Does Manny Care? Who cares?

Posted: October 18th, 2007 | Filed under: Baseball | 12 Comments »

So this afternoon, while we wait for crucial Game 5 to begin, I thought it might be fun to get into some MannyBeingManny talk. I can never get enough Manny Ramirez. Anyway, it seems like more fun than reading the seven billion shmillion angry emails I’ve gotten from people over that Chief Wahoo blog.

Yes, I have promised that I would not write anymore on this blog about Chief Wahoo, and I will not. However, I must advise you — pro or con — you have to read my brilliant friend Scott Raab’s blog, “Why I Have A Racist Caricature on My Arm.”

OK, you have no doubt by now seen the Manny Ramirez quotes that he offered after the Red Sox loss to Cleveland in Game 4. These have apparently set off some folks back in Boston. Here is the money quote, just in case you missed it:

“We’re confident every day. It doesn’t matter. We’re not going to give up. We’re going to play the game and move on. If it doesn’t happen, who cares? There’s always next year. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”

Yeah, you could see why that would tick some people off. There are those who will read this quote and take it to mean that Manny does not care if the Red Sox happen to lose tonight (there’s always next year). He also seems to be hinting that losing would not be the end of the world.

First, I have to say, I find the whole thing pretty hilarious. People have watched Manny Ramirez for how many years now? They have watched him jog after baseballs in the outfield with all the enthusiasm of a guy walking in to get his colonoscopy. They have heard him demand trades how many times? They have seen the guy move slower than health care reform on double-play grounders. This seems a funny time to be shocked and appalled to find that perhaps MannyBeingManny doesn’t share General Patton’s hunger for victory.

But that’s not really my point here.

Here’s my point: Does it matter at all? For one thing, the quote doesn’t really mean anything. MannyBeingManny actually said all sorts of stuff — many of his other quotes indicate he does care and would like very much to win tonight — and it’s very possible that this particular quote, while not taken OUT of context, was perhaps not really placed IN context either, if you know what I mean. OK, you might not know what I mean.

Here’s an example: A football player comes off the field after a loss. He’s beat up. he’s tired. He’s frustrated. His ankle has blown up to roughly the size of a Chevy Nova, and it is wrapped up with enough ice to service most weddings. And someone asks, “What did you think of the play calling?”

And he goes off: “It’s ridiculous. We need to run the ball more. I have no idea what the coaches are thinking.” Etc.

Now, as a reporter, you obviously report those quotes. That’s the job. Those quotes are gold. And you are not reporting them out of context, not exactly, but you also will probably not write: The lineman was obviously in great pain and he was embarrassed after the loss and he had a hugely swollen ankle and couldn’t really walk, and there’s a good chance he will not feel the same way this morning when he wakes up and has to deal with the angry coaches.“ We don’t have the time (nor the transcendental understanding of other people) to put every single word in precise context.

Manny’s quotes — his first offered by his locker all year, from what I’m reading — were obviously affected by the Cleveland loss, by the fans getting on him, by whatever emotions he might have about his old team and town and so on. MannyBeingManny also likes to make people believe that nothing bothers him, nothing can get to him, he takes it all in stride, and it seems to me likely that these quotes are part of the act.

But even more to the point: Does it even matter if Manny really DOESN’T care? How much does the rah-rah, ”Our backs are against the wall,“ stuff actually help a team win games? I remember — as most fans do — the first time I started to suspect that as fans, we are sometimes more emotionally involved than the players themselves. I went out after a football game, a loss by the Cleveland Browns, and I was beyond depressed, and suddenly I saw some of the Cleveland players whooping it up in a bar on the Flats. I remember my exact feeling: ”What are they so damned happy about? Don’t they even care?“

Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe they did care but they were blowing off steam. Maybe they thought that the best way to come back after a loss was to put it behind them. I don’t know. But I do know this: The Browns won the next week, and two of the players I saw in here laughing had great games. Sure, I want to believe there’s something to caring — North Carolina coach Roy Williams calls it ”want-to,“ a noun, as in, ”Our team could use a little more want-to.“ — but if Manny hits two homers tonight to send this series back to Boston (and he’s more than capable of doing it) I suspect nobody will give a rat that he told reporters that losing would not be the end of his world.

We’re going to try to do something live tonight off of this crucial Game 5 — don’t know what yet. Maybe we’ll get a couple of blogging guest stars.

The Baseball Knight …

Posted: October 18th, 2007 | Filed under: Other Sports | 20 Comments »

Note to self: Never, ever, ever write about Chief Wahoo again.

So on Wednesday, I was sitting in the front row of the Bob Knight basketball press conference because, well, I get a huge kick out of Bob Knight. I know there are people who see Knight as a saint and others who see him as the devil, but I mostly see him as a cranky uncle who happens to be a genius at coaching basketball games. I find him to be absolutely hilarious.

(If you have not seen it — and I cannot believe there is anyone who has not seen it — you have to take 9 minutes, 41 seconds out of your day RIGHT NOW to watch these outtakes from the short-lived Bob Knight golf show. Let’s just say it’s not safe for work or church, but when I was listing off the 10 funniest things I’ve ever seen, I forgot to include this).

Anyway, I was sitting in the front row, and Knight began what was supposed to be a press conference about Texas Tech basketball by talking about the baseball playoffs. Knight grew up as a Cleveland Indians fan and he said that with Tony La Russa out of the playoffs, his best friend remaining is Indians manager Eric Wedge. Then he said, “Anybody got any questions about the American League Championship Series.”

Well, you know me (well, actually, you don’t know me, but hey, you’re here at my blog for some reason): I’m not going to pass that up.

I asked: “How important do you think it is for the Indians to win Game 5 so they don’t have to go back to Fenway Park.”

Knight said: “I think it would be damn important.”

Which I think is succinct and perfectly sums up my own feelings.

Knight then went on about baseball for about 10 minutes. It was beautiful. I’m sure I ticked off some of the other reporters there who wanted to hear about Texas Tech basketball (though they did have a chance to ask Knight basketball questions later). But let’s be honest here: How interesting is Texas Tech basketball in October anyway? You can’t pass up a chance like this. It’s like someone said (who? Mark Twain? Robert Frost? Abe Lincoln? Dane Cook?): There’s only one Actober.

So here are some of the thoughts Bob Knight has about baseball, followed by my a few of my own.

Knight on Terry Francona’s decision to not bring back Josh Beckett on three days rest:
“We will now see everything on television geared for two days to where Beckett should have pitched last night. If (Tim) Wakefield had pitched well, it would have been the greatest decision in baseball. I always get a kick out of TV people because when a play works — a guy runs a trap, you know, or a delay and it gains 12 yards — boy, what a great call that was. Well, it was a great call because someone blocked well. It wasn’t like it came out of divine intervention somewhere. And if they run the same play, and it gets thrown for a three-yard loss, boy, that was a bad call.”

My own thoughts:
I think Knight brings up a great point here, one that we all know intellectually but have trouble with emotionally (at least I do) and that is: You never know what the alternative outcome would have been. Say a manager brings in a relief pitcher into a crucial situation, and the reliever gives up the game-winning home run, My instant and gut reaction would be: “The manager made the wrong decision.“ Especially if, before he made the decision, i suspected it was the wrong call.

What I would not think is that there might not have been a right decision. The other reliever might have given up the homer too, only maybe he’s so mentally fragile that it would have wrecked him for three weeks. Or he might have blown out his arm. Or he might have walked five guys in a row. Or a woman in white might have stood up the crowd, and then the batter might have hit a baseball into a clock tower. Point is: Because we don’t know the alternative outcome, it’s easy to assume that our way would have worked better, even though there’s no evidence of that at all.

Personally, yeah, I would have brought back Beckett because i believe two things: One, in the playoffs, you take any chance you have to take to win — as an Indians fan, nothing would scare me more than seeing Josh Beckett three times in the Series. Two, I think pitchers should be brought back on three days rest more often anyway. I think a four-man rotation could still work in baseball. I really do.

But that said, let’s be honest: Francona’s strategy still might work fine for the Red Sox. Beckett is fully rested for Thursday night and gives the Sox a great chance to take this thing back to Fenway, where the series would be wide open again.

Also, I am on record saying the Indians should have brought back C.C. Sabathia on three-days rest in the Yankees Series, and that move might have cost the Indians the series. We’ll never know. We only know that Eric Wedge’s strategy of starting Paul Byrd worked out just fine.

Still, yeah, I would have pitched Beckett. And you know what? I think Knight would have too.

Knight on doing something because it’s the conventional way to do it:
”I think you get stuck with some things that are, for lack of a better word, traditional or expected. So at the end of the eighth inning, I was with two guys watching, and I said: ‘I wonder if (Rafael) Betancourt will pitch the ninth inning.’ Which he did. Which to me was a great decision because he had just gone through three guys like a hot knife through butter. And when he pitched the ninth inning, I thought maybe they’d bring in Joe Borowski because that’s the thing to do. it was good. I like that part of it.

”I used to tell Bill Parcells that football ought to investigate the guy that invented the prevent defense.“

My own thoughts:
I love this kind of talk from college basketball’s all-time winning coach. It shows that they — at least some of them — do think about some things the way us fans do. You know, so many coaches want to make it seem like they come up with their decisions through some sort of magical sixth sense they have. But they’re just human beings like all of us, and they susceptible to conventional wisdom, old wives’ tales and the fear of breaking away from tradition.

Or as one Big 12 coach so eloquently put it: ”it’s true. Sometimes we are afraid to put our nuts out there.“

Knight on the Royals’ chances of hiring Tony La Russa to be manager.
”I think it will depend on what he thinks would be the best situation for him to have a team that can contend. Which might leave the Royals out.“

My own thoughts:
Cheap shot. I was talking with Royals general manager Dayton Moore afterward, and this came up. Moore said: ”You know Bob Knight used to be one of my heroes.“ Guy’s got a dry sense of humor. Then Dayton brought up a really good point. He said: ”Funny, Bob must have thought they could contend at Texas Tech.“

Also, I would like to make it clear that I am all for Tony La Russa refusing to be the manager of the Royals, I don’t really care what his reasons are.

Knight on the Indians nickname (OK, yeah, I asked him that too):
”I think there’s a real long history of Indian culture in the state of Ohio. And half a dozen different tribes from the lake down to the Ohio River. And I think that that’s something that — I can’t speak for anybody other than myself — but I think I would be kind of proud of that. Here’s a Major League franchise that uses the name Indians, and I think that kind of reflects on the whole heritage of various Indian tribes in the state.“

My own thoughts:
Oh no, I’m not going there again. Not a chance.

Wahoo …

Posted: October 17th, 2007 | Filed under: Cleveland, Essays | 161 Comments »

The Indians are one game away from the World Series, there’s mayhem and excitement and so much to write about. But for some reason, I’m motivated tonight to write about Chief Wahoo. I wouldn’t blame you for skipping this one … not many people seem to agree with me about how it’s past time to get rid of this racist logo of my childhood.

* * *

Cleveland has had an odd and somewhat comical history when it comes to sports nicknames. The football team is, of course, called the Browns, technically after the great Paul Brown, though Tom Hanks always says it’s because everything Cleveland is brown. He has a point.

You know, it was always hard to know exactly what you were supposed to do as a “Brown” fan. You could wear brown, of course, but that was pretty limiting. And then you would be standing in the stands, ready to do something, but what the hell does brown do (for you)? You supposed to pretend to be a UPS Truck? You supposed to mimic something brown (and boy does THAT bring up some disgusting possibilities?) I mean Brown is not a particularly active color.

At least the Browns nickname makes some sort of Cleveland sense. The basketball team is called the Cavaliers, after 17th Century English Warriors who dressed nice. Perfect. The hockey team, first as a minor league team and then briefly in the NHL, was called the Barons for reasons that seem to be lost to history and logic. Another hockey team was called the Crusaders. Another hockey team was the Lumberjacks. You get the sense that at some point it was a big game to try and come up with the nickname that had the least to do with Cleveland.

Nickname guy 1: How about Haberdashers?
Nickname guy 2: No, we have some of those in Cleveland.
Nickname guy 1: Polar Bears?
Nickname guy 2: I think there are some at the Cleveland Zoo.
Nickname guy 1: How about Crusaders? They’re long dead.

Cleveland’s baseball nickname history has its own crazy history. The baseball team was, for a year in 1890, called the Cleveland Infants. My best guess is they were named that for 16-year-old pitcher Willie McGill, who won 11 games that season, but I don’t know. Maybe they brought infants to the games. Maybe they had a deal where you could use your infant as a ticket into the game.

