Winning the Argument

One of the defining features of the early 2000s that went hand in hand with the increasing spread of the internet was a clear dichotomy between old-fashioned "dumb" and new-fangled, stats-inflected "smart" sports opinions.  This manifested itself most clearly in baseball, where an emerging vanguard of stats-focused fans and analysts got a stronger foothold into the mainstream with game-changing revelations like “it is bad to make outs for no reason.” It helped that the opponents were a true rogue’s gallery of oafs and dunderheads: baseball lifers marinated in a cocoon of tobacco juice, mummified local announcers telling decades-old Mickey Mantle anecdotes, and newspaper columnists (there were still locally well-known newspaper columnists) who were photographed grimacing over typewriters and churning out sentence-paragraphs about how there’s only one stat that matters and it’s Heart. 

Their argument was based on That's How It's Always Been Done, This Smacks of Math That Belongs in a Mother's Basement, and That's Not How The Mick Would Have Done It even though I have conclusively proven in this blog over the years that the existence of a ballplayer named "Mickey Mantle" was invented by Ken Burns and Billy Crystal as a CIA psy-op on Baby Boomers in 1988. Despite the fact that these people controlled 90% of the narrative in the game and had most of the airtime, they were, to anyone remotely capable of listening to reason, buffoons.

Eventually the rational argument won out. Stats guys replaced grizzled former players in front offices. Managers are now jacked 45 year-olds in hoodies, replacing the pot-bellied, hooch-nosed older breed who all regardless of their actual age appeared to be 77 years old after a lifetime of exposure to the sun, liquor, and the fact that 43% of all plate appearances before 1993 involved a guy getting a baseball thrown at his face because he may have smiled at some point. Baseball broadcasts now feature statistics that come from sophisticated cameras measuring every movement that happens on a diamond. All of the Hat Guy sports columnists took buyouts or retired and have been replaced by a bot dispensing gambling advice.  

But what did the baseball fan gain from this? Front offices are obsessed with efficiency meaning they have a justification to avoid signing pricey free agents. The three true outcomes-style of optimized baseball is more boring than the objectively stupider method of having little slap hitters out there running around. Every team is run by a hair gel guy wearing one of those investment vests instead of a crusty baseball creature who makes dumb trades in order to feel alive. Starting pitching is disappearing from the game as dozens of identical guys who throw 98 with nasty movement are beltfed from the bullpen and are constantly bouncing between the majors and minors and subsequently batters just get up there and strike out. It’s enough to make you want to turn on the moneyball movie and hope John Connor has traveled back in time to take out Jonah Hill before he can start replacing production in the aggregate.

Another classic early 2000s "smart guy" sports opinion was to demand a college football playoff.  The concept of a college football championship had been, for most of its history, a process where the most boorish second-generation ski-doo salesmen in each state yell at each other and hire airplane billboards in order to essentially demand their team win a national championship.  Every once in awhile, teams just go back in history and decide they won a championship like they are forging documents to claim a minor principality in the Holy Roman Empire.  The entire sport was based on hollerin’.  To a rational person, this was incredibly stupid. Why not just have the best teams play each other?

Finally, college football acted and arranged for the two best teams to meet in a national championship game. Unfortunately there was rarely a consensus about who the two best teams were, and more often than not the answer was more hollerin’ and also bellyaching by the team or teams left out as expressed by rude airplane banners.  It seemed to make sense to simply do what every other level of football does and simply have a playoff. So they unleashed a playoff that is constantly growing and threatening to swallow the entire sport.

An institution as corrupt and rickety as college football could not elegantly implement a playoff.  They decided to ignore all of the rankings that had traditionally been used and consecrate a conclave of recently retired coaches and athletic directors and the occasional war criminal to disappear themselves into bland executive hotel conference rooms and emerge with their own rankings based on mysterious and whimsical criteria.  Every week the square tie knot ESPN guys have to go on TV and guess at what the Committee was thinking by portentously intoning that "By its new rankings, the Committee has shown that it really values ranked road wins" like they are trying to divine the whims of ancient gods by the arrangements of fish bones on a beach.  

And once ESPN and the conferences got a whiff of playoff money, the question would not be if the playoff expanded but to how many teams.  Last year, the playoffs expanded to twelve teams, including higher seeds getting to play home playoff games.  The atmosphere for those games was incredible, but the conferences are too committed to the big bowl games to move the next rounds off of neutral bowl sites.  But that is not enough. The Big Ten has now proposed a playoff that consists of 28 teams.

Big Ten Commissioner Tony Pettiti announces plan for 28 team playoff

The problem is not with the playoff itself, but with the way the playoff has devoured the rest of the college football landscape.  The bigger the playoff gets, the more its shadow covers the rest of the college football landscape.  Unfortunately for ESPN, which along with the Big Ten and SEC is driving the push towards a more NFL-style setup in college football, there are not 32 teams in FBS football but 136.  It is impossible for ESPN and the other TV networks to both focus increasingly on the playoff picture that affects a handful of teams while simultaneously trying to build up their inventory of other games, which they market as narratively meaningless.

The playoff is not the entire problem.  The constant realignments, the merciless pillaging of rival conferences, and even the desperately-needed implementation of player payment under a grungy and haphazard system governed by collectives of alumni determined by who has the stupidest goatees instead of making these players employees with unions and employee protections-- these are all vandalisms against the sport that the conferences and TV networks are trying to paper over with the spectacle of the playoff, the promise that we will eventually have a champion where 40 years from now a university president standing next to the smirking heir to the only plot of fresh water not yet claimed by an LLM data center can decide that they actually won the 2031 title. Unfortunately, while the so-called "smart" sports argument was to beg for a rational answer to the question of awarding a title in college football, it turns out that maybe having people yell at each other on the radio was the best way to do it.

Before the playoff, the best way to ensure your team was in the playoff was by creating BCS acronym themed signs and also hiring airplanes to fly them over your rivals' games; another way would be to hire a fleet of Napoleonic war ships to denounce your team's rival with a series of saucy semaphore codes.

The playoff is a fun and entertaining mechanism for crowning a college football champion.  It also has nothing to do with how college football is experienced on about 100 of the 136 campuses where it is played.  The networks and conferences now has to figure out what to do with all of the excess football that has nothing to do with the playoff that is left around like overstock inventory. Perhaps these games never mattered before either in the grand scheme of the mythical national title chase. But they had weight because the sport seemed at least to acknowledge that the title chase was only part of the picture; college football was a self-justifying enterprise because there were drunk college students willing to yell about it and regional rivalries and dumb trophies that meant as much as turning the World's First Monster Truck Lawnmower Boca Raton Bowl into a playoff game between the 34th and 36th seeded teams.  As the sport gets rationalized into a more and more efficient way of distributing money to the biggest programs in the two big conferences, that seems to be getting lost.

Early 2000s sports arguers got the college football playoff, advanced stats in baseball, optimized shot distribution in the NBA, and even (and I remember this being sort of part of all of this conversation as well) legalized gambling.  But when the optimized and rational idea gets combined with the obsession with chasing efficiency in money, we get obsession with salary cap arcana, bland homogenization of tactics, and idiotic gambling being forced into everything.  I'm sure that people arguing for better baseball strategies or normal ways of crowning a football champion at the time were not aware that their cries for rationalization would get swept up with the ruthless and efficient financialization of everything in sports.  The one silver lining is that I strongly believe that college football is too stupid to ever be fully contained.

NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL 

Whatever they do with the playoff, it is not my problem because I root for Northwestern, a team that will almost certainly not qualify for the playoff no matter how many teams they let in.  Every change in college football bodes terribly for the Wildcats, who feel to me like they are sort of floating in the Big Ten and just waiting for the axe to come down and send them into DIII the second the conference can justify it by adding a lawsuit in university form like Florida State or Miami.  But here we are in 2025, the Big Ten is one of the two pinnacle quasi-major league conferences in college football, and some of these august teams are going to have to waste their time on the 'Cats and their makeshift stadium that holds 25 people or play in a baseball stadium that regularly devolves into a muddy pit.

Last week, the university finally settled its lawsuit against former coach Pat Fitzgerald, who was fired in the wake of a widespread hazing scandal where several former players described ugly incidents, many of which inexplicably mentioned the Dreamworks motion picture Shrek. Fitzgerald sued the university, claiming he was shocked, shocked! to see hazing going on in the Northwestern football program and demanded $130 million for costing him his career coaching at the only school in the country where a guy who goes 1-11 is not even on the hot seat.  

