Yesterday the Chicago Cubs fired the only manager to win them a World Series since Frank Chance, which is what you do when the Team Built To Last fails to Last. All those kids and in-their-prime guys who were going to deliver yearly trips to the World Series, or at least the NLCS, led them instead straight downhill.
World Series title in 2016. NLCS loss in 2017. Wild-card loss in 2018. No playoffs at all in 2019.
And so Joe Maddon had to go, because firing the manager is what you do when you've run out of ideas. And the Cubs braintrust certainly seems to have. Whatever magic beans Theo Epstein brought to Chicago with him apparently have lost their potency. Prescription magic beans tend to do that over time.
Epstein promised a renewed sense of purpose for the Cubsters in spring training, and indeed they started out well. But since the end of May, they played .500 baseball. And for the second year in a row, they swooned in September.
Last year they went a beige 16-12 in September. This year, allegedly fighting for a playoff spot, they lost 10 of their last 12, including nine straight in the last week of the season.
This is not going to win any manager a re-up in his contract year, but as the season unraveled it also revealed Epstein's touch was not what it was. His solution to the Cubs' season-long lack of a closer, for instance, was to bring in former stud closer Craig Kimbrel. He lived up only to the "former" part.
And all those vibrant young kids of 2016, who were going to be the cornerstone of Built To Last?
Not so much.
Addison Russell, instead of getting better as he got older, regressed. And Kris Bryant, who batted .292 and hit 39 home runs in 2016, hasn't come within eight homers of that since. Plagued by injury, he played only 102 games in 2018 and hit just 13 home runs; this season he rebounded to bat .282 and go deep 31 times.
But as a team, the Cubs again struggled to hit at times. And the bullpen, collectively, were Chicago's most notorious arsonists. And so ...
And so, Joe Maddon is gone. He was never a master strategist, even in the World Series season; his strength was creating and maintaining a culture that kept the clubhouse loose and the kids calm through the long slog of the season. But when David Ross retired after the 2016 season, Maddon never again had as effective a veteran lieutenant to anchor that process. This perhaps has not been given the weight it deserves in the Cubs' erosion from great team to still-a-really-solid-but-not-what-it-was team.
In any case, it will be interesting going forward to see who Epstein comes up with to pump air into the tire again. And to see where Maddon lands, because surely he'll land somewhere.
My cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates, for instance, have an opening at manager after firing Clint Hurdle. Just sayin'.
Monday, September 30, 2019
Sunday, September 29, 2019
Fun with numbers
Notre Dame won the 900th football game in its storied program's history yesterday, beating Virginia, the only team left on its schedule that might have had a shot at beat it this fall. A couple of hours earlier, Oklahoma also won its program's 900th game.
This made the Sooners and the Irish the sixth and seventh FBS programs in college football history to reach that milestone. The others are the usual suspects: Michigan, Ohio State, Texas, Alabama and Nebraska. Also Yale, but Yale is no longer an FBS program, so I guess Albie Booth, Brian Dowling and them don't matter anymore.
Anyway ... what got the Blob thinking about all this is how long it takes to win 900 football games, and what that says about just what an enduring legacy college football has. The NFL is just a bunch of johnny-come-latelies, by comparison. Practically every major American sport but baseball is.
Notre Dame, for instance, started playing football in 1887. That was just 22 years after the end of the Civil War, and just 11 years after Custer bought it on the Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull was still alive. The shootout at the OK Corral still qualified as current events. Knute Rockne wasn't even born yet over there in Norway, and it would be 31 years before he became head coach at Notre Dame and invented the forward pass, the T formation, the wishbone, the bubble screen, the jet sweep and the parking pass.
(OK, so he didn't invent any of that stuff. But Domers think he did.)
In other words, college football at Notre Dame has been around for a good long time. It's been around so long, in fact, that the Irish have actually won 900 games twice.