In other years, the baseball teams were called the Blues, the Bronchos and, of course, the Spiders. We’ll get back to the Spiders in a few minutes.

Then, from 1903-1914, they were known as the Cleveland Naps. This was after the great Napoleon Lajoie, who signed with the team as a free agent in 1903. II’m guessing it was in the contract that they name the team after him; I’m surprised Roger Clemens didn’t ask for this. Though Lajoie was a great player, you do have to admire a team that would name itself after a quick afternoon sleep.

Then, in 1914, the Naps lost 102 games, and Lajoie hit .258, 80 points below his career average. He was 39 then and clearly done (he did play two more mostly ineffective years in Philadelphia), and so Cleveland needed a new nickname. You know what’s coming. This is when legend and fact blur.

* * *

The way I had always heard it growing up is that the team, needing a new nickname, went back into their history to honor an old Native American player named Louis Sockalexis. Sockalexis was, by most accounts, the first native American to play professional baseball. He had been quite a phenom in high school, and he developed into a a fairly mediocre and minor outfielder for the Spiders (he played just 94 games in three years). He did hit .338 his one good year and apparently (or at least I was told) he was beloved and respected by everybody. In this “respected-and-beloved” version, nobody ever mentions that Sockalexis may have ruined his career by jumping from the second-story window of a whorehouse. Or that he was an alcoholic.

Still, in all versions of the story, Sockalexis had to deal with horrendous racism, terrible taunts, whoops from the crowd, and so on. He endured (sort of — at least until that second story window thing). So this version of the story goes that in 1915, less than two years after the tragic death of Louis Sockalexis, the baseball team named itself the “Indians” in his honor. That’s how I heard it. And, because you will believe anything that you hear as a kid I believed it for a long while (I also believed for a long time that dinosaurs turned into oil — I still sort of believe it, I can’t help it. Also that if you stare at the moon too long you will turn into a werewolf).

In recent years, though, we find that this Sockalexis story might be a bit exaggerated or, more to the point, complete bullcrap. If you really think about it, the story never made much sense to begin with. Why exactly would people in Cleveland — this in a time when native Americans were generally viewed as subhuman in America — name their team after a relatively minor and certainly troubled outfielder?

There seems to be some evidence now that the Indians were actually named that to capture some of the magic of the Native-American named Boston Braves, who had just had their Miracle Braves season (the Braves, incidentally, were not named AFTER any Native Americans but were rather named after a greasy politican named James Gaffney, who became team president and was apparently called the Brave of Tammany Hall). This version makes more sense, certainly. There’s also a theory that the name was chosen by a fan contest in the newspapers and you KNOW they weren’t honoring Louis Sockalexis.

We do know for sure they were called the Indians in 1915, and (according to a story written by author and NYU Professor Jonathan Zimmerman) they were welcomed with the sort of sportswriting grace that would follow the Indians through the years: “We’ll have the Indians on the warpath all the time, eager for scalps to dangle at their belts.”

Oh yes, we honor you Louis Sockalexis.

What, however, makes a successful nickname? You got it: Winning. The Indians were successful pretty quickly. In 1916, they traded for an outfielder named Tris Speaker. That same year they picked up a pitcher named Stan Covaleski in what Baseball Reference calls “an unknown transaction.” There need to be more of those. And the Indians also picked up a 26-year-old pitcher on waivers named Jim Bagby. Those three were the key forces in the Indians 1920 World Series championship. After that, they were the Indians to stay.

* * *

Chief Wahoo, from what I can tell, was born much later. The first Chief Wahoo logo seems to have been drawn just after World War II. Until then, Cleveland wore hats with various kinds of Cs on them. In 1947, the first Chief Wahoo appears on a hat. He’s got the yellow face, long nose, the freakish grin, the single feather behind his head … quite an honor for Sockalexis. As a friend of mine used to say, “It’s surprising they didn’t put a whiskey bottle right next to his head.”

Three years later, they changed the Wahoo logo — I suspect this is not because people thought it was racist (nobody really cared) but because they liked a newer, cleaner version of Wahoo. This new Wahoo was another grinning, slightly-smaller-nosed, one-feather Indian, only this time his face was all red. This is, more or less, the Chief Wahoo of today.

This is also the Chief Wahoo I grew up with, though it should be said that there was a time during my childhood when the Indians seemed more or less embarrassed by Wahoo. I never thought this was because of any PC sensibilities — I think they Indians were just so bad they were looking for a new start wherever they could find one. They started going back to trying various Cs on hats throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including the unforgettable “Crooked C” blue and red catastrophe of 1975. I have to find one of those hats.

Wahoo was around though — there was a giant Wahoo on Cleveland Municipal Stadium, you could see it from a half mile away. I know I wore lots of clothes with that grinning Wahoo on them. I had no problem doing that. I liked Wahoo. To me, he was funny. Then, that’s the point, isn’t it?

You know, I remember once walking through the Holocaust Museum, and seeing all of these horrifying caricatures of Jews that they would give to kids in 1930s Germany. I looked at these things in horror for a long, long time. You know why? The logos themselves weren’t so different from Wahoo. I’m not comparing anything but the style of logos — obviously, the Jewish caricatures were a billion-billion times more sinister. They were meant to raise an entire generation of Jew-haters. Wahoo is, I think, just a stupid sports logo.

But — and this is the point — those logos, like Wahoo, were of real people only they were cartoony and goofy and exaggerated and meant to make a child laugh. They did not LOOK much different.

* * *

Here’s a newspaper quote you might enjoy, taken from the same article I mentioned earlier:

“To insist that Native Americans be given equal rights with other citizens is one thing. To insist that their particular sensibilities entitle them to exercise a kind of sensorship is quite another.”

That’s the argument for Wahoo, isn’t it? The argument is that Native Americans are being too sensitive. What’s the big deal anyway? Chief wahoo doesn’t hurt anybody. Don’t Native Americans have much bigger problems to deal with than a logo on a baseball cap? Wahoo has been around for a long time, we don’t need censorship of our sports because a few Native Americans are marching, right?

Trouble is, that quote wasn’t about Native Americans. It was actually a quote taken from Washington Post in 1947, and you can replace “Native Americans” with Negroes. It was an editorial The Post wrote about how Little Black Sambo was a fun little storybook character, and anyone who took offense to this grinning, big-lipped abomination was just acting silly and politically correct.

Symbols do matter. The funny thing is, everybody really does understand this on both sides of the argument. The Confederate Flag doesn’t just matter to those who see it as a racist symbol. It also matters to those who put in on their trucks or state flags. Neo-Nazis spray paint swastikas on Synagogues — they know it matters. You could not put a Little Black Sambo statue on your front lawn and then say, “Oh, I just appreciate the artistry.”

Wahoo is an inherentry racist symbol. Nobody could really deny this. Nobody could look at that grinning mug and say, “No, it’s really a flattering portrayal of Native Americans, who were conquered, nearly wiped off the planet by our ancestors and then forced to live on reservations.”

The thing is, I think so many of us were raised to think of Indians as cartoon characters, as movie villains, as the Native American who had a tear in his eye because people kept dumping garbage all over this great land, that we have become desensitized. I heard someone doing a comedy bit on XM Radio about Native Americans and casinos and alcohol and how nobody should care anyway because they lost the wars, and though I’ve heard similar bits (and I think I have pretty tough comedy constitution), this particular one was so cruel, so mean-spirited, so wrong, that I realized there was probably no other group in America someone could say such awful things about without drawing the Kramer backlash.

The only reason Chief Wahoo is around is because Native Americans don’t have a strong enough voice in this country to put a stop to it. When Native Americans protested at the 1997 World Series, they were mostly laughed at. Three were arrested. Is this really the kind of country we want to be? And for what? To stand up for our inherent rights to enjoy a racist sports logo?

I love Cleveland. I love the Indians and I even love Wahoo in a weird way because it is such a part of my childhood. But it is not just time to get rid of Wahoo, it is way, way past time. I don’t think this is the biggest problem facing the world, or even the 5,4993,287th biggest problem facing the world. I don’t care about political correctness either. No. It’s just wrong. Very wrong.Get rid of it. The fewer wrong things in the world, better.

And it brings me all the way back to this … why can’t we just go back to calling the team the Spiders. That’s a great name, and it’s not taken by anybody in major sports. There’s history there. It actually fits Cleveland (believe me, there are more spiders in Cleveland than Native Americans — especially those creepy Daddy Long Legs that are like walking paperclips). And there are a million incredible logo and mascot possibilities.

Even if they don’t get rid of the Indians nickname (I think you might as well go all the way) it’s definitely time to bury Wahoo. This would be a good year to make it happen. The Indians are a game away from the World Series. There is some real joy happening. There is some real exciement. The Indians have a real chance to end the longest citywide sports drought in American sports. There are a lot of good feelings in the Cleveland air. It would be a good time to bury a logo that should never have been born to begin with.

Playoff thoughts …

Posted: October 14th, 2007 | Filed under: Baseball | 19 Comments »

A few thoughts about sports, life, Jeremy Affeldt and my daughter while we wait for the Red Sox and Indians to play Game 3:

– OK, so, help me with this. I’ve now seen this Liberty Mutual, “When people do the right thing, we call it being responsible” commercial about 500 times during the playoffs — you know, the one where one woman prevents the obviously drugged up kid from wandering into traffic, and then someone else gives up their parking place, and another woman gives up her cab in the rain and so on. It’s obviously an absurd commercial for an insurance company — I really don’t care that this woman with shopping bags prevented the basketball from going into the street, I’m more concerned that you won’t screw me over when my house gets hit by lightning — but that’s not my point here.

One of the scenes shows a woman slowing down so she doesn’t run over a dog. Really? Have we fallen this far in society that now not hitting a dog with your car qualifies as extra credit on the great responsibility exam. What next? How about they show a scene where a man is in his car, and he’s looking at his handgun, pondering killing someone, and then he shakes his head and put the gun under the seat. Put some music behind that Liberty Mutual.

– Classic John Madden moment Sunday night. You know, I used to like John Madden, or at least not dislike him, and then Frank Caliendo ruined him forever for me by pointing out that the stuff he says is always stunningly, sharp-blow-to-the-head obvious. I had grown so used to his voice, especially paired with the minimalistic strains of Pat Summerall (“Handoff. Emmitt Smith. Not much”) that I had never really noticed this before.

Now, it’s like being too aware of background music — the inanity of what Madden is saying is all I think about now when he talks.

Sunday, Madden was talking about what it takes to have a successful field goal. He said, “Well, it comes down to three parts. The first part is, you need a pretty good snap. The second part, is you need a good hold. And the third part, obviously, you need a good kick.”

Oh, it’s just the THIRD part’s the numbingly obvious. The snap and hold, those things are too intricate and confusing for football fans.

– Speaking of Frank Caliendo, I’m thinking now the Frank TV commercials have become such an overwhelming pop-culture joke (even Joe Buck was making fun of them) that I’m now reversing my position and suggesting there should be more of them.

– Tim McCarver leads me to ask this question: How long can anyone be a sports color commentator on national TV without getting on the nerves of everybodyin the world? (This also could be about John Madden). I say this because for years, I liked McCarver. He was passionate about baseball, he told some good stories, he did not seem to take himself too seriously, and he occasionally said something that made me go, “Hmm, that’s an interesting point.” I mean, that’s pretty good announcing.

Well, I don’t think McCarver has changed all that much. He still has all those good qualities. But somewhere along the way, I think, we have just heard most of the points he has to make about baseball. We heard most of his good stories. I don’t know that he takes himself any more seriously than he once did, but it now SEEMS like he does, probably because he’s telling the same stories and making the same points he has for 20 years. It’s like if you followed around a commedian, even a great one like Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock, and you saw his same act 40 or 50 straight performances, at some point you would probably think, “OK, this guy’s a jerk. He just keeps saying the same thing every night. Get over yourself, pal.”

I was talking with a friend about this once … I think we decided that five years was about the maximum amount of time that a color commentator could make fresh points. After that, it’s a whole lot of rehash or, worse, bizarre efforts to say something new, like this from McCarver:

“Dustin Pedroia is a high-ball hitter. And by that I mean he’s a waist high-ball hitter, not a letters high-ball hitter.” Now what does the heck does that mean? He’s sort of a medium-high-ball hitter? He likes it high but not too high? Whah?

Incidentally, play-by-play commentators have a much longer shelf life, as long as they don’t rely on goofy shtick like catch-phrases or nicknames.

