in both numbers and enthusiasm, and Bavasi then topped off this particularly bitter-tasting sundae with a cherry of a trade – acquiring oft-injured and underachieving starter Erik Bédard from Baltimore in exchange for current Orioles superstar Adam Jones, current Orioles ace Chris Tillman, and three other players in what is, hands down, the single worst deal made in Major League Baseball since the turn of the millennium. You would think that Zduriencik couldn’t have done worse – but in fact, he’s not done much better. Indeed, the M’s record over the first five years of the Zduriencik era was almost identical to the Bavasi years. And while, in fairness, the Mariners have seemed to have an awful lot of bad luck this year – having played an ungodly number of close games and lost them, having an offense whose hard contact numbers don’t jibe with its BABIP, and having lost far too many man games among its starting rotation to injuries – you cannot look at this team without asking about the farm system. Where are all of those good young players? What happened to them all?

Indeed, the cutlers currently carving up the corpse of the Mariners, be they local or national, have all fixated upon that very point. During Zduriencik’s seven years in charge, the Mariners may have missed out on a few terrific talents available with the first picks in the MLB draft, but they’ve picked second twice and third once, which has netted them Mike Zunino, a catcher hitting .170 and striking out in a third of his at-bats; Danny Hultzen, an oft-injured pitcher whose career is, most likely, over; and former can’t miss prospect Dustin Ackley, whose been traded to the Yankees now after a career in Seattle which has been … well, suffice to say, he’s not going to be missed:

The thing is, Zduriencik wasn’t alone in thinking Ackley would turn out to be good. Quite honestly, everyone thought that way. And when the Mariners were dangling Cliff Lee at the trade deadline in 2010, on their way to a 101-loss season which featured the worst offensive team in the history of modern baseball, both the Yankees and the Rangers offered their top hitting prospects as trade bait – Jesus Montero and Justin Smoak, respectively. As fate would have it, Zduriencik managed to acquire both of them over the course of several years, and neither of them has amounted to anything. Now, prospects have been known to flame out, of course. Nothing is guaranteed, and everyone whiffs on a few from time to time. But what this speaks to, on an organizational level, is a lack of proper player development, which is the bugaboo of pretty much every awful franchise across the spectrum of North American sport.

Player development isn’t sexy and it doesn’t really get much attention – at least not until the process pays off. It’s hands on, it’s slow, and it requires patience. Players are not finished products when they arrive. Players can learn. Skills can be taught. It’s extremely easy to gloss over this aspect of the game, since it doesn’t take place on the field of play. Out of sight, out of mind. Statheads love to throw around numbers to show how good a player is, but it isn’t until an organization puts in the time to develop a player that any of those numbers show up in the first place. As a sports-watching public, we’ve become obsessed with the draft over the years, and a good number of franchises in pro sports have become obsessed as well, viewing it as some sort of quick fix to whatever ails them. Guess what? It rarely is.

The draft is an apparatus intended to create parity within a closed system, of course. The bad teams get first dibs on the best players available and, in theory, that should move them back towards being competitive again. Were that actually the case, of course, you wouldn’t see the same teams in the lotteries of the NBA and the NHL year after year, and you wouldn’t have such disparate levels of success.

The Edmonton Oilers seem to think they’ve struck it rich this year, drafting Connor McDavid with the first pick in the NHL draft after winning the lottery. (According to this rather zealous article, McDavid promises to be the single-greatest player in the history of all hyperbole.) His selection by the Oilers, followed by the pick of another supposed can’t-miss prospect, Jack Eichel, with the 2nd pick by the Buffalo Sabres, culminated a rather ridiculous season in the NHL in which the Sabres and the Seattle Totems Arizona Coyotes blatantly tanked in the hopes of landing one of the top picks. The Oilers, meanwhile, didn’t blatantly tank this past season – they really were that terrible. Edmonton has been so terrible that McDavid marks the fourth #1 pick in the draft the Oil have had in six years. What should give long-suffering Oilers fans hope is not the arrival of McDavid, but the arrival of former Boston GM Peter Chiarelli on the scene – mostly because it means the ouster of Edmonton’s failed coach/clownshoes GM Craig MacTavish and the end of his regime. Chiarelli’s first act was to fire basically everyone in the organization – assistant coaches, instructors, scouts, you name it. He fired them all, a good number of whom were former Oiler players with connections to the 1980s glory days of the franchise. There’s no guarantee Chiarelli will be successful running the Edmonton Oilers, but given the track record of his predecessors, he could scarcely do worse. All of the top picks in the world haven’t helped the Oilers one iota. What will, in fact, help them is to rebuild the organization from the bottom up and put good people in place on the talent development front. Indeed, as the money has gotten bigger and bigger in sports, as the ability to throw it around has become easier and player movement has become a given, that base need for talent development has, in fact, become more important than ever. And the Oilers never truly started over like the Astros did. As a rule, you should never count on the people who ran your franchise into ruins to somehow revive its fortunes.

With the draft and also all of the cost-containment measures instituted over the years – the salary caps and the luxury taxes and the revenue sharing and whatnot – the end result should be something akin to parity. And that has been to case, to some extent, with another result being that if you’re team is perpetually terrible, you’ve run out of convenient excuses as to why that is. It comes down to a question of competence, pure and simple. There is really no excuse for the Cleveland Browns and the Sacramento Kings. There’s no excuse for the Detroit Lions going 0-16 and winning one playoff game in 57 years, for the Colorado Rockies having basically one good month in the history of the franchise, and the Florida Panthers existing at all. In almost every case, at the root of those franchises’ collective struggles lays an inability to acquire, develop, and then maintain, good talent.

It seems maddening at times. The Mariners have developed about three good players in the past decade, but in St. Louis, they apparently grow good players on trees. The truly elite franchises always find good players, no matter where they are picking in the draft. Quite bluntly, all of the scouting combines and player rankings put forth by the supposed “draft gurus” ultimately don’t mean shit. The New England Patriots draft in the 20s pretty much every season in the most parity-laden league of them all, and all they’ve done is been to six Super Bowls since 2002. The Seahawks won a Super Bowl with 5th round picks turned All-Pros in their secondary, an inexhaustible rotation of defensive linemen, a 3rd round QB who was supposedly too short, and two starting receivers they paid all of $26,000 to sign. In baseball, the Giants have won three World Series in five years and haven’t signed a premium free agent away from another club since the Barry Zito debacle nearly a decade ago. In fact, ownership there actually put the kibosh on such signings, requiring both creativity from GM Brian Sabean and an emphasis on – you guessed it – the farm system. For years, the narrative put forth was that the Giants’ farm system isn’t very good, and yet the Giants had an entire home-grown starting rotation for the playoffs in 2010, had four rookies on the roster in 2014, you’ll find a farm system product occupying every position around the bases, and somehow they’re still in the playoff chase despite having had half their starting lineup on the DL at any given time. They just call up another kid up from the Sacramento River Cats and drop him in the lineup and he starts to perform. (The latest, Kelby Tomlinson, just hit a grand slam today against the Cubs and has been hitting .330 or so.) Indeed, what always impresses me most about call-ups to the Giants or the Cardinals or the Yankees is that they always seem ready to play at the big-league level. The excuses surrounding young players – they’re inexperienced, they need to learn, etc. – just don’t seem to apply in their cases.

The Golden State Warriors, meanwhile, were never particularly lucky in the NBA lottery. The one time they landed the top pick, they drafted Joe Smith. It was a draft about as exciting as the name of the player they picked. So how did they build a champion? They landed Steph Curry with the 7th pick of the draft, as well as Harrison Barnes. They landed Klay Thompson with the 11th pick of the draft. Draymond Green was a 2nd-round pick with a crazy skill set that didn’t make sense in the NBA – at least not until the coaching staff started experimenting with different lineup sets and different styles of play. Not only did the Warriors win their first NBA title this year, but they did so with a cutting-edge style of play. I’ve never really bought into the great infatuation with the NBA draft lottery. As I’ve mentioned before, only two players in the history of the lottery won the NBA championship with the team that drafted them first overall – David Robinson and Tim Duncan. Most of the teams mired in perpetual misery in the NBA are there for a reason, and no one player is that likely to help them out. For all the acumen that Sam Hinkie has shown playing the metagame of the NBA salary cap during his tenure as GM in Philadelphia, making the 76ers into a laughingstock in the process, he hasn’t actually shown whether or not he has an eye for actual talent. Perhaps somewhat worryingly, the returns on his drafts wouldn’t seem to indicate that he does, which would set up the Sixers and their fans for possibly even more misery for the foreseeable future.

And the problem with teams that go bad is that they often tend to stay bad. Sure, 28 and soon to be 29 of the 30 teams in MLB have made the playoffs since 2001, but maintaining that level of play is far more difficult. Pro sports in North America are fraught with narratives of teams whose quality run the gamut from mediocre to awful for decades or even centuries, in the case of the Cubs. I ran across a post on a Vancouver Canucks fan site recently theorizing about the value of tanking – the Canucks having dipped from being one of the élite clubs to one of those also-ran mediocre sorts who can push to grab a playoff spot but likely go no further than that. Are you better off just blowing it up at that point and starting over? The problem with that line of reasoning, of course, is that success through failure is no guarantee. The Houston Astros’ of the world that seemingly rise from the ashes are few and far between. Once it goes bad, it often stays bad for quite a while. It’s been 22 years since the Blue Jays were in the playoffs. The Warriors went 40 years in between NBA titles. The Mariners have spent the past 14 years wandering aimlessly in the woods. My guess is that none of the people driving the discussion on the Canucks board remember very clearly the era when the Canucks had 17 straight losing seasons. One glorious Stanley Cup playoff run aside, that team was miserable to watch, run both incompetently and cheaply. The last time the Canucks were truly terrible, in 1999, they lucked out and, with some draft day finesse, landed both the Sedin twins with the 2nd and 3rd picks in the draft. Good luck finding one generational type player again, much less two. (Having the Winnipeg Jets Atlanta Thrashers stupidly select Patrik Štefan with the #1 pick helped their cause as well.)