The last game Pat Fitzgerald won involved him somehow squeezing a crystaline football helmet over his head so he could look like a warlord in a movie where the prop budget involved stealing a bowl from the director's mom. 

Fitzgerald seems to have prevailed in his lawsuit.  We have no idea how much money the school ultimately paid to Fitzgerald, but they were forced to put out a humiliating press release claiming that Fitzgerald knew nothing about the hazing, possibly because during the time he was the coach, he was one of those Guillermo Del Toro guys whose eyeballs are on his hands and he was always holding something.  The ruling presumably clears the way for Fitz to get one of those bullshit "analyst" jobs for disgraced coaches and eventually reenter the coaching ranks for any program in the market for a guy who failed to win a single played game in the United States in his last active season and who will denounce NIL and player movement as some sort of new offshoot of communism.

THE 2025 WILDCATS

There have been two recent vintages of Northwestern teams: those where there is a capable veteran transfer quarterback who can at least manage to keep the offense on the field long enough so the defense doesn't keel over from exhaustion in the third quarter that is good enough to get to a bowl game and teams where there is functionally no quarterback and they win one 0-1 Big Ten games.  In David Braun's first year, they had Ben Bryant and a vicious defense, and that was enough to win eight games. Last year, they played offense like they were on the game show Slippery Stairs.  

This year, the 'Cats will have heralded transfer quarterback Preston Stone, who was last seen grimly watching his replacement at SMU self-destruct in a playoff game against Penn State while Stone was functionally en route to Evanston.  There are some questions about who will catch the ball-- Northwestern's receiving corps is most politely described as "untested"-- and some key losses and transfers on defense, most notably with stalwart captain Xavier Mueller's graduation. 

And even is Stone is as good as advertised and the defense is as much of a pain in the ass as it has been in the past, it might not be enough.  Northwestern's veteran-quarterback-and-defense program was optimized for the Big Ten West, where teams would simply bash their heads into the locker room walls for 60 minutes and the winner was the last guy to stagger onto the 50 yard line and vomit.  The Enormous Ten has taken away these comfortable environs and traded them for an absolutely brutal schedule.  Stone will not be hanging out on the sidelines against Penn State this time.  They also have to face Oregon at home and Michigan at Wrigley in what has been described as the most annoying football game ever played.  I would rather lick the L tracks at Addison than sit with 40,000 power-shushing Michigan fans and I am a person who willingly pays money to go to Cubs games and sit next to a group of 48 year old guys wearing backwards hats and loudly having "tell my lawyer she doesn't get the audi."phone calls.

It is possible that Northwestern is both a much better team this year and also has an equally bad or worse record simply because the schedule is marked "thar be dragons."  Even Illinois is good now; the only Big Ten team that anyone has any expectations to beat is Purdue which will either be very bad or can be expected to have the entire roster at one point in the game ensnare itself in a giant net on the sidelines.  Either way, I'm not sure how this bodes for David Braun, who unlike his predecessor cannot rely on a legacy of being one of the greatest players in the history of the program to shield him from criticism.  Braun's success seemed like a minor miracle under the gross circumstances surrounding the team in 2023, but no one is particularly tied to him and they're opening a shiny new stadium next year.  It doesn't help that I have watched a lot of Northwestern football and I could not tell you anything about Braun's personality other than "football coach." Maybe also "regularly photographed with mouth open."  In the end, what may save him if he has another rough season is the classic Northwestern conundrum of who else would even be willing to coach here.

The 'Cats will have to open the season on the road against Tulane, a very good team in out of the American Conference.  The Green Wave face some uncertainty at quarterback, where they are choosing between latecomer Jake Retzlaff from BYU and former Northwestern quarterback Brandon Sullivan who has been hovering around the Wildcats like a specter.  Sullivan, who served as the backup for Bryant, ended up in Iowa last year and came off the bench to lead the Hawkeyes to a dispiriting romp against the 'Cats.  It would be at the very least awkward, in my opinion, to see him getting the better of his former team again and hope he does not have three more years of covid-related eligibility so he can barnstorm around the country every year playing for at least one Northwestern opponent that he gets to by traveling via one of those pump railroad carts with a bindle sporting a Tim Beckman-inspired anti-Northwestern symbol.

The Tulane game is a good measuring stick for Northwestern.  Tulane is favored to win by about as large of a margin as you'll see from a team outside the Power Four against a Big Ten opponent this time of year. A surprising Northwestern win would instill some hope that they could seriously scrap for a bowl this year. A crummy loss does not mean the season is instantly over, but Northwestern desperately needs every win that that it can manage before facing the Big Ten manglers.

Northwestern's first year in the brutal, unforgiving Enormous Ten was discouraging.  And yet, there has been no reason why the Wildcats should have been able to field a competitive program for more or less the entire modern history of the school, and for about 20 years in the new century, they were able to be reliably annoying if not occasionally outright good.  The fact that Northwestern will constantly have to face off against playoff powerhouses in whatever stadium they happen to be playing in that year is a blow to their hopes of making crappy bowl games should they still exist, but on the other hand, each of those games offers a rare but tantalizing opportunity to do something incredibly funny.  

Unfortunately, the playoff means that, should the Wildcats manage to do the impossible and actually knock off a ranked team in front of an overwhelming number of opposing fans at what is supposed to be a Northwestern home game, it does not have the destructive power that a loss to crummy or mediocre Wildcat team could have in the past. Before the playoff, a loss to Northwestern usually meant an absolute annihilation of that big time opponent's dreams of winning anything.  The playoff has meant that teams like Northwestern can't single-handedly derail a opponent's national championship season by punting them into hell but what the playoff can't take away is a bunch of those fans going on the internet demanding that they fire their coach and whining about uncalled holding penalties, which to me is the greatest prize of them all.  Let's hope we get one of those this year.

Lock In Success The Mike Locksley Way

All week long the football pundits were screeching about the twisted hideousness of an Iowa-Minnesota matchup.  Look at this disgusting freak football, they all said about a Peak Big Ten West game where everyone expected the teams to spit and blow their noses on the football for three downs before forcing the other team to handle it.  And they were right.  The 12-10 affair won by Minnesota on a controversial Illegal Punt Gestures penalty was a gruesome mess that no one but the most deranged midwesterners huffing pork intestine fumes could watch for extended periods without intense vomiting.   But that was a game with actual stakes and intrigue with Iowa vying to lock down the division.  Further down the dial on Big Ten Network Regional Action and, presumably, the only game available for inmates in the Face/Off Magnet Shoe prison for psychological reasons, was the deranged anti-football available between perpetual football ruiners Northwestern and Nebraska. 

 

A football fan settles in with to watch the afternoon slate with his beloved pet bees but has just learned the only games available on TV feature Big Ten West teams

I assume anyone who is deep enough down the Northwestern rabbit hole that they are not just reading normal internet football stuff but have found themselves on a blogspot web page that is now mainly a repository for experimental coach-related fan-fictions is also a person sick enough to have watched an entire Northwestern-Nebraska game, but I am going to recap the first few drives anyway because only by explaining them to other people can I convince myself that what I saw actually happened and was not some sort of AI rendering of the prompt "Northwestern and Nebraska play a game that gets football banned in the United States."  

Nebraska's quarterback, on the very first play of the game, throws a ridiculous interception directly to a Northwestern defender.  Northwestern gets the ball and moves backwards then punts.  Nebraska gains three yard and punts.  Northwestern gains five yards and punts.  Nebraska's quarterback then throws another interception in the Huskers' own ten yard line.  Northwestern loses 14 yards and kicks a field goal.  Emergency medical teams in the stadium report dozens of people are succumbing to Punt Madness.  The Big Ten attempts to intervene to force the teams to move the ball, but the sadistic Nebraska governor mobilizes the national guard to stop them.  A Nebraska fan is arrested outside the stadium for completing a pass during a tailgate.  Only a Nebraska touchdown late in the first half prevents a wide-scale riot as anxious Nebraska fans prepared to leave the stadium en masse and run the option all over Lincoln.  "These are the eventualities that you have to prepare for and execute at," Northwestern coach David Braun said at the half. 