– I’m really loving this Colorado team. This is one of the best stories in recent baseball memory. They have actually won 20 of 21 games now. Incredible. I mean, sure, the National League absolutely stinks. And while I personally like the Diamondbacks — I mean, how can you not like Eric Byrnes? — they have to be the worst team to ever appear in a Championship Series, right? I mean this team finished dead last in a dreadful NL in hits, batting average and on-base percentage (this in a big-time hitters park). And the pitching staff, minus the irrepressible Brandon Webb, isn’t much good either. Yet, this team won 90 games.

ARIZONA INTERLUDE: It has been funny to hear those TBS announcers try to explain how this Diamondbacks team won 90 games. Announcers (and us columnists) don’t work very well in gray, we need absolutes. So from what I can tell, the announcers generally have given much of the credit to the Diamondbacks “Amazing fielding,” which I think perfectly qualifies for what Bill James calls the “Bullshit dump.”

You probably heard this theory: Anytime there’s a gap between what we KNOW and what we BELIEVE we have to fill this gap with something. Bill says we tend to go to the Bullshit Dump (BSD) to fill those gaps. This is usually where the talk about clutch ability comes from. Not to pick on Derek Jeter again (I really do like the guy), but he explains the concept best. We may KNOW that Derek Jeter is a good hitter who gets on base, steals a few bases, hits a few homers, plays every day and plays a statistically subpar shortstop. But we may BELIEVE that Jeter is the biggest winner in the game. So how do we get from one place to the other? Well, we reach deep into the BSD and start talking about all these vague, non-measurable things like his leadership, his remarkable influence on teammates, his penchant for never making a mistake, his ability to perform in the clutch, his knack for making the big play offensively or defensively, etc. I’m not saying here that there is NOTHING to all that. But it’s mostly BSD.

(Speaking of BSD, I wish someone — SOMEONE — would find video of Joe DiMaggio throwing to the wrong base. You know it happened).

More BSD is this Arizona defense. Yeah, they have a pretty good defense, I guess. But their defensive numbers certainly don’t stand out. They committed 106 errors, which places them in the middle of the pack. Their defensive efficiency (percentage of balls hit into play that are turned into outs) is .691, which is nothing special. They turned 157 double plays, which is OK, but not great. I don’t deny that Arizona is a brilliant defensive team. I’m just saying, I don’t see how it allowed a team that gave up 20 more runs than it scored to win 90 games.

To me, the simple truth is: There are still mysteries in baseball — and this is part of the reason many of us love it. The Diamondbacks went 32-20 in one-run games. They were fabulous in their home park (they hit 19 points higher with a lot more power at Chase Field, which is an extreme hitters park. Interestingly, though, they pitched a little better at home too). And I think some of the BSDs probably fit in there too — they did play with a lot of confidence, their defense was pretty good, they made plays at the right time, Bob Melvin did do a heck of a job, etc. And some of it just boggles the mind.

Back to Colorado. Think about this: On Sept. 15, they were 76-72. They had just lost three in a row, the last to Florida 10-2, a game where they used seven pitchers, one (Juan Morillo) who gave up an enormous grand slam to Miggy Cabrera. They were 6.5 games out with 15 games to play, which is just about reverse-dormy (I don’t know if there’s a phrase reverse-dormy, but is sounds cooler than “dead.”) Nobody, and I mean nobody, saw any greatness in this team.

And then BLAMMO. They win 14 of their last 15 games. They hit .317 with 23 homers during that stretch, averaging just about seven runs a game. Their pitchers have a 3.13 ERA during that stretch, throw two shutouts, hold opponents to 1 run four times. And this is against their own division — Dodgers, Padres, Dodgers, Dimaondbacks and finally Padres in the playoff game. Then comes the playoffs, and they obliterate Philadelphia, a team that had its own mad-dash finish. Now they lead the Diamondbacks 3-0. This is like something out of the movies.

And even though the Rockies are certainly not loaded with big names, you can at least see how they win. They honestly DO have a great defense. They set a major league record for fielding percentage this year (only 68 errors, which either means they are amazing defensively or they have a wresting referee as their official scorer … I didn’t see enough games to tell). They had a .701 defensive efficiency which was second only to the Cubs — and the Cubs play in a much smaller ballpark. They turned 178 double plays, second only to Pittsburgh which pretty much began every inning all season with a runner on first base.

Plus the Rockies led the National League in batting average and on-base percentage. They were second in runs scored. There’s something substantial about them.

– I’m also happy for my old friend, Colorado reliever Jeremy Affeldt, who for years would call me “Mr. Posnanski,” either because he’s very polite or because he wanted to make me feel about 283 years old.

I may have written about this on the blog before, but Affeldt offered me one of the most amazing sports reporting days of my life. We were in Bradenton, I think, and it was a sleepy spring training game, a Sunday afternoon if I remember right, and I was sitting down in the stands with former Royals general manager Allard Baird. There was nothing going on, I mean nothing, Scouts were slumped down, half asleep. So were umpires. It was a nothing day.

And then Jeremy Affeldt entered the game. He was a kid then, 22, and he had not pitched above Class AA. He had not exactly pitched mind-blowing baseball there (10-6, 3.91 in Wichita). He was a moderate prospect at best — I’m not sure he was on the Baseball America list (Sports Illustrated mentioned him in their preview and called him a “righty sinkerballer” which is slightly off since Affeldt is a lefty power pitcher). Well, he came into the game and first pitch, WHAM, 96 mph on the black.

“Whoa!” Allard said.

Next pitch, WHAM, 96 mph on the black (We are using lots of sound effects for today’s blog by the way. WHAM! BLAMMO! OOF!).

“Whoa,” Allard said.

Third pitch, well, there’s no sound affect for it because it started about the height of the batter’s chin and then took a four-foot dive. The batter didn’t just swing over it — he looked like he was swinging at something else. It was one of the nastiest curveballs I have ever seen up close. That was strike three.

“Whoa,” Allard said.

And suddenly, everything in the park perked up. Scouts jumped to attention. They pulled their radar guns back out. And for two innings, honest to God, it was like watching Koufax. High fastballs. Back breaking curves. Again and again. He struck out five and the other out was a foul pop-up. Except for the pop-up, nobody even touched the ball.

Now, you see that, and you will believe in a guy. There were moments when Jeremy Affeldt flashed that brilliance again (I remember a game in Minnesota when he pitched in relief and was just about that good). But I think we all know that Affeldt never turned into an unhittable force of nature. Still, whenever I see him pitch, I can’t help but think: “Maybe he will do that again.” It’s another reason I love sports.

– We’ll try to make some live comments tonight off the Indians-Red Sox playoff game (so come on back) but for now I do want to say that the 73-hour marathon Saturday night was a bit much. There may only be one October, but I can’t spend every waking hour of it watching Kevin Youkilis foul off pitches, OK? Something has to be done.

I will also say this — all game long (because of my Cleveland paranoia) I was sure the Indians would lose Saturday. Absolutely sure. It was that feeling in the pit of your stomach, and it was there for all 73 hours (time actually stands still when Rafael Betancourt pitches, so it was even longer than 73 hours) … UNTIL … Eric Gagne came in from the bullpen.

A few years ago, I went to the Olympics in Greece when my oldest daughter, Elizabeth, was only two years old. I was away from her for three weeks, and it was awful. For three weeks, I thought about how much she was changing, how much I was missing, how bad a father I was, how desperately I missed her. And then, finally, the Olympics ended, and I took the long plane ride, and then another, and finally I arrived at the airport, and I walked on the concourse, and there she was, mt Elizabeth, and she ran into my arms and shouted “Daddy” and it was just about the best feeling I’ve ever felt.

Yeah, that’s just about how happy I was to see Eric Gagne.

LeBron’s Hat …

Posted: October 12th, 2007 | Filed under: Cleveland, Essays | 27 Comments »

This is a brutally long blog about my history as a Cleveland sports fan. It is self-absorbed, certainly, and I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you skipped over it. But it’s also thousands of words (footnotes and all), and I have to do something with it. (I have added a few footnotes to clarify some of the Cleveland heartbreaks).

* * *

Things have changed in Cleveland. Things have changed all over. When I was kid growing up in on the East side — in South Euclid, if you want to be specific, home of Steve Stone (1980 Cy Young Winner), David S. Ward (director of Major League) and Eric Carmen (Hungry Eyes) — I’m pretty sure it was in the city ordinance that any locally born minor caught rooting for a team outside the city limits was to be fined and, on second offense, publicly caned. I suspect it was like this all over.(1) You rooted for your hometown teams or else, hell, there was no or else, no other option, you rooted for your hometown team because that was how it was.

Now, of course, it’s different, a topic which has been analyzed by us sports old-timers much in the same way sociologists have analyzed the development and modernization of the Kondh tribe. Kids root for whoever the heck they want to root for now, we have decided, because they have access to all the teams, free agency has changed the landscape (leagues, especially the Major Leagues, are set up more to root for individual players rather than teams), America has become more homogenized, etc. It also could be that there’s no loyalty left in the damn world.

All of this might explain how LeBron James, who grew up in Akron (which is just South of Cleveland) became a fan of the New York Yankees (which is nowhere near Akron, either geographically or emotionally) and therefore felt the need to wear a Yankees hat to the Indians-Yankees playoff game.

But I could not care less WHY he wore the Yankees hat (an Akron kid who grows up to be a Yankees fan defies explanation) as why it had such an enormous effect on Cleveland sports fans. I’m really wondering why the heck it ticked me off. Who really cares what teams LeBron James roots for? He’s a brilliant basketball player. He carried — in every possible way that verb can be used — the Cleveland Cavaliers to their first NBA Finals last year. He’s a Cleveland hero. What possible difference does it make if publicly roots for the Yankees or Dallas Cowboys or practices voodoo in his home or believes, deep down, that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame should have been put in Detroit? Who cares?

I care. It flat ticked me off. And when I tried to come to grips with this, I realize that I have hard time coming up with a sensible reason why it ticked me off. It’s not logic, I guess. It’s emotion.

I read a letter to the editor from some Boston transplant who could not understand the fuss over LeBron — he wrote that Tom Brady was seen wearing a Yankees hat, and after a brief uproar, things quickly died down in New England. People even laughed about it. That nutty Tom Brady. “What difference does it make anyway?” the Boston guy asks. “We hate the Yankees more anyway.”

But he can’t understand that Cleveland and Boston fans are just different, just as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh fans are different, or San Diego and San Francisco fans, New York Mets and New York Yankees fans. Tom Brady isn’t from Boston. He doesn’t stand for the same things.

The feeling we felt about LeBron — or at least the feeling I felt — wasn’t anger or hatred or even betrayal. It was more like this red-hot disappointment. He knows us. He knows what it has been like. He knows how many times his hometown sports teams have crashed to the ground the last 40 years. And he wore a freaking Yankees hat to the freaking game.

* * *

Cleveland Municipal Stadium, as we used to call it (all three words) had its own smell. All stadiums have their own swirl of scents, of course, popcorn, stale beer, sweat, cut grass, chewed gum, old shoes. Cleveland Municipal Stadium had all those, but it also featured a mystery smell, a constantly-shifting fragrance that sometimes burned the eyes like chlorine and in the next moment smelled sickly sweet, like burnt cotton candy. The scent undoubtedly blew in from Lake Erie — which was then a bouillabaisse of Lex Luthor chemicals and unimaginable garbage — and this scent mingled with the rust and asbestos and despair to create a smell that was new and unforgettable.

This was the indefinable smell of my childhood. it was the smell of losing.

Most people, I suspect, do not realize that Cleveland is actually in its second phase of losing. This current phase — which we can call the Heartbreak Phase — began on January 11, 1987, three days after my 20th birthday. This was the beginning of adulthood. You can, if you want, pinpoint the precise moment when everything Cleveland changed. It was on third down and 18, with Cleveland leading Denver by a touchdown. The wind howled, and the people in Cleveland Municipal Stadium drank schnapps and huddled close and made a wailing sound that could only come from frozen men and women who had known disappointment. Up to that very instant, we all believed Cleveland could win. We had no idea we were rooting, passionately, for WIle E Coyote.

John Elway zipped a 20-yard pass to Mark Jackson, and this led to culmination of The Drive (2), which led to The Fumble (3), which led to Michael Jordan soaring over Craig Ehlo (4), which led to the bitter face of Bill Belichick in his pre-genius period (5), which led to the Browns skipping town (6), which led to the Indians losing to Atlanta in the one freaking World Series the Braves decided not to choke (7), which led to Jose Mesa and Tony Fernandez and that horrifying Game 7 (8), which led to a return of some new team wearing Jim Brown’s uniform (9), which led to the LeBron Sweep (10), which led to present day and the eventual high crime of LeBron himself wearing that Yankees hat to an Indians playoff game.