The Royals are an interesting example, having finally shed their 29-year absence from baseball’s playoffs a year ago, and now sprouting the best record in the American League. Drayton Moore looks like a genius in Kansas City now, of course, since all of the young players he stockpiled have begun to play worth a damn, but it should be remembered that mid-summer a season ago, the Royals were basically going nowhere. Were it not for a hot finish to the season, which propelled the Royals into the playoffs and on to the World Series, Moore was quite possibly going to be out of his GM’s job, because the body of his work in his career indicated that he didn’t really know what he was doing. Indeed, one of his greatest moves was something somewhat accidental – shut down reliever Wade Davis, the key to the Royals amazing bullpen, was basically a throw-in in the James Shields trade a year ago. He was terrible as a starter in Tampa Bay, but someone on the Royals coaching staff thought that he might make a good reliever. And while they’ve added some pieces here and there in the offseason, the core of the Royals were homegrown on the farm. About a decade’s worth of player development work in Kansas City is finally paying off – but during that time, the product the Royals put forth on the field was often insufferable.

The great myth which has arisen in pro sports is that money solves all your problems. But far more evidence would seem to indicate that a franchise which seemingly has license to print money also has license to spend it badly. The entire principle of Moneyball was the idea that the poor-mouth Oakland A’s simply didn’t have the finances to compete with thoroughbreds like the New York Yankees, who have a seemingly inexhaustible well of resources from which to draw. While there is certainly a correlation between the size of a club’s payroll and its success in major league baseball, what gets forgotten in that equation is that often that large payroll is actually spent to keep the players you already developed. The core of the Yankees championship teams from the 1998-2000 – Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, etc. – were prospects developed within the Yankees minor league system. They were able to attain other key pieces to those teams through trading other good prospects they developed. Now, having a large revenue stream afforded the Yankees the ability to go out and sign some free agents, and also absorb other large contracts in trades, but the entire success of the organization was fundamentally based upon its ability to produce top-quality prospects.

Indeed, even in the Wild West capitalism that rules the roost of professional soccer, where the biggest clubs can seemingly drop €50 million on a player as easily as you or I drop $2.25 for a cup of coffee, talent development at the academy level is often even more important. Developing young talent adds depth to your squad, after all, which is essential when you have a season that can last 55-65 games. Young talent is also an asset that you can sell to other clubs and fetch a nice price. European clubs with poor development systems have to overpay to fill out their squads, which is inefficient, since that’s money not being used for buying players you actually want. Spending inefficiently also often leads to too much debt. It’s possible to spend yourself into oblivion, which is what happened to Rangers, who went broke and had to start all over again the Scottish fourth division, and, more recently and more humorously, at Queens Park Rangers, who were so desperate to make it to the Premier League that they were carrying a wage bill in the second division in 2013 that almost was as high as EPL champion Manchester City, and likely breaking quite a few financial rules while doing so. After one inglorious season in the EPL, QPR are back in the second division again, and also having to face up to the regulators for their past transgressions. Now, few teams have ever spent quite as spectacularly stupidly as QPR, but the point is that all of your big spending has to be matched by an structure in which you’re creating more talent for your organization.

And speaking of stupid spending, what immediately comes to mind here on this continent is the L.A. Dodgers, whose payroll this season is pushing $300 million and who’ve spent about $90 million or so simply to make some players go away. At one point in and around the trade deadline, the Dodgers were responsible for about 25% of the Marlins’ payroll. They’re going to look really stupid when if the Giants catch them in the National League West, since $300 million apparently doesn’t get you a shortstop hitting his weight or a bullpen that doesn’t suck six ways to Sunday. But what’s truly frightening about the money the Dodgers organization is throwing around is not the idea that they can seemingly but any player they want, but that for the $90 million they wasted telling Matt Kemp and Dee Gordon and Dan Haren and Michael Morse to get lost, they could pretty much buy the entire Cardinals development apparatus. And why wouldn’t they do that? No one working the backwaters of A Ball and AA is making any money at all, compared to the salaries you get at the higher levels of the game. Why wouldn’t the Dodgers simply target everyone the Cardinals or the Astros employ and offer to double their salaries?

The Lose wonders if this is where the next arms race might occur in sports – through the systematic pillaging of another organization’s development apparatus, you also force other clubs to have to spend more to keep it intact. Indeed, one of the beauties of having so much money at your disposal is forcing your rivals to spend money they don’t wish to spend to keep up. Then again, you’ve already seen something similar happen in the NFL, without a whole of good results. Bill Belichick’s New England staff has been systematically raided over the years, yet none of his former assistants have come even close to matching his success, and a good number of them have graded out to be among the worst head coaches in the league. (And in the case of Scott Pioli in Kansas City, arguably the worst General Manager in the league.) The same sort of thing is now happening with the Seahawks, which have lost two defensive coordinators to head jobs in Jacksonville and Atlanta. (Sadly, no one will take offensive coordinator/big tool Darrell “I’d-run-the-same-stupid-play-again-in-the-Super-Bowl” Bevell off their hands yet.) The salary cap might eventually catch up to the Seahawks, whose scrubs-cum-superstars all have to be paid like it, but only if they’ve lost the ability to generate more superstars out of thin air through their coaching and development.

Which brings us back once more to the Seahawks’ next door neighbours there in Occidental Square, the Mariners. What, pray tell, do they do? All the indications are that Zduriencik is a goner at the end of the season – apparently, soon-to-be Red Sox president Dave Dombrowski mentioned to someone that the Seattle job would’ve been his second choice, which is interesting, seeing as how Seattle doesn’t yet have a job opening – and likely manager Lloyd McClendon will go with him. Even though I think Lloyd’s done OK, all things considered, it’s a results-oriented business and the results have been disastrous. I would like to think that whomever comes in to clean up the mess will be given carte blanche to just get rid of everyone and start over. The trouble with Seattle is that patience is diminishing among the fan base as fast as their numbers. And with about $100 million players on their rosters, the Mariners were built to win now, but they don’t have a farm system capable of producing enough players to compliment them. And while it may be good news that Zduriencik’s tenure is soon to be up, as Friend of the Lose and long-suffering Northwest columnist Art Thiel points out, the same guys who hired Zduriencik will be hiring his replacement. They haven’t gotten these hires right in 14 years, so why would anyone think they will start showing wisdom now?

Regardless of whom the Mariners hire, that franchise – propped up by Microsoft money in a Microsoft town – might want to heed the words of one of Microsoft’s former CEOs and focus on development. The Mariners’ greatest success – the 116-win season of 2001 – came primarily because, even though they had lost three Hall of Fame players in successive seasons (Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez), they had built up a talent base able not only to withstand the losses but adequately replace them – which took nearly a decade to accomplish. It doesn’t have to take that long, but there likely isn’t going to be a quick fix to what has been a long, slow, and insufferable leak.

National Disaster

The Nats were absolutely horrible this past weekend

Well Casey was winning
Hank Aaron was beginning
one Robbie going out, one coming in
Kiner and Midget Gaedel
the Thumper and Mel Parnell
and Ike was the only one winning down in Washington
– Terry Cashman, “Talking Baseball”

WERE I to revisit my horrid baseball predictions from the preseason and attempt to justify why it is that I thought the Washington Nationals would win the World Series this year, I would be one of many writers and columnists and pundits feeling forced to do so – and one of many writers and columnists and pundits who’ve been forced to do so for the past four seasons. It’s a pretty easy choice, picking the Nats to win everything, because on paper, they’ve had more talent than everyone else in the National League, if not in all of baseball.

The Official Wife of In Play Lose has some allegiance to the Nats, having grown up in the D.C. area, and so we usually make it a point to take in a game whenever they come to San Francisco. The Nats rolled in for a 4-game series at Phone Co. Park against the Giants, who’ve been something of a M*A*S*H unit all season – their starting lineup of choice has played together all of three games the entire year – and have a starting rotation held together by duct tape and silly string. The Nats lined up Strasburg/Scherzer/Gonzalez to throw the first three games of the series, all top calibre pitchers matched against a cobbled-together rotation. Pitching and defense rule the roost at Phone Co. Park in San Francisco, where the mists and the cool weather and the winds put a severe dent in the offense. It looked like the Nats had three serious mismatches lined up, and with a little luck on Sunday afternoon against Giants ace Madison Bumgarner, a sweep would be possible.

Well, a sweep was possible, indeed.

We’re having a strange summer here in San Francisco. The last four days saw temps around 90° with no wind, no fog, and still, humid air – and in those sorts of conditions (which don’t happen EVER), Phone Co. Park plays more like the ballparks in Cincinnati and Philadelphia. It becomes a launchpad, with slick grass and a rock hard infield, to boot, and the Giants went about peppering the walls and skidding balls into Triples Alley and singlehandedly shortening the career of Nats CF Michael Taylor, who ran about 10 miles over the weekend chasing balls down. By the time Bumgarner completed his masterful performance on Sunday – a complete game 3-hit shutout with 14 Ks as well as a homer and an RBI double in a 5-0 Giants win – the Nats had been subjected to a 4-game sweep and been outscored 28-12 in the process.

