Golden battiness

 I am no strict baseball constructionist, that species of fan who thinks the designated hitter marked the dawn of civilization's fall. But neither am I a baseball agnostic.

In other words, I'm fine with the DH. I'm also fine with the pitch clock, and limiting pitching changes, and all other tweaks baseball has added recently to speed up its numbing stem-winder plod.

Those changes have shaved a considerable number of minutes from the average length of a game -- a good thing here in the go-go 2020s. We may pine occasionally for what we imagine was the more leisurely pace of the good old days, but that doesn't mean we want our baseball games to outlast entire epochs in the march of time.

Three-and-a-half, four hours to play nine innings is too much foot-dragging even for nostalgia buffs like me. Get on with it already.

However. 

However, some things are just too contrived even for the Blob's relatively enlightened stance.

Abolishing the shift, a legitimate defensive strategy since Moses was throwing his two-seamer, crosses a line that shouldn't be crossed, in my opinion. Ditto the "ghost runner" employed now in extra innings, because I think if a man is out there standing on second base, he should damn well have better done something to get there.

Even that, however, is not as egregious an affront to the game as the latest gimmick being tossed around in baseball's boardrooms: The Golden At-Bat.

In essence, the Golden At-Bat would be a one-time-only maneuver that would allow a team to insert a designated hitter into the batting order whenever it felt like it. In other words, if the Dodgers were trailing by a run or two in the bottom of the ninth, it could send Shohei Ohtani to the plate no matter who was next in the order.

Theoretically, this means Ohtani could get two at-bats in a row. Imagine the nightmares an opponent's closer would have about that.

And, sure, I get the appeal. The Golden At-Bat would add a whole new layer of strategy to a game whose strategy has always been one of its draws. When does manager "Biff"  Biffington use his Golden At-Bat? Does he save it for the later innings? Or, if his team jumps out to a lead, does he use it earlier in hopes of putting the game out of reach?

Inquiring minds would want to know. Well, not really, but we can pretend.

Now, I'm not going to go all cranky old guy here and wonder what some of the old timers would have thought of all this. The old timers thought moving on from the deadball era was too radical a move. So we already know they're turning the air blue somewhere in the Great Beyond.

(Although, honestly, Ty Cobb and the Babe maybe even Honus Wagner might have liked the idea of the Golden At-Bat. As long as they were the Golden At-Bat, of course)

No, what I'm going to do instead is say baseball wants to be very careful about gimmickry like the Golden At-Bat. They're treading perilously close to a place where baseball becomes not baseball but some loony mix of the WWE, Hollywood Squares and a carnival midway. 

Now batting as the Designated Celebrity, Charles Nelson Reilly! He'll be swinging a giant plastic bat at a beach ball thrown by ace closer Ace Closer, who'll simultaneously try to guess Charles Nelson's weight!

And you thought the '24 White Sox were a joke.

Flag football

 Tuesday morning after the big holiday weekend, and Curmudgeon Boy has broken his surly bonds again. Someone left the gate open, and now he's out there roaming free in my brain and, who knows, probably leaving little Curmudgeon Boy piles in places he shouldn't.

Which is to say I've been listening to the chatter about the Michigan-Ohio State brawl, and the other brawls that broke out in college rivalry games over the weekend, and it's brought out the cranky old guy in me. And also all the cranky old guy bromides.

Such as: Winners, act like you've been there before.

And also: Losers, accept your fate with humility and no loud noises.

This goes back to Paul Brown, the original Curmudgeon Boy of football, who once said when you win say very little, and when you lose, say even less. 

Not anymore, apparently.

Now the winners can't wait to rub salt in the wound after rivalry games, and the losers are no longer disposed to put up with it. This betrays a general lack of discipline on the part of both, even though the Blob tends to side with the losers in this matter. It takes less discipline to taunt than it does not to respond to it.

Which brings us to this whole flag-planting business.

Two geniuses from Michigan decided it would be a good idea to plant a giant M flag on the Ohio State logo after upsetting the rival Buckeyes in Columbus, touching off the brawl we've all seen on TV by now. This happens all the time now in rivalry games -- remember Baker Mayfield planting an OU flag on the same Buckeyes logo years ago, after Oklahoma upset the Buckeyes? -- and it's a disgusting phenomenon.

Winners win with class. The ones who don't are only losers in disguise. Thus sayeth Curmudgeon Boy.

But, nah. The two Michigan geniuses decided instead to rub it in with the flag business, and further decided it would be an excellent idea to do it with the Buckeyes still milling around at midfield. Especially considering how bitter this rivalry is, what did they think was gonna happen?  The Ohio State players were just gonna say "Ha-ha, good one, Wolverines"?