This is the phase people talk about, but the losing actually has a beginning. It wasn’t until Elway came along that we Clevelanders realized that we were cursed. Until then, we thought our teams just sucked. It’s a crucial distinction. Norv Turner sucks. Marty Schottenheimer is cursed. The first makes you want to throw a brick at something. The second makes you wish someone would throw a brick at you. Two very different feelings.

* * *

When I was 5 and wandered into sports consciousness in Cleveland — this would be 1972 — Cleveland still saw itself as a winning sports town that had fallen out of fighting shape, a once brilliant ex-jock with a beer belly. In the 1950s, the Cleveland Browns had played in the NFL Championship Game seven times. They had won the championship game in 1964, they had reached the championship again in 1965. Everyone in 1972 still remembered exactly what it was like to watch Jim Brown. The Indians were also good most of the 1950s, but were generally shut out by the Stengel-Mantle Yankees. They were erratic but reasonably interesting in the 1960s. The great and crabby Bob Feller still bounced around town and spoke to Optimist clubs and Little League banquets. He was available for Bar Mitzvahs.

The Cleveland NBA team was brand new, and nobody knew what to think of them yet. There had been one of those never-a-good-idea newspaper nickname contests, and the team was eventually named “Cavaliers” after those dashing well-dressed supporters of King Charles I in the English Civil War of 1600. There is no explanation how this name won, in large part because, seriously, what explanation could possibly answer that question? The first Cavaliers logo was an odd drawing of one the English dandies (I always suspected it was Jacob Astley, but that’s just me, I could be wrong, I don’t want to start a bar fight with you Henry Wilmot fans) brandishing his sword toward a basketball roughly the color of yellow snow, the color being the only authentic Cleveland item in the logo.

In any case, there was no sense of sports doom in Cleveland then. True, the Indians had just lost 100 games, the Browns were slowly, but steadily, sinking into the abyss, and the Cavaliers had a drawing of the fourth musketeer on their jerseys. The irrepressible feeling, though, was that the city was mired in a minor and temporary sports slump (and a minor and temporary economic slump as well) but it was only that, a slump, and the sun would rise again. That feeling of hope was best described by a hauntingly beautiful jingle that used to play on a Channel 5 commercial throughout my youth.

The best things in life are right here in Cleveland
From the Playhouse to the Karamu (11)
From the parks to the Cleveland zoo
We’re a big league city with little leagues too!
University Circle, Blossom and the Heights
Make it clear! Very clear!
That Cleveland’s a great place to live!
‘Cause all the best things in life are here! (12)

I would say it wasn’t until about 1977 that we, as a city, realized that no, this wasn’t just a minor dip for Cleveland. We had, rather unexpectedly (at least it seemed unexpected to me as a child) become the nation’s punch line. The Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, Lake Erie was specifically called out in Dr. Seuss’ odd environmental book “The Lorax” (the Lake Erie reference was later taken out), the mayor’s hair caught fire, the banks withdrew credit from the city. I knew things were bad when Cleveland was dissed on television show “One Day at a Time.” In this scene, Schneider the super, for reasons that defy memory and reason, ended up locked in a room with a Soviet dissident.

Schneider: “So what is it like in Siberia.”
Dissident: “It is cold and terrible place.”
Schneider: “Oh yeah, we have Cleveland.”

By 1980, when I was 13, the Browns gave us our one hope. Everything else was dismal. The weather. The gas lines. The roads. The Indians were terrible and more or less bankrupt. The Cavaliers were still wearing those horrendous uniforms, and they were owned by the late Ted Stepien, a key figure of my childhood if for no other reason than he allowed me to see a halftime show called “Fat Guy (Eating Beer Cans).

* * *

My favorite Ted Stepien moment had to be the interview he did after he decided to drop softballs from the top of the Terminal Tower, the tallest building in Cleveland. He did this, allegedly, to promote the pro softball league that he had created (13), but I always suspected that he just wanted to see what would happen if he dropped softballs from the top of the Terminal Tower.

Here’s what happened: He broke a woman’s wrist, broke a windshield and grazed another guy’s shoulder. It was like a horror movie. Softball Attack! Afterward, they interviewed him, and he had this great sheepish look on his face that said, so clearly, ”Um, I guess that was kind of a dumb idea.“

Stepien, from what I could tell, was not a bad guy. He was not a good guy, but not bad. He was an advertising man from Pittsburgh who had once been a good high school basketball player, and from my perspective he mainly seemed surprised that he had actually made enough money to own his own team. He was a fan at heart, which sounds like a good thing for an owner to be, but it really isn’t. Fans think they know. Stepien was sure he knew. And he knew absolutely nothing.

He also had a huge ego, which completed the picture of incompetence. One of the first things he did was fire Cleveland icon Joe Tait — the greatest basketball announcer I have ever heard — because Tait had the audacity to publicly question a couple of the obviously bad Stepien’ ownership moves. Tait (I can still hear him now, ”The line, the lane, the shot, it drops.“ ”Pass outside to Bingo Smith, top of the key, it’s the Bingo Rainbow, and it’s good!“) eventually returned, but not before Stepien had made the Cavaliers the all-time joke in sports.

Here’s how bad Ted Stepien was an owner: As soon as he became owner, he hired Bill Musselman to be the coach. Musselman was a generally successful but indisputably insane coach (14) who once said that defeat is worse than death. His drawing card was defense — his team at Ashland University once allowed teams 33 points per game — which you might recall wasn’t an especially important feature of early 1980s NBA basketball. The Cavaliers, a motley bunch anyway, could not get it, and they won only 25 of Musselman’s first 71 games. Stepien fired him, which was somewhat more humane than dropping him from the top of the Terminal Tower (though you suspect Musselman would have preferred that).

Here’s the thing: The very next year, Stepien had Chuck Daly as his coach. So he fired Daly and hired Musselman BACK. When asked why, he said (according to Terry Pluto): ”Bill won 25 games with a team of Mike Bratz, Roger Phegley, Mike Mitchell, Bill Laimbeer and, really, no bench.“ Musselman won two of 23 games and was canned again.

Of course, Stepien became famous for his extraordinarily bad trades. The NBA still has the remrakable ”Stepien Rule“ which prevents teams from trading their first round pick in back-to-back years. Stepien traded away so many high draft picks from 1982-1985 — the league office finally had to step in and announce that it would need to approve all Cleveland trades. Before they did that, though, Stepien traded four of his high picks to the Dallas Mavericks, who apparently would have someone manning the phones more or less 24 hours a day just in case Stepien called. He also traded Bill Laimbeer and James Edwards to Detroit, where they won a championship for Chuck Daly, the man Stepien had called, ”Not a proven NBA coach“ just before firing him.

One year, I remember Stepien trying to talk a 50-year old Wilt Chamberlain out of retirement.

Stepien did, however, keep the Cavaliers somewhat solvent, and he did hire Fat Guy (Eating Beer Cans) who was, yeah, a fat guy who ate beer cans. I seem to recall that the guy wanted to be known as ”Superfan“ (though his only known superpower was his uncanny ability to eat aluminum, which might be tough to build a series around). He would move around the Richfield Arena (another genius move — the Cavs played at an arena in the middle of nowhere between Cleveland and Akron), and he ate beer cans to the confusion and eventual boredom of the 432 people who would go to Cavs games in those years. I mean how many times could you see a man eat a beer can? Stepien did hire cheerleaders called the Teddy Bears, who remain to this day the closest thing to actual strippers to perform at an NBA game. And so went my Cleveland childhood.

* * *

In 1977, the Cleveland Indians did not exactly make reservations in hotels. Instead, they would arrive in town, and the team bus would drive around and stop at different hotels until they found one where the team’s credit was still good. This would sometimes take two or three stops.

When I heard this shocking bit of news from several members of that team, a number of things began to make sense. There was always something slightly pathetic about cheering for the Indians … rooting for them always felt a little bit like rooting for a doomed restaurant in a bad location that never had any people in it. The newspaper reports sometimes hinted that the Indians were on the brink of collapse, that they were looking perhaps at moving to another city, that the owners were really, really broke. But I believe now they kept the worst from us because, hey, it was bad enough being a Cleveland fan.

For instance: The team really did refuse to put air conditioners in the home clubhouse … the movie ”Major League“ was much more of a documentary than any of us knew at the time.

One year, pitcher Wayne Garland — who actually signed a big-money free agent offer with Cleveland during those dark years — bought air conditioners for everyone in the clubhouse. His pungent explanation years later: ”It was bleeping hot.“ Ownership tried to fine him for putting in those air conditioners.

Nothing made sense with those Indians teams. It wasn’t that they were comically bad (for much of my childhood, they hovered somewhere close to .500, though, of course, they were never good) but the entire experience was comical. No matter where you sat in Cleveland Municipal Stadium, your view was blocked by a metal beam. It was architectural genius. I.M. Pei could not have done better. And so you would have to lean back and forth all game long, back and forth, back and forth, like people praying at the Wailing Wall.

Then, you had to keep moving because it was cold inside Cleveland Municipal Stadium. It could be July, it could be 98 degrees everywhere else including the stadium parking lot, but once inside, the wind kicked up off the lake, and it would instantly drop to 12-degrees below zero. Then, the wind would dissipate, and the sun would blaze down, and it would be 117 degrees. Then the wind kicked up again. All around you could see rust and dripping asbestos and exposed and cut wires that would occasionally spark. The floor stuck like fly paper. It would have been a good place to interrogate people.

Who could enjoy a game in this atmosphere? Real Clevelanders. They would wear short-sleeve shirts and laugh at the shivering tourists. These were tough men and women, they had to be tough, they had STAYED in Cleveland even as hundreds of thousands fled the city throughout the 1970s for places South and West where the potholes did not eat cars and the sun occasionally burst through the smoke and the city’s No. 1 resource was not brown slush. I loved these people who stayed. Still do. Real Clevelanders. They all seemed to have incomprehensible jobs like bending refrigerators or blowing the crushing carburetors into dust with their bare hands. They lived hard lives. They drank beer that smelled like gasoline out of wax paper cups, and they smoked Marlboros and Kents without filters, and would take a nip now and again from a flask containing schnapps powerful enough to burn through metal, and they believed that this time, definitely this time, Rick Manning would come through.

We all loved Indians center fielder Rick Manning (still do) and I figure that this is because there always seemed this chance that he would, like the city itself, emerge into superstardom. Manning was fast, and handsome, and he seemed big enough to hit with a little power, and he played the game hard, and he won a Gold Glove his second year … it always seemed possible that he would turn into Duke Snider or Fred Lynn or someone heroic. Unfortunately, he wore No. 43, and that’s what he would do too often, it was 4-3, 4-3, all day long. He made 821 outs to second base in his career, and while I don’t know if this is a lot compared to other players, I’ll bet I saw 700 of them.

Duane Kuiper was my personal hero because of the way he dived for every ground ball, including those hit to third base. But there were any number of classic characters. Rico Carty would not slide because he kept his wallet in his back pocket (”I don’t trust nobody,“ he would say). Manager Frank Robinson was utterly despised by everybody on the team and once got into a still legendary fight with the immense Jim Bibby. Third baseman Buddy Bell was tougher than steel wool and he once played on a broken toe by cutting open his shoe and painting his sock red. And so on. To a kid, these players always seemed on the brink of doing something spectacular. The Indians from 1972 to 1993 never once finished higher than fourth place.

And unlike the tough refrigerator-benders at the ballpark, most people in Cleveland stayed away then. They saw the Indians as just another thing in the city to be embarrassed about. I remember once going to Cedar Point (”The Amazement Park!“) and being on the boat ride that the floated to Western World. Suddenly we passed a tribe of wild Natives who were shooting at us, and the guide said, ”Oh, don’t worry, those are Cleveland Indians, and they can’t hit anything.“ The laughter on the boat was loud and pained.

* * *

Whenever something even slightly positive happened, we in Cleveland tended to overreact. In 1976, for instance, the Cavaliers made a rather unlikely run to the Eastern Conference finals, where they were unceremoniously booted by the unquenchable Boston Celtics in six games. It was a nice story. In Cleveland we refer to it, even now, as ”The Miracle of Richfield.“

In 1980, a 25-year-old Indians rookie named Joe Charboneau hit 23 home runs and won the Rookie of the Year and, as a nice bonus, could open beer bottles with his eye socket. A great little story. We called him Super Joe Charboneau and determined that he deserved his own song:

Who’s the newest guy in town?
Go Joe Charboneau
Turns the ballpark upside down
Go Joe Charboneau

Super Joe hurt his back and only played 70 more agony-filled games, though I’m told he would later would be seen playing softball around town.

