The Thrill is Gone

I’M NO longer interested in the NFL, the NCAA, or pretty much any other variant of American football. I have been meaning to write a post about the following subject for a while now, but first, I wanted to see for myself just how disenchanted I had become. This past weekend marked the opening salvo of the NFL season and, other than a snippet here in an evening newscast or crossing an online stream, I watched none of it.

I did flip through a few of the highlights from the implausible game on Saturday between The Good Guys and Rutgers, since bad football is high comic art and there are few purveyors of bad football who have done it better (worse?) over the years than Washington State and Rutgers. Sure enough, the game followed a predictably wobbly script: Rutgers committing a boatload of turnovers and stymying their own potentially game-winning drive by committing 30 yards of penalties on three successive plays; WSU giving up TDs on a kickoff return and punt return to the same guy in the same quarter, the latter coming with 90 seconds left to give Rutgers the lead; the Scarlet Knights then playing no defense whatsoever, allowing WSU to drive 90 yards in a minute, a drive which included Rutgers jumping offside on 4th down, affording the Cougars another opportunity, and a winning TD pass by the Cougars with :13 left on what was essentially a free play, as Rutgers had about 13 men on the field. It was all an utter shambles, and the Cougars’ march through the mess will continue this coming weekend against Wyoming, who is so bad that they’ve lost home games to North Dakota and Eastern Michigan, who hadn’t won a non-conference away game in 27 years. More comedy is likely to ensue, and I may check the boxes out of morbid curiosity from time to time, but I’m not going to watch it.

In the abstract, bad football is hilarious and in the abstract, the game itself is remarkable. It’s a chess match on grass, requiring 11 players to work as one in intricate detail. It’s the most complex game we have ever created. But there is an inherent intellectual dishonesty to it all, as you have to suspend your disbelief, viewing the players as chess pieces rather than actual human beings. There have been numerous portrayals of live action chess in cinema and literature (Harry Potter immediately coming to mind), the act of Knight taking Bishop being a violent battle to the death. It’s something of an alarming image, in fact, since we think of chess as a game that is purely about intellect. Seeing the actions of the pieces physically rendered is something of a shock to the system – and yet, we watch that very thing happen on a football field every week, as players crash into and collide with one another hundreds of times over, yet somehow, we’re immune to the violence.

But I just cannot be immune to the violence any longer, and I’m not alone. What follows is a piece written by the Good Rev. Jeremy Cahnmann, the Official Officiant of In Play Lose, speaking of his disenchantment with the game of football. I am reprinting this here with his permission:

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So I don’t want to get too preachy … but you may have noticed my profile picture has changed. The two men in my profile picture were two men who gave me a lot of enjoyment growing up.
On top is Dave Duerson, who was my favorite player on the 1985 Bears. (The greatest team ever in any sport – just an FYI.) On bottom is Junior Seau, the Hall of Fame linebacker who was just awesome.
Today, neither of those men is alive. Both men took their own lives. I saw a lot of people talking about Suicide Prevention Day, which happens on September 10th every year. I find it ironic that it often coincides with the start of football season.
I grew up loving football, I dreamed of playing it, I watched every Sunday. I thought the day after the Super Bowl should be a national holiday. I was always excited when my birthday (January 25th) fell on Super Bowl Sunday. I was pretty bummed when the Super Bowl started being in February, as I knew that meant no more Super Bowl Birthdays. In college and beyond, various football jerseys made up much of my wardrobe. Drew Bledsoe, Kurt Warner, Warrick Dunn, Brian Urlacher, etc. etc. etc. When I got my first apartment, the first thing I did was buy a big screen TV (it was all of 36” – that was a big screen then and cost $1000), and I made sure I got DirectTV so I could get the Sunday Ticket so every week I could invite the guys over to BBQ and watch football. I always ran my office football pool and Super Bowl squares and was often doing 2-3 fantasy football leagues.
I say all this because I want you to know how much I LOVED FOOTBALL and LOVED THE NFL. Many who know me, know that I no longer watch or even follow the NFL. The game disgusts me.
When Dave Duerson killed himself it made me look long and hard at the game I Loved. Was it worth it? I had heard of players having health issues (Mike Webster and others), I knew some suffered from dementia and other illnesses but I never wanted to admit that playing football was the culprit. When Dave Duerson took his own life, and shot himself so that his brain could be preserved and studied, it made me think what part did football play in his death.
After Duerson’s death, I tried watching football but it wasn’t the same. Then, the next year Junior Seau took his life and that was it, I couldn’t do it anymore. In the last 6 years at least 6 players (former players) have committed suicide and countless others have suffered head trauma, and who knows how many former players suffer with dementia and other brain related injuries due to the abuse their bodies took? The truth is, we will never know.
Football is a violent game. When you ask people to hurl their bodies at one another, it is only logical that injuries will happen. Yes, NFL players get paid handsomely, but is it worth the damages they do to their bodies? Players are bigger and stronger these days, and the game has grown increasingly violent because of that. I love sports, I love teamwork, I love the idea of a group of people working towards one goal, but I no longer love football.
America has an obsession with football. I get that, as I was once obsessed. I know most of you just want to watch the games, play in your football pools and survivor pools and set your fantasy lineups. I don’t expect many people to join me in boycotting football, but when you watch the games, think about the Dave Duersons and Junior Seaus of the world. If you have kids, think long and hard before letting them play football. At a young age, the hits won’t be as vicious, but the risk of serious injury is still there.
I won’t be watching any college games or NFL games this year. I haven't watched a game since Super Bowl XLVI. (That was the 2nd Giants/Pats game.) I promise to not preach every week about this, but I thought I would share it this week, as the NFL season has now officially kicked off.
So enjoy your games. I’ll be watching baseball and waiting for the NBA season to tip-off.

