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.

Baseball Botches Cheating Scandal By Not Calling it "Glue-Doping"

For my money, the most enjoyable cheating scandal in any sport is when a professional cyclist is caught using a motor secreted into a bicycle. That is an incredibly brazen way to cheat. It is cartoon cheating-- the only thing more dastardly than competing in a cycling race with a literal motor would be to see someone attempt to qualify for the Olympic high jump wearing enormous springs before getting carted out of the stadium with an injury where they are folded up into an accordion shape.

Cyclists have decided to refer to this, the practice of entering a bicycle race with a literal motor attached to the bike, as moto-doping. Presumably this name comes from the more common method of cheating in bicycle races through drug regimens or those programs where Tour de France riders have all of their blood drained and clumsily replaced with a mutant ooze in a dank hotel room. This is wonderful. Somehow, a plague of guys zipping past the peloton on improvised mopeds has yielded an all-time great cheating suffix, one that should be adopted immediately by every sporting concern.

Baseball, for example, spent most of the 2019-20 offseason entangled in the Astros sign-stealing garbage can banging scandal, which by all rights should be referred to as Can-Doping. Now, the biggest story in baseball is about pitchers using exotic adhesives to doctor the baseball. It seems like the baseball world is grappling with what to call this transgression. The most common term I have seen is a crackdown on “sticky stuff;” if MLB and baseball media had any sense or clarity of purpose, they would immediately begin referring to this crisis as Glue-Doping.

Pitchers have been rubbing baseballs with foreign substances as long as the sport has existed. The current glue predicament, like most modern baseball scandals, seems to have mutated into a crisis from the twin hobgoblins of analytics and technology. Baseball undergoes an approximate five-year cycle where a new term appears on the nerdiest baseball blogs that explains an advantage or long-sought market inefficiency and then the term then filters into the Sloan Analytics circuit and front office guys wearing those Investment Vests and then finally comes dribbling awkwardly out of the of mouths of grizzled former players on studio shows and local broadcasts like a trickle of tobacco juice. One of those recent trendy metrics has been Spin Rate, which has become ubiquitous.

The consequences of the new spin rate obsession were obvious: pitchers recognized that increasing their spin rate would lead to higher paychecks for established pitchers or the possibility of a steady job in the majors for the dozens of interchangeable relievers who are belt-fed at hitters and often yo-yoed between the big club and minors.

The emphasis on spin rate manifested from technological change in two ways. First, spin rate was not something that could be measured without the fancy cameras that teams have all recently adopted as part of their increasingly-ubiquitous pitch labs. Second, pitches gained access to new sticky substances beyond the pine tar that Michael Pineda was attempting to hide by pretending it was some sort of alarming neck secretion or the various sandpapers and jalapeño snots that pitchers had used before. The most infamous of these is a product called Spider Tack, invented by one of those strongman guys who you see on ESPN2 wearing the car suspenders when strapped to a Volkswagen who made the glue so he could get a better grip on those gigantic concrete spheres that the strongman haul around. This substance was so sticky that the guy who invented it ripped his biceps because he physically could not release a boulder, and now it is used to make a guy swing and miss at a curve ball and yell an obscenity.

After reading the article on Spider Tack the thing that immediately struck me is there is no way that oafish baseball players who regularly hurt themselves in the most improbable and clumsy ways even if most of those stories are probably dopey inventions to cover for being drunk should be allowed to handle a substance that sticky. It is a minor miracle that a baseball player has not dangerously glued himself to his own person, a teammate, or a moving vehicle. I am shocked that a pitcher as not yet thrown a ball but remained stuck to it so he flies towards the mound still gripping the ball and the hitter hits it now the momentum has him flying toward the outfield still stuck to the baseball where a quick-thinking outfielder must snare him with a gigantic net before there is a five hour video review that ends with the umpire declaring that everything that happened is legal and then must flee the stadium in a bullpen car shaped like a baseball glove.

While it is obvious that the Glue-Doping crisis is real and a detriment to a game already perilously tiled towards the pitcher, I am also somewhat skeptical of the impending crackdown only because I have no faith that Rob Manfred can competently resolve this situation, especially if it empowers Cowboy Joe West to do his Buford T. Justice routine as he becomes a Forensic Ball Inspector. Or maybe they will be able to pull it off and the change is enough to give hitters a bit more juice, let the ball go into play a bit more, and make baseball more than a festival of strikeouts. Either way, I think I have been very clear that the most important thing is that the practice of doctoring balls should be known as “Glue-Doping.”