If you look at this you will get a call that says Seven Days and then a spooky woman will crawl out of your television and run for a -2 yards.

Northwestern was unable to regain the lead and eventually scored another touchdown to ice the lead.  The Wildcats never managed to find the endzone.  The loss probably ends the team's unlikely quest for bowl eligibility because it is very difficult to imagine them playing a Big Ten team worse than Nebraska that spent the entire first half sending strongly worded telegrams to the Northwestern sideline all but demanding that the 'Cats take an enormous lead.  But it is still possible.  The team is slowly regaining its identity as a pain-in-the-ass defense that can make it very difficult to score without an effective passing game, and they play in the Big Ten West: Home of the Oaf Quarterback. They no longer look like the worst major-conference team in college football but merely a recent-vintage Northwestern team enjoying its final year rolling around in the garbage with its lumbering midwestern peers.

Unfortunately, they do not face a lummoxing punt factory team this week.  Maryland is 5-2 this season, and averages about 33 points per game.  They are, however, coming off two losses-- one to Ohio State and one to fellow Big Ten West slopsmen Illinois, but are also coming off a bye.  Maryland, like all Big Ten teams is heavily favored against the Wildcats.  Autumn has finally descended upon Chicagoland, and a nasty, blustery, and gray day will match the general vibes of Ryan Field.   I received an email from Northwestern offering a "flash sale" on tickets earlier this week, so I assume there will be approximately seventeen people in the stands forcing Northwestern on crucial downs to rally its army of tarps.  This might be the least-anticipated football game played today.

MICHIGAN SKULDUGGERY UPDATE

Last week, the college football world met Michigan Intelligence Asset Connor Stalions, who allegedly masterminded an elaborate sign-stealing operation by sending his network of agents out to various Big Ten stadiums to record opponents' sideline signals.  We have learned more this week.  Stalions is, according to reporting, the author of a strange Manifesto about Michigan football, which is something I cannot really make fun of because what you are reading on this blog is equally embarrassing.  The NCAA, ridiculed and stripped of almost all meaningful power, is rallying around its ability to investigate an actual Football Crime and as we speak Stalions' network of Joes and Lamplighters is getting rolled up while the association takes aim at its nemesis Jim Harbaugh.  This, at last, is a perfect NCAA football scandal where everyone involved seems to be a nincompoop and the results only affect football games and undermines Michigan's self-described Football Paladin reputation while its fans begin going rogue by making right turns on red lights or ringing up organic produce as normal produce in the self-checkout aisle.  

 

Stalions and his agents, adorned in this cloak, were able to roam the sidelines undetected at eleven Big Ten stadiums.

Last week, I asked readers to submit their own Airport Thriller paragraphs about Connor Stalions.  I'd like to thank everyone who wrote in, and here are their contributions, each of which I have titled.

Codes Blue, by noahcoffman22:

Ask anybody in Ann Arbor about Connor Stalions, and one of the first things they'll tell you is that he's a man with a code. Right now, he has several of them, actually, burning up the inside pocket of his vintage leather jacket as he hightails it out of Piscataway. His Harley squeals into a sharp left toward the New Jersey Turnpike, discarded milk bottle (a present from "Big Jim" himself) clinking away behind him. Slowly, he allows a smile to creep across his grizzled visage. Cupping his custom earpiece, he mutters the only two words he needs for the man on the other end to know the job has been done: "signs.....stolen."

Ooooo RAWR RAWR RAWR by Kermit Van Jensen

A naked bootleg is not unlike an amphibious landing. An operation drunk with stupid courage, yet critically reliant on tactical deftness. Any Marine, no matter how hard-headed, knows no feat of bravery can save a botched landing. A forewarned defensive battalion will massacre an amphibious force left with nowhere to run.

This thought repulsed Stalions, who now envisaged himself holed up in a pillbox, directing perfectly sighted fire on his hapless brothers in arms.

He shut his eyes, hard, and briefly pulled the binoculars away from his face.

What he did see was a grad assistant in neon green wildly flailing both of his arms from a proud kneel.

“This shit makes me sick,” he muttered to himself, referring not only to Northwestern’s offense, but also his own betrayal of the Corps’ values.

“Semper Fi … Go Blue,” he sneered with sardonic cadence.

“Doesn’t mean nothing to a grunt like me” 

The Spider Weaves Its Own Web: A Connor Stalions Novel by Joshua L.

“You’re a long way from the Big 10,” Kiffin chuckled softly, almost wryly.

Under other circumstances it might not have been an unfriendly sound, but here—with a sixth consecutive Jaxson Dart bubble screen throw headed directly toward Connor Stalions’s already bruised eight pack abs—it was the very chorus of evil. “You wanted a look at our playbook, Mr. Stalions,” the Ole Miss coach whispered from underneath his signature white visor before leaning close to look directly into the flint-gray eyes of Stalions, who remained bound firmly to the tackle dummy.

“Well, you got it. Jaxson! bubble screen, strong side, hut!”

Stalions had trained for this. Bracing his abdominals for impact, he began working the razor edge of Kiffin’s laminated play sheet, which he’d lifted from the coach’s windbreaker just moments before, against his bonds. Harbaugh had to know what Stalions had seen in Oxford. The world had to know.

Day of the Jackal 2: Different Day, Different Jackal by Anonymous

Ryan Day laughed.

Operation Cheeseburger failed to turn public support against the Enemy, but this would achieve that aim. Deep Punt had come through with the needed intel. Now he just needed to get to the drop site undetected and RonEnglishFanJS09 would finish the mission.

He knew that Stallions had cracked his publicly exposed signaling network like the Allies had deciphered the Enigma Machine. That must be the only reason they experienced setbacks; not their inability to block Aidan Hutchinson. Now he would rectify this.

Day knew that when Mike Leach’s network was compromised, he arranged an elaborate ruse to exploit his enemy’s assumed faulty intel. But the rogue pirate’s tradecraft was flawed. Don’t plant false information to use against the opposition. Complain to the teacher instead!

He reached the spot. Glancing around nonchalantly, Day reached into the back of his pants and pulled out the laminated A0 play-card and finished the dead drop. “Who is born on third base now?” he muttered as he walked into the cold night.

LOCK IN SUCCESS THE MIKE LOCKSLEY WAY

And when it ended, all Mike Locksley wanted from me was an explanation. I told him I was desperate and that I needed money.  More than that, I wanted a shot-- I spent all day answering calls and turning people down on my boss's behalf as they tried to throw money and plaudits at him, but no one ever called and asked for me.  He told me this was not a road to success the Mike Locksley way.  I know, I said.  I had read all about it in his papers.

I had been working as the assistant for legendary sports personality ghostwriter Roddy Pfampfor about eight months.  My novel, an experimental work about hypotheticals and the objectivity of "truth" that I explored by writing about something happening and then writing "or did it?" right after or sometimes in a footnote, had been rejected by 71 small presses, journals, quarterlies, websites and even some 'zines, and I had just been fired from a job proofreading manifestos.  I got the job with Pfamp after seeing a bizarre ad for a "Literary Fetchman" in the print shop where I was picking up another copy of my manuscript that I was going to send to a publisher that specialized in vintage microwave owner's manuals.  I learned that I was the only one who answered that ad, and soon I found myself at the right hand of Roddy Pfamp.

Pfamp was not a household name, but most people encountered him at some point by picking up one of his ghostwritten memoirs.  He written hundreds, including The Hat Had It Coming by Lou Piniella, Bill Laimbeer's Combat Literature, and Climbing to the Majors: A Matt Stairs Story.  Pfamp was a ghostwriter's ghostwriter, always refusing credit and press.  On any occasion where he had to be credited as an "as told to" or even a "with," he always used a different pen name; no one knew that Losing to Win by Matt Millen with Herb Nadacky was by the same author as Winning to Lose by Marv Levy as told to Larry "Gred" Gredsonof.  Pfamp also refused to be photographed and wore elaborate disguises every time he met with an author in order to maintain his air of mystery.

