From Each According To His $15M Salary, To Each According To ... Good Lord, We Really Are Going To Blow This!

What the f***?

Those three words best describe the collective feeling of Braves fans on the morning of September 28, 2011? The Braves are one loss from completing one of the great collapses in baseball history. After all of their terrible play over the course of the month, they woke up on Saturday morning with a three-game lead and five games to play. Since that time, they have lost four in a row, scoring a whopping four runs in the process. Last night, with the season very much hanging in the balance, Fredi Gonzalez pulled a Bobby Cox in October special, sticking with the underperforming veteran - Derek Lowe - until it was far too late. Yes, the Braves are in a difficult spot because of the injuries to Jair Jurrjens and Tommy Hanson,* but the rookies who have replaced them have been perfectly fine. Of the Braves' five starting pitchers this month, Randall Delgado and Mike Minor have the lowest ERAs of the five.  How much better would Jurrjens and Hanson have done than a 3.11 ERA in 52 innings?  Maybe they would have pitched a smidge deeper into games, but that's it.  Meanwhile, Derek Lowe, a guy who is taking up a smidge over one-sixth of the team's payroll, has an 8.75 ERA and a 1.99 WHIP in five starts.  He has been the losing pitcher in all five.  If by some simple twist of fate the Braves do make the playoffs** and Lowe pitches in any capacity other than long relief, then Frank Wren ought to relieve him of command on the spot.

* - Was anyone else completely non-plussed when Hanson and Jurrjens failed to return from the All-Star Break with their arms intact?  That's how baseball is now.  You have a good young pitcher and you immediately start counting the days until some arm injury that initially sounds innocuous, then the team can't figure out what's wrong, and then he's finally seeing Dr. Andrews.  Baseball manages to combine a turtle's pace with high-impact injuries.  Bravo, Abner Doubleday!

** - I'd put the odds at this stage at around 30%. They should win tonight with a favorable pitching match-up, but their odds in a one-game playoff will not be good.  The playoff would just be insufferable.  The Cardinals will be up 6-2 in the seventh and then Tony LaRussa will prolong our misery with a bevy of "look at me!" switches.  And G-d only knows what happens when he gets into the One-Game Playoff Supplement to his Compendium of Unwritten Baseball Rules.  Fredi could redeem a season's worth of frustration by decking LaRussa in a stupid, futile gesture at the end of a dispiriting collapse.  That would make the whole thing worthwhile.

And then, let's discuss the offense.  It has been a sore spot all year, with just about every offensive regular underperforming his PECOTA (or whatever Baseball Prospectus is calling it these days) projection, but September has been a total freefall.  The top of the order - Michael Bourn and Martin Prado - both have sub-.300 OBPs this month and have walked a grand total of nine times.  Brian McCann is in free-fall, having slugged .313 in September.  The team collectively has a .301 OBP in the month.  By way of comparison, the Giants - a team that is having a historically bad offensive season - have a .303 OBP for the year.  Parrish raus!

The glass half-full thought for a morning that desperately needs it is that I wouldn't trade places with a Cardinals fan for a second.  Yes, the Cards look likely to pull off a remarkable comeback.  All that gets them is a likely defeat at the hands of the Phillies.  Their franchise player is a free agent, which means that they are either going to lose him or they are going to have to sign him to a payroll-crippling contract.*  They don't have a single good, young position player now that their cantankerous manager chased off Colby Rasmus because his stirrups weren't perpendicular to his big toe or whatever else it is that LaRussa views as necessary to baseball success.  They rely on Dave Duncan to stitch together a pitching staff every year.  Their farm system is blah.  In contrast, the Braves have young keepers at first (Freeman), third (Prado), catcher (McCann), and right (Heyward), assuming that Parrish has not done permanent damage to some or all of them.  We finally have a lead-off hitter.  The Braves have five quality young starters and three quality young relievers, assuming that Fredi hasn't destroyed the relievers with overuse this year.  Do you detect a theme here?  The Braves' future is very bright if the on-field coaches don't screw it up.  Maybe the real silver lining here is that a collapse like this requires at least one fall guy in the dugout.