THE DINK AND THE BATH

“Those reformers tried to blow up th’ place an’ look what they got for it. The Tribune thought people was gonna stay away. Well, look at it! All th’ business houses are here, all th’ big people. All my friends are out. Chicago ain’t no sissy town!”

Thus spoke Mike “Hinky Dink” Kenna, one of Chicago’s alderman for the first ward about a notoriously debauched 1907 First Ward Ball that he put on with his fellow alderman “Bathhouse” John Coughlin. The two were a classic team-- Bathhouse John (AKA “The Bath”), a large garrulous back-slapper who came up as a massage rubber in the swanky Palmer House, and Hinky Dink, the diminutive tight-lipped schemer who served as the brains behind the illegal voting strategies that kept them in power and in illicit profits for decades. I have written about them on this site earlier, but not after reading the full treatment of their antics from Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan’s Lords of the Levee published in 1943 that covers the full scope of their schemes in the rough-and-tumble politics of turn-of-the-century Chicago.

Wendt and Kogan were newspaper reporters, Wendt mainly for the Tribune and Kogan for the Sun-Times, and their depiction of Coughlin, Kenna, and Chicago politics comes off as cynical amusement. There are more recent and more academic studies that effectively grapple with the effects of Chicago’s crime and political corruption during this time period, but those studies would not have the alternate title of Bosses in Lusty Chicago that this book bore for several reprintings. Wendt and Kogan instinctively know that when someone reads a book about Chicago politics in the 1890s they want to know about crooks with dumb nicknames, big mustaches, and their hands in as many pockets as possible. Much like Gem of the Prairie, a Chicago crime opus published in 1940 that I wrote about in 2018, the central question driving this book seems to be “can you believe this shit.”

Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink sampled from a wide buffet of crimes including using the police to create protection rackets for saloons and brothels in the notorious Levee district, requiring anyone who wanted a contract with the city to buy insurance from Coughlin’s firm, and other sorts of standard Chicago clout-wielding, but they reveled in the art of the boodle. Boodling, in the parlance of the time, meant giving contracts to utility companies-- gas companies, for example, or those building the then-nascent elevated trains-- only after allowing company lobbyists to brazenly bribe them. The schemes were shameless, and the contracts usually meant a bad deal for taxpayers. Given the expansion of Chicago and the burst of new technology into cities like L trains and electricity, Bathhouse John, Hink Dink Kenna, and the bevy of corrupt city officials essentially sold off the entire city’s burgeoning  modern infrastructure to shell companies that often times did not yet exist or were already despised, such as one gas company whose shoddy equipment killed numerous people.

The two aldermen repeatedly faced off with reformers desperate to drive out corruption, crime, and vice. These reformers, like most late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century people devoted to good government, were blind to problems their solutions could cause and generally priggish, but it is hard to fault them on their basic premise that elected aldermen should not gleefully steal money from everybody. Wendt and Kogan, though, are not really interested in analyzing the reform agenda.  They generally treat these reformers as if they were stern foils for the Three Stooges who are constantly getting their eyebrows singed off or getting hit by an errant pie meant for another Stooge. They are characters getting in the way of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink but ultimately falling victim to their genuine popularity in the ward combined with Hinky Dink’s unstoppable voting strategy of rounding up as many indigent men as he could and registering them to vote and then hiring some street toughs to throw people down staircases and punch them using those nineteenth-century boxing stances; neither one ever lost an aldermanic election.

Of the two, Bathhouse John was the more colorful figure. He loved giving speeches constructed from the remnants of malapropisms; Wendt and Kogan also enjoy rendering his speeches in a phonetic Chicago accent that pushes the limit of typed nasalness. Unlike Hinky Dink, who preferred to scheme in his dank saloon, Bathhouse John craved the limelight like someone in collapsed cave digging towards brightness. In 1900, the Bath produced a sentimental poem he had written called “Dear Midnight of Love” that he had set to music and unveiled at the opera house. He attempted to get a famed opera diva to sing it but was rebuffed (she snorted as Wendt and Kogan note, "according to contemporary accounts").  Instead, he hired a cronie's thirteen-year-old daughter and augmented her performance with a brass band and a chorus 50 voices strong. The swells and papers ridiculed him for the spectacle, but he sold out five shows. “That settles it,” proclaimed the Chicago Daily Journal, “From now on it’s Bathos John.”