Of course not. An Ohio State player ripped the flag away, both teams waded into one another, and it took cops with pepper spray to break it up. Meanwhile, Florida players were fighting with Florida State players after the Gators tried to plant a flag on the Florida State logo in Tallahassee, and North Carolina and North Carolina State players were throwing down after the Wolfpack tried to plant a flag on the Tar Heels logo.

Enough, people. Enough.

Look. No one appreciates a good college football rivalry more than the Blob, and the more enmity the better. Michigan and Ohio State certainly didn't invent the latter on Saturday afternoon; go back 50 years, and you'll see Woody Hayes tearing up sideline markers in a fit of rage during the Michigan game, and coasting across the state line on fumes because he refused to buy gas in Michigan. 

Great stuff. But Woody and his splendid doppelganger Bo Schembechler at least had the good sense to get their teams the hell off the field after Ohio State-Michigan games. Sherrone Moore and Ryan Day, not so much.

Moore you can partly understand, because his team had just scored a jaw-dropping upset and were, as they say, in the moment. No such excuse for Day, who stood and watched as his players waded into the Michigans. 

One would have thought, considering what he's said in the past about how special is THE Ohio State University, that he would have been reminding his players what they represented, and to conduct themselves accordingly. Perhaps by grabbing a facemask or two to get the point across.

And Moore?

Same message to his Wolverines. Delivered the same way if need be.

The good news here is the Big Ten refused to put up with all the nonsense, and dropped a $100,000 fine on both schools.  And given what happened elsewhere, the NCAA may waken from its slumber long enough to ban planting flags on rival logos.

Curmudgeon Boy would be A-OK with that.

He'd also be A-OK with coaches controlling their players. But I suppose that's too much to ask these days.

A few brief thoughts on NFL Week 13

 And now this week's edition of The NFL In So Many Words, the "Hey, look" Blob feature of which critics have said "Hey, look, here comes that idiot again," and also "Hey, look, only about a month left of this torture":

1. Hey, look, it's Tuesday morning and Browns quarterback Jameis Winston just threw for another gazillion-bazillion yards, and also threw another touchdown pass.

2. Also another pick-six.

3. Also another completion to Browns wideout Jerry Jeudy, who caught, I don't know, 50 balls for infinity yards in the Browns' 41-32 shootout loss to the Broncos.

4. "Actually it was only nine balls for 235 yards, but thanks for noticing." (Jerry Jeudy)

5. "Hey, look, I ran for another two scores and we won again!" (Colts quarterback Anthony Richardson)

6. "OK, so it was only the Patriots, and it was only by a point, but still." (Also Anthony Richardson)

7. "Hey, look, I'm out of a job!" (Former Bears coach Matt Eberflus)

8. "Hey, look, I'm about to be suspended!" (Texans defensive back Azeez Al-Shaair, after his vicious helmet-to-helmet late hit on a sliding Trevor Lawrence, although it doesn't look quite as vicious or late until you see it in super-slow motion)

9. "Hey, look, two wins in a row, baby! We're back on track for THE SUPER BOWL!!" (The Cowboys)

10. "OK, so it was only the Giants, but still." (Also the Cowboys)

Sunk cost

Purdue got the first part right Sunday, painful as it must have been. It swallowed the ten or so million necessary to buy out football coach Ryan Walters' contract, and showed him the road out of West Lafayette.

You go 1-11 and winless in the Big Ten, these things will happen. You lose by a combined score of 132-7 to the two other football majors in your state, these things must happen.

A catastrophically bad Purdue team did that, losing 66-7 to Notre Dame at one end of the season and 66-0 to Indiana in the Old Oaken Bucket game at the other. In between there were some 56-7 and 49-10 wipeouts, as well as a stray 35-0 or two. But it was the Notre Dame and Indiana capitulations that did in the short-lived Walters regime.

Together, they served as bookends to what is possible when you make the right hire. The contrast with Purdue, who made the wrong one, was simply too stark to be tolerated another second.

And so, less than 24 hours after the surrender in Bloomington, Purdue declared Walters a sunk cost and ponied up the cash to send him on his way. Meanwhile, in South Bend, Marcus Freeman has the Irish 11-1 and cruising into the College Football Playoff; downstate, meanwhile, Curt Cignetti has the Hoosiers 11-1 and cruising toward the same.