* - If you think that Derek Lowe making $15M next year is bad, think about paying twice that amount for Albert Pujols' age-39 season.

How to Lose a Fan Base in Three Easy Steps

1. Build your team to contend in the East, then get swept in consecutive years in the second round of the playoffs, the latter sweep by record margins.

2. After having received definitive proof that your team is not in the top tier in the conference, sign a good player to superstar money, thus ensuring that you will keep trotting out the same team that was just humiliated in the playoffs.  For good measure, fire your coach and appoint his nice guy lieutenant, on whom the team will quit within a matter of months.

3. To ensure that your fans have the message that ownership has fully committed to a fatally flawed core, lose 15 of your first 36 home games in the following season.  Make sure to include blowout losses in all of the marquee games to guarantee that your fans get the message.  You know, losses like 114-81 to the Bulls, 106-85 to the Heat, and 101-87 to the Lakers.  Throw in a 100-59 loss to the Hornets just to remind your fans that you had the chance to draft Chris Paul and didn’t take it.

I started this blog in no small part because I was going to a fair number of Hawks games and I wanted to write about them.  In other words, I’m part of the Hawks’ target audience, so if they are losing me, they have major issues.  I’ve been wondering whether I’m unique in my place in life (busy at the office, wife and two small kids, strange attachment to a European soccer team that provides great emotional fulfillment), so I’ve been asking various friends who like basketball if they have the same feelings about the team.  To a man, everyone has echoed the same conclusion: the combination of the repudiating loss to the Magic, the re-signing of Joe Johnson, the hiring of Larry Drew, and the tepid performance this year (especially at home) has killed our interest in the team.  I’d like to be writing more about the Hawks to be a little truer to the title of this blog, which sits on top of the page taunting me as I write thousands of words about Barca, Michigan, and other sports topics that are not strictly Atlanta-themed.  I just can’t work up the interest.

I was reminded of the Hawks when I read Christopher Clark’s great piece at SB Nation defending Lakers fans against the taunt that they are bandwagon jumpers of the worst variety:

The Lakers have the most fair weather fans in all of sports.  Why?  Because Los Angeles is one of the entertainment capitals of the world.  If the Lakers suck, fans have a myriad of other fine options to more suitably distract themselves with.  As such, when the Lakers struggle, support for the team dwindles dramatically.  That couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the team has missed the playoffs only five times in the 62 year history of the franchise, could it?

The Lakers have reached the NBA finals a staggering 31 times, averaging a Finals trip every two years.  They've won roughly 25 percent of the league's championships.  There are a whole bunch of reasons why, and a fair number of inherent advantages that allow it to be so, but a Laker fanbase which has made it clear that winning is important has to be part of the equation.  Jerry Buss is keenly aware of the price he will pay if the Lakers ever have a prolonged period of poor play, and it drives him to ensure the team reloads quickly.

So, the next time you accuse someone of being a fair weather fan, take a second to think about exactly what that means.  The Los Angeles Lakers might be the most fair weather fanbase on the planet, and I for one am proud to be one of them.  I don't suffer bad food, bad dish soap, or bad movies, so why in the hell would I suffer bad basketball?

Atlanta isn’t on LA’s level in terms of entertainment options, but like LA, it a major city with good weather and a host of options for one’s entertainment dollar.  Just like LA, fans in this city will not pay for a bad product.  Sadly, this incentive for ownership to put a quality product on the court has not led the Hawks to anything close to the Lakers’ history of success.  Still, Clark’s central point applies to the Hawks just as much as it applies to the Lakers.  Fans shouldn’t reward a team that has had a 12-month period like this Hawks franchise has had.

Who’s in the Mood for an Exercise in Generalization?

My operative theory on why the Big Ten underperforms despite outpacing every major conference other than the SEC in revenue generation is that the conference’s members do not spend their lucre on hiring brand name coaches. Rather, because of the Midwestern cultural bias towards blandness, they hire guys like Tim Brewster and Danny Hope instead of Bobby Petrino and Steve Spurrier because G-d forbid we pay for clothes and a car that make us look … flashy!