So, this might give you an idea just how important the 1980 Cleveland Browns were to us. They remain the only legitimate title contender of my childhood. I’m not certain, looking back, how legitimate they really were. The defense was leaky and led by the still insane but now aging Lyle Alzado, who would simply change the coach’s plays whenever the mood struck him. The coach, Sam Rutigliano, was a likable but certifiable son of Brooklyn immigrants who used to say very uncoach-like things like, ”Running the football is boring.“ The quarterback was a Southern California guy named Brian Sipe who had such a weak arm that when he threw the ball into the wind, it would sometimes come back to him. The Browns also had a straight-on kicker named Don Cockroft, and he had a herniated disc, which meant that pretty much any field goal longer than 13 yards was an adventure.

What they did have, though, was a little bit of magic. We called them the Kardiac Kids — I never liked that cute spelling of Kardiac, that seemed very un-Cleveland like — and they had this uncanny knack for winning (and losing) games in the final seconds. The Browns went 11-5 in 1980, and they won nine of those by a touchdown or less. They were exactly what we needed in Cleveland, a thrilling team in orange pants that passed the ball all over the field and somehow won in the end. We gave our hearts to them totally. We were sure that they were charmed. We were sure that something good was finally going to happen to us. We felt sure that we deserved that.

Then the Browns played Oakland on a brutally cold day in Cleveland, and it all came crashing down. Don Cockroft, predictably, missed two field goals and had an extra point blocked. Brian Sipe’s passes fluttered in the wind (he was intercepted three times). Still, we believed, we believed until the end, and sure enough the Browns moved the ball deep into Oakland territory, final seconds of the game, and that’s when Sam Rutigliano called Red Right 88 and told Sipe that if it wasn’t there, if the receiver wasn’t open, he was to throw the ball into Lake Erie, and Cockroft would try once more to kick the field goal.

It wasn’t there. Sipe threw the ball instead into the arms of Oakland defensive back Mike Davis.

Ali said that the Thrilla in Manilla was the closest thing he ever felt to dying. That was the sports feeling an entire city felt when that last pass quivered into the Lake Erie wind and died. You could feel the ground sink three inches when Sipe threw that interception. It was only sports, but it was all we had. There would be a whole lot of heartbreak after that in Cleveland — Drive, Fumble, Jordan, Mesa. But to me that moment remains. That was the moment that told me, life is not like the movies, cartoons or wrestling matches. The good guys lose.

”I love you Brian,“ Rutigliano said to Sipe as he came off the field.

* * *

So that’s what it has been like in Cleveland. Comedy. Tragedy. Stupidity. Agony. Right now, I am watching Cleveland lose to Boston 10-3 in the first game of the American League Championship Series, and I realize that at this point, as a Clevelander, after 40 years, you come to know the awful truth. Pain’s coming.

And that’s why LeBron’s hat mattered. Because even if he really does love the Yankees, even if he is secretly related to Mickey Mantle, even if George Steinbrenner paid his family’s mortgage during hard times, even if his great grandfather handed him a Babe Ruth autographed baseball on his deathbed — he still should know better. The Yankees have won a lot. The Yankees will win again. Cleveland’s a great place to live. ‘Cuz the best things in life are here.

* * *
Footnotes:

(1) t should be noted that loyalty was ESPECIALLY true in Cleveland in the 1970s. Here’s my opinion why: I think people in the pre-ESPN, NFL Ticket, MLB.com mosaic days chose their sports teams based on three main criteria:

1. Geography.
2. Media access.
3. Birthright.

Geography is obvious; you chose the team in your town. Media access is connected, but a little bit different. In Charlotte, N.C. — before the Carolina Panthers came to town — most people were either Atlanta Falcons fans or Washington Redskins fans, and this is because those were the teams on television pretty much every week. There are Yankees fans all over America (and Cardinals fans all over the Midwest) because that’s who they saw on television and heard on the radio.

The third reason, birthright, comes down to the simple truth that kids generally root for their parents team.

Well, if you grew up in Cleveland, you were hammered by all three reasons. There was a very strong geographical connection to the city; unlike other places I’ve seen, in Cleveland it didn’t matter if you were from South Euclid, Chagrin Falls, Chardon, University Heights or Chagrin. Someone asked you were you were from, you said: Cleveland.

The media access was strong too … I don’t recall reading much about other teams in the local papers. And of course there was no Internet surfing, no SportsCenter highlights, no expanded box scores, no nothing. I suppose you COULD have been an Orioles or Rams fan in Cleveland, but it would not have been easy.

The third, birthright, is especially key in Cleveland. As far as I knew, everybody’s father rooted for Cleveland teams. The reason now is obvious: Nobody was moving TO Cleveland in the 1970s. People were only moving away. In Charlotte, Atlanta, Phoenix, places like that, you could meet 100 people, and they would be from 85 different cities, and maybe 10 percent would be natives. Maybe. In Cleveland, everyone was a native or they had recently arrived (like my parents) from some place like Minsk or Lublin, which did not have a baseball team.

(2) The Drive represents the 98-yard drive, final minutes drive that Denver quarterback John Elway led against Cleveland in the 1987 AFC Championship Game. It was a torturous series of plays — the Browns were leading by a touchdown and needed only to keep the Broncos out of the end zone to go to their first Super Bowl. They did not stop him, which not only created heartbreak in Cleveland, but it also launched the heroic career of Elway, who would prove to be persistent pain in Cleveland’s neck (not to mention Kansas City).

(3) The Fumble represents the last-minute fumble of Cleveland Ernest Byner just as he was about to go into the end zone to tie Denver in the 1988 AFC Championship Game. The Browns had trailed all game … what hurt most is that Byner had played heroically all game, and at first glance he appeared to score the tying touchdown. So for a fan it sounded like this: ”YES! YES! WAIT! NO! NO! NOOOOOOO!“

(4) The Cavaliers led Chicago by a point in the final seconds of their clinching playoff game when Michael Jordan set off his career of heroics by getting the in-bounds pass, rising for his jump shot, hanging in the air long enough to allow his defender Craig Ehlo to jump and then fall back to earth, and then making the winning shot. Until that instant, Cleveland and Chicago seemed to be very similar teams. After that instant, Chicago won six NBA titles while Cleveland, naturally, won zero.

(5) Before Bill Belichick became the super-genius of sports as coach of New England, he was a disastrous and bitter coach in Cleveland. He ran the team much in the same way Richard Nixon ran the White House … I remember once going to work in the press box, which overlooked the practice field. About five minutes before practice started, a public relations person came in and, very theatrically, pulled down all the shades so that we would not be able to see practice. I have no problem with the concept — many coaches don’t allow reporters to see practice — it was the theatrics that was pure Belichick. The team did not win a single playoff game in Belichick’s tenure as Browns coach, and he also theatrically cut hometown hero, quarterback Bernie Kosar. When asked about the uproar, he said, ”I don’t care what people think.“ Good man.

(6) At the end of the 1994 season, longtime Browns owner Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, where they became the Ravens and, shortly thereafter, won the Super Bowl.

(7) In 1995, the Braves beat the Indians in the World Series. It remains the only World Series title during the Braves era of winning 14 division titles. They won when Tom Glavine threw a one-hit shutout in Game 6 without, as any Cleveland fan will tell you, throwing a single strike all game long.

(8) In 1997, Cleveland lost Game 7 of the World Series to Florida even though they went into the ninth inning with the lead. There were a whole herd of goats, starting with Jose Mesa, who gave up two hits and a sac fly in the ninth to allow the Marlins to tie the game. The Indians never came even close to scoring in the 10th or 11th innings. And in the bottom of the 11th, Bobby Bonilla singled, and then Craig Counsell hit a ground ball to Cleveland second baseman Tony Fernandez, who flat booted it. This eventually led to Edgar Renteria’s heart-crushing and run-scoring single the ended things.

(9) The Cleveland Browns returned in 1999 with the same uniforms, owners of their own history (this was supposed to placate Cleveland fans) but to me they have never been the same. I know many Cleveland fans are over the Modell move, and they feel the same about the new Browns as they did the old Browns. I’m just not one of these people. I can’t help it.

(10) In 2006, LeBron James almost singlehandedly led the Cavaliers to the NBA Finals, which electrified the city. Sadly, though, the Cavs were swept by San Antonio and the Spurs were so dominating, so overwhelming, so much better than Cleveland, it sort of took some of the fun out of it.

(11) The Karamu House was/is the nation’s oldest African American theater. I did not know that then either. I would have sworn they were singing “Katmandu.”

(12) This was actually better than a later Cleveland public relations campaign, “New York may be the Big Apple, but Cleveland’s a plum.” After a while, in Cleveland, you just lost all sense of irony. … The shame of it is, I could not find a video of this commercial on You Tube, which has to be one of the few times that YouTube has let me down. Then again, it was not a complete failure; I did find this extraordinary Channel 5 commercial which, I believe, features more or less the same tune. It’s definitely the same orchestra. Enjoy!)

(13) This was the North American Softball League, a slow-pitch league that featured the greatest collection of beer guts in the history of sports (and this includes Charlie Kerfeld’s prime). The greatest player in my memory was, of course, a Clevelander, named Mighty Mike Macenko, who could be seen smoking a cigarette as he swung his bat in the on-deck circle. Mighty Mike hit like 583 home runs that season. I personally saw him hit eight home runs in a single game. He said that was an off-day.

(14) Musselman once was so angry about his team’s lack of passion that he played his starters all 48 minutes in an ABA game. Another time, he was so angry that a referee made bad calls that he chased the referee to his locker room and banged on the door. This may not sound like an unusual thing except the calls the referee made were IN HIS FAVOR. He kept screaming how the referee screwed the other coach, and it wasn’t right. You had to admire that sort of insanity.

Gundian Prose …

Posted: October 11th, 2007 | Filed under: Other Sports, Pop Culture | 12 Comments »

You have, by now, undoubtedly seen and heard the rant of Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy. If you are like me (an unlikely proposition) you have seen and heard it many, many times. I don’t think one day has gone by since Gundy went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs that I have not popped over to You Tube, clicked it on, if only to watch a snippet, if only to hear the man say, “This was brought to me by a mother … of children.” It is, possibly, one of the ten funniest things I have ever seen in my life.

Nominees for funniest things I’ve seen in my life include:
– The Stonehenge scene in “Spinal Tap.”
– The Marshall McLuhan scene in “Annie Hall.”
– Richard Pryor’s boxing bit.
– “The sea was angry that day” soliloquy on Seinfeld.
– Bookman’s rant on Seinfeld.
– Any number of Chris Rock routines/rants
– The first AFLAC duck commercial
– Any number of Jon Stewart routines/rants
– The “Zip it” scene in Austin Powers.
– Any number of Homer Simpson lines
– Any number of Norm lines on Cheers
– A joke someone told me at camp when I was 12 years old that I know ended with the punch line, “I said PING PONG balls.”
– This Jake Johannsen bit I once saw about him renting a car.
– The first time I saw/heard Frank Caliendo’s John Madden impression.
– This comedy bit I heard on XM radio where the guy (don’t remember his name) was talking about his 6-year-old daughter and how she was a bleepin’ bleephole.
– The final scene of “Wall Street” when Charlie Sheen turned to his father and, in one of the worst bits of acting I have ever seen in a movie that did not star Sofia Coppola, said: “I’m going to jail Dad, and you know it.” I don’t know why it struck me as funny, but even now I think about it and laugh.
– Any number of Dave Barry lines, one being the time when he was talking about how men and women can’t play softball together because — I’m paraphrasing here because I don’t have the book handy — “men know that if it came down to catching a fly ball or saving an infant’s life, the woman would save the infant without even considering if there were men on base.”
– The introduction to “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”
– The Black Knight scene in “Holy Grail.”

OK, I don’t know how we got off track there. I could spend all night on this, and I’m supposed to be writing about Mike Gundy. The point I was trying to make, I think, is that I’m easily entertained.

Back to Gundy. I’m not going to rehash the whole story here because that has been done many times already, and you already know it. Quickly, a columnist (and a friend since she was in college) Jenni Carlson wrote a column about the Oklahoma State quarterback that, at best, pushed to the edge of good taste and at worst drove over that edge at about 70 mph. She essentially used observed scenes to call the quarterback a Mama’s boy. Different people reacted different ways. Gundy responded after the game with the now-famous rant.