Dear Midnight of Love
Why did we meet?
Dear Midnight of Love
Your face is so sweet
Pure as the angels above
Surely again we shall speak
Loving only as doves,
Dear Midnight of Love.

Bathhouse John also bought a large property in Colorado and tried to build it into an amusement park and zoo that involved essentially stealing an elephant from the Lincoln Park Zoo.

But the place where Bathhouse John made his greatest mark was in fashion. He decided that he should set a new standard for menswear that involved loud, blasting colors. Then, just before the Democratic National Convention in 1900, the Bath went out east to show off his new duds, as the Times Herald put it, “going to seaside resorts to startle the eastern men with is magnificence.” In reality, he was going to meet with Democratic power brokers before the convention to try to drum up support for Chicago mayor Carter Harrison Jr. His most notable article was a green suit described by one First Ward apparatchik as “like an Evanston lawn kissed by an early dew." The Times-Herald continued that “the alderman of the First Ward will dim the glory of J, Waldere Kirk and snatch from the latter’s grasp the crown of fame which he has worn so many seasons as King of the Dudes.”

 

I had made a grave and naive assumption that the King of the Dudes that the Times-Herald mentioned was Evander Berry Wall whom I had previously run across in this blog and has survived the twenty-first century with the great honor of being the Dude that pops up when you put King of the Dudes into Wikipedia. But it turns out that heavy and presumably ostentatious lies the crown, and by 1900 Evander Berry Wall was no longer King of the Dudes, presumably put out to some Dude pasture by larger and dandier Dudes. J. Waldere Kirk has become a more obscure figure here in 2021, but I was able to uncover an incredible article in the New York Journal and Advertiser from 1897 about him entitled “A Dude from Denver Reviews the Dudes of New York.”

“A dandy-dude from altitudinous Denver descended upon the Metropolis a week ago,” the article begins. “He resents vigorously the insinuation that he bears even a remote resemblance to a dude, but modestly declares that he is “considerable of a sartorial sirocco.” The rest of the article, which is lavishly illustrated with Kirk staring through opera glasses at a procession of Dudes under the legend “The Dude from West Inspects the Dudes from the East” is an interview where Kirk expounds on his various theories of wardrobes, and is one of my favorite specimens of writing where some obnoxious windbag gets to explain how things are. If there was a climactic Dude Off between Kirk and Bathhouse John where they put on elaborate hats and colorful cloaks at each other until one of them exploded into a mushroom cloud of fabric, Wendt and Kogan did not say.

 

 
Wendt and Kogan pick up the pace considerably as Batthouse John and Hinky Dink age into grises-eminences of the City Council. By the 1920s, their own political power base gets subsumed by a more violent and brazenly criminal organization: the mob under Al Capone. Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink supported Capone out of self-preservation and greed-- Hinky Dink served as an informal advisor to Capone’s chief henchman Frank Nitti while Bathhouse John hung onto his seat on the City Council, known mainly for his wardrobe and poems that were ghostwritten by a newspaper editor. Hinky Dink even managed to get elected once again as alderman at the age of nearly 80 because the Capone Outfit needed someone reliable.  He was still alive when Lords of the Levee was published.

It is a bit jarring to read a book on municipal corruption where the authors seem to celebrate it. There is no doubt that Chicago would have been better off if Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink had lost power or faced any sort of consequences for their larcenous ways, but Wendt and Kogan have the reader instead marveling at their brazen schemes and Bathhouse John’s ostentatious oafishness. Readers almost can't help rooting for these characters to steal another election, humiliate another reformer or anti-vice crusader, and defeat their equally sleazy aldermanic rivals for the biggest slices of the boodle pie. As reporters, Wendt and Kogan are primarily interested in a story, and this is a great story. And, they have made a tremendous case that when a aldermen in the present day is caught using the same techniques to extort a Burger King or collect kickbacks from a gambling operation, the least they could do is wear ridiculous outfits, build a disastrous zoo, or produce a musical extravaganza.