This completed a dreadful West Coast road trip for the Nats, who went 1-6 vs. L.A. and the Giants – a nasty sort of 2-stop road trip even in the best of times –  and dropped to 10-20 since the All-Star Break, a slump which has seen them fall from having a healthy lead in the NL East to now being 4½ games behind the suddenly resurgent Mets and 10½ games out of the wild card race. Were it not for the Pittsburgh Pirates sweeping the Mets over the weekend – the ’Mazins somewhat magical second half being momentarily halted when they faced a team that actually knows what it’s doing – the Nats season may already be over. It certainly looked over for the Nats on Friday night when my wife and I attended the game, a Giants win by a score of 8-5 in which Bryce Harper did his Bryce Harper thing, hitting a 3-run RBI and driving in four, and the rest of his teammates seemed to be sleepwalking, as Scherzer got tattooed, the bullpen couldn’t stop the bleeding and the defense looked utterly lost. Quite honestly, that team looked dead.

What the hell is wrong with this team? Certainly, injuries have played a huge part in it. Denard Span really makes that team go from the leadoff spot, and he’s been on the DL for a while now. Anthony Rendon and Jayson Werth also spent large chunks of the season on the DL as well. But consider the Giants again, who are 2½ games out of first in the West and presently have three regulars and two starting pitchers on the DL. Injuries happen to almost everybody, at some point. Indeed, the absence of Rendon and Werth from the starting lineup on Friday night had nothing to do with health and everything to do with the fact that neither of them is hitting their weight in the month of August. I looked at the Nats lineup on the Jumbotron on Friday night and said to KC, “wow, that lineup isn’t any good at all.”

Indeed, the Nats have spent most of the past three seasons failing to live up to lofty expectations. On paper, they always look to be better than they turn out to actually be. This has been especially true on the offensive side of things. Even as Harper has developed into arguably the best player in the National League, he’s only one guy. They just don’t put up enough runs on a regular basis, not even for a starting staff which should – should – be absolutely dominant. The trade for closer Jonathan Papelbon from the Phillies gives the Nats what should – should – be a dominant back end of the bullpen with he and previous Nats closer Drew Storen. But this is where the Nats start running into trouble, of course, seeming like a team that’s far too obsessed with what’s happened in the recent past.

Storen, of course, coughed up the lead in the Nats’ demoralizing Game 5 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2012 playoffs, and also coughed up the lead in the 9th inning of Game 2 against the Giants last year. Storen was having a terrific season this year, and of all the things the Nats could’ve added at the trade deadline to boost their squad, which was in first place at the time, getting a closer shouldn’t have been that high on the list at all. That they did so speaks to a fundamental lack of confidence in their closer Storen to come through when they really, truly need him to – which is fine, I suppose, but you’ve been throwing him out there in the 9th inning for most of the past four years and he’s been pretty good. Two poor games is statistically a small sample size – but they just happen to be the two most important games in the history of the D.C. franchise.

One of the things which I am fond of saying in relation to scrabble is that you must fear metaphor. The reason for this is that the actual mechanics of the game are the same from game to game – but what changes from game to game is the importance that you attach. The fact is that some games do, in fact, mean more than others, and your performance is necessarily going to be judged by how you fare in those situations. The whole “Drew Storen is a choker” motif has been statistically proven to be untrue over time, but you don’t, in the end, get to choose how a game comes to mean. And for a seemingly star-crossed franchise that’s never been to a World Series, that was left to twist in the wind and rot in Montréal for half a decade by the commissioner and MLB, and that had it’s greatest team taken away by the baseball strike of 1994, the failings can seem all the more pointed and painful.

Of course, it’s hard to know just how the Storen-Papelbon combo will work in the bullpen at Washington, since the Nats haven’t been winning any games of late and on two occasions in the pivotal series with the Mets in early August, manager Matt Williams didn’t see fit to put them in the game as the Nats were blowing late-game leads on their way to getting swept at Citi Field – a pivotal series which seems to have changed the entire course of the narrative in the NL East. Williams is in his second year managing the Nats and trying to grow into the job, and his tactical acumen hasn’t been particularly stellar. It’s a lot easier to grow into the job when you have a terrible team to work with, and whatever mistakes you make pale in comparison to the mistakes being made on the field on a regular basis. Instead, Williams got handed the keys to a Ferrari and has been trying to figure out how to drive a stick.

And the second-guessing of everything Matt Williams does was probably inevitable after the trainwreck that was the playoff series last season with San Francisco, beginning with a strange decision in Game 2 of last year’s playoffs: his starter Jordan Zimmerman, having thrown a no-hitter in his last start of the season, was throwing a 2-hit shutout in Game 2 against the Giants and had retired 53 of the 58 previous batters he’d faced when he was yanked with two outs in the 9th in favor of Storen, who promptly coughed up the lead and, nine innings later, the Giants had won a 2-1, 18 inning marathon. The Nats got themselves into a pitching and defense and tactical matchup with the Giants, which pitted Williams in a chess match with Bruce Bochy, whose three World Series titles confirm him as MLB’s grandmaster, and Williams managed to maneuver his way into trying to save the season, in Game 4, using his 6th and 7th best bullpen options. The results were predictable. At the key junctures of the season, Williams seemed out of his depth. In the playoffs, some lateral thinking is necessary, of course – given the hot hand that was Zimmerman, he was sure to get the ball in Game 5, which meant that the Nats’ #1 starter, Stephen Strasburg, should’ve been available for Game 4. To hell with established roles at that point – you’re down 2-1 in a best-of-5 and you have to save the season! Yet there was Strasburg sitting next to Matt Williams, becoming more of a poster child for Washington Nationals ineptitude through inaction than he already was.

Strasburg, of course, was the #1 pick in the draft in the first of back-to-back years where the woful Nats hit the jackpot – drafts which landed them he and then Bryce Harper. He then blew out his arm, and the Nats have been cautious with him ever since. Too cautious. The ace of the staff in 2012, when the Nats had the best record in what was a loaded National League that season, Strasburg was shut down in mid-August under the wishes of the Nats’ front office, who had made the decision at the start of the year to limit his innings count for the season come hell or high water. So there was Strasburg sitting in the dugout watching Game 5 of the playoffs, perfectly healthy but off the roster, watching the Nats face the St. Louis Cardinals ace Chris Carpenter – a guy who, earlier in the year, had a rib removed because it pinching nerves and preventing him from pitching. (Umm, ick.) The juxtaposition of mentalities between the two clubs there is impossible to ignore. Baseball is a game full of voodoo and superstition and faith, of course – “never fuck with a winning streak,” as they say in Bull Durham – and while I don’t subscribe to that sort of hocus-pocus, if there was ever a franchise that deserved to be cursed for trifling with the baseball gods, it would be the one that willingly shut down it’s best pitcher who was perfectly healthy in the throes of what could’ve, and maybe should’ve, been a championship season.

Because guess what, folks, winning championships is hard. It’s really hard. You need great talent, smart management, great timing, good health and also having a little bit of luck doesn’t hurt. As spoiled as we are here in San Francisco, what with the Giants hoisting three new championship banners in the past five years and the Golden State Warriors getting to hoist one here this coming autumn, it’s not lost on people that the Giants went 56 years without winning a World Series, and the Dubs went 40 years without winning an NBA title. And contrary to popular belief among the stathead set, winning championships is why you play the game. It’s how you’re ultimately judged when your career is done, fair or not. It’s why you started playing in the first place, and players go to amazing extremes in order to try and win championships. In last year’s Super Bowl, the Seahawks’ three best defenders – Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Kam Chancellor – were all trying to play with what would otherwise had been season-ending injuries. After the Stanley Cup playoffs are over, players always reveal that they’ve played for the previous two months with broken wrists, broken hands, torn muscles. Questioning the wisdom of doing such a thing is another issue, of course, but the fact is that these are the most competitive people on earth, and capturing that grand prize is all that truly matters in the moment to any of them.

That shutdown of Strasburg coincided with the season that Chipper Jones retired from the Braves and he perhaps explained it best when asked his opinion of the Nats moves. He’d arrived in Atlanta in 1996, the year the Braves won a World Series and in the midst of a 14-year-run of playoff appearances. But the Braves never won another title in his entire career, despite being good and sometimes great. Chipper had come to understand that success was fleeting in sports. When you have the chance to win a championship, you simply have to make the most of it. Jones basically said that the Nats were idiots for doing that. Strasburg held his tongue throughout the season, then voiced his disapproval after he’d been shut down, since he was feeling fine and wanted to pitch and wanted to try to win – which is exactly what the organization should’ve been thinking as well. Sure, the organization has to be mindful of long-term concerns, but the clock is ticking from the moment a player comes up to begin with. You want a guy to have a long career with your franchise, but you don’t always have much of a say in how long that career is going to be. And if you’re Strasburg, and you know that time is short and the opportunities to win titles can be few and far between, are you really going to be that interested in reupping? Sure, money talks, but there’s plenty of money for everyone. Winning, and the chance to do so, often becomes paramount in a free agent’s mind.