There were some grumbles among the Domers when Brian Kelly blew town and Freeman was elevated from within to replace him, but hardly anyone is grumbling now. And Cignetti has energized an IU program even more chronically beige than Purdue's, which at least has a few Drew Breeses and Bob Grieses in its woodpile.

It also has the right hire in its history, if that means anything. Joe Tiller was the right hire, even if hardly anyone in the Midwest had heard of him when he landed in West Lafayette. Jeff Brohm was the right hire, even if the siren call of his alma mater (Louisville) lured him away.

And Ryan Walters?

Walters looked like the right hire, at least initially. He'd never been a head coach in the Big Ten before, but neither had most of the coaches in the Big Ten before they became coaches in the Big Ten. What he was, by all accounts, was a defensive genius who, as defensive coordinator at Illinois, turned the Illini into one of the most fearsome Ds in America.

But he turned out to be a disaster, an epic fail who made other recent epic fails (paging Danny Hope; paging Darrell Hazell) look like Vince Don Lombardi-Shula by comparison. Now athletic director Mike Bobinski and the same people who hired Walters must go back to the drawing board, two short years after they blew it big time.

Wild guess, but I'm thinking that scenario might keep the alums awake at night. Especially the ones with deep pockets.

I'm also thinking this: Whoever Purdue hires, he'll need to blow into town like Hurricane Cig did downstate. If 66-0 didn't seal Walters fate, after all, the fact recruits were bailing on his program left and right surely did. With the early signing period looming, Walters had just five recruits still locked in.

So this will be a total reconstruct. And thus crunch time squared for Bobinski and Co.

They got the first part right. The hard part awaits.

Karma's a ...

 ... aaaand you know the rest of that one.

Karma is what happens when you do something you shouldn't oughta done, like running your mouth about how so-and-so sucks, and then having so-and-so stick it to you by punching in one last touchdown after the issue had long been decided.

That happened last week, in Columbus, Ohio, when Ryan Day and the Ohio State Buckeyes decided to school Indiana coach Curt Cignetti about why you don't say "Ohio State sucks," because Ohio State will remember it. And so the Buckeyes scored one last touchdown with seconds to play, and a 31-15 Indiana loss became a 38-15 Indiana loss.

And yesterday, also in Columbus, Ohio?

Ryan Day and the Buckeyes got theirs.

They were beaten again by their bitterest rival, Michigan, this time by the Woody/Bo score of 13-10. It was the fourth straight time the Wolverines had beaten the Buckeyes -- and this was the worst of all, because Michigan came in a beige 6-5, and the Buckeyes were 10-1 and ranked second in the nation.

By all rights, they should have pounded lumps on the Wolverines. Instead, they lost, and then got into an embarrassing brawl with the Michigans that security had to use pepper spray to break up.

(About that: Why were both teams still on the field? And what sort of brainiacs does Michigan have on its roster these days, considering two of them thought it would be a good idea to plant a giant "M" flag at midfield with the entire Ohio State team milling about? Of course the Buckeyes took offense. Which of course ignited the whole brouhaha.)

Anyway ...

Back to Ryan Day, the Buckeyes, and karma.

If karma paid back Cignetti last week, then karma paid back Day and the Buckeyes yesterday. You run your mouth, it comes back on you. You disrespect an opponent because the opponent ran his mouth, it also comes back on you.

Remember Will Howard, the Ohio State quarterback who taunted Cignetti -- aka, Coach Cig -- by pantomiming putting out a cigarette on the sideline as the game ended last week?

Yesterday he threw a touchdown pass. But he also threw two picks to contribute to the Buckeyes' loss.

Karma.

As for Indiana ...

Well, the Hoosiers embarrassed their own rival last night, laminating the worst Purdue team in recent memory 66-0. It was the first shutout of the Purdues for the Hoosiers since 1945, and Indiana's largest margin of victory in a Big Ten game ever. And it was like watching Joey Chestnut play with his food. 

The Hoosiers outgained Purdue 582 yards to 67. They out first-downed the Boilers 30-5. Kurtis Rourke threw six touchdown passes; Elijah Sarratt caught eight balls for a school record 165 yards; and, like Ohio State the week before, Indiana shamelessly ran it up on their helpless rival, with Rourke still slinging it deep in the game and Cignetti dialing up a fake punt for a first down with the score 38-0 and the game long over.

Then they took a knee at the end -- which looked like mercy, but which felt more like rubbing it in given the circumstances ("See? We didn't make it 73-0 like we coulda").

Which makes me wonder what misfortune will befall the 11-1 Hoosiers in the upcoming College Football Playoff, in which they surely will be included now. 

Because, you know: Karma.