Pfamp needed an assistant because he had been seriously injured on his last assignment.  No one knew that Pfamp had another secret career as the ghostwriter for the entire literary output of famed sportswriter Warren "Plaid" Blanton.  Blanton had been a fixture in the sports press for decades, known for his outrageous participation stunts, his love for an exotic form of Flemish badminton, and his ever-present pipe.  What no one knew was that everything under Blanton's byline was actually written by Roddy Pfamp.  Blanton never wrote a word of his book Fly Me To The Ground chronicling his attempt to win a home-made flying contraption contest nor did he write the famous prank article where he invented a legendary baseball player named "Mickey Mantle," which bamboozled an entire generation of Baby Boomers. Blanton was a handsome man who sounded vaguely European despite having grown up entirely in the United States and who divided his time between the literary fête circuit and by expounding from his book-lined study in documentaries about boxing, squash, joust injuries.  The two had met when the they were covering a varsity squinting competition.  Blanton was a young stringer for Cudgel, and the two of them essentially invented the Plaid Blanton persona over a drunken, weeks-long bacchanal that resulted in Pfamp ghostwriting Blanton's first "I Say" column and Blanton purchasing his first ascot.  

Pfamp's injury occurred when he was writing a book about Blanton secretly joining the new Slamball revival.  What people didn't realize is that Pfamp also silently joined in these stunts, working alongside Blanton as a lion-tamer, monster jam driver, and competitor in the New England Maritime Salty Sea Dog competition.  Pfamp felt he needed to join the Slamball league disguised as someone named Titus Slamballicus despite being 77 years old, and he instantly severed 70% of his leg ligaments on his first attempted slam.

It was not particularly fun to work for Roddy Pfamp.  I thought he would be full of interesting and colorful stories about the famous sports-men he met, but he was gruff and quick to anger.  I'm not sure he ever learned my name.  Instead he just called me "egghead" because of the remarkably round and admittedly somewhat bulbous shape of my skull.  "You, Egghead, get me the 1959 Almanack of Yachting Winds," is something he might say.  Or "How can I get it into your head to get no pulp orange juice? I'm speaking literally, how does anything penetrate that cranium?"  I brought up my writing often and even left copies of my manuscript around in areas where he would normally read it but he became so agitated even seeing it that a doctor told me that I had to burn it in front of him or he might suffer from a rare condition common in old, mean writers called Literary Agita.

My main job, aside from helping with the basic household tasks, was dealing with Pfamp's voluminous correspondence.  Even in his ailing state, publishers bombarded him with requests.  Sports personalities needed memoirs, magazine profiles, and apologies written on the notes app on their phones and posted to social media.  I was told to turn them all down.  I learned that this was Pfamp's preferred technique.  He had not accepted a pitch for decades.  Instead, the publishers and editors he preferred to work with and those who knew how to handle him all understood how to find him.  Others who didn't know him thought they could win him over with elaborate gestures.  One publisher, desperate to sign him onto an untitled Rony Seikaly project, sent over fourteen singing telegrams.  Another disguised himself as a meter reader from the city in order to get an audience with Pfamp, who then chased him from his apartment with a game-used Mickey Morandini bat.  Others sent elaborate meals, expensive liquor, blank checks.  Every day, I sifted through a pile of proposals and sent pointed letters to them on Pfamp's letterhead telling them to buzz off.

I was tired, frustrated, and broke when I found a small packet buried under some papers.  While Pfamp rejected all proposals on sight, he still read all of them in the off-chance something special caught his eye and also so he could ridicule the book when it was inevitably published by one of his many ghostwriter rivals.  But he had not seen this one.  It had gotten lost among his notes for an abandoned project called A Life In Fifteen Shoves by Charles Oakley that ended in a shoving match. The packet held a proposal for a book to be titled Lock In Success, a life advice manual from a fellow named Mike Locksley.  The offer was a truly astronomical sum.  I began to get an idea.

Because of his elaborate disguise regimen and reclusive personal life, almost no one knew what Roddy Pfamp actually looked like.  I could easily present myself to this Locksley, write down his Business Secrets from sports, and produce a book very quickly.  The money would allow me to quit this job and tell Pfamp where to cram it while knowing that my giant head had outwitted him and then self-publish my masterpiece and even market it to the discerning literary public at various high society functions.  It was a scheme so devious and simple that I chuckled to myself when I first game up with it.  I wrote the publisher and told them that Roddy Pfamp accepted and then detailed instructions for payment to his assistant who handles those sorts of things for him as he was too busy to get bogged down in the details of business (unlike Mike Locksley, I presumed).

I figured that Locksley would appreciate a punctual man, but I my planned subterfuge to get several hours away from Pfamp had not worked.  He had a difficult time getting his VCR to work and he wanted to watch an old Olympic fencing match from 1984 to heckle the participants, but the tape was old and worn and Pfamp kept telling me I was causing "cranial interference" so by the time I was able to pry myself from him and get to Locksley's hotel room, I was nearly an hour late.  

Mike Locksley, I learned, is not a man you want to keep waiting.  He is detailed and precise and busy.  I knew from previous research that he was a football coach, and that implied to me a certain type of disciplinary fetish. I told him I had been detained by car problems and began inventing an elaborate story about a zoo truck that had unleashed two or three irate rhinoceros on the main highway.  "Let me tell you what Nick Saban used to say about excuses," he said.  I took it that Nick Saban was some sort of football personality that I should know about.  "The minute you give me an excuse, you excuse yourself from consideration."  He stared at me and then smiled, so I let out a nervous chuckle as if to say yes that is something Nick Saban would say.  "Well you made it here, let's see if we can work together."

He handed me a a sheaf of papers.  It was an outline based on some motivational seminars he had been given, some anecdotes, life lessons, etc. that would form the basis of the book.  Lock in Success, they were called.  There were a lot of football metaphors.  This was a problem.  Though I worked for a major sportswriter, I had no interest or knowledge of any sort of sport or sporting pursuit.  I despised them and saw them as grunting circuses for troglodytes.  I had no working knowledge of football whatsoever.  I suppose, in my excitement for the scheme, I had not ever considered that ghostwriting for a football coach might at some point require learning about football.  Locksley told me to look over the materials and come back in a week with a few samples so we could see if we were on the same page.  

On the way home, I started to read.  "When life gives you fourth and inches, don't punt."  I was lost.  I tried to subtly get Pfamp to explain football to me, every time I brought it up he said "You, Egghead.  You're blocking the afternoon sun.  Move that melon of yours before I freeze."  I even tried to research football at the local library, but a quick glance at some books made everything seem even more complicated.  The deadline loomed.  

It was four AM and I had consumed several bags of coffee at the time (I had lost my coffee pot in an ill-fated night of gambling with my old peers at an experimental writing workshop that I eventually left after exposing them all as charlatans and at this time I was simply chewing the beans).  I was set to meet Locksley in only two days.  It was impossible to ask for an extension because that would be a dreaded excuse.  I began looking at the pages again, my eyes barely able to focus, when I had a brilliant idea, one so simple yet ingenious that I could not believe it did not strike me earlier.  I would simply make up football.  A parallel system that had its own equally confounding jargon and terminology.  Because Locksley was a master coach and technician, the lay reader would only assume he was talking about stratagems so complex and diabolical that he or she could not grasp it and would simply skim through it to get to the valuable life lessons.

I began writing.  Now, instead of facing something called fourth and short, which I imagined to be some sort of adverse position, the quartered-back would be cowering in Strife Position (as a writer, I could not simply holster my literary weapons altogether).  I assumed one of the appeals of football was its violence and mayhem so I wrote many anecdotes about football players fighting out of dire circumstances by kicking and biting the opposition.  In fact, I enjoyed the concept of sports-biting so much that I invented a designated chomper-back, a strong-jawed specialist who would be lowered onto the field in a cage and then left to set upon anyone in his path with savage abandon.

I became so taken with my own version of football that I quickly abandoned Locksley's materials to elaborate on the astonishing game that flowed from my pen.  Once every thirteen minutes, the visiting team may legally perform a Reverse Oxen.  During the fourteenth period, players may craft artificial limbs to attach to themselves including tails, claws, mandibles, and fins.  In certain conditions, the coach can call for the game to take place entirely within a body of water where both teams must attack each other on skiffs.  There are times when the ball was illegal but it was only possible to figure it out by deciphering an elaborate riddle.  Points are awarded in lengthy arbitration hearings.  

I was very excited to present my new vision of football to Locksley.  As a discerning sportsman, I figured he would easily see the superior qualities of my version of the sport and become an ardent promoter.  This is not what happened.  Locksley was perplexed.  "This was a very simple assignment.  I did almost all of the work.  I know people respond to these life lessons packaged with football because I did these presentation to literally thousands of people.  It's as if you have no idea what you're doing whatsoever."  