I really do feel that 2012 is going to haunt this franchise, if it isn’t already doing so. The 2012 flag that very easily could’ve been flying in Nationals Park is flying over on McCovey Cove. They’ve spent the past three years adding to the core of the roster – Harper, Rendon, Span, Scherzer, Fister – yet they seem to be running in place and perpetually underachieving. That core, meanwhile, is crumbling – Werth is aging, Ryan Zimmerman can’t move, Desmond is costing himself millions in a contract year with a dismal season both offensively and defensively. The Nats were struggling through all of the issues – helped in part by a terrible division – but now the wheels seem to have come off. Something needs to change in a hurry. In the meantime, the clock is ticking and the window continues to close.

There’s still time for the Nats to salvage this season, of course. (For starters, they have a few games coming up with the likes of the hapless Colorado Rockies and the rotting corpse of a franchise that is the Miami Marlins.) 4½ games isn’t an impossible deficit to overcome. The Mets seem a bit slump-proof at the moment, however, given how they pitch. Then again, they just got skunked by the Pirates while the Nats were failing to hit, pitch, field, coach, or even show a pulse for the past weekend. If the Nats somehow rally, they may owe the Pirates a beer or two.

It’s one thing to be awful in perpetuity, and the Nats certainly went that route for a while. That sucks, to be sure. But sports in North America tend to be a boom-and-bust enterprise, and failing to maximizing your opportunities during the good times just makes the bad times seem even worse. Just look at the other team I picked to reach the series – the Mariners won 116 games in 2001, one of the greatest teams in history, but blew their opportunities in the playoffs and haven’t made the playoffs since. The club continues to peddle 2001 nostalgia in lieu of putting a competent product on the field, but the Seattle fans have come to no longer care about such a thing. Waxing nostalgic about glory days that didn’t turn out so glorious only makes the losing more insufferable. The only way you cleanse yourselves of some of those disappointments is to go out and win. John Madden has always been fond of saying that “winning is a great deodorant,” but it’s also a great disinfectant and stain remover as well.

Just a Typical Saturday Morning

We may not play very well, but we’ll look good, damn it.

7:00 A.M. and I’m up early for the telecast of the season opener and Carrow Road looks grand when bathing in bright sunshine and wait what is Neil doing with this lineup, no Redmond and no Jerome in the first XI and this strikes me a EPL rookie manager mistake in trying to win with tactics instead of talent but this is OK, good pace and controlling the play, pressing high and looking dangerous and JESUS CHRIST GRABBAN HOW IN FUCK DID YOU MISS THAT? cross to the center of the box he has an open goal and skids it off the outside of the post for fuck sake and for fuck sake how is that not a red or at least a yellow? Palace guy gets neither from Simon Hooper the EPL rookie referee who I think I remember from Norwich games in the championship last season and who I think I remember being awful although he’s right to book Tetley although the three full rolls from the Palace winger on the dive score him no style points and the Canaries players are right to crowd around him “get the fuck up you fucking sissy” was that in the mike? but it’s OK they are controlling the possession but not enough numbers forward and Palace have some dangerous wingers they are kinda good I think I picked them 6th in the EPL pool for a reason and DAMN IT a goal against the run of play, down 0-1 and a little spooked into the second half and DAMN IT MARK SOMEBODY cheeky set piece from Palace on a corner catches Canaries asnooze jeez an NOW you decide to bring on Redmond and Jerome when you’re down 0-2? about fucking time well this game sucks REDMOND SHOT FROM DISTANCE GOAL and, hmm, that was really poor defense from Palace there and JEROME GOAL ON A BICYCLE KICK!!! FUCK YEAH!!! but wait what is that blind as bats Simon Hooper doing? disallowed goal for dangerous play? are you fucking kidding me? that wasn’t dangerous play it was a guess by an official not having a great day well this game sucks and it’s a good thing our keeper is a stud because that’s some pretty naïve defending going on there from the good guys in the yellow and the green stoppage time one last gasp HOW THE FUCK IS THAT NOT A PENALTY? that was a good old fashioned two-hand shove in the back it was so bloody obvious that anyone would’ve called it if they weren’t blind as bats well done Simon Hooper you’ll undoubtedly grade out by the FA as the worst official in the EPL this week good luck in your next assignment in Rotherham or Leeds or some shit town or, even worse, Ipswich, well it’s just one game and oh, look, Palace just waltzed in for an oh-by-the-way goal in the 95th minute which is the sort of thing that comes back to bite you in the ass when it comes down to goal difference at the end of the season so that’s Norwich City 1:3 Crystal Palace and there’s the whistle and it’s only one game and Palace is pretty good but still it’s a disappointing result with enough truly hideous and bad calls by the referee to almost mask a few glaring weaknesses but not quite so it’s welcome back to the EPL and this is looking like it might be a challenging season for The Good Guys and that game sucked I cannot believe I woke up early for this fuck this I am going back to bed …

Celebrity Fiction Edition

Matt Tunnicliffe’s scorecard from the 2014 National Scrabble Championships. He wasn’t pleased with how he played.

TWO of the good guys in the game of scrabble – and two official Friends of The Lose – were playing in a best-of-5 final on Wednesday at the North American Scrabble Championships in Reno. Matthew “Muffin with Tentacle” Tunnicliffe defeated Jesse “Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod” Day 3-2 to win the championship in a series that was tight, tense, and suspenseful. It was something of a heartbreaking and excruciating loss for Phonerz, who lost one game in the series on the account of playing IR inadvertently late in the game, which isn’t a word and which Matt quickly challenged off. Scrabble is, like all sports and games and contests, often decided by mistakes, if not nearly always so. Everyone makes them from time to time, no matter how good they are.

I was watching this match streamed online while commuting, and I physically cringed when I saw my good friend and club mate Phonerz play IR. For a moment, I felt physically sick. I was sitting next to one of my regular commuting companions on the Caltrain, whose name I don’t even know, and she was startled when I yanked the earbuds out of my ears and facepalmed.

“What happened?”
“He played IR.”
“Uh, who did what?”
“Scrabble,” I said pointing to my phone. “It’s the nationals.”
“What does IR mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not a word.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s not a word. He lost the game because of it.”
“Do you like Words With Friends?”

Sigh.

Jesse handled the defeat with class, however, which means it will probably be safe for me to give him some shit the next time I see him. (And if it’s not safe, I think me and my bad ankle can outrun him and his bad knee.)

As for Matt, the scorecard at the top of the page should give you an idea of his sense of humour. He’s one of the funniest guys in scrabble, and possesses the heightened sense of absurdity that you’d expect from a guy who’s been rooting for the Ottawa Senators all his life. He’s contributed some factoids to this blog, and he gave me permission to reprint here two of his scrabble short stories.

These two stories chronicle battles between Matt and Nigel Richards, who has won everything in English-language scrabble, recently won the French championship after spending nine weeks learning the dictionary, and is presently studying the Klingon dictionary as our planet’s chosen rep for the Interplanetary Scrabble To The Death Festival. These stories also feature some dazzling construction of scrabble game boards, links to which are end the end of the stories, and they possess a sentiment very much in keeping with the ethos here at In Play Lose.

I thought this would be a good way to tip my cap to Matt for his performance in Reno. I, for one, welcome our new muffin overlord:

- - -

Nigel stole my mom's car
So yesterday I spent my Saturday the same way I spend most of my Saturdays: hustling Scrabble players at Confederation Park. This is how I buy my food for the week.
"You sure got a lot better when money was on the line," said my latest victim as she reluctantly handed over a crisp $10 bill.
"Yeah, well, what can I say? I play well under pressure."
The lady scowled and left. I pocketed the money and dreamed of the Arby's I would purchase with it on the way home. My first hot meal in a month!
"Anyone else up for a fun game of Scrabble?! Maybe make it interesting and put a couple bucks down?!"
A man emerged from behind the trees. "I'll play!" he said in a thick British accent. He was comically dressed: a top hat and monocle adorned his jolly face, and a royal blue overcoat barely covered his large gut. The pocketwatch and handlebar moustache completed the ensemble.
"Sure thing! You know the rules, right? Want to put a few bucks on the game?" I asked, hoping his wallet was as luxurious as his attire.
"Oh, why not?" he said, pulling out a velvet pocketbook. My eyes widened and stomach growled. "How about $100? I have no clue how much this Canadian currency is worth, anyways."
"Oh!" I said, trying not to gawk, "$100 is fine. Pocket change, really." I did not have $100. "Sure, I'll bet that much. Let's play!"
The fat English man sat down and we played. He was awful. Almost every one of his plays consisted of exactly two tiles. It was like he was fishing, but never hit anything. I did my best to play poorly, too. I didn't want to scare him off in case he was interested in more money games. Even playing my worst Scrabble, I beat him handily.
"Well done, old chap!" said the man. "I guess I have a lot to learn!"
"Yeah, thanks," I said, trying not to damage the $100 bill as I folded it and placed it in my sock. "Your best bet would be to stop playing only two tiles a turn. You'll never win that way."
"Oh, no, I'm sure I understand the strategy of Scrabble quite well," he said with a chuckle. "Two tiles a turn is fine!"
"Um... no. Trust me, you need to play more tiles. You'll never win that way." I said, forgetting that I was supposed to be convincing him to play more games with me.
"Well, we'll see," he replied. "How about another game, boyo? Higher stakes?"
I licked my lips. "Sure. What kind of stakes?"
He riffled through his pocketbook. "Oh I don't know. How does $5,000 sound?"
I almost fell off my chair. I had to take a second to calm down and collect myself. "F- five-thousand dollars sounds fine."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes!"
"Shake on it?"
We shook on it.
"Alright then."
At that moment, the man grabbed the front of his overcoat and pulled hard. The entire disguise came off. The fatness, the moustache, the British accent. It was all a ruse. The man who stood before me was Nigel Richards, beard and all. I almost barfed.
"Don't have $5,000, do you kid?" he said in his normal voice.
"W- well, I - I..."
"How about that red Mazda 3 you drove here in. That must be worth almost five gees."
"M - my mom's car?" I live in my mom's car when my bedroom at home needs to be fumigated.
"Yeah, that'll do, I guess. I already have five red cars, but I guess I can use that one as a lawn ornament. Bet you feel stupid for dissing my two-tiles-a-turn strategy now, eh? Well, ready to play?"
"Ohcrap..."

game on ...
 