A lot of people have tried to take a serious look at this situation — what does it mean, how does it explain the combustive reporter-subject relationship, what does it tell us about the media’s treatment of college athletes, have we gone too far, are coaches too controlling, where do women sportswriters stand in today’s society, etc, These are all worthwhile questions, and I applaud anyone who wants to take them on.

It’s just that … well, this rant is so ridiculously funny.

To me, trying to learn lessons about journalism and sportsmanship from this rant is like trying to use “Snakes on a Plane” to discuss the issues of the Airline Industry today (and animal safety) or analyzing Tim Conway’s “Dorf on Golf” to get a deeper understanding of the divide between rich and poor in America.

So, what I want to do instead is publish Mike Gundy’s discussion of journalism ethics and parenting in this free-form prose style. I call it:

I’m a Man
By Mike Gundy

I wanna talk about this article
right here.
If anybody hasn’t read this article
I don’t read it
But this was brought to me
By a mother
Of children.

I think this is worth reading
Let me tell you what I’m talking about
This article
Three fourths of this
Is inaccurate
Fiction.
And this article embarrasses me to be involved
With athletics
Tremendously.

And that article
Had to be written by a person who doesn’t have a child.
And has never had a child
That’s had their heart broken
And come home upset.
And had to deal with the child
When he is upset.

And kick
a person
when he’s down

Here’s all that kid did
He goes
to class
He’s respectful
to the media
He’s respectful
to the public
And he’s a good kid
And he’s not a professional athlete
And he doesn’t deserve to be kicked when he’s down.

If you have a child someday
You’ll understand how it feels
But you obviously don’t have a child
I do

If your child goes down the street
And somebody makes fun of him
because he dropped a pass
in a pickup game
Or says
He’s fat
And he comes home
crying
To his Mom
You’d understand.

But you haven’t had that
But someday you will
And when your child
comes home
You’ll understand.

If you want to go after an athlete
One of my athletes
You go after one
That doesn’t do the right thing
You don’t downgrade him
Because he does everything right
And may not play as well on Saturday

And you
let us
make
that decision

That’s why I don’t read the newspaper!
Because it’s
Garbage.
And the editor that let it come out Is
Garbage.

Attacking an amateur athlete
For doing everything right.
And then you want to write articles
About guys that don’t do things right
And downgrade them
the ones that do make plays.

Are you kidding me?
Where are we at
In society
Today?

Come after me!
I’m a man!
I’m 40!
I’m not a kid.
Write something about me
Or our coaches.

Don’t write about a kid that does everything right
Thats heart’s broken.
And then say that the coaches said
He was scared
That ain’t true!
And then to say
That we made that decision because of Donovan Woods.
Because he threatened to transfer.
That’s not true!
So get your facts straight.

And I hope someday
You have a child
And somebody downgrades him
And belittles him
And you have to look him in the eye and say
“You know what?
“It’s OK.
They’re supposed to be mature adults
But they’re really not.”

Who’s the kid here?
Who’s the kid here?
Are you kidding me?

That’s all I’ve got to say.
Makes me wanna puke.

Heartbreak City …

Posted: October 10th, 2007 | Filed under: Cleveland | 31 Comments »

OK, we are ready to unveil the official HCQ Ranking for 2007 — that would be the “Heartbreak City Quotient,” — where I use my extraordinary statistical skills to tell you, to the final 100th of a point, just how much heartbreak you are dealing with as a sports fan in your hometown. I would explain to you just how I came upon these numbers, except, well, I believe my ninth grade math teacher reads this site, and if she saw the kind of damage I“m doing to numbers, she might never leave the house again.

I will tell you that I tried to take numerous things into account to measure heartbreak.

1. How many championships (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) the last 40 years (well 42 years actually — I’ll explain in a bit).
2. How long it has been since the last championship
3. How many horrendous seasons those teams/fans endured.
4. How many “near misses” the fans have had to endure such as the Drive, Buckner’s bungle, Bartman, the tuck, etc.
5. Various complicating factors such as teams leaving town, athletes leaving town, the quality of ownerships, the kind of weather fans have to endure, the prominence of any specific athletes (one Michael Jordan cane make up for a lot of Cubs losses), style of play, etc.

I will also tell you that this is an attempt to rank CURRENT pain. Before 2004, Red Sox fans would have, of course, contributed major suffering to the city’s HCQ ranking. But the Sox won the World Series, and they have great ownership that spends money, they have my buddy Bill James, they have Ben Affleck as a fan (OK, that’s a negative) — it’s awfully good to be a Red Sox fan these days. I’m not discounting the suffering years Red Sox — I’m just saying a championship washes a whole lot of that way.

This is a ranking for well-rounded fans — meaning fans who more or less equally love all their teams. If you live in Detroit, for instance, but don’t like basketball, baseball or hockey, your score would be a lot higher.

One last thing — I have tried to make the score so that long ago suffering — say, the Miracle at the Meadowlands for Giants fans — doesn’t score nearly as high as more recent suffering, say the Music City Miracle. The reason for this is probably obvious, but to spell it out, there are a lot of Giants fans who were not even ALIVE for the Miracle @ Meadowlands, which depresses me but is, nonetheless, reality.

One last, last thing: I have not had time to go over these numbers, so if you are a fan of one of these teams and see factual errors — forgotten championships, misplaced championships, pointless Tony La Russa bashing whatever — and are so moved, you can email me at “joe att joeposnanski dawt com.” (Did you see how I misspelled some words there to try and fool those email spambots. Unfortunately, you probably have no idea where to email me now. So it goes).

Here we go. In reverse order. We rank 26 cities (the perfect HCQ score is 10.0). I apologize in advance to Tampa, Phoenix and a few other cities that simply did have enough years of pain to register on the scale.

26. Boston/New England
HCQ: 1.00
Total championships: 15
Last championship: Patriots 2005
World Series: 1
Super Bowls: 3
NBA/NHL: 11
Pain Report report: Buckner … The whole Yankees thing … Belichick’s clothing selection and general surliness … The Celtics since Rick Pitino … The Bruins since Bobby Orr. … Whatever, they’re going to win another Super Bowl this year, maybe another World Series, this is the best place on earth to be a sports fan these days.

25. Los Angeles
HCQ: 1.86
Total championships: 14
Last championship: Angels, 2002 (Lakers, 2002 for Dodgers fans)
World Series: 4 (Dodgers 3, Angels 1)
Super Bowls: 1
NBA/NHL: 9
Pain Report: Having no NFL team though LA is 4.9 billion-smillion times bigger than Green Bay is painful (though my friends in LA say they love it; they don’t want a team) … Kobe is a pain in the butt … Grady Little’s voice … All in all, it’s still not too bad being in LA.

24. Miami
HCQ: 2.01
Total championships: 4
Last championship: Heat, 2006
World Series: 2
Super Bowls: 1
NBA/NHL: 1
Pain Report: The drivers down there are terrible … There is some leftover Nick Saban slime that won’t come off … OK, seriously, how much pain could there be when you don’t even care about your baseball team and you still win the World Series every few years?

23. New York No. 1
This includes fans of the: Yankees, Knicks, Giants, Rangers.
HCQ: 2.14
Total championships: 11
Last championship: Yankees, 2000.
World Series: 6
Super Bowls: 2
NBA/NHL: 3
Pain Report: It can’t be too painful being a Yankees fan (or LeBron wouldn’t have become one), but there are a few rough spots — those occasional moments when George Steinbrenner comes out and decides whether or not there will be six more weeks of winter … Everything Isiah … Would you want Tom Coughlin as your coach? This guy makes Dick Cheney look open and communicative.

22. Pittsburgh
HCQ: 2.29
Total championships: 9
Last championship: Steelers, 2006
World Series: 2
Super Bowls: 5
NBA/NHL: 2
Pain Report: Nobody wants to manage the Pirates … The Penguins almost left town … Sid Bream … Nobody likes playing with Moses Guthrie … Honestly, with the Steelers and memories of Mario, it’s been pretty good in Steel Town even with the collapse of the Pirates.

21. Dallas
HCQ: 3.14 (hey, it’s Pi!)
Total championship: 6
Last championship: Stars, 1999.
World Series: 0
Super Bowls: 5
NBA/NHL: 1
Pain Report: The Rangers are the essence of pain, but fortunately nobody cares as long as Tony Romo’s out there. … Mark Cuban. Discuss.

20. St. Louis
HCQ: 3.43
Total championships: 4
Last championship: Cardinals 2006
World Series: 3
Super Bowls: 1
NBA/NHL: 0
Pain Report: The Blues have never won a Stanley Cup, which amazes me. I mean, it’s hockey. Don’t they award the Cup to the ninth caller? Heck, didn’t Carolina win one? Anyway, it isn’t baseball, so it doesn’t matter. Hell, the Rams have been to two Super Bowls in a decade, and they blacked out last week. … The Cardinals won the World Series last year. So everybody’s happy.

INTERLUDE: A friend brought up a rumor, I have no idea if it’s true, that the Yankees want to hire Tony La Russa to be the manager next year, replacing Joe Torre. I want to say right now that I am 100 percent in favor of this. I’m 40 now, and I simply don’t have the time to do all the things I need to do in my life. There are so many projects I want to get involved with but I lack the time. So I’m always looking to consolidate. It would certainly help my schedule if, instead of spending so much time despising BOTH LaRussa and the Yankees, they could be together in one easy-to-loathe package.

19. Detroit
HCQ: 3.66
Total championships: 8
Last championship: Pistons 2004
World Series: 2
Super Bowls: 0
NBA/NHL: 6
Pain Report: The Lions … The Lions … Also the Lions.

18. San Francisco
HCQ: 3.71
Total championships: 6
Last championship: 49ers 1995
World Series: 0
Super Bowls: 5
NBA/NHL: 1
Pain Report: It really has been a rough go for Giants baseball fans, but you know what? Joe Montana and living in San Francisco really might make up for that.

17. Baltimore
HCQ: 3.72
Total championships: 5
Last championship: Ravens, 2001
World Series: 3
Super Bowls: 2
NBA/NHL: 0
Pain Report: Lots of pain for the old-timers who remember the moving van … Orioles are as tough to root for as just about any team … I tried very hard not to mark down the fans because the city stole the Cleveland Browns and then won a Super Bowl with them. It’s not the fans fault. I tried. Really.

16. Denver
HCQ: 4.03
Total championships: 4
Last championship: Avalanche, 2001
World Series: 0
Super Bowls: 2
NBA/NHL: 2
Pain Report: I tried hard not to mark down the fans because of whatever lingering personal pain that may have been induced by John Elway. I tried. Really. I am, in fact, over that Elway thing, or as my psychiatrist says: “Well, we’re making slow progress.” … There does have to be some pain involved with having Mike Shanahan as your football coach. I don’t want to say he’s confident in his abilities, but I’m pretty sure he came up with that “Mastermind” nickname himself. And even if he didn’t, I’m even more sure he has it monogrammed on his bathroom towels.

15. New York No. 2.
This includes fans of the Mets, Jets, Nets and Islanders.
HCQ: 4.43
Total championships: 9
Last championship: Mets, 1986
World Series: 2
Super Bowls: 1
NBA/NHL: 6
Pain Report: Well, for one thing, the Islanders don’t rhyme with the other teams. Who’s running things over there? … Actually there is lots of pain with with this version of New York fanhood, but there’s too much mixing and matching in New York for my taste. I have one friend who is a Mets-Jets-Knicks-Rangers fan, another who is a Mets-Giants-Nets-Islanders fan and still another who is a Yankees-Jets-Knicks-don’t-give-a-damn-about-hockey fan. There are too many escape clauses in New York. In Kansas City, if you grow tired of the Chiefs, your next step is the Kansas City Shockers.

14. Oakland
HCQ: 4.86
Total championships: 6
Last championship: A’s, 1989.
World Series: 4
Super Bowls: 1
NBA/NHL: 1
Pain Report: The death of Moneyball … Al Davis … You know, when I worked up these numbers, I forgot that the Raiders were actually in Los Angeles when they won the Super Bowl in 1984. So if you want to move Oakland up a couple more city spots, you can. Personally, though, I think Raiders fans have so much fun being Raiders fan — it’s like Halloween every week — that they have, like Superman, become impervious to pain.

13. Washington
HCQ: 5.02
Total championships: 4
Last championship: Redskins, 1992
World Series: 0
Super Bowls: 3
NBA/NHL: 1
Pain Report: The various baseball escapades … You never want a football coach who was more successful in NASCAR … There was that whole sad Michael Jordan period.