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I find myself thinking in much the same ways, and my discontent from the game has been slowly growing for much of the past seven years or so – interestingly enough, through extrapolating what it really means for a team to be ‘bad’ at the game of football. It was seven years ago that Washington State fielded one of the least competitive football teams that I have ever seen. They were the first team in NCAA history to give up more than 60 points in a game four times, and they also gave up 59 and 58, for good measure. One particularly atrocious game was a 69:0 loss at home to USC – and amazingly, the score was merciful. USC had a 41-0 lead towards the end of the first half and the ball on the WSU 10 yard line – and the Trojans took a knee and ran out the half. They then did nothing more than run the same play over and over in the second half, a routine handoff to the 2nd-string and 3rd-string tailbacks, who each racked up 100+ yards, anyway, as the Trojans scored four more touchdowns in what amounted to a glorified scrimmage. USC’s coach at the time, Pete Carroll, did this because he realized that he was up against a team who was only playing the game because they had to, since the game was on the schedule, and that WSU was doing little more than trying to avoid getting people hurt – because a large reason why WSU was so bad was that so many players had already succumbed to injuries that year. Season-ending injuries and, in the case of their starting QB, a career-ending spinal injury. Nasty injuries, all of them – back injuries, torn up knees, dislocated shoulders. Horrible stuff.

And for what? What was being gained by breaking your body for the worst football team in America? (Actually, that’s not true. The Cougars beat Washington that season, who were 0-12. The Huskies were worse. LOL.) Is that really worth it? I mean, losing gets funnier over time, of course, and anyone who endured that death march of a season in Pullman will have a lifetime of good stories to tell. And being a college athlete, in fact, does afford you the opportunity to get an education (which far more athletes take advantage of than narratives in the media would indicate), but was busting yourself up, in what was ultimately such a failed endeavour, really worth it? But, when you get right down to it, is busting yourself up for the purposes of winning championships worth it, either? I mean, the long-term effects of the injuries sustained playing football seem to be so devastating that you wonder, in this day and age, given what we’ve come to understand, why any parent would willingly let their son play this game. (Indeed, there was a report of a death recently during a high school game in Louisiana.)

And to be clear here, there are no safe sports. I’ve written at length about this before. If you play a sport at any sort of high level, you’re going to get hurt. I have a dead right ankle from playing basketball. My good buddy phonerz has had two knee surgeries from playing ultimate. My friend Laura, who’s my age and who used to be a dancer, has a bad back, bad knees, and has already had a hip replaced. Athletics mess you up, plain and simple. And yet, it’s easy to intellectualize your way out of this realization, of course. You can play basketball a thousand times with nothing happening, but then maybe there’s that one play in that one game where it goes wrong. Once is all it takes and once is all you need. What’s far more damning about football is the extent to which the NFL, and the NCAA to somewhat of a lesser extent, have gone about attempting to conceal all of the evidence suggesting the sort of negative long-term effects from playing football. Indeed, the league is going to be employing a fleet of high-priced attorneys to fight off all of the lawsuits related to the subject for decades to come.

This article published in Sports Illustrated earlier this summer about Chris Borland, a promising rookie linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers who walked away from the game after a season in the NFL, is shocking simply in his description of the extent to which he and his teammates at the University of Wisconsin went to play, and the sorts of horrid injury troubles they were facing. It’s really disturbing. And in that article, Borland echoes a sentiment predominant in A Few Seconds of Panic, the in-depth look at the NFL by Friend of the Lose Stefan Fatsis. One of the most surprising things about that book, which focuses on Fatsis’ training to become a placekicker with the Denver Broncos, is just how seemingly indifferent the players are to the game that they’re actually playing. So few of them, in fact, seem to even like what they are doing. The best quote of the book comes from WR Charlie Adams about training camp coming to an end. “Actually, the season kinda sucks, too.” To them it’s just a job after a while. I don’t think many of them actually like playing football, but they are professional athletes, who are the most competitive people on the planet. What they do like is winning. There is a big difference.