———
Nigel stole my dad's car
Several months after my first incident with Nigel Richards, I finally convinced my parents to let me borrow my dad's car. You see, I had wagered my mom's car in a game of Scrabble with Nigel. Through some extraordinary circumstances, I lost that game. Just barely. My parents were quite pissed. They made me get a part-time job to pay to replace the car.
So I was driving to my new job one day, thinking about how unlucky I am. Seriously? How did he get 730-something points playing two tiles a turn? What a lucksack.
I tried to keep my mind on the road. If I crash my dad's car, my parents would kill me. No question.
I looked at the rear-view mirror, and then back at the road. Wait. Did I just see that? I looked again. Nothing. Whew. I looked a third time. There it was! A bearded man on a bicycle with a Scrabble board under is arm. Nigel!
"No!" I thought. I stepped on the gas and sped away. I was not interested in another encounter with that man.
After turning several blocks, I lost him. Whew. Eyes back on the road. There is was again! This time in front of me! How the hell did he catch up?! I sped past him and zoomed away at 120km/h. No way he could follow me on a bike with me driving that fast.
Then I heard the sirens. Crap! I guess I was going 120 in a 40 zone. I will never be able to pay this ticket. I make minimum wage at Wendy's! I pulled over to the curb and the police car did the same. The officer approached my car and I rolled down the window.
"Up for a game?" It was Nigel!
"What the? No! Get away from me!"
"Oh come on. I'm bored. Just one game of Scrabble?" he asked again.
"No! You took my mom's car! Now I have to work a crappy job to pay her back!"
"Well, tell you what. We'll play for the car. You win, you get your mom's Mazda back. I win, I get this lovely Toyota Venza. Sound fair?"
"No! This is my dad's car! And we both know what's going to happen! I'm going to have the game of my life. Getting all sorts of bingoes and scoring a ton of points, and then you're going to pull off some sort of ridiculous comeback and win out of nowhere. That's what's going to happen! So no, we aren't playing!"
"Oh come now. Tell you want. I'll sweeten the deal. I have to win AND get two triple-triple bingoes. Otherwise, you get the car back."
I thought about it. "Well... two triple-triples would be hard to get. Especially if I play super defensively... But no! I won't do it! You'll find a way to win!"
"I like your uniform, by the way. Wendy's makes good burgers. It's weird how "Trainee" is actually sewn onto your shirt there. Like you're forever a trainee. I mean, usually they put it on a nametag, but that stitching looks permanent. Weird."
"OPEN THE BOARD!"
So I sat down to play with Nigel, thinking there would be no way he could beat me AND get two triple-triple bingoes... 

game on ...

That Didn’t Take Long

The ex-journo in me is jealous for never getting to run a headline like this

IT TOOK all of three days for The Worst Call Ever in soccer to be replaced by The Even Worse Call Ever in soccer, but when I say “the worst call ever,” I should probably qualify that remark.

There is a difference between calls and non-calls. Four particularly awful non-calls which taint the history of soccer are The Hand of God, The Hand of Gaul, The U.S. getting jobbed in 2002, and the most vicious play in the history of the World Cup. In all four of those cases, the outcomes should have been bloody obvious to anyone who was actually paying attention. (In order: 1. No goal for Argentina; 2. No goal, and likely no World Cup, for France; 3. American penalty and German sent off; 4. Toni Schumacher sent off at the least, if not locked up for felonious assault, and I am genuinely surprised no French player just went and decked him.) Now, in all of those cases, the officials somehow didn’t see the plays. They were out of position, the angle was bad, what have you. Honest mistakes, all of them, although inexcusable in every case. Soccer, in recent years, has acknowledged that the referee has it tough and looked to give the referee on the field some help, by giving the linesmen more authority and also having a fourth official on the sidelines who can point out infractions to the headman on the pitch, but as we saw the other night in the CONCACAF Gold Cup quarterfinal, when the fourth official incorrectly called a foul in the penalty area and the referee foolishly went along with it, awarding an undeserved penalty to Mexico and essentially ending the match, the process still isn’t exactly foolproof.

The four Worst Calls Ever that I highlighted above are all errors of omission – guys missing stuff. That’s annoying and somewhat baffling when it occurs – there were only about 110,000 people in the building who saw Maradona handle the ball, so how could the guys in black somehow miss it? – but understandable. In general, it’s probably best to err on the side of calling nothing when you aren’t sure, and letting the game sort itself out on the pitch. As a referee, you look like something of a blind doofus when this happens, but as we’ve discovered this week with CONCACAF, it’s better to be thought of as a blind doofus than some of the terms being through around to describe first Walter López, the Guatemalan referee from Sunday’s game with Costa Rica, and now Mark Geiger, the American official at the center of controversy following last night’s semifinal at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

Two more infamous officiating decisions happened to involve the same countries – the Germans and the English – and the exact same situation – a English shot striking the lower side of the crossbar and landing/not landing over the goal line – some 44 years apart. In the 1966 World Cup Final, the goal was given in England’s 4:2 victory, despite many German protests. In 2010, the goal was not given, even though it had obviously crossed the line. England went on to lose and this decision is what has led to goal line technology being instituted by FIFA. Small consolation for the English, but as a Seahawks fan who saw his team lose out of a playoff spot thanks to a phantom TD by Vinny Testaverde, and saw the NFL adopt instant replay almost immediately thereafter as a result, I can say that the loss wasn’t entirely in vain. In both cases, the positioning of the officials at the moment of the strike made viewing the flight of the ball impossible. (To add to the intrigue of 1966, the Soviet linesman who ruled it a goal, when asked about it on his deathbed, reportedly responded by saying, “Stalingrad.”) So, again, these are understandable, if not entirely excusable.

The error on Sunday night in East Rutherford, however, was an error of commission, and those are often far, far worse. It was a case of a referee taking a wild guess, stepping in and awarding a penalty in extra time of a scoreless game and directly affecting the outcome. It was an awful call, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. But it pales in comparison to the nonsense which happened last night in Atlanta in the match between Mexico and Panama, a match which showed everything that is bad about the beautiful game, and showed everything that is especially bad about the game in this little confederation of the world called CONCACAF where I reside.

Geiger, by the way, is considered the best American referee. To his credit, his work during the 2014 World Cup was highly regarded – he became the first American official in history to work a match during the knockout stages of the competition. But saying he’s the best American referee is not necessarily a compliment. Geiger works MLS games, and last night the rest of the world got to see, firsthand, what everyone involved in MLS, and watching MLS, has been saying for years – the officiating sucks.

And I hate trashing referees, for pete sake. They work hard and they do the best that they can in whatever sport they are officiating. As a tournament director in scrabble, I’m called upon to officiate when there are rules disputes, and I’ve gotten it wrong in the past and made the wrong decision. It happens. The rules are complex and, at times, confusing. You mess up sometimes. You get it wrong. It happens. So I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of the officials. Furthermore, I generally believe that no matter how many errors referees and officials commit, the players commit far more of them. Whining about officials gets tiresome, as it’s often little more than a cheap cop-out on the part of players for a bad performance.

But when an official is as bad as Geiger was on Wednesday, and when his actions directly and grossly impact the game, it’s impossible to ignore.

He put his stamp on the game 25’ in when he tossed Panama’s Luis Tejada under rather iffy circumstances. Tejada was going for a ball on a header, his back to Mexico’s Francisco Rodriguez, and his elbow/forearm clipped Rodriguez on the side of the face. Rodriguez, of course, acted like he’d been shot, and Geiger pulled out the red card. This was one of those letter of the law/spirit of the law sorts of things. Sure, you need to be in control of your body out there, and getting the elbow up is definitely something they’re trying to crack down upon, but the contact on the play wasn’t any more than you see on quite a few air-to-air collisions which don’t even result in fouls being called. It is a dangerous play, although it is more clumsy than reckless, and there isn’t much intent to it. Yellow? Perhaps. Red? Well, like I say, this was iffy.

 
But what makes that worse was the fact that, earlier in the game, Mexico’s Carlos Vela had full-on slugged Panama’s Anibal Godoy with an elbow on a set piece, which also could have resulted in a sending off, and yet for this received only a yellow. Now, frankly, neither play deserved a red card, but what’s worse, in this situation, is that Geiger has, with those two calls, essentially established the boundaries for this game. Which is what you do when you’re an official – you have to let it be known, up front, what the parameters are going to be for a game, what’s going to be tolerated and what isn’t, etc. The official is there to make calls, but first and foremost, the official is there to keep the game moving. And what two calls by Geiger did, in terms of setting the ground rules, was make it clear in the Panamanians’ minds that the same rules didn’t apply to both sides.