The Irish first did it in 2017, but then the NCAA took away 21 victories in 2012 and 2013 because, I don't know, they forgot to wash their hands after using the bathroom or something. This of course does not mean those 21 wins didn't happen. Everyone remembers that they happened, how they happened, and who made them happen. Knute Rockne probably remembers that they happened, and he's been dead for 88 years.
In any case, because of the NCAA's splendid penchant for Stalinist revisionism, they never happened. The NCAA said, nope, sorry, what you think you remember you don't remember. And so you don't have 900 wins anymore.
But yesterday the Irish got back there, anyway. And for that, we can bless college football's eternal, unmatchable reach across the decades.
This made the Sooners and the Irish the sixth and seventh FBS programs in college football history to reach that milestone. The others are the usual suspects: Michigan, Ohio State, Texas, Alabama and Nebraska. Also Yale, but Yale is no longer an FBS program, so I guess Albie Booth, Brian Dowling and them don't matter anymore.
Anyway ... what got the Blob thinking about all this is how long it takes to win 900 football games, and what that says about just what an enduring legacy college football has. The NFL is just a bunch of johnny-come-latelies, by comparison. Practically every major American sport but baseball is.
Notre Dame, for instance, started playing football in 1887. That was just 22 years after the end of the Civil War, and just 11 years after Custer bought it on the Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull was still alive. The shootout at the OK Corral still qualified as current events. Knute Rockne wasn't even born yet over there in Norway, and it would be 31 years before he became head coach at Notre Dame and invented the forward pass, the T formation, the wishbone, the bubble screen, the jet sweep and the parking pass.
(OK, so he didn't invent any of that stuff. But Domers think he did.)
In other words, college football at Notre Dame has been around for a good long time. It's been around so long, in fact, that the Irish have actually won 900 games twice.
The Irish first did it in 2017, but then the NCAA took away 21 victories in 2012 and 2013 because, I don't know, they forgot to wash their hands after using the bathroom or something. This of course does not mean those 21 wins didn't happen. Everyone remembers that they happened, how they happened, and who made them happen. Knute Rockne probably remembers that they happened, and he's been dead for 88 years.
In any case, because of the NCAA's splendid penchant for Stalinist revisionism, they never happened. The NCAA said, nope, sorry, what you think you remember you don't remember. And so you don't have 900 wins anymore.
But yesterday the Irish got back there, anyway. And for that, we can bless college football's eternal, unmatchable reach across the decades.
Win one, ya bums
There is no such animal as the Knute Rockne Dyin' Guy Locker Room Whip Up The Boys Soliloquy Award, so far as the Blob knows. (Though it would be cooler if there was.) But if there was, Washington State coach Mike Leach would not have won it yesterday.
This after Utah floor-waxed his Cougars 38-13 in Salt Lake City, which prompted Leach to channel his inner Doug Niedermeyer and call his players "fat, dumb, happy and entitled."
This was not quite "you're all worthless and weak," but it lives across the street. And Leach expanded on that, because that's what Leach does. A strange football mad scientist who never met a fleeting thought he wouldn't vocalize -- Pirates? The emoluments clause? The history of bread? Leach will go there -- he was perturbed because his team didn't put up much of a fight a week after blowing a 32-point third-quarter lead in an epic 69-63 loss to UCLA.
This, and the Utah laydown, led Leach to explain that his was "a very soft team" that believed its press clippings as the nation's top passing team, and that folded like a cheap lawn chair every time it got challenged.
"I think we've got a bunch of free agents running around there that think they're pretty special, and then as soon as something doesn't go their way, they want to pout," Leach said. "I think that at some point they have to embrace the effort themselves."
Now, some of you out there might regard this as mean-spirited. But as a former card-carrying, pressbox-buffet-stained sportswriter wretch, the Blob heartily endorses coaches like Leach. We don't want some bland automaton telling us "We just weren't good in any area today." We want the goods.
Like, you know, "Our offensive line couldn't block a sunbeam."