I was writing a column here the other day for an auto racing magazine, concerning the horrible accident which happened recently at Pocono International Speedway during an IndyCar race which claimed the life of driver Justin Wilson. It was a terrible tragedy, and any time something like this happens in racing there are calls to “take action” to make the sport safer. But the fact of the matter is that the sport is, truthfully, about as safe as it’s ever been, and the accident which claimed Wilson’s life – another car crashed in front of Wilson, and he was struck by the bouncing debris on the track – was something of a fluke. Now, of course, IndyCar and NASCAR and Formula One should always be looking for ways to make their sport safer, if for no other reason than the advancements they make in auto racing safety are often then passed on to a similarly dangerous activity, which is the act of actually driving a car at all. I mean think about it: you’re placing your body inside a metal cage powered by a volatile explosive and hurtling at a high rate of speed. What could possibly be wrong with that? Accidents will happen from time to time in auto racing. You simply cannot account for every variable.

Some commentators have suggested that auto racing, as a sport, threatens to lose its popularity every time a fatal accident occurs – and, worldwide, it’s one of the most popular sports of them all – but if that were really true, we’d have lost interest in it ages ago. Centuries ago, even. As I’ve mentioned before, the most popular sport in ancient Rome was chariot racing, which often drew 250,000 to the Circus Maximus on a weekend afternoon. A large part of the strategy of chariot racing was having your back marker team members attempting to force the opposing chariots to crash into the columns in the center of the track – which generally resulted in gnarly injuries, if not death to both humans and equines alike. The Romans ate that shit up, and we’ve been eating that sort of thing up for centuries. We love it when people push the envelope. We love it when they take risks and put themselves in jeopardy. We, as a species, love to watch and, even more importantly, we love to gamble on it. In this day and age, Americans wager billions of dollars on football every year, just as the wealthy Romans gathering at the Circus Maximus would wager outlandish sums on the chariots, and just as the Aztec chiefs in Central America would wager entire kingdoms on the outcome of matches in their primitive form of soccer. Now, whether we should be doing this is another question entirely. The more sordid and violent the contest, the more compulsion we seem to feel to personalize the outcome, while still depersonalizing the game and detaching from the violence as much as possible.

Humans, as a species, have always loved conflict and combat and competition – so long as it’s someone else who’s doing it and we can watch from the sidelines. The fascination with bloodsports goes also back centuries. (We think of football players as gladiators on the gridiron for a reason.) For some reason, we as a species just love watching people beat each other up. (Sugar Ray Leonard once said he couldn’t believe so many people would pay so much to watch two guys in their underwear beat the hell out of each other in a hotel parking lot.) Interest in boxing began to wane finally after about 2,000 years, but not because of being aghast at the violence. No, it began to wane because spectators got sick of all of the accompanying corruption – which always seems to go hand in hand with anything that is both extremely violent and potentially extremely profitable. But what do we have now? Instead, we have MMA, which is basically human cockfighting. That sport is absolutely frightening. Instead of getting rid of sanctioned violence in the name of sport, we’ve simply come up with one even more violent than before.

And I mention all of that historical stuff because football in America isn’t going away. It’s a deep cultural institution in much of this country. We’ve woven it into our educational institutions to the point where the Homecoming game and the tailgate are inherent aspects of the educational experience. It’s been woven into our psyche to the point where we have to make an active choice to disdain it.

What’s baffling to me about football is that there is, in fact, a lot of things you can do to actually make it a safer game. The obvious parallels can be drawn to rugby, a rough-and-tumble game of full contact and yet one which is considerably ‘safer’ even though players wear no helmets and no pads. Quite obviously, the reasoning for this is that, as a rugby player, you are perpetually behaving in a self-protective fashion. Since your head is exposed, you never make a tackle where you lead with your head, and you’re taught from the moment you start playing to never, ever do that. So much of football coaching is the preaching of sacrificing oneself for the betterment of the team, this militaristic sort of jingo which really doesn’t make much sense, if you think about it – after all, it seems like the best way to help your team on the field is to figure out how to stay on the field. Doing things which would actually prevent injuries seems the smartest course. But the entire game of football needs to be retaught for that to happen. As such, it’s a generation of players away from ever truly being ‘safer,’ if we even want it to be safer in the first place. In the end, I’m not entirely convinced that we do.

About the only reason I’ve even been as interested of late in football as I have been is that the Seattle Seahawks, whom I grew up watching fail in every way possible, have suddenly risen to the level of being a Super Bowl champion. Winning is awesome, and everyone in the Pacific Northwest has endured far too much losing over the course of their sporting lifetimes. But not even that is holding my interest any more. I guess I’ve just reached a point where I can no longer detach myself from the consequences of the actions on the field. As someone who endures the after effects 20+ years on from serious injuries which occurred while I played a sport, seeing the routine sorts of injury reports that come out of the NFL – torn ACLs, broken collar bones, broken hands, broken wrists, etc. – just sort of makes me shudder for the players’ futures. And it’s all of the other unreported injuries that are even more alarming, the various grades of concussions that go unreported, that go undiagnosed over the course of a game. You’d have to be a fool to think that so much blunt trauma wouldn’t ultimately have long term consequences. (And I haven’t even gotten into the culture surrounding football, which I find, at turns, baffling and revolting and perverted, but we can save that for another post.)