Panama plays with a chip on its shoulder. They piss people off, they’re tough and scrappy and annoy a lot of opponents. Like most of their Central American brethren, they resent the favored-nation status afforded to the two big guns in the North American part of the confederation. In short, they’re not the sort of team you want to have thinking they’re being jobbed.

Even reduced to 10 men, they outplayed El Tri, deserved to be up 1-0 after a nice goal (and were subjected to some awful behavior from Mexican fans, being pelted with beer and garbage as they celebrated). They were mere minutes away from winning the game, from advancing to the final, and hopefully helping to rid themselves of the memory of one of the most heartbreaking defeats imaginable two years ago, when Mark Geiger decided to pretty much lose his mind, and a near-riot ensues:

OK, first off, the play in question that starts this mess: Mexican player trips a Panamanian defender, he loses his balance and falls on the ball. There has to be some intent here. Without intent, you can’t call a penalty on that play. I’m not sure how any guy who is falling on his ass has any intent other than breaking his fall. If anything, there should be a foul on Mexico for the trip. The Mexican players appeal for a hand ball, because that’s what players do, but even that’s half-hearted. That isn’t a penalty.

So that’s bad enough, now think about the situation: it’s 89’ into the game, Mexico is losing. They just got bailed out, three days earlier, by a phantom call against Costa Rica which was the source of ire and scorn across the footballing world, and called into question the entire ethics and credibility of the tournament in the process, as at-the-death penalties are wont to do. And you’ve also got a team that’s already feeling slighted, having had to play the game with 10 men, and who’ve also been subjected to the opposition’s fans throwing shit at them, which the security in the stadium has done nothing about, and then you call that penalty? Are you serious? And you’re going to make that call on top of what happened the other night: the bogus penalty awarded to the big team with the big fan base which helps prop up this tournament, a bogus penalty that was regarded as a disgrace and the act of scoundrels and crooks and thieves, and in repeating that process, you’re going to make yourself look like a scoundrel and a crook and a thief in the process and damage your credibility and damage the entire credibility of the tournament even more? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Kind of a lot to think about in an instant, I know. But if Geiger hadn’t been completely clueless in his approach to managing the game, it likely wouldn’t have come to that in the first place.

We like to think that games are played in a vacuum. We like to think that, somehow, outside stimuli and situations don’t dictate the actions on the court or the field once they begin. Guess what? They do. If you’re officiating this game, you have to be damn sure that, if you’re calling that penalty, at that time in the game, under those conditions, that’s it’s absolutely, positively the right call. Quite honestly, anything short of a Panamanian player catching the ball with both hands or making a form tackle straight out of the NFL shouldn’t be a penalty in that situation.

Now, a common complaint you hear in other sports is that, with the game on the line, the officials swallow their whistles. You see it in the NBA and the NHL all the time, in fact – what was a foul early in the game isn’t with 2:00 left on the clock. This can drive you crazy sometimes (particularly watching the NHL, where it seems at times that only a two-handed Paul Bunyan impersonation with the stick is going to draw a whistle). Studies have been done in baseball which show how umpires behind the plate tend to widen and shrink the strike zone depending on situations. For example, the strike zone gets really wide in a 10-0 blowout, because common sense dictates to move the game along and get it over with. There is nothing in the rule book about this, and no umpire is taught this. It’s simply a normal reaction by human beings whose main job, as I said before, is to keep the game moving. We’ve all come to expect this. Players and fans adjust. They play within the parameters and the boundaries established by the officials.

So does that mean Mark Geiger should swallow his whistle in the 89th minute of a CONCACAF semifinal? Not necessarily. But to make a call like that shows him to be so out of touch with the situation as to verge on being obtuse. Someone who is that out of touch has no ability to control a game.

And players figure that stuff out and act accordingly. One of the ugliests moment of last summer’s World Cup – the injury to Neymar in the Brazil-Colombia match – was the result of about 80 minutes of tension built-up, in part, because the Brazilians had correctly deduced that the referee wouldn’t dare throw one of them out of the game and went about systematically chopping down James Rodriguez every time he touched the ball. It was a cynical approach, but it was working – Brazil won the match, after all – and it was all fun and games until the frustrations started to boil over, the game got far too physical and Brazil’s best player got hurt. The referee in that particular game had lost control the match, in some ways, before it had even begun – he was somewhat understandably intimidated, of course, since you’re in Brazil and you’ve got 200,000,000 Brazilians who will potentially be angry at you.

And in some ways, Geiger is cursed from the start of this particular game. For that, he can thank Walter López, the Guatemalan referee who made a mess the other night. If López makes the call that he did in favor of Costa Rica, he looks dumb. If he makes it in favor of Mexico, he looks corrupt, given all of the financial implications of Mexico making the final. So not only does López look corrupt, but he paints widely with that brush and, after that, if Geiger makes any sort of a last-gasp penalty call, it will inevitably be called into question. In Mexico’s favor? He’s corrupt. In Panama’s favor? It’s retribution for the other night. You can’t win. So don’t play! Just swallow the damn whistle. Any sort of guff you get for not blowing the whistle there was going to be minimal, at best.

And instead, now you have this:

 
Charming.

Geiger makes a terrible call and all hell breaks loose, and pretty much every bad cliché and everything ugly about the beautiful game results. You’ve got Panamanian players losing their minds and shoving the referee, which is not OK. You’ve got fans throwing more crap on the field, which is not OK either and we’ve put up with too much of it already, which makes me wonder why CONCACAF so desperately wants those kind of people going to the games. You’ve got an altercation on the pitch as the benches empty. You’ve got the players chasing the referee off the pitch at the end as he’s surrounded by security. Everyone looks bad, in the end. It’s all a farcical spectacle of a game in a scandal-ridden part of the world where no one seems to know how to run the game properly.

When the match finally resumed, Mexico’s captain Andrés Guardado converted the penalty to tie the score at 1-1, leading to one of the stranger goal calls ever on Univision – “GOOOOOOOL Mark Geiger” – and also creating one of the strangest scorelines that I’ve ever seen in football: ‘90+10 Guardado (pen)’ And in a surprising bit of candor, Guardado admitted after the match that he thought, for a moment, about deliberately missing that penalty in the 90-10th minute:

“It was painful. Yes, for a minute, yes [I considered kicking it wide] but in the end, we are professionals and you think about the times you have been on the other side and the hearts of the other team’s players aren’t moved. This is football, sometimes you are given and sometimes it is taken away. Whether it should have been a penalty or not, that is not our fault.”

Normally charasmatic Mexican coach Miguel Herrera echoed that sentiment in his subdued post-game comments:

We didn’t play at all well. The first penalty wasn’t a penalty, but it had nothing to do with me … I am worried about how the team played. We didn't create anything … No era penal … Not the team’s fault. Sometimes you have to take advantage of circumstances in your favor. That is football … FIFA referee told me that penalty against the Netherlands wasn’t a penalty. What am I going to do? … We didn’t deserve to win, we didn’t play well …

Oh yes, the second penalty, the one that in stoppage time, the one that gave Mexico a 2:1 win. That was sort of soft and there may have been some offsides on the play, but it was probably the correct call – but at that point, the game had been so compromised that it didn’t really matter whether it was the right call or not.

And anyone who suggests Guardado should’ve missed the first penalty on purpose is kidding themselves – he’s a pro and you have to play the game to win – but, at the same time, if he had chosen to do so, no one would’ve thought the worse of him for it. Mexico won the game, but didn’t feel particularly good about winning this way.

And El Tri are in an impossible position come Sunday’s final vs. the Jamaicans. Given all that’s gone on in this tournament, a win on Sunday will be tainted. Not even their own press is giving them much support after Wednesday’s debacle. But given all that’s gone on in the past week, there is sure to be more interest and better TV ratings than you’d have thought a Mexico-Jamaica final would garner, and a possible Mexico-U.S. playoff in October for the Confed Cup spot promises to be some mighty interesting viewing. What is it they say about all P.R. being good P.R.?

As for the Panamanians, their coach has said he is thinking about getting out of the sport entirely, and there’ve been rumblings that the team doesn’t want to go to Philadelphia for the 3rd place game against the U.S. They’ll show, I suspect, but I doubt their hearts will be in it.

And as for the U.S., well, the American contributions to the game of soccer have looked awfully bad here of late (not the least of which being that lame effort against Jamaica in Wednesday’s other semifinal). We like to look down our noses at all of these pesky little countries in CONCACAF and their corrupt little schemers, but the fact is that there are American soccer officials sitting in American jails implicated as key figures in all of CONCACAF’s scandals, and it was American officials – not just Geiger, but the fourth official from the Mexico-Costa Rica game the other night – who showed themselves to be woefully incompetent this past week, and a tournament on American soil has gotten completely out of hand. I doubt anyone was on the take here, and really do chalk this up to sheer incompetence, but it doesn’t matter. Perception is everything, and the perception right now is that soccer in this part of the world is a joke. We’re as much a part of this mess as all of those supposed banana republics and tropical tax havens we sneer at. The U.S. Justice Department is looking into the ways the game is being administered and developed across the globe, but obviously the ways it’s being administered and developed here at home leave a lot to be desired.

The Treachery of Penalties

Ceci n’est pas une pénalité

 
FOOTBALL is life. Fans around the world live and die alongside the clubs and the teams that they support. (Sadly, this has far been too often literally the case.) If you want to better understand the world that we live in, and you want to do so through the games that we play, there really is no other sport than soccer that really matters. Baseball and cricket? Sure, those are in the same vague realm of discussion. But soccer is king. It is endlessly fascinating, and also endlessly infuriating.