Michigan’s hire of Brady Hoke might have been the result of simple desperation. Dave Brandon assumed that he had Jim Harbaugh in the bag and when Harbaugh had second thoughts after NFL teams started chasing him, Brandon was left without a Plan B. However, the Hoke hire might also have been a classic example of what I’m talking about. With the money that Michigan potentially has to spend on a head coach, Brandon could have gone from candidate to candidate with the pitch “how would you like $4 million per year to coach a famous program in a famous stadium?” Instead, he picked the desperate girl whom he knew would go home with him the minute he raised the possibility. (Who knew that Dave Brandon and Cristiano Ronaldo have something in common?) To speculate for a moment, Brandon’s Midwestern sensibilities made him more likely to pick an unassuming guy without, you know, a big ego caused by numerous on-field successes.

With Hoke onboard and the rational members of the Michigan fan base thoroughly unimpressed, the PR machine has to go into full swing. What better way to sell the guy to your fan base than by portraying the new coach as a simple everyman? Short of finding a picture of Hoke driving into the parking lot of a Meijer in a Dodge Stratus, Michael Spath hits all of the notes with a frankly ludicrous piece. Spath’s thesis is that “almost everyone [in Michigan’s athletic department] is already impressed.” (Thank heavens that the athletic department won’t be acting to undermine the head coach by cooperating with the Detroit Free Press on a chilling expose that leads to the conclusion that Michigan was misclassifying ten minutes of stretching at the start of each practice! I guess that’s progress.) Spath’s evidence? I hope you’re sitting down for this: Hoke didn’t play Score-O at a Michigan hockey game. I shit you not, the following two paragraphs made it into a major online publication:

Three years earlier, Rich Rodriguez donned a Maize and Blue hockey jersey and took a stab at Score-O - the second-period intermission game in which three contestants attempt to slide a shot from the blue-line through a tiny opening into the net. The student section roared with delight. That was Rodriguez's way and that didn't make it wrong but his occupation of the spotlight did offend some folks.

Flash-forward (or rewind) to Friday night. Hoke stepped onto the ice from the north entrance wearing jeans and an untucked collared blue shirt. He looked uncomfortable as the patrons rose to their feet just as he appeared a bit out of sorts at a men's basketball game a few weeks ago. Hoke probably would have retreated quickly, disappearing out of sight, but the band broke into a rendition of The Victors and Hoke was soon pumping his fists in unison with the crowd.

If there are actually a non-trivial number of Michigan fans who were offended that Rich Rodriguez played Score-O between periods at a hockey game, then the program has bigger problems than I thought. Heaven forbid that the highest-paid employee at the University of Michigan, the man up front for the winningest program in college football history actually acknowledges that he is in the spotlight! Thank goodness that we’ve hired a guy who is going to do his work in front of 110,000 paying customers and millions watching on TV, but is uncomfortable with attention. This is bound to work out well!

Spath’s second piece of evidence is testimony from a current Michigan assistant coach that Hoke doesn’t engage in self-promotion. Leaving aside the obvious “what the hell do you think an assistant coach is going to say to a reporter about his boss?” factor, it seems fairly clear to me that Hoke doesn’t engage in self-promotion because he has nothing to promote! On a related note, I would like to brag that I am a committed husband because I haven’t slept with Salma Hayek. Thank goodness that Michigan doesn’t have a larger-than-life figure as its head coach. We all know that the program couldn’t prosper with a guy like that.

As with Dave Brandon’s "I stared into his eyes and saw his soul" defense of an indefensible hire, there are two possibilities here. One is that Spath is doing his best to make the best of a bad situation. Michigan has hired a coach with an underwhelming resume, so let’s find some way to build the guy up. How about the fact that he looks like a slob!?! The second is that Hoke’s underwhelming persona is actually a positive. If that’s the case, then Spath’s mindset is the Platonic ideal of why Big Ten football fails. It is generally (but not universally) true that successful head coaches have big egos. The level of adulation that fans and the media heap on coaches who win makes this a natural result. If having an ego is a red flag for Big Ten programs, then they’ll just keep hiring guys who get broiled 49-7 in Orlando. If the focus is on having rock-ribbed, square-jawed Midwesterners instead of guys who have actually won things, then the league can look forward to more 0-4 New Year’s Days. Southerners can be as provincial as anyone, but at least we demand that our ADs hire on the basis of credentials instead of stereotypes.