I just cannot bring myself to watch it any more. I like baseball too much. I am in love with basketball again. My beloved Canaries from Norwich City are back in the EPL. I am with my buddy Jeremy on this one. I’ve fallen out of love with football, and just cannot bring myself to be that interested any more. Oh, I’ll still pay attention, if only because it’s a source of excellent material for this blog. (The New York Giants loss to Dallas on Sunday night was about as stupid as they come.) But the interest has faded for me. The thrill is gone.

And one of the things I’m going to start doing more of here at In Play Lose is providing a proper musical soundtrack to these posts. To that end, I give you B.B. King, who is still my favorite interview of all time, and who I would love to just sit and listen to as he played for me one more time:

Kind of Blue

Because Miles

I THOUGHT that I would give you an album’s worth of Miles Davis today. Divine music, Miles. It was in the book Lamb by Christopher Moore where he talks of how Miles Davis was actually the angel Gabriel come down from the heavens in disguise. I’ve read almost all of Christopher Moore’s books, simply because I used to do a visualization technique back in my days of foolishly pursuing book contracts and the like where I would go to a bookstore and find the exact spot in the store where my novel(s) would one day be housed – which was always in the fiction section on a shelf next to Christopher Moore, who had titles like Bloodsucking Fiends and The Stupidest Angel and Island of the Sequined Love Nun, and, well, how can you not buy a book with a title like that? (Hint: you should, but read The Stupidest Angel last.) None of those visualization techniques and efforts to write and then sell the Great and Hyperbolical American Novel really amounted to much, in the end, other than me buying a few fun Christopher Moore novels to read. Writing novels – hell, the whole act of writing in general – felt like an exercise in self-torture and strenuous exercise. I think I still have scars in my forehead from banging my head against that wall. I’m happy to report that I’ve retired from the pursuit of such lofty literary goals, and feel none the worse for it. (And everything related to this nonsense makes me all the gladder to be far removed.) I may one day write a memoir about that fruitless endeavour (working title: Tools & Whores), but in the meantime, feel free to click one of those book cover gadgets on the side of this page if you wish to purchase a novel or a book of poems. Or do it some other time, if you wish. I’m not going anywhere. I can wait.

I offer you an album of Miles because it is beautiful music, arguably some of the most beautiful of music ever made. (But don’t you go all jazz snob aficionado on me and start nitpicking with me over which of Miles Davis’ albums are the best. You’re probably wrong, and I’m not in the mood to argue.) And on the 11th of September every year, I make it a point to sit back and savour some of the small and simple things in life which I find innately, inherently beautiful. It doesn’t have to be anything extravagant (although that 2002 Cyrus Creek Cabernet Sauvignon in the wine storage is suddenly looking mighty tempting). It may just be something as simple as taking a long walk on a warm late summer day here in San Francisco and listening to an assortment of other musics – the birds, the passing cars – while enjoying a particularly good cup of coffee.

Aah, coffee. Last night, I went back and watched again the film Wings of Desire, one of the most poetic and soulful movies I have ever known, and in the pivotal scene, when the angel takes the leap and chooses to fall to Earth, what’s the first thing he wants? Coffee, of course.

“I can’t see you but I know you’re here. I feel it. You’ve been hanging around since I got here. I wish I could see your face, just look into your eyes and tell you how good it feels to be here, to touch something. See, that’s cold. That feels good … to smoke, have coffee, and if you do it together, it’s fantastic. Or here … to draw, you know you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line and together it’s a good line. But when your hands are cold, you rub them together. See, that feels good. There are so many good things.”
– Peter Falk, Wings of Desire

It’s a truly remarkable scene, the falling of the angel from the heavens to earth, dropped into the grey and the drab slab, walking alongside the graffiti-covered walls of West Berlin, the hemmed-in city an ugly remnant of humanity’s ugliest conflicts, and yet to this newcomer, there is nothing but beauty everywhere. Because it is everywhere, and often it’s hidden in plain sight, but you can see it if only you take a moment to look.

Now, as you may have guessed by now, this isn’t exactly a typical entry to this blog. I mean, I’ve been on a roll here of late at In Play Lose when I’ve had the time to actually write. This pillaging of the Mariners came one day before they fired their GM, and I pretty much nailed The Nats dwindling to oblivion. And it’s bad football season, of course. Time to muse on why W.S.U. is so bad, marvel at how it’s possible that Kansas could be worse, and probably write that long post about how I really don’t care much about American football any more. But all of that can wait. It can wait for another day. Players and coaches and teams play badly on a daily basis – and in the case of the other football, it’s being played badly on a daily basis across the globe – but I necessarily get rather contemplative every year when this particular date on the calendar turns up.

But not for the reasons you might think.

Oh, I can certainly contemplate and pontificate on the events of this date 14 years ago, to be sure. How can I not? It’s the single-defining moment of our generation. I know someone who died that day. People from my city died that day in a field in Western Pennsylvania. We all lost something on that day and in the days that followed – as individuals, as a society, and as a human race. But to be perfectly honest, I have no real interest in rehashing that time and again, simply because doing so renders the perpetrators of what took place that day as being relevant to my life. They are not relevant to my life, nor will I permit them to be relevant to my life. They are not worthy of being spoken about. I will not give them that belated and posthumous joy.