To Save Baseball, MLB Should Legalize Can Bangs

The Pittsburgh Pirates started their stalwart first baseman Kevin Young 125 times in 2001. Young, a Pirate since 1992 save a one-season dalliance with Kansas City in 1996, was now a grizzled 32 years old, in his penultimate full season with the club, and was creaking and groaning around the bases like a piece of antiquated machinery. For some reason he tried to steal a base fifteen times, and he got unceremoniously thrown out on eleven of those attempts. Young played for a putrid Pirates team that lost 100 games that season, and he was their fourth best qualified hitter with a .232/.310/.399 line. This diminished 2001 version of Kevin Young is the closest statline I could find casually scrolling around baseball reference for the past 25 or so seasons to what Major League Baseball players are currently hitting.

Major League Baseball is in a hitting crisis. This is one of many concurrent crises currently gripping baseball; the fact that baseball is circling the drain represents the official line from MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, who administers the sport like he is gravely overseeing a shareholders meeting for an electric typewriter company in 1994. In this case, baseball doom-sayers have a point: baseball players are currently unable to get a damn hit. They are striking out nearly a quarter of the time they come up to bat, they are putting the ball in play less than ever, and very few of them sport mustaches which you might think has little to do with this but compare statistics of eras when baseball players had rakish mustaches and when they were blooping and bunting it all over the place and I believe you will find a very strong correlation.

To be fair, baseball players face a foreboding gauntlet of challenges at the plate. Pitchers all throw harder and more wicked stuff then ever before and in the course of a game it is likely that they will face several guys throwing 98 with a wipeout slider or a bugs bunny curve from both sides of the plate as teams go to their bullpens earlier and earlier. More aggressive scouting and shifting in defenses has made it harder to get to first on a rare ball in play. And, after a 2019 season that resembled a decadent home run bacchanalia, MLB freaked out and deadened the ball while tacitly allowing pitchers to load it up with space-age synthetic goos that make give the ball a sharper break and make it stick to Yadier Molina's chestplate. It is small wonder that batters are hitting like a collective of 32 year-old glove-first infielders.

 

Baseball analysts and officials have made proposals to change reliever usage, crack down on illegal Eddie Harris substances, and even move the mound back a foot in an echo of the 1968 "Year of the Pitcher" when baseball lowered the mound height.  But there is a much simpler solution available and that is for baseball to allow teams to electronically steal signs and relay them to the hitting team by banging a trash can.

 

Sign stealing would help level the playing field.  We have all seen those overlays on the internet where a pitcher throws two or more pitches identically except one is a 98 mph heater that moves and the others take two or three sharp bends and disappear into another dimension.  Hitters must think that is, at least, very rude.  But if players knew to at least look for a breaking ball, they would have more a fighting chance and could strike out less.  Pitchers could be upset about this, but they would have a concrete thing to blame for shitty outings instead of having to succumb to crippling self-doubt that might lead to a form of yips where they are terrified to confront the catcher during a mound visit and start retreating back to the outfield when he comes out to tell him some important information such as if he throws two more like that he is going to walk someone.

 

MLB officials can do what they had, until recently, done with sign stealing which is to look the other way and have a hearty chuckle at the ridiculous Wacky Races-style cheating endemic to the sport.  This solution would allow teams to devise even more devious and tech-savvy sign stealing regimens that they are probably doing right now like using devises to transmit signals under the uniform with the type of wires that Chicago aldermen use in order to entrap other aldermen as part of a plea agreement with the FBI when they are caught stealing a Burger King or by hitting a wobbly piece of aluminum with a baseball bat.  It would take awhile for anyone to catch on, but by that point baseball may have entered a new offensive era with players spraying hits around the diamond and teams chasing the New Inefficiency which is no longer 6'7" beard guys who all throw 97 but squat, ungainly knuckleballers and fans will be so excited that they won't care.

Looking forward to a new inefficiency as teams 

rush to sign the schlubbiest relievers possible. 

If anyone reading this is currently in graduate 

school in the humanities, the next time someone 

brings up Foucault, I urge you to say "oh you mean 

Steve Foucault, the closer for the Tigers in 1977?"

 

But given Rob Manfred's obsession with emerging from a mountain like a Baseball Moses to announce that he has saved the sport by proclaiming that teams must use their relief pitchers in alphabetical order, I suggest that the most likely course for baseball to organically bring in sign stealing is for Manfred to allow teams a set number of Legal Can Bangs they can execute in high-leverage situations.  In this case, the manager could waddle from the dugout (actually, research shows that managers are younger and tend to be fit instead of being geriatric paunch-monsters that are so thoroughly grizzled that they appear to have been removed from a sarcophagus, but this is yet another Crisis in Baseball that remains unaddressed) and make a can-banging gesture that signals to the umpires and the crowds that it is time to bang some cans.