Or, "Our running backs are yellow as butter."
Or, "We couldn't guard that door over there."
Which a certain high school basketball coach actually said to me once, with a rich disgust in his voice that was absolutely priceless.
God bless the man. Made this sportswriter's job a whole lot easier that night.
Being, you know, fat, dumb, happy and entitled occasionally, too.
This after Utah floor-waxed his Cougars 38-13 in Salt Lake City, which prompted Leach to channel his inner Doug Niedermeyer and call his players "fat, dumb, happy and entitled."
This was not quite "you're all worthless and weak," but it lives across the street. And Leach expanded on that, because that's what Leach does. A strange football mad scientist who never met a fleeting thought he wouldn't vocalize -- Pirates? The emoluments clause? The history of bread? Leach will go there -- he was perturbed because his team didn't put up much of a fight a week after blowing a 32-point third-quarter lead in an epic 69-63 loss to UCLA.
This, and the Utah laydown, led Leach to explain that his was "a very soft team" that believed its press clippings as the nation's top passing team, and that folded like a cheap lawn chair every time it got challenged.
"I think we've got a bunch of free agents running around there that think they're pretty special, and then as soon as something doesn't go their way, they want to pout," Leach said. "I think that at some point they have to embrace the effort themselves."
Now, some of you out there might regard this as mean-spirited. But as a former card-carrying, pressbox-buffet-stained sportswriter wretch, the Blob heartily endorses coaches like Leach. We don't want some bland automaton telling us "We just weren't good in any area today." We want the goods.
Like, you know, "Our offensive line couldn't block a sunbeam."
Or, "Our running backs are yellow as butter."
Or, "We couldn't guard that door over there."
Which a certain high school basketball coach actually said to me once, with a rich disgust in his voice that was absolutely priceless.
God bless the man. Made this sportswriter's job a whole lot easier that night.
Being, you know, fat, dumb, happy and entitled occasionally, too.
Friday, September 27, 2019
Eternal voices
Marty Brennaman called his last Reds home game last night, and there goes more of summer's background music. This is how it works in baseball, see. No sport is more wedded, in its porch-swing cadences, to its season and its medium -- the season being summer, and the medium being radio.
And so when a Brennaman sits behind the mike for 46 years as the voice of Cincinnati Reds baseball, a curious alchemy takes hold across the long slow days and lollygagging twilights of summer. After awhile his voice becomes what you hear when you look back on that season of the year, a soft murmur that's barely noticed but indelibly stitched into every summer memory.
It worked that way with Red Barber and the Yankees and Ernie Harwell and the Tigers and Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray and the Cubs, and it works that way with Brennaman and the Reds, too. Next season someone else will be calling balls and strikes and telling tales in baseball's long pauses, but something will be off. The Reds will still be the Reds, but it won't seem so, somehow.
Every Reds fan has his favorite Marty Brennaman story, and, even though I am not and never have been a Reds fan, I have one, too. It is an outsider's story, and thus an odd one. But in some way it is its own tribute to the Brennaman canon, its own nod to 46 years of ritual.
Back in my Anderson days, when there was still such a thing as two newspapers even in fair-to-middling cities, the assistant sports editor at our rival paper was a huge Reds fan, as many folks in central Indiana are. Every night he'd lay out the pages or write headlines or craft ledes with Marty Brennaman's voice as his accompaniment. And when Brennaman got to his signature line, "And this one belongs to the Reds!" ...
Well. The sports editor, being an impish sort, would always time it perfectly. He'd wait until juuuust before Brennaman began "And this ...", and then he'd reach over and quickly turn off the radio.
The assistant sports editor was not amused by this, I am told.
Because, yes, ritual is all, in this realm. And now, after 46 years, it is no longer.
Someone has reached over and turned off the radio. For good, this time.