Nor will I permit them to define the meaning of this date upon the calendar. I take back the 11th of September. I take back the symbols and I make my own meaning. I took it back years ago, in fact. There are other things worth celebrating upon this day. (Including the birthday of The Official Scrabble Statistician of In Play Lose.) In fact, the 11th of September is one of the most precious days on the calendar for me, surpassed perhaps only by the 18th of October. (Aah, shit, I need to think up something cool for the anniversary … hmm … well, fortunately she won’t read this blog and know that I’m up to something …) But when I think about the 11th of September, I don’t think about 2001. No, I think about 2006, because the date of September 11, 2006, was the day that The Lose decided he was going to start winning.

Now, for some of you who know me personally, and have known me for a while, this next bit is old news. You can skip over this part. But I’ve met quite a few new people since then, of course, the great majority of whom I’m grateful for knowing, and this blog has now been read in over 80 countries – gasp! – which means that I don’t know a lot of you out there who are reading this post. Thanks for tuning in, I hope you enjoy it, and now seems like the appropriate time to give you a chance to know me a little better.

I’m going to repost something now from a previous blog I used to keep. It’s a post which was written on this date back in 2007. I explained it better then than I have ever done since, and I feel like all of you should know this about me. I ain’t got nothin’ to hide from nor be ashamed of. Apologies in advance for the sloppy grammar that follows. I was writing in a slightly different persona and character back then:

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it’s odd that a date which has become synonymous in this country with death, destruction, anger and sadness has now, for me, come to be a date synonymous with life and new beginnings. but it’s best that way – i believe in taking back your symbols.
sep. 11 has become, in essence, my second birthday. you can call it the release date of xp version 2.0.
this is a very personal post, but i feel compelled to write it and finally feel as if i can talk freely about this. i’ve hinted at it before, but never gone into detail. those of you who know all of this about me, and who have kept it to yourselves, i thank you for that, and hereby absolve you of that burden. you don’t have to cover for me anymore.
so, on Sep. 11, 2006, i started over. literally. started everything over. i took a month off from work and entered a monthlong Partial Hospitalization Program at UCSF's Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. technically, it’s an outpatient program – i could leave every day at 4:00 p.m. – but if you didn’t show up at 9:00 the next morning they’d send the police out to find you and lock you up on the 5th floor of S.F. General. serious shit. but hell, it’s not like i had anywhere else worth going to at that point, anyway.
so, why did this happen? well, during the summer i had what was essentially a nervous breakdown. i wasn't hospitalized, but i should have been. i was like a zombie. i was pretty much dead to the world. this breakdown was, oh, about 37 years in the making. i’ve suffered from severe clinical depression since i was a child. entire years of my life are just gone from my memory, lost in a fog and haze. day after day where it literally hurt to be alive and i wished that i was someone else.
and so, while most of my friends were off scrabbling at the nationals in Phoenix, i was spending several days going through a battery of psychological evaluations. it was eye-opening, to say the least, to hear the doc say to me, “well, Chris, most people who are like you either commit suicide or overdose before they reach 30. you’re 37. congratulations, you beat the odds.”
i’d never really gotten any sort of treatment for mental illness for a couple of reasons. first off, when i manage to put all the pieces together, i can do some incredible things – write 500-page novels in three weeks, design 10 prints in a day. a creative machine that nearly overflows with ideas and energy. i never wanted to mess up that artistic side of me, never wanted to mess with how i see the world.
but the main reason i never did anything about it was that i never wanted to admit that i was mentally ill. there is a terrible stigma to that, and the reality is that the vast majority of the people in the world who don’t suffer from it will NEVER understand the people that do. after all, i’m healthy and have a job and have relationships and all of that jazz. what could be wrong? just suck it up, everything will be OK.
well, it wasn’t OK, and it’s never been OK. it just doesn’t work that way. not for me. trust me, i wouldn’t willingly be this way.
so i agreed to go to the UCSF psych ward for a month, at enormous expense (none of it was covered by my insurance, so i’ll be paying for it until about 2010). Langley Porter is one of the best institutions of its kind in the world, and they have a program designed specifically for people similar to myself: functioning depressives. i got there the first day and surveyed my fellow group members: a nurse, a biologist, a 3rd grade teacher, a Ph.D. student, an executive chef, an event planner, a foreign correspondent. the sorts of people you read about in the papers, the ones who have careers and degrees and families and then turn up dead, having killed themselves, leaving everyone at a loss as to why it could have possibly happened.
Losers. all of us.
probably the hardest thing i’ve ever done was to walk through the door. and, for the first three days, we were all collectively miserable. the social worker asked why the energy level was so low and V., the event planner, said, “because we’re all fucking losers. we suck at life.” and D., the biologist, said, “we’re in a psych ward. life can’t get any worse.”
and then the light came on for me. yes, life COULD get worse. we could all be dead. (i was about the only one in the group who hadn’t attempted suicide.) we could all carry on in this pseudo-catatonic state for years and years and years to come. we could all be jonesing for a fix in an alley. we could go on ruining our lives and ruining other peoples’ lives in the process. yeah, life has been terrible, but we’re here, in this place, because we all need help and we want our lives to be better. THIS is actually the first step in the right direction.
and, really, that was what the program was all about: taking the first steps. teaching people who have suffered so badly, for so long, how to actually live life again, and how to cope with their illnesses. and living with those illnesses meant owning them.
so i owned it. OK, i’m nuts. i’m a lunatic. fine. fuck it.
the group was desperately in need of someone to take the lead, and so i did. i was sick of suffering, and it was time to put an end to it. so, on the fourth day, i decided to lighten the mood. i started telling jokes. i started ribbing people, playing with them, making them laugh and smile. and it continued on for the rest of the month. i would treat people to coffee at the Starbucks across the street. i would take A., the Ph.D. student with the eating disorder, to Safeway to help her conquer her fear of food. i would call people on the weekends and encourage them over the phone. i would clown and goof off, keep the energy level high in the room, stay enthused.
the verve was contagious. i made the commitment to try and get better, and made the others come along for the ride. and it was a hell of a ride: there were days when we would all laugh so hard that we cried, and then feel bad about laughing, and then laugh some more about that.
being crazy doesn’t have to suck.
honestly, going to that program at UCSF was probably the smartest thing i’ve ever done in my life. xp the malcontent, xp the bitter divorcé, xp the jilted lover, xp the walking attitude problem who has been fired on 5 occasions, had over 30 jobs, moved 15 times, and always had a black cloud hovering over his head, was thanked on the last day by his fellow loons for being such a positive influence and making such a big difference in their lives. i don’t think that’s ever been said of me before. i love all of those people like they are my brothers and sisters, and i’m going to call a few of them today and see how they are doing.
as i said, i’ll be paying for the program for years, but i also make anonymous donations from time to time to the general fund. whatever i can give. lack of funds shouldn’t prevent people from getting help and getting better. and, really, there is no reason to suffer. anyone who is suffering should get help, and not be afraid to do so. it’s worth it. trust me. it’s so, so worth it.
one year later and i’ve certainly had some bad times. i always will. there is no cure for depression. you have to learn how to cope. but it’s better. so much better.
 one of the things i began to do while i was at UCSF was the act of setting goals for myself, committing to the process of working to those goals, and then documenting and appreciating the progress. small stuff, nothing huge or overwhelming. breaking things down into simple steps. it necessitates a Zen, somewhat meditative approach to things that suits me quite well: living in the moment. being mindful and present and engaged. and while i still fly off the handle from time to time, in general i’m considerably calmer. at peace. i no longer feeling like i’m fighting all the time.
the best part of it all was connecting and reconnecting with my family and my friends, all of whom i had kept at a deliberate distance. once i accepted the fact that i needed help, i was amazed to discover that i wasn’t alone, after all. the people in the world whom i love and who love me are, in fact, like objects in the rearview mirror – a lot closer to me than they appear. their love and support through all of this has been immense and immeasurable.
i’m reminded of the story of my musical idol, Miles Davis (who happens to share my birthday), who went home to St. Louis and locked himself in his own bedroom and quit the heroin for good. when he was done, the only thing Miles wanted to do was write song after song, and try to catch up after wasting so damn much time. i can’t get back all of the time that was lost and the opportunities in life that were wasted, but that’s OK. i’ve got lots to do and lots of time to make up. i’ll get there. and, in a lot of ways, i’m feeling younger now than i have in years. and that feels better than i could ever describe.