Soccer has always been a game of the masses, the poor and the working class. Indeed, when you hear complaints nowadays about the wildly popular, multi-billion entity that the English Premiere League has become, the majority of the complaints you hear center on the idea that the EPL has lost its connection to the fans. As the prestige of the league has grown since the EPL was formed in the early 1990s, the players have become even higher-priced, facilities been upgraded, the English game has been beamed on satellite TV around the globe, the pounds and the dollars and the euros flowed in, and the potential for more pounds and dollars and euros been monetized. In the process, some would argue, the game has gone about pricing out the average Joes who helped make the game what it was in the first place. These were originally clubs, first and foremost, they were representations of unique groups of people. (Never forget that Manchester United began as a sports club for railroad workers.)

A good number of these complaints which are the loudest from longstanding Chelsea faithful – they’re certainly glad to see their Chelsea Blues winning EPL crowns and Champions Leagues, of course, after the London club dabbled in mediocrity for most of its existence, but the games at Stamford Bridge are no longer catered to them, instead targeting the middle and upper classes, the ‘fair weather’ fans if you will you go to Stamford Bridge less to see than to be seen – the sorts of people who don’t, in fact, live and die with the fates and fortunes of the club. Chelsea’s fortunes changed dramatically, of course, when Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich decided to poor a large amount of his fortune into the club after purchasing it in 2003. Abramovich has spent untold millions of his own over the past decade for players – the club itself didn’t post an operating profit until a modest, £1.4 million showing in 2012 – and the result is one of the best and most popular clubs on earth. But that definition of ‘popular’ is a curious one, of course – the Chelsea F.C. brand maybe worth up to £200 million worldwide, but the general narrative thread pervasive in England is that they and another recent darling, Manchester City, owe their success entirely to deep-pocketed, Johnny-come-lately ownership, whereas the real clubs in England – Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur – have built more than a century of tradition and success through their hard work and good old fashioned English ingenuity. A narrative which was probably rubbish to begin with, and is even more so now that Man U and Liverpool have American owners while Arsenal’s fate continues to be in the hands of a Frenchman, but we are all susceptible to our own mythology. But the argument put forth frequently and repeatedly is about how, in the process of making billions and transforming middling mid-table clubs like Chelsea and Man City into global brands, they know longer identify with the supporters who have backed them for generations, and there is some merit to that. Identity is crucial in understanding football, understanding those who fervently follow it ... and understanding those who have put up with the kind of bullshit that we saw on the pitch on Sunday night in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Part of why the supposed homogenization of the EPL Football is troubling to many is that soccer is, and always has been, a game of the working class. Games should, in theory, be diversions from real life, they should be escapes and pastimes. But that’s not true and it’s never been true. It wasn’t true a decade ago, a century ago, it wasn’t true 2,000 years ago when 200,000 Romans used to go to the hippodrome and root on their favourite team in the chariot races, an event which usually involved drinking too much, gambling too much, rioting after their team lost, rioting after their team won, keeping detailed statistics about which riders were good and which horses were good, etc., etc. (Hell, for all we know, there was a Roman Natus Silvicus doing his DMMMVIII analysis.) Not much has changed, really. And as we’ve said before about soccer, the game’s origins, when traced back to its ancestors in Latin America, have always shown it to be a game with massive popular appeal – but also a game bankrolled by enormous sums of money and power. That unstated power struggle and tension between the classes is innate to the game, and always has been.

Soccer is not an escape from life at all. In fact, it’s more of a microcosm of life than any other sport. It’s part of why it’s endlessly fascinating. Soccer is not fair, and the results are often not just – much like life, in fact. Soccer is a game where getting a draw – simply breaking even and getting by – is an acceptable result. Both of these notions I just put forth run counter to the fundamental optimistic ethos of America, which is why, I suspect, the game hasn’t fully caught on here (at least not yet, anyway, but that’s a further discussion we can have at a later time). And when Guatemalan referee Walter López decided to award a nonsensical, nonexistent penalty to Mexico in the 123rd minute of its scoreless CONCACAF Gold Cup quarterfinal with Costa Rica, it tapped into another value that working class football fans can relate to both on the field and of: being screwed over by The Man.

No official in any sport has more power to influence the outcome of a match than the referee does in soccer, simply through his ability to award a penalty – the success rate of which is upwards of 80% – in a game where scoring is otherwise so damn hard. There is but one of them on the pitch and he is judge and jury, his word the rule of law – and to the rank-and-file, worker bees making up the soccer-following faithful, many of whom live in nations where judge-and-jury types declare themselves presidents for life, that authority figure is deemed to necessarily be corrupt. He is a crook! He is a cheat! The other team has him in their pocket, which is why he gifted them that penalty. He won that game for them, the blasted ref! He is as crooked and dishonest as our opponents!

Now, The Lose is fundamentally opposed to conspiracy theories. I don’t believe there are grand master plans being orchestrated behind the scenes to deny certain teams – in this case, the team from Costa Rica – advancement in certain tournaments – in this case, the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the regional championship. I don’t really want to go down that road, and so I’m going to be objective here and look at this particular play once more.

Upon further review, that call sucks. That’s not a penalty. That’s a terrible call. Given the situation – a scoreless game in extra time – and given the consequences – giving Mexico the opportunity to win on what is essentially the last kick of the match – it just might be the worst call I’ve ever seen. Why Walter López and his team of apparently blind as bats sideline officials felt such a sudden urge to exert such profound influence over this match (especially when they didn’t do it 10 minutes earlier, but we’ll get to that) is something that conspiracy theorists can only dream about.

I mean, come on here. That’s not a penalty. Look at that play again. The ball is a foot above Mexican striker Oribe Peralta’s head as he goes flying and flailing through the air. He cannot reach that ball. Whatever contact came between he and Costa Rica’s Roger Miller looks incidental at best, and the ball is as good as past him when he starts with his “I can fly” routine. You can’t call a foul on that play. You just can’t, unless there is some little known statute in the rules by which Miller impeded Peralta’s ability to spontaneously grow 12” taller. It’s not impeding progress to the ball when the ball can’t be played. That’s just dumb and stupid. Peralta only half-heartedly tries to influence the call, and watch the video again. He and his El Tri teammates are surprised and bemused by the spot kick being given.

Saying this is a bad call is an affront to other bad calls. If you’re going to be awarding a penalty in the 123rd minute of a game, and as much as handing the game to one team in the process, you’d better be 100% certain you got it right. López had no idea what was going on here. It was the 4th official who ‘spotted’ the infraction, but he’s not in any better position to see this play unfurl, either, and let’s not pass this off on some sideline guy. It’s the referee on the field’s decision, and he blew it. He flat blew the call. There is no other way to say it.

And referees do that sometimes. They make mistakes. Unfortunately, moments decide matches, since the moments when the ball does actually go in the net are so few and far between. I maintain that a pivotal moment in the transformation of the U.S. as a nation into USA FC came in South Africa in 2010 – not in the moment where they won, but in the moment where they should’ve won but got screwed over by a clueless referee, because a lot of sports fans in this country got justifiably outraged by it – although defacing the guy’s Wikipedia page was probably not cool. When have Americans ever been up in arms about soccer? And that was a classic officiating mistake, one which budding American soccer fans didn’t understand but all of them should’ve, since it involved a concept – the make-up call – which runs rampant in the American sport of basketball. And if you don’t remember the play I’m talking about off-hand, it occurred late in a 2:2 game against Slovenia and the referee, Koman Coulibaly from Mali, made sort of an iffy call which gave the Americans a free kick. Now, this sort of scenario plays out a lot in soccer. A referee makes an iffy call, realizes it’s an iffy call and then, on the ensuing free kick, immediately blows his whistle and points the other way, indicating that some sort of a foul has been committed. You don’t have to explain the foul, you just point the other way. And you can get away this is in soccer, because nothing ever happens, anyway. It’s not like the free kick you iffily awarded resulted in a goal or anything, because no one ever scores in soccer.

Except, of course, that the U.S. did score.

But the whistle had blown and the goal was disallowed. There wasn’t anything even remotely close to a foul committed by an American player. In fact, there were about three Slovenians grabbing ahold of American players. (Not that it did much good. That play looks like a jail break.) There was no foul. It was a phantom call. A make-up call. Coulibaly got outed, and you could tell that he knew it. How could you tell? Because after the game was over, Coulibaly was understandably subjected to a verbal barrage from American players, and rather than flee the scene, or just start flashing red cards about, Coulibaly just stood there and took it.

Welcome to the footballing world, America. You’ve now been jobbed at the game’s highest level. Congratulations, you’ve arrived.

And speaking of being screwed, one of the first narratives which arose from the El Tri faithful was to resurrect that no era penal bullshit from last summer, when they were knocked out of the World Cup in a 2:1 loss to the Dutch thanks to a somewhat marginal penalty being called late in the game – never mind, of course, that the Mexicans blew the lead, and never mind the fact that the official missed an even more egregious foul in the first half which should’ve given the Oranje a spot kick. And another narrative which arose was that Mexico was the better team in the game and had created the better chances, so they deserved to win. Well, if you’re supposedly the better team and supposedly create the better chances, but the score is still nil-nil, you probably don’t deserve to win since your finishing is so poor. I don’t really care who ‘deserved’ to win the game, and I don’t really care what happened in Brazil in 2014 or South Africa in 2010 or what have you. On the night of the 19th of July in the New Jersey swamplands in a game between Mexico and Costa Rica, that call by Walter López decided the game and THAT WAS A TERRIBLE CALL.