And so when a Brennaman sits behind the mike for 46 years as the voice of Cincinnati Reds baseball, a curious alchemy takes hold across the long slow days and lollygagging twilights of summer. After awhile his voice becomes what you hear when you look back on that season of the year, a soft murmur that's barely noticed but indelibly stitched into every summer memory.
It worked that way with Red Barber and the Yankees and Ernie Harwell and the Tigers and Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray and the Cubs, and it works that way with Brennaman and the Reds, too. Next season someone else will be calling balls and strikes and telling tales in baseball's long pauses, but something will be off. The Reds will still be the Reds, but it won't seem so, somehow.
Every Reds fan has his favorite Marty Brennaman story, and, even though I am not and never have been a Reds fan, I have one, too. It is an outsider's story, and thus an odd one. But in some way it is its own tribute to the Brennaman canon, its own nod to 46 years of ritual.
Back in my Anderson days, when there was still such a thing as two newspapers even in fair-to-middling cities, the assistant sports editor at our rival paper was a huge Reds fan, as many folks in central Indiana are. Every night he'd lay out the pages or write headlines or craft ledes with Marty Brennaman's voice as his accompaniment. And when Brennaman got to his signature line, "And this one belongs to the Reds!" ...
Well. The sports editor, being an impish sort, would always time it perfectly. He'd wait until juuuust before Brennaman began "And this ...", and then he'd reach over and quickly turn off the radio.
The assistant sports editor was not amused by this, I am told.
Because, yes, ritual is all, in this realm. And now, after 46 years, it is no longer.
Someone has reached over and turned off the radio. For good, this time.
Sports injury of the week. No, year.
Maine Maritime and Massachusetts Maritime hooked up in their annual rivalry football game last weekend, and, well, so this happened.
(And a tip of the hat to Deadspin for alerting us to it.)
Keep your eye on the official in the end zone in the upper right side of the screen, and ignore the background audio, which apparently is someone listening to someone else explain why the President of the United States shouldn't oughta be strong-arming foreign governments into assisting in his re-election bid. As if, you know, that's not kind of "well, duh" to anyone in America who still has a working brain cell.
Anyway ... watch the puff of smoke. Then watch the ref go down like he was shot. Because, well, he kind of was.
Turns out the wadding from a cannon fired to celebrate Maine Maritime touchdowns hit Stripes in the head. Apparently it's a tradition at Maine Maritime for an alumnus to bring a cannon to the games and let 'er rip. Because nothing says a lovely Saturday afternoon in the fall like "Let's load this puppy with double canister wadding and fire away, boys."
("Hear, hear," says the ghost of Alonzo Cushing.)
(Look him up, Blobophiles.)
Anyway ... the ref was carted off to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries, thank heavens. And Maine Maritime, those spoilsports, sent out a statement saying alumni would no longer be allowed to bring their own artillery to the games.
Some people just live to take all the fun out of college football, I guess.
(And a tip of the hat to Deadspin for alerting us to it.)
Keep your eye on the official in the end zone in the upper right side of the screen, and ignore the background audio, which apparently is someone listening to someone else explain why the President of the United States shouldn't oughta be strong-arming foreign governments into assisting in his re-election bid. As if, you know, that's not kind of "well, duh" to anyone in America who still has a working brain cell.
Anyway ... watch the puff of smoke. Then watch the ref go down like he was shot. Because, well, he kind of was.
Turns out the wadding from a cannon fired to celebrate Maine Maritime touchdowns hit Stripes in the head. Apparently it's a tradition at Maine Maritime for an alumnus to bring a cannon to the games and let 'er rip. Because nothing says a lovely Saturday afternoon in the fall like "Let's load this puppy with double canister wadding and fire away, boys."
("Hear, hear," says the ghost of Alonzo Cushing.)
(Look him up, Blobophiles.)
Anyway ... the ref was carted off to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries, thank heavens. And Maine Maritime, those spoilsports, sent out a statement saying alumni would no longer be allowed to bring their own artillery to the games.
