Ouch. OUCH. But congratulations, Jim!

bmaz, I said after the Niners game that they will have to play much better when the Cards come to the Bay Area. They picked up three players who are going to make a big impact on the team, especially amazing was how well Kenyon Drake played after only three days in AZ. We need this long stretch to heal before the Seahawks.

Lamar Jackson is tremendous. He’s lucky that the Ravens fired Marty Mornhinweg and hired an OC who was willing to design a system around him, instead of trying to force him to play within the OC’s system.

I have no doubt that Jackson slipped as far as he did in the draft in large part because teams are deathly afraid of changing their schemes to fit personnel. They’d much rather go with second rate talent to fit their established system than to play to the strengths of the best people they can get. Not unlike the problems with a lot of the party machinery in America these days.

I meant to include a note about the wonderful success of the Washington Nationals in a truly excellent World Series. It was tightly played, tense and just plain good baseball. There were games where a little small ball – work the walk, steal second, sacrifice to third, score on a groundout or sac fly – made all the difference. In an age of launch angle and exit velocity bullshit, these serving to remove the human factor and digitize a game (for the benefit of gaming houses desiring a predictable product and owners’ profits therefrom) which has forever been as analog as can be and should remain so, it was refreshing. The German paper Die Zeit led its article on the Nats’ triumph with “Nothing is as boring as baseball. Nothing is as enthralling as baseball.” And they went on to highlight the centrality of the pitcher, talked in some reverential detail about just how good Greinke was for Game Seven and … how suddenly things changed when Hinch lifted him for relief.
Of course, none of that would have happened had the Nats not been a Team With No Quit In Them. In other words, they didn’t want the participation trophy. It wasn’t good enough to just be there. Contrary to the Deadspin article BobCon links upthread, https://adequateman.deadspin.com/fuck-winning-1724810215 , they weren’t playing just for fun. They were playing to win. They had loads of fun doing it, but the fun was the product of the desire to win expressing itself in coming through in the clutch. Yes, they had the songs and dance, but compare, e.g., the 99-00 Piazza-era Mets, who at various times adopted “Who Let the Dogs Out” (still a favorite of minor-league stadia everywhere) and The Doors “Mojo Rising” for their celebratory motivational exercises. We watch, and as a consequence they get paid a lot to play in magnificent stadia, because they are playing to win.
And, frankly and as much as your communitarian kumbaya instincts recoil at admitting it, that playing to win ethos is what gave you the wealthy, luxurious society you live in and enjoy. Where your houses are tight against bad weather, your morning eggs come from a carton in the fridge and you get to cavil and complain on computers about how those higher on the socioeconomic totem pole are shitting on your sunny day. A big hint: knock that emphasis on winning out of your kids and you wind up with an ossified society where the 1 percent stay the 1 percent for generations far into the future because there’s no one who has the spine to challenge them because they were taught from little on up to accept their spot at the table. Because it was good enough.
I think the Nats, and their fans, ought to enjoy this to the fullest. I tend to doubt the Nats will repeat. They’ll be good, probably good enough for second in the East (behind the Braves) and maybe a wild card. But they are old in baseball terms, have some free agent exposure and, most of all, caught lightning in a bottle. When they played the Cards in the LCS I was sure enough to say they were a team of destiny. (And not, like in the Schilling quote, where Destiny dances alongside Aura at that bar down near the airport.)
And, as sometimes happens, I was right.
For those who’d appreciate this, I point you to a lovely banner the courtroom artist Art Lien has had posted over at SCOTUSBlog: https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Banner191102.jpg Love ’em or hate ’em, agree or disagree, baseball is one thing we all should appreciate and enjoy.
Perhaps if we can persuade Commissioner Manfred to ditch the juiced balls in favor of regular ones, so we can get the panoply of small-ball strategy instead of Home Run Derby all night every night, things will get better.
Hail the Nats and put a curly W in the scorebook.
And James Silverback Harrison, he of making his sons return the participation trophies, remains god.

Winnin’ ugly is still winnin’.

My Stillers have made it back to .500, something I would have discounted as a near impossibility even a week ago. Rudolph is a piece of work. We’ll see how he progresses. What makes my heart warm and smiley is the way the Stillers’ D is playing. They put Brissett and later Hoyer on their asses more times than I could count. Watt the Younger is coming into full flower of his Linebacker-ness, and the rest of the pass rush is pretty awesome, too. Still wondering what possessed the Colts QB to throw that INT, but I’m surely not sending back the TD.

That PI call, where the ball landed about 7 yards downfield passed about 10 feet above the players’ heads and off to the side (and unfindable) had to be one of the most bullshit PI calls in the league’s long history of bullshit PI calls. I would contribute to the fine fund for Tomlin, or any player, who said so and was tagged by King Roger the Clown for speaking the truth. If you watched the play, the nearside official was clearly signaling “incomplete” before the other official threw the flag. You can be sure that will be edited out.

At the rate these PI calls are going, and the intransigence about overturning even the most egregious bad calls continues, one has to assume the worst: that maybe the refs, or someone controlling them, has money riding on the outcomes.

Iggles won. Yay. Still trying to get their shit together.

Bad day for kickers. Vinatieri missed 2 – one blocked, one hooked badly when the holder did not spin the laces away. Tenn’s kicker just pounded one off the upright.

And it’s finally decided as final: the Dolphins beat the J-ET-S JETS JETS JETS. FWIW, on the tiebreakers I think the ‘fins are now ahead of the Green Slime. Count me as laughing.