— — —

Now would be a good time to listen to some of that Kind of Blue up there at the top of the entry. I’m certainly going to, because I’m certainly feeling kind of blue after recalling all of that, and I need to figure out where the hell I’m going with all of this.

[Listens to All Blues …]

That’s much better now. OK, so, where were we? So, that UCSF experience took place nine years ago. Nine years have passed. Ho-ly shite. Back in 2006, I hatched a fool-proof, 3-step plan for combating my own mental illness:

1] Own it. OK, I’m nuts. So be it. Next?
2] Knowledge is power. Learn about it. Learn everything that I can about it.
3] Kick its ass.

Well, OK, so #1 was easy. But #3 would be a whole lot easier to accomplish if I could just get past #2. I’ve spent nine years working on #2 and still haven’t come to terms with it. Learning about it means figuring out the ways in which it’s affected me in the past, how it affects me in the present, and how it might affect me in the future. And it’s not just as simple as saying, “oh, well, yeah, I was crazy back then, which is why I acted like such a dumbass.” Uh-uh. Not good enough. That’s too easy. That’s smelling the smoke and seeing the embers and saying, “well, obviously, the house burned down,” but not explaining why and how it caught fire in the first place.

And let me tell you something. #2 sucks.

But frankly, all of it sucks. Let me just get that out of the way because I’m reminded of some conversation I got into online surrounding assisted suicides and one person who was clearly an overly devout simpleton and who was a … hmm, what’s the right word … fuckwit? Yeah, that works … and who was a fuckwit kept vamping on how morally wrong it was that, in Belgium, there had been cases where people had gone the assisted suicide route not because of having terminal illness but because ‘all’ they had were mental illnesses – apparently having zero understanding of the sort of physical toll that mental illness takes upon you over time. It wears you out.