I decided to switch tactics.  I told him that I ghostwrote for a lot of people in a lot of sports.  It would be too easy to get mixed up.  For example, what if I was writing a memoir about a tennis player and then a swimmer and pretty soon I had the tennis player doing laps at Roland Garros?  He frowned.  I explained that in order to clear my head in between projects I practiced a mental technique called "shamanic forgetting" where I would attempt to completely rid myself of all information about one sport.  I had just done a baseball book, and had completely cleared it out of my head.  "I could not tell you a batsman from a quickjobber," I said.  He continued to frown and stare.  He said "I'm sorry but you seem like you are really full of shit."

I apologized and confessed to the ruse, telling him of my desperation for money and literary fame.  This did not move him.  Another excuse.  This time he didn't laugh.  I was ruined and humiliated.  Locksley would get word back to the publisher and, though I controlled most communications with Pfamp from the outside world, the ghostwriting community was a small world, and someone would quickly tell him what I had done.  I could not face the browbeating.  I simply stopped going to Pfamp's house with no explanation.

Several months later, I was walking past the bookstore when something caught my eye.  Lock In Success.  Dozens of copies of it in the window.  The sign said "best-seller" and "top book for 45 weeks in the Life Advice With Football Metaphors genre.  I ran in and grabbed it.  In small print, it said "with Reginald Ox."  I knew it immediately.  It was a Pfamp.

Baseball Maudlin Sentimentality Check-In

Willson Contreras was not supposed to be here. It was a Friday day game at Wrigley Field in the late summer, late in the game with the shadows ominously creeping up to the batter’s box and the three o’clock seagulls divebombing the outfield, and the park was filled with tourists and children enjoying their last weeks before school and a lot of people who, like Willson Contreras, were supposed to be somewhere else. Contreras should have been gone, traded to a contender for one or two babyfaced nineteen-year-olds, and he had spent the season as a ghostly specter haunting Wrigley but here he was fully corporeal in the eighth inning blasting a pitch into the left field bleachers and pointing to the ecstatic fans and ground as if to say “this is where I am” as the last-place Cubs took a 2-1 lead over the last-place Marlins.

 

The trade deadline on the North Side of Chicago has become an emotional time in recent years, but Contreras elevated it into a sublime melodrama. The past couple weeks have seen Contreras hold tearful press conferences, grab teammates in interminable embraces, soak in multiple ovations, and generally act like he is on a train platform sending his wispily muttonchopped sons to fight in the Civil War. It has been over the top but also very endearing. Contreras represents one of the last remaining World Series Cubs besides Kyle Hendricks and Jason Heyward– while I was writing this post, Jed Hoyer announced that Heyward has played his last game as a Cub and will be released next year and exists on the current team as an apparition. Contreras has spent pretty much his entire adult life in the Cubs organization, hit a home run on the first pitch he saw in the big leagues, won a world series his rookie year, and has been a fan favorite; regardless of how he might feel about the Cubs and its management, he sure made it seem like he would rather stay here in Chicago slopping around the bottom of the National League Central in beautiful Wrigley afternoons than getting to play in the playoffs, which serves as a full embrace of the Cubs lifestyle.

What makes more sense as a fan here? To root for two more months of Willson Contreras in a career year soaking up the adoration of the crowd as the Cubs plummet into yet another pointless toilet season? To get angry at the Cubs for not maximizing his value by dealing him earlier? To hope that the Cubs use a bunch of transaction arcana to somehow turn him into an extra draft pick next year? And what will the Cubs do with Ian Happ, whom they also declined to trade this year and will presumably submit to another deadline of trades and dugout speculation, and seeing his hair growth billboards get swallowed up into more Urlacher ones to the point that there are so many Brian Urlacher hair billboards that there are now meta Urlacher billboards commenting on the number of Urlacher billboards on the Jane Addams tollway?

Rooting for the Cubs means a clash between sentimentality and the bloodless calculation of baseball’s heartless marketplace and it is crushing to see that, as of this year, the spreadsheets have won in an absolute rout. The Cubs let their World Series heroes go and so far it looks like they made a brilliant baseball decision. Kris Bryant has spent most of his first season in Denver in traction and various walking boots. Javy Baez’s Detroit career, save for that disputed opening day walk off against the White Sox, has looked exactly like the horrifying scenario of someone turning Javy’s baseball mojo sliders down one notch. Anthony Rizzo, meanwhile, seems to be having a great time in New York playing for a chance for another ring, dinking baseballs over Yankee Stadiums short right field porch, and being in the enviable position as a respected veteran leader who is not important enough to the team that the tabloids will ruthlessly attack him with “Anthony Shizzo” puns instead of fending off the Pirates and Reds for fourth place in the NL North. It is a bummer that the Cubs decided to sell off their stars like they are the Oakland A’s; it is also upsetting that it may have been a good move.

BASEBALL'S CORN GAME AND MLB'S MACABRE DEATH OBSESSION

After two years of turning the Cubs into the Iowa Cubs, Major League Baseball manifested this transformation literally by making the team play in Iowa in their nationally televised Corn Game.  This year, instead of an exciting and up and coming White Sox team clashing with the flagship Yankees they got two tanking teams from the bottom of the shittiest division in baseball in the middle of cynical rebuilds headlined by the Reds owner opening the season by telling his fans they are like ants to him and they should go fuck themselves while wearing a jaunty red blazer during a parade.

As a spectacle, the Corn Game looks fantastic on television.  The players emerge from the stalks in perfect golden hour sunlight, the tiny stadium has been expertly art-directed to exude quaintness, the Cubs' uniforms featuring a crudely-drawn bear that appears to be confused how it obtained a bat were nice, and it is extremely cool when someone blasts a home run into an ocean of corn.  I'm not an enormous fan of what the game is trying to evoke with the sepia-toned paeans to some imagined bucolic purity; my preferred old-time baseball aesthetic would instead focus on the players' ridiculous nicknames and dirtbag ballplayer bullshit and the various elaborate ways that they would cheat and get rioted upon by fans, but I understand why MLB would not want to put on a Mustache Guy Chased From Brothels Game.

But the thing that is strange about the Corn Game aesthetic is that it is a grim and macabre evocation of death.  Field of Dreams is a movie about processing grief through the mechanism of baseball.  To MLB, the movie's ghosts represent baseball history and Kevin Costner's desire to play catch with his dead dad is a maudlin marketing gimmick about baseball linking generations, but if you look at it another way it is a Very Special Baseball Event about how you and everyone you love even if that also includes baseball players from the 1910s will die. This is a phenomenon unique to baseball, the oldest of the American major sports leagues, the one that makes a connection to history one of its greatest selling points, and the one where the limitless supply of documentary talking heads feeding baseball's nostalgia industrial complex are always ready to spring up in book-lined study to talk about how the sun was shining in Yankee Stadium when they went there to see the fictitious baseball player "Mickey Mantle" that they only remember because of a pervasive disinformation campaign targeting baby boomers by Ken Burns and Billy Crystal.  Major League Baseball is not the only sports league that appeals to history and nostalgia, but it is the only one where the theme of all of its newsreel grandeur is not look where we came from but look what he we have lost.  The Field of Dreams is a mausoleum.  I suppose that is why the most noteworthy feature of the game was holographic necromancy.

In 2020, when baseball chaotically returned in the middle of the pandemic and some Fox broadcasts used bizarre, poorly rendered computer graphic versions of fans to up the empty stadiums, I wrote that we had officially become a cyberpunk society.  It was not only the computerized fans on MLB telecasts, but also a feeling that the pervasive low quality zoom images everywhere suddenly gave all television the aesthetic quality of 80s and 90s movies about cyberpunk dystopias.  The Harry Caray hologram fit into that style.  It looked like a playstation cutscene.  It lurched unnaturally.  It glowed eerily.  The mouth movements were off so it seemed like Take Me Out to the Ballgame was being being dubbed over a demonic incantation in some dead, unholy language. In a setting where everything was supposed to evoke an old-timey feel to the point that the broadcasters all dressed like members of the rival "Hey Mister" and "Whaddaya Say Fella" gangs who were about to brawl on a streetcar, Fox decided to unleash a hologram of a famous 1980s drunk who has been dead for more than 20 years for what appears to be no reason whatsoever.  