Some people just live to take all the fun out of college football, I guess.
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Your wild-card moment for today
And, no, it doesn't involve your Chicago Cubs being officially eliminated from postseason play last night, after losing their eighth straight game and second straight to the Cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates.
This moment happened in the nation's capital, and it doubles as the Karma's A Bitch moment for today. Earlier this week, see, the Washington Nationals clinched the National League wild-card spot not clinched by the Milwaukee Brewers last night. They did it in a doubleheader with the Philadelphia Phillies, who had to watch the Nats celebrate.
Among those interested observers?
Bryce Harper.
Who jumped ship with the Nats to sign with the Phillies last offseason, an arrival that was presumed to mean the Phils would be celebrating a postseason berth come late September.
Alas, but no. The Phils, as of this morning, are a dead-even 79-79 on the season. They have lost five in a row and seven of their last 10, an end-of-season death spiral that rivals that of the Cubs. Right now they're 17 1/2 games out of first in the NL East, and four games behind the third-place Mets. Only the hideously inept Miami Marlins, the worst team in baseball not named the Detroit Tigers, keeps them safely out of the cellar in the division.
Oh, yeah: And they weren't a factor even in the wild card chase, finishing (as of this morning) nine games out.
Poor Bryce. Backed the wrong horse, looks like.
This moment happened in the nation's capital, and it doubles as the Karma's A Bitch moment for today. Earlier this week, see, the Washington Nationals clinched the National League wild-card spot not clinched by the Milwaukee Brewers last night. They did it in a doubleheader with the Philadelphia Phillies, who had to watch the Nats celebrate.
Among those interested observers?
Bryce Harper.
Who jumped ship with the Nats to sign with the Phillies last offseason, an arrival that was presumed to mean the Phils would be celebrating a postseason berth come late September.
Alas, but no. The Phils, as of this morning, are a dead-even 79-79 on the season. They have lost five in a row and seven of their last 10, an end-of-season death spiral that rivals that of the Cubs. Right now they're 17 1/2 games out of first in the NL East, and four games behind the third-place Mets. Only the hideously inept Miami Marlins, the worst team in baseball not named the Detroit Tigers, keeps them safely out of the cellar in the division.
Oh, yeah: And they weren't a factor even in the wild card chase, finishing (as of this morning) nine games out.
Poor Bryce. Backed the wrong horse, looks like.
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
The inevitability of Cubness
Maybe it's just a nostalgia deal. Sure, that's it.
Took a gander at the baseball standings this a.m., and I saw that your Chicago Cubs have lost six games in a row and are now comfortably out of the playoffs, four games behind Milwaukee for the second wild card spot with a week left in the season. Just a week ago they were hanging onto that spot by the skin of their teeth, but then an outbreak of extreme Cubness broke out, and they lost four one-run games in a row in Wrigley Field to their fiercest rival, the Gosh Bleep St. Louis Cardinals.
Four one-run losses in a row! In the Confines! With a playoff berth on the line!
This is not just extreme Cubness, it is epic Cubness, given that it hadn't happened since the Wilson administration (1919). And it hadn't happened against the Gosh Bleep St. Louis Cardinals since the Harding administration (1921).
So, yes, this suggests the Cubs secretly pine for the days of yore, when world wars weren't yet numbered, men handled the voting for all you lovely ladies and "That's a doozy" was what you said when your snooty neighbor came home wheeling a Deusenberg. The Cubs were just a decade removed from winning the World Series, but they could still say, "Gosh, we haven't won a World Series since 1908." And they could go right on saying it for another 97 years.
Now?
Well, 2016 spoiled everything. Complaining that you haven't won a World Series in three years, after all, just isn't the same as complaining that you haven't won a World Series in 108 years. There is not that tinge of endearing pathos to it; it's just complaining. And from a fan base that's grown used to winning -- until now, the Cubs have made the playoffs the last four years, and until last year had reached at least the NLCS three straight years -- it's not endearing at all.