In my case, I’ve spent my whole life living with this feeling of impending doom, this inner sense that the walls or the ceiling or the roof are going to collapse in upon me, I feel that pressure constantly building and my response is to tense myself up. Well, when you spend 46 years feeling that way, your body twists up in knots. My spine is like a corkscrew. I have migraines. I cannot really drive a car, nor barely sit in an airline seat, because it hurts my back. I have pinched nerves in my neck, in my shoulders. And guess what? Those sorts of pains are, at this point, probably never going to go away. This is how I get to live from hereon. Isn’t that swell?

I also have several addictions I cannot get rid of – nicotine, caffeine – and probably drink more than I should simply because I’ve spent the entirety of my life trying to cope. This is why, when the psych said, “you should’ve been dead by 30,” she meant it. Clinical depressives kill themselves, they overdose, they have more accidents because they don’t take care of themselves. When you go through the entirety of your life this way, feeling like shit all the time, feeling like all that you can do is cope and get by, eventually you just stop caring. Or, you do what I did and simply resign yourself to it. Well, this is how life is supposed to be. It’s supposed to fucking suck. Oh well. Tough shit.

And see, that sense of resignation settles in. You’ve gone past a threshold of misery. Things don’t work out – you don’t get the job, or the grad school offer, or whatnot – and it’s not because of the fact that, well, sometimes that happens to people, but it’s obviously because you’re shit and you shouldn’t expect anything to work out. Just shut up and get on with it. Move it along. You make bad choices, bad decisions. You cannot ever succeed because success isn’t possible, unless you’re just stupid dumb lucky. Whatever good interpersonal relationships you might have start to flounder, because those people wonder just what in the hell they are supposed to do with you, or you can just settle for some bad ones, usually one-sided affairs where your boss in your bad job or your spouse in your bad marriage simply point out how shitty you are and bad at everything you are. But this is how life goes, see? You have a brain that doesn’t work, you’re not normal and you cannot function like the others around you. This is obviously the way it was meant to be, right?

And if you happen to be me, someone who has lived their whole life in a state of mental illness and come to accept it as it is, you might even do something like marry a woman who is the single-most evil and cruel person who will ever meet and then, some five years after you divorce them, you’re casually walking down a street in San Francisco and you notice her mother approaching you (the second-most evil and cruel person who you have ever met, for that matter), and it occurs to you that you should duck into the Egyptian convenience store in a hurry, because if she sees you, and she happens to tell her daughter about how she ran into you on the streets in San Francisco, then that person will now know where you live, and there is a nonzero chance they will turn up at your doorstep and shoot you dead, but first they’ll make a point of shooting your girlfriend dead, so maybe you should rush home and tell Kate that her life is in danger. Holy … motherfucking … shit …

I’ve had that nightmare now for 17 years, even though we divorced in 1998 and she died in an auto accident in Farmington, New Mexico, in 2003. And you know, Tam, I have made peace with many, many people, I have forgiven and been forgiven, but you are an exception. I hope you rot in the hell you made for yourself. In the end, I did nothing, ever, to deserve that.

And one of the things you do, when you learn about your own mental illness, is start to figure out the difference between what’s your fault and what isn’t, and come to be honest about it. Whatever line you’ve heard about how it’s always easier to blame others for your misfortune is a bunch of bullshit. When it comes right down to it, it’s actually far more easy to blame yourself.

And quite honestly, I don’t know why I just wrote all of that, since I’ve never spoken of it before. Damn, I really do feel like I have nothing to hide. Oh well. Fuck it. It is out there now and I don’t give a goddamn.

And everything that I just mentioned there, that’s all part of learning about it. How did I contribute to my own demise? It’s sort of difficult for me to parse all of that since, in general, I have very sporadic memories of large swaths of my life. I’ve spent most of the past year working with a therapist essentially attempting to rebuild my memory of pretty much everything that occurred prior to 1998. Because honestly, I don’t really know any more. I can no longer tell the difference between what is real, what was imagined. But it doesn’t do me much good going forward if I don’t actually know how I got here.

One of the tenets of DBT (the therapy technique they employed at UCSF) is the concept of ‘radical acceptance,’ in which you come to accept that which has happened in the past without making judgments. (I may be the only person you know who actually says, “it is what it is,” without irony or contempt.) It’s been shown to be effective with people who’ve suffered all sorts of traumas. (Hmm, I think what I was just writing about qualifies.) And it sounds simple, right? Pfft. WRONG! It’s actually about the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life. And it’s really damn hard if you basically have no idea what you were doing in the first place. The whole point of this has been to figure out how being mentally ill was affecting me all along. I’m basically my own personal case study. Yeech.