This was such a strange and insane thing to do that I am glad they did it.  The hologram itself was an unsettling invasion from the Uncanny Valley, but I can't stop laughing about how many people had to approve it before it came lurching onto our screens like the woman from The Ring.  I can't wait to see other holograms they come up with: hologram Babe Ruth calling his shot, hologram Lou Gehrig saying goodbye to Yankee Stadium, hologram George Brett explaining how he shit himself on the Las Vegas strip to a bunch of hologram Royals rookies.  The possibilities are endless.    

MANEATING TIGERS

One thing that sometimes occurs to me when I walk by a fence and am briefly startled by the unexpected bark from a dog that is always at least thirty percent smaller than it sounds is the relative freedom I enjoy from being hunted and messily eaten by a predator. I have been thinking about this because I have been reading about the Champawat Tiger, which killed an estimated 436 people in India and Nepal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century before it was finally killed in 1910 by the famed tiger hunter Jim Corbett.

I got interested in this while rereading the tiger essay in Brian Philipps’s Impossible Owls, where he goes on a tiger watching expedition in India, and figured I should probably read Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kuamon. When I put that into the library search engine, though, it spit out a book with the arresting name No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Chamapawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal In History and immediately mashed that request button. The writer of the book is a newspaper and magazine journalist named Dane Huckelbridge who has also published a book on the history of bourbon, so I had no idea whether I was getting a decent book or a fevered J. Peterman catalog, and here’s what greeted me in Chapter 1:

Where does one begin? With a story whose true telling demands centuries, if not millennia, and whose roots and tendrils snake into such far-flung realms as colonial British policies, Indian cosmologies, and the rise and fall of Nepalese dynasties, where is the starting point? Yes, one could commence with the royal decrees that compelled Vasco da Gama to sail for the East Indies, or the palace intrigues that put Jung Bahadur in the highest echelons of Himalayan power. But the matter at hand is something much more primal– elemental, even. Something that’s shaped our psyches and permeated our mythologies since time immemorial, and that speaks directly to the most profound of our fears. To be eaten by a monster. To be hunted, to be consumed, by a creature whose innate predatory gifts are infinitely superior to our own. To be ripped apart and summarily devoured. And, with this truth in mind, the answer becomes even simpler. In fact, its golden eyes are staring us right in the face: the tiger. That is where the story begins.

And yet, despite Huckelbridge’s various forays into Magazine Mode, I enjoyed this book. Huckleridge carefully and viscerally paints a picture of the various horrible ways that a tiger will fuck you up, and he puts it in ways that can be appreciated by readers of a sports blog. “...[the bengal tiger] is the middle linebacker of the animal world, the perfect melding of power and speed,” he notes Facendaishly. “To put that number into grisly perspective, the entire roster of the National Basketball Association evens out at around 450 players. So essentially– according to most published accounts– the Champawat very nearly consumed the entire NBA.”

Huckleridge does two things effectively in his account of the Champawat tiger’s decades-long rampage spanning two countries. First, he provides a compelling case linking manmade ecological changes and maneating in tigers. In order to do this, he unspools a compact history of the terai in western Nepal, a marshy area that serves as the bengal tiger’s primary habitat, and the Rana dynasty that emerged in the nineteenth century. The new government, according Hucklebridge, began to more effectively exploit the terai with farming methods that disrupted the tigers’ relatively harmonious relationship with the native Tharu. Simultaneously, tigers just over the border in India saw an even more dramatic attack on their habitat under British policies in the late nineteenth century as the colonial government gobbled up hundreds of thousands of acres of timber. The British also greatly increased the pace of tiger hunting as visitors with money demanded to hunt tigers as a tourist experience.

These ecological changes turned out to function as ideal conditions for churning out maneating tigers. Tigers, as Hucklebridge explains, tend to leave humans alone for whatever reason unless they become injured, displaced, or otherwise desperate and figure out people have virtually no defenses against them. The British program of destroying tiger habitats and leading endless tiger hunts that maimed tigers could not have been a more effective plan for unleashing a scourge of deadly tigers. According to Hucklebridge, the instances of serial maneaters like the Champawat along with equally dangerous leopards significantly increased during the twentieth century. Tigers are territorial, and one adult tiger can claim territory of 25 square miles to even 50, and tigers that lose that territory to a rival get pushed further and further out where they are more likely to encounter rapidly encroaching human settlements. These tigers are further from the environment they know and become desperate for new food sources; at best they can become a plague on livestock and at worst they become monsters that can besiege entire villages.

The second thing that Hucklebridge does well is to sell the tense terror when reconstructing Corbett’s hunt. Corbett’s own account from his Man-eaters of Kuamon (I ended up finding it on the internet) is only about 25 pages of plain-speaking bluffness, but Huckleridge provides a far longer and more dramatic account, using plenty of license and what I would affectionately describe as writerly bullshit to spice things up. There are a lot of probablys and would likely haves throughout this part of the book but Huckleridge is not just making things up to make them up but trying to convey two important elements of the story: one is the fraught politics of the situation that Corbett, who was born in India and speaks fluent Kuamoni and is coming to hunt a tiger on behalf of his own countryman, was still showing up as a representative of the British government who the people in Champawat had good reason to mistrust and hate; the other, which Corbett makes very clear and Hucklebridge reiterates, is that hunting a maneating tiger is in fact extremely scary.

Do you know a tiger is hunted? It is not some pith helmet guy out there crawling around like the predator except with embarrassing knee socks instead of dripping mandibles. As Phillipps writes about the experience of just trying to photograph them, tigers can be virtually invisible to human beings. Instead, what you do is organize an enormous party of dozens if not hundreds of people into what is called a “beat,” a large battle line of people and elephants making an enormous racket to rouse the tiger and scare the absolute shit out of it until it gets cornered or exhausted and the hunter is able to take a shot from the safe pachyderm perch.  Corbett did not have the luxury of an elephant and his beat was designed to lure the tiger into a ravine where he only had a few shots.  In Hucklebridge's telling, Corbett dropped the tiger only seconds from getting mauled.  And then there it is, the photograph of Corbett and the deadly maneater that looks identical to any number of photographs of British hunters from the era.

Hucklebridge taps into the primeval horror invoked by tiger attacks, but the real strength of the book is to contextualize it as a modern phenomenon.  His account of the Champawat tiger, presented as the forces of colonialism and environmental despoliation literally creating a monster, is an allegory almost too on the nose to be published if it was fiction.  But tiger attacks unfortunately persist, even as they have been driven into dangerously low populations and confined to nature preserves; unfortunately the tigers don't know where they're not supposed to go.

The Maniacs Blew It Up

 There is a point that I get to any time I play the baroque soccer management game “Football Manager” in the dregs of semi-professional leagues where I have to decide whether to sell off the contract of my club talisman and star who may or may not be any good at the next level or sign him to a potentially ruinous contract that will destroy the wage budget and every time that has happened I have just stopped playing the game.  These are not real people but digitally-created blips that I can sort of watch pretend to play soccer for me over a spreadsheet that have been given ludicrous computer generated names like “Paolo Pasta” but I have gotten so attached to these digital athletes heroically dragging my sorry-ass team from a league where you have a van to one where you have a slightly bigger van that I can’t possibly let go of them. I get so anxious about making the wrong decision that it completely drains the fun of playing anymore; the experience transforms from being in a rollicking overseas soccer adventure to a middle management layoff simulator, at which point I just stop playing and turn to other ways to waste time like writing long, ponderous blog posts for 45 people.  It should come as no surprise that this is a post about the Chicago Cubs.

For more than a year, Cubs ownership and management have been signalling that the team was unwilling to sign any of its star players and World Series heroes to large, lucrative extensions, and fans have been bracing themselves to see them get shipped out of town in an attempt to salvage some sort of trade value for them before they left in free agency.  Nevertheless, the ending came shockingly quickly, almost (apologies for using this word to describe a series of baseball transactions) violently.  On a Thursday and Friday in late July, the Cubs shipped off the remaining players that fans had followed since they were in the minor leagues while the big league placeholders oafishly ran into each other and struck out by spinning around so quickly that they levitated several feet over the air-- these were the prospects representing the hope of a team that could somehow win a World Series victory.  Somehow, against everything I had grown up believing about the Chicago Cubs, they actually managed to do it.  Then they were gone suddenly, like the Cubs were a crooked nineteenth century circus leaving exactly one hour before someone realizes that the bear is actually a guy in a costume or if they were the fucking Pittsburgh Pirates.
 

