Losing Hard Is Sucky But Useful

Sports springs eternal in the human breast. So I'm gonna put up some of the best articles I run across, accompanied by comments which I trust are sufficiently smart-ass to be amusing. Many of these links will be to Tom "Best Baseball Writer I  Know Of" Boswell of the Washington Post. As is today's. A column on how "losing hard" in the playoffs helps you build your team for next year. Brilliant.

Pillars of Fandom

National Disaster

This is what happens if you don't play baseball. Horrible, isn't it?

Every year, they stop playing baseball and pretty soon, this kind of thing occurs.

It is only two more months until pitchers and catchers report in mid-February but even that is not enough. White stuff doesn't stop falling out of the skies in the major cities of North America until the baseball players begin to move around on the grass, pitching, throwing, catching, hitting, and running the bases in actual games that count in the standings.

As Spike Milligan said, the only successful preventative of seasickness is to sit under a tree. The only cure for snow is to play baseball.

Skins On Track for 7-9

After the well-earned slaughter by Filthadelphia on national TV, the Skins' remaining games are Titans, Vikings, Pig Giants, Bucs, Cowgirls, Jags and Pig Giants.

Of these 7, there are 3 the Skins won't win: both Pig Giants games and the one with the Bucs. Those two teams have significantly better records than the Skins. Then there are 2 they should win: the Vikes and the Cowgirls, who have worse records than the Skins. Finally there are 2 the Skins might win: the Titans and Jags, whose records are roughly comparable to the Skins.

To finish 7-9 as the consensus preseason prediction was for the Skins, they need to win 3 of the 4 remaining games that they both should and could win.

So if they go 3 for 7 for the rest of the year, that is a winning percentage of 43%. Oddly enough, going 7 for 16 over a whole season also gives you 43%. And how are you doing at 4 for 9, as they are today? They're at 44%.

Pretty hard not to detect a pattern here….

Hornkeister's Follies

Enforcedly-celibate sports opinionator Phony Hornkeister, formerly of the Washington Post and Monday Night Football, is apparently pursuing some vendetta against one of his respectable former colleagues (i.e. not from MNF.) As a result there is again some question of his sincerity, sanity and sobriety.

No writer who is incapable of seeing his own foibles as mirrored in others can possibly be any more than faintly amusing some of the time. Phony Hornkeister's manifest, repeated and unavoidable failures derive from that principle. He is merely a shtickmeister with the sensibilities of a frat boy. He sucks up to the popular and pisses down on the marginalized. He is a perfect example of Freud's theory of jokes as aggression, with the drawback that none of his jokes are funny.

His work is, at best, defensive. He seeks to inoculate himself against charges of nerdhood with pretenses to vast sports knowledge. But he only knows about two jokes, and he fits everything into those forms. The jokes are, "His dick is so small," (How small is it, Phony?) "he needs a magnifying glass to find the tweezers to hold it with." The other is, "His dick is so big," (How big is it, Phony?) "he needs to keep it strapped to his thigh during games."

Since Hornkeister works in mainstream media he, of course, has to translate these jokes into various other put-downs and glorifications. You might think this was a work of creativity until you notice that, if Hornkeister can ever substitute a shtick for a proper joke, he will do it every time. It is as the Englishman said of someone with extremely poor taste, "In lieu of an actual ornament, he placed a garden gnome beside the walk."

His popularity has nothing to do with his merit. They are not automatically opposed phenomena but neither are they inevitably allied.

I recall an instance where some hockey player had given Phony an opportunity to proclaim (which he thought was the same as demonstrating) his superiority. Being terminally insecure, he wanted to seem better not only than that hockey player in particular but than the game of hockey and hockey fans in general. I disremember the specifics but it involved Phony's questioning the player's mental capacity or masculinity or both. When he finished his rant, Phony said, with the happy sigh of a pervert who has just had sex with the head of a dead goat, "I just love doing that to guys."