12. Milwaukee
Total championships: 4
Last championship: Packers 1997
World Series: 0
Super Bowls: 3
NBA/NHL: 1
Pain Report: I really thought the Brewers the best team in that division this year. In fact, when the Royals played them around mid-season, I thought the Brewers were the best team I had seen in baseball. They were knocking the ball all over the place, they had the good young pitching, they seemed together, I really liked that team. And then … hey, I’ve always loved Milwaukee — to me, it’s Cleveland West. I feel your pain people. You do have the Packers, though.

11. Atlanta
HCQ: 5.57
Total championships: 1
Last championship: Braves, 1995
World Series: 1
Super Bowls: 0
NBA/NHL: 0
Pain Report: This Michael Vick thing will leave a mark on you as a fan, no? I’ve wondered sometimes about the father having THAT conversation with his eight year old son, Daniel (I’ve always thought I would name a son Daniel):

Dad: Son, I know you like Michael Vick.
Daniel: Yeah, he’s the coolest, Dad. The neatest! He’s the bomb! He’s super-bad! (Please insert whatever phrase 7-year-old boys are using for “cool” these days).
Dad: Well, he won’t be playing this year, son.
Daniel (tears i his eyes): Why?
Dad: Well (pause), he got into a little bit of trouble.
Daniel: Well, what did he do? Did he not clean up his room?
Dad: Ha ha! No, not exactly. He had deadly dogs fight each other so people could gamble on it.
Daniel: Oh.
Dad: Well, there’s more. You know the losing dogs? He killed them.
Daniel: He killed them?
Dad: Well, yeah, but (nervous laughter) you know, not by conventional means. He, um, electrocuted them, drowned them, hung them.
Daniel: Oh. (Looks down at the ground) Dad?
Dad: Yes, Daniel.
Daniel: I don’t think I want to wear my Michael Vick jersey anymore.
Dad: I understand, son. (They hug).
Daniel: Except when we’re having dog fights in the backyard.

10. Seattle
HCQ: 5.71
Total championships: 1
Last championship: Sonics 1979
World Series: 0
Super Bowls: 0
NBA/NHL: 1
Pain Report: That Mariners team has definitely provided some pain, especially when they lost Unit, Griffey and A-Rod in a four-year period. … Plus, Pearl Jam just hasn’t been as good since their second album. (Question: Can you still call them “albums?” I have never gotten a ruling on this. Does “album” refer specifically to the vinyl packaging, or is “album” a collection of songs placed together in one grouping, however it is distributed? Looking for a ruling here).

9. Chicago
HCQ: 5.72
Total championships: 9
Last championship: White Sox, 2005 (or for Cubs fans, Bulls 1998)
World Series: 1 (White Sox)
Super Bowls: 1
NBA/NHL: 6
Pain Report: Two different worlds if you are a White Sox fan or a Cubs fan. White Sox fans are probably back with Detroit and St. Louis, it’s been pretty good for you guys lately … Cubs fans have had it hard, but the good Michael Jordan makes up for a whole lot. Plus, there was Ditka. I’m not sure that any town, any city, ever enjoyed a coach more than Chicago enjoyed Ditka.

8. Cincinnati
HCQ: 5.86
Total championships: 3
Last championship Reds, 1990
World Series 3
Super Bowls: 0
NBA/NHL: 0
Pain Report: I had this discussion with an NFL insider recently:

Him: The great thing about the NFL is that, because there’s so much money, and the salary cap is in place, if you want to win, you will win sooner or later. It’s not like other leagues. Baseball, the NBA, you need a lot of commitment, but you also need luck. The NFL is all about motivation. The only teams that will keep losing are the teams that are not trying.
Me: Interesting.
Him: So, that means you can cross off Cincinnati.

7. San Diego
HCQ: 6.06
Total championships: 0
Last championship: Chargers, AFL, 1963
World Series: 0
Super Bowls: 0
NBA/NHL: 0
Pain Report: Well, there was the Marty Schottenheimer pain of a year ago followed by the Norv Turner fiasco this year … The Padres have been tough to take … Generally, though, it’s tough to feel bad for any fans who live in/near San Diego.

6. Minneapolis/St. Paul
HCQ: 6.86
Last championship: Twins 1991
World Series: 2
Super Bowls: 0
NBA/NHL: 0
Pain Report: The Bud Grant Vikings … The Denny Green Vikings … The Wasted Years of Kevin Garnett … The window closing on the Twins … But they lose a few suffering points for moving football into a Dome. It’s not true football suffering unless you’re so cold you want Harrison Ford to slice open a camel/horse/tauntaun so you can warm yourself on its innards. And, yes, I had to look up the fact that the animal was called a “tauntaun.” I’m not a Star Wars geek. Really.

5. Philadelphia
HCQ: 6.94
Total championships: 5
Last championship: Sixers, 1983
World Series: 1
Super Bowls: 0
NBA/NHL: 4
Pain Report: Oh yeah. Plenty of pain. Phillies’ collapses. Eagles’ near misses. Flyers’ destruction. Iverson. It’s pretty bad. But the good news is the fans in Philadelphia handle the losing with grace and patience. … I love Philadelphia. Love it. As should be apparent by now, I tend to compare cities to my hometown, and Philadelphia is like Cleveland after a few too many drinks.

4. Kansas City
HCQ: 7.13
Total championships: 2
Last championship: Royals, 1985
World Series: 1
Super Bowls: 1
NBA/NHL: 0
Pain Report: The city has lost three sports teams in 40 years, and look at the teams they were left with. In the last 11 years (or, “since I arrived here”) the Chiefs have not won a single playoff game, the Royals have lost 100 games four times, there have been countless comical moments but no classical ones, each of the major colleges nearby has had at least one crushing near miss, and the single championship of any kind was when the Kansas City Wizards won the Major League Soccer title, which did not set off any ticker-tape parades. It’s been bad.

3. Houston
HCQ: 7.43
Total championships: 2
Last championship: Rockets, 1995
World Series: 0
Super Bowls: 0
NBA/NHL: 2
Pain Report: There’s sports pain pretty much everywhere you look in Houston now. Although I have a friend from Houston, and he insists that the very best Chinese Restaurant in the world is in Houston. So you have that. When we visited the city together, he drove me out there — it took 50 minutes, because any and all drives in Houston take 50 minutes — and then we came upon a strip mall and fast-food Chinese restaurant. You may ask: Was it the best Chinese food you’ve ever had? And I will answer it this way: It was a fast food Chinese in Houston, Texas. You decide.

2. Buffalo
HCQ: 8.57
Total championships: 1
Last championship: Bills, 1965 (AFL)
World Series: 0
Super Bowls: 0
NBA/NHL: 0
Pain Report: You want pain, try ordering the suicidal wings at the Anchor Bar. That’s pain. Of course, there’s also the Bills’ Super Bowl fiascos, the in-the-crease Sabres moment, and the fact that Buffalo has an extraordinarily loyal base of baseball fans but are cut off from the Major Leagues. Plus, it’s freaking cold. I suspect Buffalo sports is WHY they invented suicidal wings.

1. Cleveland
HCQ: 9.58
Total championships: 0
Last championship: Browns, 1964
World Series: 0
Super Bowls: 0
NBA/NHL: 0
Pain Report: Yes, this whole thing was an exercise to see just how painful it is to be a Cleveland fan … that’s why we started this thing 42 years ago, just after the Browns championship on Dec. 27, 1964. I am finishing up an enormous blog on my life as a Cleveland fan to unveil during these playoffs, so there’s no point in going into greater detail here. But just look at the record. Marvel. Forty two years. Zero championships.

Jeters never prosper …

Posted: October 9th, 2007 | Filed under: Baseball | 37 Comments »

Hype is a funny thing. It can rattle your nervous system even when you KNOW the hype is wrong. Take Derek Jeter. I know, intellectually, that the whole “Derek Jeter is Captain Clutch, Conqueror of Pressure, Count of Men on Base, Knight of the Round Ball, Duke of the Postseason, Chairman of the Big Moment, Come Through Lou, Lord of the Swing, Prince of the Playoffs, Emperor of October, Secretary of Fate, Johnny Big Appleseed, Legend of the Fall, The Impossible Out, Shah of It’s Gone, Yankee Go Home, the Mightiest Duck on the Pond” … all of that might have been slightly overplayed. I knew that.

And still, when he came up in the sixth inning on Monday, two men on, Cleveland up by four, Yankee Stadium bursting with sound … I couldn’t help it. The thought popped into my head and echoed: “Oh boy, here it comes, the Derek Jeter moment, he’ll hit a double into the gap for sure, make it 6-4, turn the whole game around, have three more supermodels wait outside the locker room for him …”

He promptly hit into a nifty 4-6-3 double play, the cruelest stab to the heart of the Yankees postseason.

And I remembered: Oh yeah, Derek Jeter chokes in the clutch.

It’s true. Derek Jeter DOES choke in the clutch, if you use the verb “choke” to mean, “ performs below his usual standards in the biggest games.” Look at his career numbers:

Jeter during the regular season: .317 average, .388 OBP, .462 SLG.
Jeter during the postseason: .309 average, .377 OBP, .469 SLG.

That’s close, but clearly Jeter is not performing BETTER during the playoffs than he does during the regular season. Here’s the thing, though: Those postseason numbers are deceiving. Take a look at those numbers when you take out Division Series.

Jeter during ALCS/World Series: .279 average, .358 OBP, .418 SLG.

That’s significantly down. His average drops 38 points, his on-base percentage 30 points, his slugging percentage 44 points. In the biggest games, he becomes Orlando Merced.

Of course, it’s silly to write that Jeter chokes in the clutch because over the years his numbers in the postseason are slightly-to-moderately lower than his regular season numbers. That’s natural — pitching is better, weather is colder, games are played differently, etc.

Then again, that is no sillier than the 10,000 odes written to Jeter (and dozens of other players) when his postseason numbers are slightly-to-moderately HIGHER than his regular season numbers. It’s no sillier than going off an A-Rod when he has a bad series. The whole thing is pretty stupid, and in my opinion it is best summed up by John Updike in his famous story about Ted Williams last game. Updike was trying to answer the ugly change that the Splendid Splinter shattered what it mattered:

Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money.

I especially like that last sentence. What would it say about a guy if a guy was, truly and completely, a clutch player, if he only played his best when it was a big, huge moment? Isn’t that Randy Moss?

OK, that said: Jeter did hit .176 in the Cleveland series, he did not walk, he played lousy shortstop, he rapped into three double plays in the last two games, he killed the key rally, and you know what? I’ll admit it: I kind wanted to see a little New York outrage. I know it’s wrong. But I wanted to see people all over New York turn on their beloved hero. Just a little.

And it isn’t because I dislike Jeter — I actually like him very much. I think he’s a terrific player who gets on base, gives you good at-bats, plays hard, plays smart, steals you some bases, hits with a little pop and so on. I don’t have any problem with Jeter getting all the publicity he gets — he’s a good looking guy, he represents himself and the game well, he’s a good player, and if he was playing for, say, Cleveland, he would be vastly underrated, and I don’t see that being any better …

UNDERRATED/OVERRATED INTERLUDE: The announcer during Monday’s game actually called Grady Sizemore, “The best player you’ve never heard of,” which made me think about 11 different things all at once.

1. Are there really baseball fans who have never heard of Grady Sizemore?
2. Really?
3. Wasn’t he, like, on the cover of Sports Illustrated?
4. Have people heard of Sports Illustrated?
5. If Chip Caray’s name happened to be Chip Babblerock, would he be announcing playoff games on national televeision?
6. I thought Curtis Granderson was the best player you’ve never heard of.
7. Oh, you’ve heard of him too.
8. If Grady Sizemore was playing for the Yankees would he already have a statue in Monument Park or would they wait until he turned 30?
9. How many different Frank TV commercials are there anyway? There have to be like 40 of them. You know, he might want to save some bits for the actual show. Thing is, I like Frank Calliendo — I think his John Madden is freakishly good — but I will say this: My wife Margo was watching the game with me (you mothers and fathers out there can check out her Mom’s blog HERE), and whenever one of those commercials would come on she would say, “Was he supposed to be Dr. Phil? … Was that supposed to be George Bush? … Who is that? (It was supposed to be Robert DeNiro). My wife is usually a better judge of the American psyche than I am, and that show seems doomed.
10. Are there really baseball fans who have never heard of Grady Sizemore.
11. Really?