 
The season was already doomed when they traded Yu Darvish in a pure salary dump and replaced him with a variety of castoffs and sixteen-inch softball pitchers and despite that the Cubs briefly managed to fight into first place based on an MVP-calber performance from Bryant and a shockingly good bullpen, most of which has also been sold off for scraps.  The players seemed like they were trying to spite the front office and stay together for one last season, but like so many seasons since 2016 they came up short.  I made my first and likely only appearance at Wrigley in nearly two years on a steamy Tuesday night to see the remnants of the World Series team one last time in a desultory loss to the Reds.  The previous night’s game, where Baez hit a walkoff single in a display of rollicking shittalkery, would be his final appearance as a Cub and the team’s last home win for nearly a month.

The Cubs faced a management conundrum based on how teams operate in 2021.  That means that the central question has changed from whether a baseball player is good to whether or not the club has extracted the maximum value possible for him and will continue to do so.  And in those terms, Hoyer had a genuine quandary.  Is it prudent to give a large amount of money to a unique player like Baez who must make up for frequently striking out on swings that can only be described as cartoonish by clobbering enough pitches over the fence and making plays on the field and basepaths that seem so reckless and ill-considered that they somehow work out like he is a charming Southern state senator who keeps getting reelected despite getting caught up in extortion schemes involving alligators?  Is Rizzo’s status as the most beloved Cub since Sammy Sosa worth paying for if he ends up as a declining power bat with back problems?  Should the Cubs pay Kris Bryant the enormous amount of money he will command as a free agent if they suspect that he is no longer the perennial MVP candidate and franchise savior he looked in the 2015-17 seasons but merely a very good baseball player who suffers at least one power-sapping injury a season?  \In each case, Hoyer clearly said no, and chose to restock the farm with a bunch of mysterious 19 year-olds who are so far from the majors that it is impossible to tell what they will become without letting any of the beloved World Series Cubs turn into albatross contracts like Jason Heyward.  Under these conditions, Hoyer may have acted wisely-- it is certainly possible that all three do not live up to the WAR per dollar calculations that baseball players can be abstracted to.    

Watching these guys fade away like Marty McFly's family 

 

On the other hand it is also possible to say that those are stupid, self-imposed conditions.  Major League Baseball does not have a salary cap.  The Ricketts family could pay any or all of these players and run up an astonishing payroll and then use their unfathomable wealth and the enormous amounts of cash available from their garbage television network and real estate ventures to buy their way out of mistakes, even if their short-term profits are in the red from the pandemic.  I don’t care if the Cubs are “financially responsible” with their payroll if it means I get to watch Javy Baez strike out and hit moonshots and somehow bamboozle an unfortunate Pittsburgh Pirate so badly on the basepaths that he goes to play in Korea; giving a large amount of money to any of those guys even if they end up mediocre or playing poorly is probably the least objectionable thing the Ricketts family can do with their money.   

Sentiment is a tricky thing in sports.  A certain ruthlessness is baked into the entire enterprise, and there are no small number of websites and podcasts that have stacks of statistics and acronyms and salary arcana that can make the case for cold-bloodedly jettisoning players no matter their importance to the team.  At the same time, baseball in particular runs on sentiment; I have come to believe that if you are ever on the East Coast you run considerable risk of being buttonholed by a sweater-wearing notable author who insists on waxing poetic on the Boston Red Sox or a fictional player invented in 1989 by Ken Burns, Bob Costas, and Billy Crystal named “Mickey Mantle” as part of a CIA psy-op on the Baby Boomer generation.  The biggest baseball event this season was a syrupy tribute to a 30-year-old movie about dead baseball players and the only time something supernatural emerging from a remote cornfield in a film has ever not eaten two or three supporting characters.  Owners want fans to feel sentimental when they ask for taxpayer-funded stadiums or cable carriage fees.  The tension between that sentiment and a process where teams are now full of fungible athletes like the transient relief pitchers who essentially live in a boxcar that is constantly shuttling them between AAA and the bigs every other week has always been a part of baseball but seems magnified now more than ever.

Being a sports fan involves knowing that, at root, you are a sucker.  Fans know that they exist in the sports ecosystem like they do in all aspects of society as breathing wallets that companies can extract money from.  But most sports fans accept this because rooting for teams is fun, gaining access to a broad, shared human experience is fun, watching spherical guys hit a ball 450 feet at a person who is about to make the goofiest face a human being can make before inadvertently showering everyone around them with beer or nacho shrapnel is fantastic.  Still, to see a team so quickly cast off any guise of sentiment, to strip a supposed “big market” team to its rivets so easily simply because the people who own it have nakedly said that signing a paycheck for a player is less important to them than saving an amount of money that to them is immeasurably insignificant is one of those moments that makes it impossible to surrender to the spectacle.  I know that as a sports fan I’m a sucker but don’t make me feel like a schmuck.

ROCK AND ROLL FABLE

If you have not seen the ridiculous 1984 Walter Hill rock and roll action movie Streets of Fire, here is how it begins: there’s a packed auditorium of fans watching a band styled like they could be backing up Jerry Lee Lewis impersonators before Diane Lane bounds onto the stage dressed like a discarded X-Man and belts out a gloriously 80s song by the maestro of goth showtunes Jim Steinman while a 1950s biker gang menacingly approaches the venue and enters shrouded in shadow before it reveals the leader is a pale, leering, vampiric Willem DaFoe whose haircut causes him to look in silhouette like a man with a perfectly square head.  It is my favorite movie scene that I have seen in some time.
 

 

The Diane Lane character gets kidnapped by William DaFoe and it is up to her ex-boyfried with the delightfully idiotic name “Tom Cody” to rescue her alongside a tough former soldier sidekick played by Amy Madigan and a slimy music manager played by Rick Moranis who is somehow named “Billy Fish.” The plot is all incidental to the appeal of the movie, which is the world of steaming neons and roaring engines that it inhabits at the fictional nexus of 1950s fashions and cars and 1980s music in a city that consists entirely of a single street that looks exactly like the portion of Wells Street under the L tracks.  The particular fusion of 1950s kitsch into an 80s setting was not uncommon; here I am thinking of how the town of Twin Peaks has a biker gang that exists to rumble with the football team over girlfriends but keeps getting getting sucked into a vast interdimensional cosmology involving formless primordial evil and dangerous French Canadians.

I do not want anyone reading this to think Streets of Fire is a particularly good movie.  Hill said he wrote it as something a 13-year-old would come up with, and it works exactly at that level.  There are bad guys and good guys and everyone acts like they are action figures being maneuvered around a damp, neon-lit basement.  The movie’s major problem is that Tom Cody is supposed to be a laconic icon of American cool but is instead played by Michael Paré as a wooden doofus.  It is not his fault that he bears a slight resemblance to Jay Cutler and the entire time he seemed like he was attempting an impossible rescue mission with the disgusted resignation of Cutler relaying a Mike Martz play that would require J’Marcus Webb to block his man for like four and a half seconds before anyone was open.  
 

Tell Billy Fish I said "fuck you"

 
The best scenes in the movie are the music scenes that crackle with energy, more so than the action scenes with are mostly Tom Cody sullenly blowing up vehicles with his rifle.  The Steinman songs are completely over the top and I am convinced the only person in 1984 who could effectively write songs for this movie is a guy who mastered the art of vaguely supernatural teenage torch songs sung by a large, sweaty man in his 30s whose music videos convey the concept of turning into a werewolf.  The other best scenes are the brief times Willem DaFoe is allowed to do anything from strutting around in an explosion while wearing leather overalls to coming up with the loonily operatic way he would like to face Cody in a final showdown. 

 

Streets of Fire bombed in theaters.  It appears that the American moviegoing public lacked an appetite for movies about motorcycle gangs, synthesizers, and old-timey police cars that probably have one of those "woo woo" sirens in 1984 or preferred movies that offered more than cardboard cutouts.  But that sort of diorama quality is the best part of this film-- a movie that exists entirely as someone putting something in a movie precisely because it would look cool in a movie and do nothing else.