And in the past, when I have attempted to work through my own mental illness, attempting to sort it out, the result has been near disastrous. It has left me feeling even worse. I have attempted to do so in the context of writing fiction, in fact – most of the 10 years I spent between novels was spent trying to somehow explicate the nature of mental illness in the context of a novel. I concluded, finally, that no matter how good the finished product would have been – and I am serious when I say that it would have likely been the greatest work I could possibly produce – it was not worth killing myself over. So I set that aside and wrote a comedy instead. I ain’t ever writing any serious fiction ever. I’ve already experienced some of the worst people on the earth, including myself. I don’t need to go about making those sorts of characters up.

But reassembling the past was important to me. I wanted to do it and now, with the help of my interminably patient therapist, I’ve pieced together something of a past, even though it’s taken me all year and a few thousand pages worth of writings on the side. And it’s easy, at this point, to find myself laden with regret. Regret is a killer. Don’t succumb to regret.

When you do something like this, you also lose all of your good and convenient excuses. You cannot blame doing stupid stuff on being mentally ill, since you did plenty of not stupid stuff as well. It’s been a humbling exercise, one which in the past would have left me feeling even worse than when I started. But it’s different this time. I always make it a point to walk home from these intensive sessions, putting in the headphones and finding some beautiful music, ignoring my angry right ankle and just opening my eyes wide, permitting myself to take in the world around me. The sights, the taste of a cup of coffee, the beautiful aroma of the BBQ joint I walk past (a scene which is absolutely unfair), the feeling of the breezes. Small things, really. Simple pleasures, all of them meaningful in their moment.

And learning to live with your mental illness, ultimately, comes down to learning to live without it. Wait? What? What does that mean? Didn’t I say before that there’s no cure? Well, I did. But I also said #3 was kicking its ass. And kicking the ass of something that will never go away is a good thing, because it just means you can keep kicking its ass all the time and gaining satisfaction from doing do.

But what it also means is that everything you have known about being alive has to change, and you must be willing to make that change – which is actually kind of scary. It’s what you know! And yes, learning to live without it when you’re 46 years is inevitably going to make you wish that you had learned to live without it when you were 20 or 25. You can’t get the time back, you can’t change it and you can’t undo what you’ve done. But hey, if you get to 46 and you’ve learned to live with it, and come to see yourself as being both a by-product of your own mistakes and a survivor, then, hey, it’s not so bad being in the present.

And I’ve spent the last nine years doing what I can to kick mental illness’ ass. My fucking weird stupid brain which revs at 20,000 rpms all the time is actually useful for that. Since I don’t take any medications – they don’t work, my tolerance is too high – I’ve basically had to train myself to practice a constant mindfulness routine, one in which I’m constantly aware of how I’m feeling and adjusting to it. It’s sort of meditation on steroids. I’ve gotten to the point where I can do it constantly, all day every day, while going about my work routines at the same time. Being a master multitasker comes in handy. I’ve practiced this routine for nine years now – just sort of checking up on myself, thinking about how I’m feeling, noticing the environment around me and how I respond, etc. It’s become second-nature to me. It comes as easy as breathing.

But in order to that, and commit to it, I’ve also had to mellow out. I’ve had to teach myself how to relax. I’ve had to find appropriate outlets for stress – such as this blog of mine, in fact, because the most effective stress relief I know is laughter. Being blessed with a good sense of humour and a heightened sense of absurdity comes in handy. I laugh easily. I let it all go.

But I also don’t take any bullshit. I have no tolerance for bullshit. I’m too old for that crap and I haven’t got the time for it, so don’t piss me off – although, in truth, that is pretty hard to do these days. Harder than ever before.

You see, I’m winning a lot these days. Maybe not as much at scrabble as I would like, but that’s mostly due to the fact that I’m a terrible scrabble player. I like my profession and I like what I do. Gone are days where I felt the need to kill large swaths of brain cells with beer to cope with working for operations which I felt to be morally, professionally, and ethically bankrupt. (Any job I get is inherently going to be someplace dysfunctional, however, simply because dysfunctional people are far more interesting.) I write books and tell stories and I’m going to write more of them, so keep on buying them. Being a complete and utter failure at most everything I did for most of my life has made me an expert on losing, which goes well with this blog, so that’s not as terrible as it sounds. I have a mathematical brain and the eye and the voice of a poet. In the past, that made me weird. Now, that makes me versatile, multifaceted. I can pretty much do anything that I wish to do. I live in San Francisco, which is terrific. (Although there’s been far too much success here of late. But the A’s are in last and the 49ers start up this weekend, so I’ll have some more material to work with.)

Most importantly, I have a great wife who loves me and brings me peace of mind, I have terrific people surrounding me who mean the world to me, I’m alive when by all rights I probably shouldn’t be and every moment of it, no matter how small, is time well spent. For that, I am and always be grateful.

And I’m going to listen to that record again now, Kind of Blue, even though I’ve been listening to it while writing this blog, and even though it’s now 3:50 a.m. and I ought to sleep, because I’m all about being present and being in the moment, and that record contains several of the greatest moments of them all. What’s most fascinating about that record is just how spacious it is, how sparse. Miles was, at times, making music by not making music at all. It’s those gaps and open spaces which, paradoxically, are often the most beautiful tones.

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.