Michigan Needs a Burst of Cleansing Synchronicity

Please tell me that I'm not the only one who reads the account of Michigan's season-ending banquet and then thinks immediately of this scene from Heathers:

[in the caf]

PF [shouts] Attention!

[GE spits out his milk]

May I have your attention?

[VS walks in through the door, wearing black glasses]

This school has been torn apart by tragedies. I'm here to fuse it back
again, in togetherness. I want everybody to clap hands. [VS takes of her
glasses, and looks at PF as if she was insane]
We need to connect this cafeteria into one mighty circuit! Look! Here's
the TV crew! Clap your hands!

[PF start walking around in the caf, making everybody hold hands]

VS [to HD] Look's like Ms Phlegm's on another one of her crusades.
Usual success, of course.

TV Hi, what's your name?

HD [smiling] Hi, I'm Heather Duke.

[MD crawls down under the table]

[JD walks up to VS, and holds her from behind]

JD Is this as good for you as it is for me?

[JD takes a seat at MD's table, and MD returns to her chair]

Greetings and salutations!

PD [to PF] I need a copy of all this by monday for my Princeton
application.

[VS leaves]

I thought we had hired Bo Schembechler, but instead, we've hired Pauline Fleming.

Nicky Santoro, Hawks Fan

My thoughts on the Joe Johnson contract:

Nicky: What the f*** is that supposed to mean? "He will be ejected from any casino in Las Vegas. And the casinos can be fined as much as ... every time he shows up." You believe this s***?

Ace: Yeah, I believe it. You got banned.

Nicky: "Because of notorious and unsavory reputation..." Motherf***er! Is there any way around this?"

Ace: No, there's no way.

Nicky: Let's say, for instance I wanna go in a restaurant, which happens to be in the casino to get one of those sandwiches I like?

Ace: Forget it. You can't even set foot in the parking lot. That's how serious it is.

Nicky: In other words, I'm f***ed.

Ace: In so many words, yes.

At Times Like This...

I wonder why I ever decided to become a sports fan. After yesterday's debacle against Appalachian State, I ended up talking to my college friend Andy while walking home from Taco Mac. I announced that the silver lining from the loss is that it is a strong indication that I shouldn't care about sports in general and Michigan particularly as much as I do. I have a job, a wife, and a son; don't I have enough to occupy my attention without worry about whether a senior linebacker can properly pick the right player to block on a decisive field goal? I am still mulling this proposition over. As the day went on, I came up with the more traditional methods of a sports fan coping with a major loss:

Transferring my negative energy onto a rival: Hahaha, Notre Dame also sucks.

Transferring my negative energy onto my team: F*** Lloyd Carr.

Transferring my attention from one favorite team to another: Maybe I should invest less emotional energy in Michigan football and more in F.C. Barcelona. After all, if Barca was knocked out of the Champions League by Shakhtar Donetsk, I wouldn't be inundated by e-mails, text messages, and voice mails from "friends" talking shit about Michigan's humiliation.

Being the intellectualizer that I am, I need to talk a few issues out. Prepare to be bored.

The most vexing aspect about Michigan's loss yesterday is that it demonstrated that Lloyd & company just do not learn. They drove Michigan fans crazy in 2005 by repeatedly bungling chances to ice games. Every time Michigan got the ball with the lead in the fourth quarter, you could be absolutely certain that they would get one first down (at most) and would punt the ball back to the opponent to give the opponent a chance to win the game. Michigan did this despite the fact that the defense had shown time and again that it could not hold a lead. So what happens yesterday? Michigan takes a one-point lead (and the lead was one instead of three because of the idiotic decision to go for two after Michigan scored to make the game 31-26 [and yes, I said aloud that the decision was bad when Michigan lined up for two]), UM then picks off a pass, and then gets one first down and gives the ball back. Michigan ran four straight times, all out of formations that gave away not only that Michigan was running, but also that they were running left or center. Compounding the problems were a delay penalty (evidence of Michigan unbelievable levels of sloppiness that were indicative of a totally unfocused team) and a typically conservative four-yard pass on third and ten when a first down would have salted the game away. Michigan put the game in the hands of a defense that had been torched for 31 points up to that point. Michigan only had a chance to come back from Appalachian State's winning field goal because Jerry Moore had a brain fart and kicked with 30 seconds to go as opposed to centering the ball, bleeding down the clock, and ensuring that the field goal would be the last play of the game.

