That winnin' feeling

So, what is a W without the L?

Kinda boring, apparently.

Thus another piece of conventional sports wisdom is consigned to the flames, not to say the locker room speeches of coaches from Rockne to Leahy to Coach Slobberknocker from Head For The Hills High School in Hog Waller, Nebraska. As Vince Lombardi once never came close to saying, winning isn't everything, but when it's the only thing, it takes all the fun out of it. In fact it's an out-and-out bummer.

Sorry about that, kids. I know, it sucks being lied to all these years.

But the fact is, Ws are only sweet when there's a prospect of an L here or there, and when there's not, you wind up like the Wilson High School baseball team in Washington, D.C., whose sad tale is chronicled here by Dave McKenna of Deaspin. A rich suburban school blessed with the best of everything, Wilson recently won the D.C. public school title for the 26th straight time. In fact they haven't so much as lost a league game in 20 years, and they've lost only one in the last 26.

You will therefor not be surprised to learn that when they won it again the other night, they didn't even celebrate.

This will happen when you weren't even alive the last time your high school lost a league baseball game, as is the case with the 2018 squad. It will also happen when you are so dominant most of your league games are like watching the Yankees or Red Sox take on Chico's Bail Bonds.

“Most of our games are called after three to five innings because of the score,” Mitch Gore, Wilson’s athletic director told McKenna. “We’ll be up 20 runs, and we’re bunting to get the outs just to finish the game. That’s not fun.”

Indeed it's not. There is, in fact, no pleasure in winning under those circumstances whatsoever. It almost makes you feel sorry for the kids from Wilson.

But, you know, not that sorry.

That's because, unlike most of the schools in the D.C. league, Wilson has resources. They have batting cages. They have pitching machines. They dress out 51 varsity, JV and freshman players.

Contrast that to McKinley High, whom Wilson beat in the semifinals. McKinley not only doesn't have pitching machines and batting cages, it doesn't even have a home field. By McKenna's count, they dressed out 11 players for the semifinal game.

This all reminds me of my days as a sportswriter back in Anderson, when Madison Heights High School (killed by consolidation some years back, God rest its soul) played in the old Olympic Conference. Unfortunately, Carmel was also in the OC. And Carmel was to the rest of the OC what Wilson is to the D.C. league.

Which is to say, absurdly, ridiculously advantaged. It was also a school that cared about football, and had the money to care about it. Madison Heights, meanwhile, was a much smaller public school in a struggling factory town that revered basketball to the exclusion of almost all else.

And so Carmel would come to Heights or Heights would go to Carmel, and the ball-peening would begin. It was merciless and unrelenting and in a lot of ways cruel to watch, because, unlike the folks at Wilson, the folks at Carmel seemed to get a twisted joy out of watching their outrageous overdogs completely overwhelm a team like Heights, which couldn't hope to compete with them.

This brings us to a certain Friday night down at Carmel, where Heights was once again hopelessly outmatched. The Greyhounds dressed out their usual 120 kids, just to show they had the resources to dress out 120 kids. On the other sideline, Heights had maybe 40 bodies. The game ran its inevitable course, and pretty soon there were three seconds left and Carmel was ahead 47-0.

At which point the Carmel coach called timeout so he could bring in his ace field-goal kicker, who (if memory serves) was one field goal shy of the school record.

Of course, the kid made it. The game ended 50-0, and, later on, we found the Madison Heights coach pacing in the darkness of one end zone, tears of helpless rage in his voice. And, earlier, up in the pressbox, I had my own helpless reaction.

As the Carmel kicker's field goal cleared the crossbar, and the Carmel folks celebrated at the other end of the pressbox, I blurted out as loudly as I could: "That's bull***t."

It was unprofessional as hell. But I just couldn't help myself.

And I can only hope that, as with Wilson, the players, coaches and fans at Carmel secretly got very little pleasure out of it all. It would only be right.