And not nearly as interesting.
The entire culture of the franchise, after all, has always been built around the inevitability of Cubness. No matter how bright the outlook every year when they came north from Arizona, you knew in your bones something Cubbish would happen to the Cubs. Sometimes there would be a breathtaking cruelness to it, like when Steve Bartman became the wrongfully blamed architect of Cubness on a ball Moises Alou was never going to catch anyway. And sometimes the Cubs just sucked.
Either way, it all ended up the same. The sun's shining, the Old Style's flowing and fer crissakes, Dusty, Prior's thrown 147 pitches, get him the hell out of there.
But then Theo Epstein showed up, and Cubness went dormant. Under his hand, the Cubs became just another big-spending overdog -- the Yankees or Red Sox, only more cuddly. Which is why this all must feel, on some level, like the Cubs merely returning to their comfort zone.
In other words: Dammit, Cubs, you did it to us again. All that talk back in the spring about a new urgency? Yeah, right. Shoulda known it was a setup.
And the Great Choke of 2019?
Just stick it up there alongside the Great Choke of '69, the Great Choke of '84 and the Great Choke of '03. And welcome back, Cubness.
Took a gander at the baseball standings this a.m., and I saw that your Chicago Cubs have lost six games in a row and are now comfortably out of the playoffs, four games behind Milwaukee for the second wild card spot with a week left in the season. Just a week ago they were hanging onto that spot by the skin of their teeth, but then an outbreak of extreme Cubness broke out, and they lost four one-run games in a row in Wrigley Field to their fiercest rival, the Gosh Bleep St. Louis Cardinals.
Four one-run losses in a row! In the Confines! With a playoff berth on the line!
This is not just extreme Cubness, it is epic Cubness, given that it hadn't happened since the Wilson administration (1919). And it hadn't happened against the Gosh Bleep St. Louis Cardinals since the Harding administration (1921).
So, yes, this suggests the Cubs secretly pine for the days of yore, when world wars weren't yet numbered, men handled the voting for all you lovely ladies and "That's a doozy" was what you said when your snooty neighbor came home wheeling a Deusenberg. The Cubs were just a decade removed from winning the World Series, but they could still say, "Gosh, we haven't won a World Series since 1908." And they could go right on saying it for another 97 years.
Now?
Well, 2016 spoiled everything. Complaining that you haven't won a World Series in three years, after all, just isn't the same as complaining that you haven't won a World Series in 108 years. There is not that tinge of endearing pathos to it; it's just complaining. And from a fan base that's grown used to winning -- until now, the Cubs have made the playoffs the last four years, and until last year had reached at least the NLCS three straight years -- it's not endearing at all.
And not nearly as interesting.
The entire culture of the franchise, after all, has always been built around the inevitability of Cubness. No matter how bright the outlook every year when they came north from Arizona, you knew in your bones something Cubbish would happen to the Cubs. Sometimes there would be a breathtaking cruelness to it, like when Steve Bartman became the wrongfully blamed architect of Cubness on a ball Moises Alou was never going to catch anyway. And sometimes the Cubs just sucked.
Either way, it all ended up the same. The sun's shining, the Old Style's flowing and fer crissakes, Dusty, Prior's thrown 147 pitches, get him the hell out of there.
But then Theo Epstein showed up, and Cubness went dormant. Under his hand, the Cubs became just another big-spending overdog -- the Yankees or Red Sox, only more cuddly. Which is why this all must feel, on some level, like the Cubs merely returning to their comfort zone.
In other words: Dammit, Cubs, you did it to us again. All that talk back in the spring about a new urgency? Yeah, right. Shoulda known it was a setup.
And the Great Choke of 2019?
Just stick it up there alongside the Great Choke of '69, the Great Choke of '84 and the Great Choke of '03. And welcome back, Cubness.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)