That's the real Phony Hornkeister.

pre-woild-serious ramble

the frost is on the pumpkin, snow is on the land, rain filleth the firmament and baseball is going to be played in november. this is not a travesty, it is a crime.

the commissioner of the owners of baseball is derelict in his duty at best. (like all used car dealers he thinks the problem is marketing, not the quality of the product.) the season started late this year because of some cockamamie idea of his. this time it was an international baseball tournament which, like all international baseball except the blue jays, ought to be played during winter ball so it doesn't interfere with the delicate rhythms of spring training, much less push back the end of the season beyond indian summer.

extra levels of playoff and the wild card were introduced by that same invertebrate pseudo-commissioner whose bumbling tinkerings with the game have masked his inability, or unwillingness, to protect what matters. but in his drooling incompetence the owner's commissioner forgot to shorten the season (say from 162 back to the historic norm of 156 games) so as to leave time to play baseball during actual, genuine baseball weather.

because even the venal collection of millionaires that owns baseball is incapable of creating any more summer climate in north america than god allows for. trying to stretch it leads to weather disasters such as were seen in this years' league series and last year's woild serious.

i personally am holding out for three rainouts and a snow day just to publicly humiliate baseball ownership's greed. here's a clue: if baseball players made more money from the extended season and playoffs than ownership did, would the extensions have happened? you don't think so either? i rest my case.

meantime i have to be for the filthadelphia filthiex even though they are the principal rivals of my noble, doomed washington nationals. (whose unjustly-fired ex-manager manny acta, an adult human being and a class act, has just hooked on with the cleveland indianx, for whom i will cheerfully root in the 2010 AL.) usually you want to beat the team that beat you. but in this case following that rule would mean rooting for the disgusting NY yanx. not none o' me.

now, i was for the yanx one time. it was late in about 1984 to 88 when the oriolex had to be my team even though earl weaver wasn't there anymore. in september there was a team ahead of the o'x in the standings that needed to be beaten for the o'x to advance. the other team was playing the yanx and, despite every fibre of my being emitting tortured screams of the souls of the damned in hell, i rooted for the yanx: for one game, maybe two. then the o'x fell back into their usual post-weaver mediocrity and there was no tactical need to adopt the putrid bronxians.

for the record, there are no circumstances, conceivable or inconceivable, under which i would ever root for the yanx in the playoffs, much less the woild serious. not that people in new york aren't entitled to. they are. (although i do look askance at guys from phoenix wearing yanx attire.) but i can't do it myself. not only has steinbrenner's profligate and self-centered stewardship been uniformly disastrous for baseball as a whole, but although papa s's ego needed no inflating, it obscenely bestrode the public face of yanquidom. and then there are the NY fans, as blatantly provincial as any southerner while pretending to vast and mostly unmerited sophistication. they are best exemplified by that rabbit-toothed ex-mayor giuliani, called by jimmy breslin 'a small man in search of a balcony,' whose in-office malfeasance and neglect directly caused the deaths of firefighters on 9/11 behind whose heroism he continually hides.

besides, i always prefer my championships earned, rather than bought. they are just more tasty that way. as for foxic TV and the repetitively redundant and redundant repetitions of tim mccarver, thank god for jon miller and joe morgan on ESPN radio. so here's to champagne along the schuylkill river this year, same as last, and to tears, salt tears in the bronx. and to a three-day nor'easter along the way...

Da Woild Serious

Hafta be for Sant Louie Louie. Detroit's waited longer but they're AL. And LaRussa's admirable whereas Leyland's only likeable. Furthermore, anyplace it snows during the Woild Serious shouldn't win. Been bery, bery good beisbul so far. Hope it goes seven. C'mon Pujols.

Steinfelon's Follies

Even though Yankee despot George Steinbrenner was convicted of campaign financiang violations simply because he was a Democrat, he still pollutes the very universe with his presence. The rumor, doubtless true, that he is going to fire Manager Joe Torre brings a schadenfreudian glow to the Slangwhanger-in-Chief's otherwise sallow cheeks.

If Steinfelon does this he will have destroyed the only force capable of holding the Yankee team together, causing them to underperform even further next year. "For this relief, much thanks," as Br'er Shaxper remarked. The rest of the civilized world outside Manhattan will heave a huge sigh of relief that Steinfelon's egotism has singlehandedly caused a further decline in Yankee fortunes.

And maybe Torre's availability to manage will stop Nats GM Jim Bowden's lurid flirtation with the disgraced and ineffective Lou Pinella. A more unsuitable successor to the dignified and honorable Frank Robinson could not be imagined. As a player, Pinella was Steinfelon's house informer during the first baseball strike, ratting out union strategy to management. As a manager, he has represented the Billy Martin school of rageoholic, backstabbing, lying, drunken, petty martinets. Plus he has a black thumb with pitchers. Let's hope Torre wants to come to the NL, and that the Nats have sense enough to pursue him for real. If the Nats are going to pick a white guy manager rather than Dusty Baker or Terry Pendelton, it might as well be Torre, a real gentleman and a baseball mind of the first order.