What’s all the more galling from the Costa Rican point of view is that the play involved Peralta, who shouldn’t have even been on the field. At 113’ Peralta committed this nasty, scissored, prison rules sort of challenge and should’ve seen red:

That sort of a play breaks people’s legs. It also gets you punched out by the opposition. That was a cheap and dirty play which fortunately resulted in no injuries, but Peralta only saw yellow from Walter López. And in attempting to look at this play from the most honorable and noble point of view, what I can deduce is that López only showed yellow because, in sending Mexico down to 10 men at this point, he would be unduly wielding his influence over the game. But then, of course, he turns around and awards a dubious penalty three minutes into stoppage time, giving Mexico a near certain win on the game’s last kick (I say near-certain for a reason), so that notion I suggested just went out the window. Hey, I’m trying here. I’m trying to give the referee at least a little benefit of the doubt.

And the Ticos handled this with a surprising amount of class and restraint. They said their piece to the referee and they were done with it. They opted to take the high road when, clearly, it would’ve been easy for them to fly into a collective rage. Reaction was a little stronger within the country of Costa Rica, meanwhile, with everything up to the current and former presidents weighing in on the injustice. (To be fair here, a good number of members of the Mexican media were also rather skeptical.) But there was no comment on the matter from the head of the Costa Rican FA, Eduardo Li, primarily because he’s in jail in Switzerland, awaiting extradition to the U.S. as part of the Justice Department’s wide spread probe of CONCACAF’s corruption and misdoings, some of the allegations of which center on this very tournament.

And this is where Walter López has really dug a deep hole for himself. He’s also dug a deep hole for the Mexicans, who can’t win – they did win the game, after all, yet the legitimacy of their win is called into question. It also checkers the entire tournament, because not only does this call look like an act of complete incompetence, but it also looks like the work of corruption in a region of the footballing world where corruption has clearly run amok.

For those of you who have no idea who Peter Prendergast is, he’s the Jamaican referee who made this awful call which cost the Belgians dearly against Brazil in 2002. CONCACAF has a decidedly unfavourable reputation in the footballing world, in spite of the fact that confederation, as a whole, has had far more international success than its African and Asian counterparts. CONCACAF are perceived as jokers and fools. It’s viewed as a confederation having three big countries – only two of which matter and neither of which they particulary like – a bunch of Central American countries no one can name, and a merry band of corrupt Caribbean would-be kingfish looking to use the game to line their pockets. Uncle Sepp and his FIFA cronies were quick to say the Justice Dept. probe wasn’t their problem at all, it was obviously a CONCACAF problem and that the confederation was obviously full of sleaze and graft and shysters. And sadly, they weren’t totally wrong in saying that. And yet it’s also grossly unfair – ridiculing a country’s FA, or a wider confederation, as being incompetent and corrupt also often implies that somehow they want it that way. But so long as you have Jack Warner lining his pockets with contributions to nonexistent football foundations, and Geoffrey Webb using his 10 Rolexes as collateral to post bond and get out of American jail, the notion of corruption and cronyism in North American football is hard to deny.

The CONCACAF Gold Cup is already something of a strange tournament, given that it always happens in the same country – the United States. There simply aren’t the resources to hold it in most CONCACAF countries. As cool as it would be to hold a joint Carribbean Gold Cup in Jamaica and T&T et. al, it’s not really viable. This year, they deviated from the norm in having the Canadians ‘jointly’ hosting – they played two games in Toronto, which begs the question as to why the Canadian home football grounds were available for this tourney but somehow not for the Women’s World Cup. You could hold it in Mexico, of course, but Mexico prefers the tourney being held in the U.S., since the short distance is enough to insulate them from the media and their zealous domestic fan base, while they can bask in the adoration of the enormous throngs of Mexican fans who live in this country and attend any El Tri match in America en masse. Which is cool by me. I live in a primarily Hispanic neighbourhood where Mexican expats and immigrants are my neighbours and I respect them tremendously, knowing that they are a part of this nation and have been a part of this nation for generations. They are vocal and enthusiastic supporters of El Tri and I have no problem with them showing their support for their side here in their home-away-from-home. I’ve always had a problem with the nonsense the USSF used to do pre-1990, when they would do things like schedule critical World Cup qualifiers against Mexico in the L.A. Coliseum and 60,000 Mexican fans would show up and it would be virtually an away game for the U.S., the USSF caring far more about the gate receipts than they did about the fortunes of its national team. Quite a few former American players have talked about how they felt they were betrayed by their own federation, and rightfully so. And in the case of the CONCACAF Gold Cup, it ends up being this weird sort of hybrid tourney where the Mexicans are essentially second hosts (and, this year, the third hosts), but Mexico’s fans always turn out in droves, often outnumbering American fans in the final attendance numbers for the event.

And to CONCACAF officials, those attendance numbers are all that really matter. Only 37,000 turned out in Baltimore for the Yanks’ laughable 6:0 quarterfinal win over Cuba on Saturday. For the Mexico-Costa Rica game in Jersey on Sunday, the attendance was probably double. Mexico’s presence in the semifinals is likely to guarantee a sellout for the semifinals at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, whereas a Costa Rica-Panama matchup was likely to be sparsely attended. The great complaint within CONCACAF, of course, has always been that decisions are made solely to try to maximize the number of Mexican fans in the seats. The Mexicans counter this by saying that their numbers of fans are important to the confederation, but yet all of those guys from small Caribbean countries vote in a bloc so as to negate Mexico’s greater influence over the game. In any case, the presence of the two big guys on the block in the semis, with the chance alive for them to meet in the final next weekend in Philadelphia, is in CONCACAF’s best interests all-around.

Cue the conspiracy theories.

If you’re a referee, nothing makes you look more like a lackey or a stooge than awarding dubious, late-game penalties. As I said before, soccer is a game loved by the poor and huddled masses and yet controlled by the rich and the powerful, and The Man on the field is perceived to be doing the rich and the powerful’s business. Scores of Italian soccer fans have decried and documented in dossiers for decades the number of times Juventus has been awarded curious 90th minute penalties on their way to Serie A championships – Juventus being owned by the richest industrialists in Italy, of course, who’ve been thought to be bribing referees much like they’ve been thought to be bribing corrupt Christian Democrat politicians all these years. This interesting Grantland article about the disgraced Dynamo brand – Dynamo having always a name attached to clubs run by the secret police in Eastern Europe – comes complete with an appropriate 90th minute penalty enabling Dynamo Berlin to clinch an East German title. (It’s strange that Houston chose Dynamo as a nickname, but having worked for a company owned by the owner of Houston Dynamo, I can say with great authority that yes, he really is that out of touch.) Those sorts of curious coincidences have been plaguing the game for decades. Far too many critical matches, in far too many places, have wound up being decided by referees picking strangely convenient times to influence the outcomes. It happened far too frequently for people not to suspect foul play, and a fair number of those times, those suspicions have been shown to have been with merit. Just earlier this year, in fact, the African Cup of Nations in Equatorial Guinea descended into farce, and the spark for that tire fire was a last gasp penalty awarded to the hosts for a flop in the box against Tunisia, with the Tunisians incensed and feeling cheated as a result and chasing the referee off the field. Let the chaos and the confusion begin.

And don’t kid yourself – Mexico reaching the CONCACAF Gold Cup Final is in the confederation’s best interests, whereas the Ticos were a great story in Brazil in 2014 and have a hell of a good team but are still a small country that no one has ever heard of. Had Walter López decided to lose his mind and make that terrible at 123’ against Mexico, giving the Ticos a penalty kick, it would’ve been looked at as being gross incompetence. But since it happened the way it did – given what was at stake, given what it means in terms of attendance and TV ratings, and given the backdrop of rampant corruption throughout the confederation’s administration – and Walter López’s call looks far, far worse. It looks crooked and corrupt in a region of the world where flying right and playing it straight on the football pitch is probably a good idea right now.

I’m someone who is always going to assume that incompetence until there is conclusive proof otherwise, but even this one had me wondering. My hope is that you can ultimately chalk this up simply to stupidity and no other outside influences. I don’t have any earthly idea what Walter López did or didn’t see – and contrary to the Sports Illustrated joke tweet from before, I suspect we won’t be seeing him officiating at this level again. In general, if you screw up that badly as an official, and you bring the game into disrepute in the process, you aren’t ever officiating at that level again. That’s not to say soccer officials are expected to be perfect, of course, but mess up so badly as to overly influence a game to its detriment, and that’s likely the last time you’re going to be seen on that stage. (People in Seattle, Portland, and all of American soccer will rejoice if that’s the case after this 11-on-7 nonsense from the U.S. Open Cup, some of the worst officiating ever seen on an American soccer pitch which I would give more time to if the competition wasn’t so small-time and amateurish by nature.)

In the end, this was a shitty way for Costa Rica to lose a game, maybe the shittiest way to lose imaginable – one which reminds that, for all the good you do on the football pitch, it’s easy to be undone by one particular individual who is entrusted with ensuring fair play and yet who may or may not have an agenda, may or may not have a fat wallet, and who may or may not have a clue. The soccer official has a tough and thankless job, but a good rule of thumb in the business, across all sports, is that if you’re officiating a game and we come to know your name as a result, you really kind of fucked that one up.