Championship/Rivalry

Let's just lead off with it: the Northwestern Wildcats have won the Big Ten West.  There are two games left; Northwestern could spend its road trip in Minnesota lounging on hammocks and its Hat Game against Illinois in a beach resort, zinc-nosed and sun-addled, and they can be 6-6, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them from showing up in Indianapolis to represent the entire Big Ten West.  Football analysts, burning out their BCS computers and going through cartons of green accounting visors have all stared at their Johnny Mnemonic virtual reality devices and come to the same conclusion: this is incredibly funny.
 
College Football analysts try to deal with their computer models that 
keep showing that Northwestern won the Big Ten West

This is not to take anything away from the Wildcats, who have had a simultaneously disastrous and heroic season.  It is to say that Northwestern has managed to win an entire division championship to the point where they get to wear special hats and get a trophy that I had no idea even existed until Saturday by what has been very close to the absolute minimum number points required.  Northwestern will be the first major conference team to win a division without defeating a single out of conference opponent-- this includes Akron, a profoundly shitty MAC team whose win over Northwestern was its first over a Big Ten opponent ever in a football history that stretches to the nineteenth century.

Northwestern won the West by racing to an enormous lead against Purdue then failing to score a point in the second half, by beating an at-the-time winless Nebraska team in the throes of its worst season in recorded history by scoring ten points in less than three minutes including a 99-yard touchdown drive to send the game to an overtime period won by a backup kicker playing in his first game, by somehow needing to come back against a Rutgers team so putrid that they had been trying to consolidate their turnovers with an agency so they just owed the entire Big Ten a few interceptions on weekly installments.
 
When you're coaching Rutgers

The Wildcats have confounded predictions, statistics, numbers, gamblers, logic, and reason.  They have won the Big Ten West through what appears to be the absolute minimum amount of success.  For three months, the Big Ten West has been told to get its act together and, with minimum competence, seize the division but no one has; Northwestern's stand is like the terrifying and insidious effects of climate change.

And so the Wildcats go into their next two games in the perfect position.  They cannot lose.  Yes, they should beat Minnesota, a team that is currently thrashing about every week while deciding whether or not to turn into a werewolf.  And yes, they should beat the flailing Illini, who remain under a tailspin under Lovie Smith who has just decided to cope by getting grizzled, even with the prized Hat at stake.  But consider this: what if they lose?  What if they get rowed by the Gophers or the Illini sneak by while Northwestern follows their patented just sort of hang out and see whatever happens is good with me gameplan and then they lose? 

They can't get taken out of Indianapolis at this point.  Jim Delany can't deploy a cardboard Yosemite Sam that says "you must win this number of games against the Illini to play in the Big Ten Championship."  And while the Big Ten would prefer to set up road blocks between Evanston and Indianapolis for this game than let a 6-6 Northwestern team play there, there is nothing stopping them.  Of course, it would be a giant bummer for Northwestern to lose the next two.  But it would also be extraordinarily funny, and the Wildcats have seized the mantle of America's Funniest Power Five Division Winner as an avatar of chaos that will easily carry them over whatever unlucky chump gets served to them in the Big Ten Championship that they are actually playing in (you can look it up) and then head to the Rose Bowl to attempt to win their first out of conference game.

RIVALRY

It has the sorry lot of Iowa fans to wake up in the middle of the night over the last decade and realize they have a rivalry with Northwestern.  They would, like most Big Ten fans, like to have a rivalry with a traditional Big Ten Power like Ohio State or Michigan or even Wisconsin, the type of rivalry where you have a Farm Implement Trophy and songs about how you hate each other and the Big Ten Power actually does despise them back but instead they are forced to deal with Northwestern every year.  The Iowa-Northwestern rivalry is not a traditional football rivalry where fans taunt each other and letter jacket guys kidnap the mascot and perform sporting japes worthy of stories that will last for generations at the Grim Waterfowl Club; their rivalry is more like the one between homeowners and termites.

Northwestern has now beaten Iowa three years in a row.  Each victory has been a disgusting affront to football.  Last year, in the midst of a howling southern gale at Ryan Field, both teams refused to score until Northwestern lured them into overtime.  This year, they battled to a putrid 3-0 half and basically refused to play offense until Bennett Skowronek made one of the greatest catches I've ever seen from a Northwestern player almost at random and then Iowa decided to close the game by bashing themselves in the head with large, comical props.  My sources on Iowa message boards inform me that Northwestern got away with numerous Uncalled Holding Penalties.

This is what life is like now, for the Hawkeyes.  Their fans do not want to give in and debase themselves to admit they have a rivalry with Northwestern; every year, Northwestern comes in and the teams blow raspberries at each other until the Wildcats ruin their season. 

In 2000, the Wildcats took on an abysmal Iowa team with an outright Big Ten Championship and trip to the Rose Bowl on the line and they lost one of the most devastating games in Northwestern history.  It was bitterly cold, and on the way out of the stadium, Iowa fans gleefully taunted anyone in purple to enjoy San Antonio, taking it as a given that the Citrus Bowl would pass up Northwestern for the more lucrative Michigan fanbase even though Northwestern had beaten the Wolverines head to head in one of the greatest games ever played.  Those vengeful Hawkstrodamuses were proven right.  This time, though, Northwestern's win, combined with just an absolute Rube Goldberg Machine of Big Ten shittiness propelled them to a Division Championship to celebrate upon Kinnick Stadium in front of disgusted Iowa fans who had, along with every other Western team, squandered an opportunity to win this wretched division.

Last week, Northwestern took on Notre Dame in another sort of quasi-rivalry game.  There is no way that Notre Dame considers Northwestern a rival: all of Notre Dame's rivalry is with the past itself, a sepia-toned succession of leather helmet mustache guys gouging the eyes of Army or valiantly battling the Spanish Flu; Notre Dame's current rivalries seem to mostly be with the entire sport of college football as everyone else has grown sick of the men's hats of the Associated Press constantly vaulting them into title games based on a stale, ghostly aura only to see them humiliated by a never-ending succession of JaMarcuses Russell.  This is how Notre Dame exists now, its pugilist cartoon mascot now squaring off at every fanbase in the world waiting for them to lose.  It is fitting that Notre Dame will play today in Yankee Stadium as their football program is the closest thing to every Boomer anecdote about Mickey Mantle made flesh.  A middling Big Ten program that resurfaces every dozen years when Notre Dame deigns to play them until they lose and mysteriously vanish off the Irish schedule cannot compete with History.
 
A 1991 image of "Mickey Mantle," a fictional 
baseball player invented in the late 1980s by 
Bob Costas and Ken Burns has created a cottage
 industry of fake Boomer Baseball Anecdotes and 
must be exposed by courageous people not afraid 
to put the truth on Blogspot.com

College football rivalry fits within the sport's completely discursive tradition in that the biggest marker of a rivalry are fans talking about whether or not a fanbase is or is not their rival.  Conferences and schools try to cement these with annual games on the schedule, "rivalry week" showdowns, and trophies, but the concept of rivalry belongs entirely to the fans.  The greatest moment in the history of college football rivalry was Bob Diacco's laudably insane quest to build a trophy from scratch and instigate a Big Game with UCF and UCF's hostile indifference to the Civil ConFLiCt.  No one has seen the trophy since it was abandoned somewhere on a sideline, ignored by UCF who would not even deign to parade it around.  In an ideal world, the complete rejection of this Rivalry Overture would eventually twist its way into a real rivalry, with UCONN coaches bringing larger and more elaborate rivalry trophies to the stadium every year while UCF makes more pointed shows of ignoring it until the Huskies roll up with a semi full of life-sized Dog-Knights while UCF has hired a crew of backhoes to immediately bury them.  The other great rivalry moment of the twenty-first century is this:

 
The accepted, Branded Rivalries are the most boring in college sports.  Instead, it's the ones at the margins, the ones that are constant sources of bickering about whether the teams are actually rivals, whether one team cares as much as the other about a rivalry, ones where there very nature of the concept of rivalry is contested in a way that would make an absolutely unreadable and dreadful paper called like "'Little Brother' or 'Big' Time Rival: College Football 'Rivalry' and the Discourses of Disparagement in American Society 1978-2012" in PAAAWWWWLLL Quarterly.   

The sole exception remains America's greatest rivalry game, the Battle for The Hat and I'm concerned because Lovie would look tremendous sporting that thing with his silver beard.