The thing I thought most about, though, is that it’s hard to keep track of whether a player is overrated or underrated. Up to that moment Chip Caray said that, I had kind of believed that Sizemore was just a touch overrated. I mean, just a touch, a hair overrated, 50.2 on the underrated/overrated scale. I mean, please don’t get me wrong, he’s a great player, fabulous player, I have nothing bad at all to say about him. He’s one of the best players in the game. But I’ve heard numerous managers and people in the game call Sizemore THE best player in the world, the first guy they would take in an dispersion draft, the most complete force in sports, and I think that’s just a little bit of overkill, no? So here I was actually thinking of Grady as just slightly overrated, and then I hear this guy say there are some people who have NEVER EVEN HEARD OF HIM which immediately made Grady the most underrated player in the history of sports. The whole overrated/underrated thing is so tough to follow.

ANYWAY, back to Jeter. I like the guy. I do. And I think it’s ridiculous to pin this playoff loss on him or any other single guy. But I can’t help it. He was so brutal during this series, so clearly the key offensive and defensive failure (he left eight men on base this series, one more than A-Rod, and he hit into those three double plays, and he didn’t have an extra-base hit, and he didn’t get to ANYTHING in the field) that I just thought it would be good, for once, to see New York eat one of its own.

I thought, if nothing else, this might point out the infuriating absurdity of making any one guy seem superhuman, impervious to pain and pressure, better than us mere mortals. Derek Jeter delivers in some big moments, and he flops in other big moments, and it has nothing to do with his moral fiber or his athletic courage. He is a good baseball player, with all the successes and failures that come with it. If you want to celebrate him as a God when he delivers, OK, but be ready to smack the sweat out of him when he hits into the 4-6-3.

Well, from what I can tell, generally, that isn’t happening. A-Rod is taking his hits, Wang is taking his hits, Torre is taking his hits, and Jeter is taking only a few glancing blows. The feeling seems to be, ”Well, Jeter wasn’t good this series, but he has such a long history of delivering in the clutch that you have to give him a pass.“ The legend feeds upon itself. I suppose, it really doesn’t matter. The Yankees are home now.

The Great Wedge …

Posted: October 8th, 2007 | Filed under: Baseball | 18 Comments »

This is an ode to Eric Wedge. Monday night in New York, he did absolutely nothing that I, as a fan, agreed with. Nothing. He started Paul Byrd when I was sure he should have gone with C.C. Sabathia on short rest. He played Kelly Shoppach because he’s Paul Byrd’s personal catcher, which just seemed comical and absurd to me (I honestly thought you had to be like Steve Carlton or Bob Gibson to have your own personal catcher). He rather bizarrely did not have Kenny Lofton bunt in the eighth inning with runners on first and second, this after spending the first three games sacrificing more than the Aztecs.

Then in the ninth inning, a few minutes after watching Rafael Betancourt blow through the Yankees, he put in closer Joe Borowski, who had a 5.09 ERA this year, and gave up nine homers in 65 innings.

And you know what? It worked anyway. Byrd pitched five strong. Shoppach hit the ball hard. Lofton’s non-bunt didn’t matter. Borowski shakily put the game away. The Indians won. The expected heartbreak never arrived. The Yankees go home, Joe Torre wanders into forced retirement, the Indians go on to face Boston with their No. 1 and No. 2 starters ready to go. It’s all good.

Look: I’m not going to offer that cliche, “That’s why Eric Wedge is managing and I’m not” line because I don’t believe that. There are a million other reasons why Eric Wedge is managing the Indians and I’m not … most of them having something to do with the fact that Wedge knows baseball and I’m just a goofball fan of the game. But this isn’t one of those reasons. I still disagree with all those moves. I still think any one of them could have blown up, and I frankly think Wedge was lucky they did not blow up. Especially Borowski in the ninth.

No, what I’ll say is this: I admire Eric Wedge for sticking with what he believes in. This is an admirable quality. I’ve long believed that the best managers are just that, the best MANAGERS — they have a way of infusing confidence in their players, getting players to understand what they’re about, defining roles, finding ways to minimize their players weaknesses and highlight their strengths and avoid putting anyone in a position to fail. This is much harder to do than, say, having the gut instinct to suicide squeeze at the right time. It’s also, in my opinion, much more important.

And here’s what I think: In order for a manager to be successful, he has to know exactly what he’s about. It can’t be fake, not over a long season. I remember a few years ago, when I was writing columns in Cincinnati, rookie manager Ray Knight (heckuva nice guy) called me into his office after I wrote a pointed column suggesting that he stop listening to talk radio shows (which he was doing) and start following his own instincts. I expected a Mike-Gundy-like beat-down from Knight, especially when I saw my column hanging on the cork-board behind his desk.

“Joe-Joe,” he said, and I braced myself.

“Joe-Joe, you’re exactly right,” he said, and he launched into a long soliloquy about how right I was, and how he was not being himself, and how he wasn’t going to listen to those other guys anymore … and I wanted to tell him, “Uh, Ray, I meant don’t listen to me either. I’m dumb too.” But he was off and running, and anyway, I realized then that Ray wasn’t at all sure what kind of manager he wanted to be. You may be surprised by how many managers in sports have that very problem. I would say more than half of the coaches I’ve covered through the years fit the description.

Wedge knows himself, and I have immense respect for that. Funny, I criticized him here on this blog for going with Byrd, and I was instant-message-ripping him when Borowski came into the game, but all along I KNEW Wedge was going to do those things, because that’s what he does. He trusts his guys. He trusts Byrd to get outs at Yankee Stadium when the statistics say no. He trusts Borowski to finish things off with his ballsy pitching and frightening lack of stuff. It’s a gift.

Perfect example: Monday night, Wedge put all his faith in Paul Byrd, and Byrdy clawed and bluffed and survived for five good innings (I applaud Paul — good for him — though I will say the television announcers made him sound like he was Christy Matthewson meets Carl Hubbell, and that might have been a little bit of overkill. At one point, I could have sworn that Tony Gwynn said, “He’s a lot like John Smoltz.” I suppose this is true if Gwynn meant that they are both right-handed. And carbon-based life forms).

Meanwhile, Joe Torre showed absolutely no faith in Mike Mussina — he went with Chien-Ming Wang on three days rest — and then Torre had to go Mussina early anyway, which could not have been a comfortable situation for anybody. Moose pitched OK, but that wasn’t good enough.

I thought going in that Wedge did the wrong thing strategically, Torre the right thing, but that’s a beautiful thing about baseball and sports. Strategy is only one part of the game. Wedge has real faith in his people, and he shows it night in and night out, and his players often reward that faith. In that way, Wedge is from the Bobby Cox school of managing, and there haven’t been many better than Bobby Cox.

Of course, there have not been many managers who broke more hearts in the postseason than Bobby Cox. But that’s a whole other story. I hope.

I also still hope that Wedge shows just a little more of a killer instinct as the Indians move along in the playoffs. But tonight, we raise a glass to Eric Wedge. I was wrong. Wedge was right — or at least right enough, which is all that it takes.

One final question: Will the New York writers tear apart Derek Jeter for having one of the most un-clutch series I can remember a player having?

The Scale …

Posted: October 8th, 2007 | Filed under: Baseball | 8 Comments »

About two weeks ago, I made one of my periodic, fist-pounding, “OK, this is just ridiculous, I HAVE to get in shape, I’m serious about it this time,” proclamations. These sorts of proclamations always inspire me to do three things:

1. Buy something absurdly expensive and pointless (bicycle, Bowflex-type machine, gym membership).

2. Begin some constrictive no-sugar, no-carb, no-fat, no-pasta, no-something diet that will often knock off as many as 10 pounds in two weeks and then make me so crazy with hunger that I will eat nothing but Quarter Pounders and PIzza Rolls until I have gained back the weight plus a bonus 10 pounds, just for playing.

3. Bring out The Scale.

Yes, I have had The Scale for most of my adult life. I don’t remember where I got it or when, but I am certain I have made at least five major moves with it. The Scale has been on more moving vans than Reggie Sanders. The Scale is white with a little red sticker on the corner. The sticker, over the years, has faded and frayed. But who hasn’t?

To get The Scale to work, you have to step on the sticker to “trigger” the machine, then, once The Scale has coughed and wheezed and set itself (this process can often take 10 minutes), step on. The Scale then thinks about things for a while, makes various calculations, makes some insulting comment about how I didn’t need to get the large Skyline 3-Way, and then takes a deep breath and finally gives me a red LED display of what it believes my approximate weight to be.

The key word is “approximate.” The great thing about The Scale is that just about every single time you step on, it will give you a different number. This is why I love The Scale. It isn’t just a scale, it’s a negotiator. My main form of exercise for the last 20 years has been stepping on and off the damn scale. I have been known to step on and off that thing 15 or 20 times before I have been satisfied with the number it gives me.

The pattern goes like this: “OK, let me step on The Scale here and, uh, no, that won’t get it. Come on Scale, I can’t live with myself at that weight. You can do better than that … Let’s try this again and, whoa, buddy, you’re going the wrong way … let’s step on again here and, yeah, OK, that’s a little better, but I think you can go a little lower than that … Let’s try this thing one more time and, no, give me that last number back …”

It has been like my own version of Let’s Make a Deal. I’m like, “Monty, that’s a pretty good weight, no doubt about it, that number there is significantly less than I actually weigh, but I’m going to step on The Scale one more time, I think I can lose about three pounds with one more step and … OH, that was a mistake. Wah wah wah wah.”

LET’S MAKE A DEAL INTERLUDE: I can’t remember if I mentioned this in my previous blog, but I loved Let’s Make a Deal. That show was way better than any of today’s game shows (I don’t know this to be a fact since I have never seen any of today’s game shows. I’ve seen enough “Deal or No Deal” commercials to believe that show sucks). The thing that pushed LMAD into legend is that part at the end of the show when Monty Hall would go into the audience, where for some reason that was never made entirely clear, people were dressed up like giant grapes or Little Bo Peep or underwear models or packages of Rice a Roni.

Then Monty would say, ”OK, I’ve got $50 for anybody in the audience who has a paperclip. Fifty dollars for the first person who can produce a paperclip.” And everyone would rifle through the purses or pockets to find a paperclip, and it was all good fun, you know, in that “Duke throwing coins into the crowd of peasants to see them fight each other” sort of way. The closest thing we have to this now is that minor league baseball promotion where they will blindfold some poor schmuck, place him/her behind home plate and announce that a diamond has been hidden in the grass somewhere nearby. That’s entertainment.

The best part, though, is that as “Let’s Make A Deal” began to become less popular, you would notice that the items Monty Hall asked for became more and more obscure. At first, sure, it was all about compacts or nickels from the year 1968. But as the show was going bankrupt, suddenly he’s saying, “OK, I’ve got $50 for anyone who can produce one of the original drafts of the Declaration of Independence. Come on, who has got one of the original drafts? Anyone? No? Well, how about this, $100 for a certified photograph of an alien spaceship. Remember, it has to be certified by the U.S. government. Come on, what do you people have in your purses anyway? One certified photo of, hey, I’ll take a certified vampire photo too … oh wait, sir, you say you have a Declaration of Independence, wait, let me see that, no sir, I’m afraid this is an original draft of the Magna Carta, no, that doesn’t count, sorry about that. OK, I’ve got $75 for anyone who can pull J.D. Salinger out …”

Back to The Scale. This time around, my absurdly expensive strategy for getting in shape involves working with a trainer. His name is David, and he’s extremely nice in that, “I could kill you with my off-hand ring finger if I wanted to” sort of way. No, he really is a good guy, and he has a lot of interesting thoughts about nutrition and health which I would share with you except I haven’t heard a word he has said because ever since I started working with him I have been in constant and severe pain. The other night I had this dream where I was in the Middle Ages and I was being stretched on the rack. And then I woke up, and wished I could go back to the dream.

Anyway,as part of my workout routine, I brought out The Scale. I was excited. And — this is heartbreaking — something happened. My scale broke. I can hardly write the words. First Eric Wedge starts Paul Byrd in Game 4, and now this. I stepped on The Scale, and it coughed and wheezed jut like normal, but then it died. I kept stomping on it, again and again, and it would not reset. I changed the battery … nothing.

Finally I shook it up, and dropped it, and shook it up again and it sort of came to life for a moment. I was thrilled. I stepped on it, and it gave me a weight that, frankly, was insulting. I stepped on it again, and it gave me THE SAME WEIGHT. I stepped on it a third time, and I hate to even say it — yeah same weight.

So I threw out The Scale. I have enough disappointments in my life.

– We’re going to try and do something live tonight with the Indians-Yankees game, so come on back.