The second most vexing aspect of the game was the fact that Michigan had all the same scheme-related flaws that they have shown throughout this decade. Inability to stop a run-based spread attack? Check. Inability to tackle a mobile quarterback? Check. Inability to recognize that the opposing offense didn't use the outside receivers and almost never threw the ball down the field or outside the hashmarks? Check. Totally predictable defensive formations that give away whether a blitz is coming? Check. Linebackers trying to cover wide receivers? Check. Dreadful safety play? Check. (Watch Steve Brown's angle on App. State's first touchdown.) Offensive formations that give away the fact that Michigan is running? Check. (Every time the fullback shuffled or freshman receiver Junior Hemingway was in the game, Michigan ran. Hell, I'd be interested to know if Michigan ever threw the ball with the fullback in the game, period.) Reducing Michigan's best receiver to a one-dimensional option who runs nothing but fly patterns? Check. (I shudder to think about how open Mario Manningham would have been for ten-yard stop routes, given the way that he was being defended.) Focus on getting six yards on third and five, thus requiring perfect execution time and again to get down the field? Check. Failure to use the entire field in the passing game? Check. Lousy special teams? Check.

The third most vexing aspect of the game yesterday is that it reminded me of the soul-crushing nature of college football. I love the sport because it is the only American sport with a meaningful regular season and as a result, every game means so much. The downside to this reality is that my team blew its season in the noon timeslot on the first day of the season. Where do I go from here (other than to decide that sports are a cruel bitch goddess that needs to be dumped)? Additionally, because college football games mean so much, fans remember them. No one remembers the Devil Rays beating the Yankees or the Hawks beating the Spurs, but everyone will remember Michigan losing to Appalchian State. Michigan fans are going to hear about this game for years. Casual fans who don't know the first thing about the sport will be able to smirk and say "Appalachian State, dude!" every time I wear a Michigan t-shirt. (And suffice it to say, I won't be wearing the one that just says "The Victors" any time soon.)

The fourth most vexing aspect of the game yesterday is that my humiliation was not simply confined to the comfort of my living room. No, because the Big Ten decided to use me and fans like me as hostages, I had to watch it in a packed sports bar that celebrated wildly when Michigan's final field goal was blocked. I'm certainly not going to say that I wouldn't have done the same thing if the shoe were on the other foot. If Ohio State would have lost on the last play to Youngstown State, I surely would have danced on the table and shot nasty looks at the Sta-Puft Marshamallow Man in the Laurinitis jersey with his walking Brutus doll two tables over. What made the defeat so difficult was that it brought so much joy to everyone else in the bar. It's hard to be really pissed off; it's doubly hard when you're pissed off and everyone else is celebrating as if it were V-E Day.

The fifth most vexing aspect of the game yesterday is that I have tickets to the Michigan-Purdue game in six weeks, so I won't be able to simply tune Michigan football out. I'll have to bear witness to Lloyd and Company gritting their teeth and emphasizing execution over and over again. I'll enjoy going to Ann Arbor with my college friends and I'll enjoy seeing Mike Hart play in person one last time. I can't say that there's much else to be excited about Michigan football, other than the fact that Lloyd Carr is probably in his last season, his political capital in determining his successor is at rock bottom, and my dreamed of replacement bolstered his resume last night in Berkeley.

"Maybe, just once, someone will call me 'Sir' without adding, 'You're making a scene.'"

It's at times like this - Barca look terrible, the Hawks have lost two in a row, the Thrashers are eyeing another late collapse (although they had a huge third period on Tuesday night that might have saved them), Michigan failed to sign any of the top eight players in-state, and Virginia blew a chance at the ACC title last night with a loss at lowly Miami - that I turn for inspiration to Homer Simpson.