The Legal Can Bang can also bring some needed spectacle to baseball as teams can use all sorts of fanfare to bring out an enormous can either as the grounds crew drags it out or it is driven in on a custom vehicle modeled on the drum truck from Mad Max; it can even slowly emerge from a platform underneath the field while the sound system blares the Venga Bus song.  The can can be struck by an overly serious team employee wearing a polo shirt or even a mascot as the tense battle between pitcher and batter is reinvented as the battle between pitcher, batter, and a triceratops theatrically whaling on a trash can with an oversized novelty mallet.

This Legal Can Bang would introduce an element of excitement, a new layer of strategy, and, most important for Rob Manfred, a new thing that everyone has to keep track of like when a manager has to decide if it is foolish to waste a challenge on if a baserunner lifted his finger off the bag for a moment of time otherwise imperceptible to the human eye but caught by a replay camera that can be analyzed for 25 minutes.  Teams can put the number of remaining Can Bangs on scoreboards next to the fan favorite display for the number of legal mound visits.

 

Another important element of Legal Can Bangs would be the development of a baroque set of Unwritten Rules about them.  Imagine how delightful it would be for irate managers to grouse about how the other team does not "respect the can bang process" or for players to sniff "it is what it is" when asked if they threw at a batter because they believe the opposing manager allowed Bernie Brewer to karate kick the Waste Management Trash Can to signal an incoming curve ball while comfortably ahead.

 

You may think that there is a better way to improve baseball's offensive environment than by creating a small-scale Busby Berkeley number around a ritual of hitting a trashcan to signal an incoming pitch type but I guarantee you that whatever Manfred comes up with will be stupider.

 

RINGS OF SATURN

 

There's something slightly embarrassing about recommending a book that is already an acknowledged classic but given that my reaction to finishing W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn was general disappointment in everyone around me whom I've ever known who did not tell me that I should read The Rings of Saturn, I am willing swallow it.  

 

The Rings of Saturn is about a German man who wanders around East Anglia and ruminates.  He sees some fishermen and it reminds him of an educational film about herring fisheries he saw as a child the and physiognomy of herring and how they emit an eerie luminescent glow when they die and then he is talking about an eccentric landowner who left his entire manor to a woman who prepared his meals on the condition she never speak to him and also this man never bought new clothes and on occasions when he had to leave the house would wander out into 1950s Britain wearing whatever he could find in old trunks so he'd look like a weird Edwardian ghost and every chapter of the book is like that.

 

The book centers on change and decay.  Many of the coastal towns Sebald discusses fallen into disrepair or are shadows of themselves.  In one case, he discusses the town of Dunwich, which had been built on a piece of low-lying coastline and was taken, piece by piece, by the sea.  This is in the chapter about the Taiping Rebellion and the Opium Wars.  Sebald focuses on the unreal and almost unthinking destruction people have wrought against the world around them and themselves, describing history as "but a long account of calamities."  He was born in 1944, and the horrors of the war remain omnipresent undercurrents throughout the book.  

 

The Rings of Saturn feels loose and rambling, but all of its digressions seem to take shape at exactly the right time and at the right place.  Sebald writes in long paragraphs, and it is not uncommon to see the foreboding sight of a paragraph taking up an entire page, but he and his translator Michael Hulse never let anything get ponderous and it is easy to get enveloped in whatever narrative he has conjured out of  the sight of an old hotel or the log book in a sailor's reading room that of course he likes to hang out in.

 

Sebald, I understand, is a major influence on the recently trendy genre of autofiction, which, in my unlearned and unsophisticated view, seems to be a literary style where the author writes largely about him or herself while having the decency to admit that they are making things up as needed for the purposes of literary merit or legal deniability.  For example, it is preposterous to believe that Karl Ove Knausgaard remembers a conversation between him and one of the dozens of people he knows named "Geir" in 1987 when he was doing some adolescent literary brooding but it absolutely opens up a world for him to write about what it felt like for him to brood adolescently and literarily in 1987.  The narrator in the Rings of Saturn is not necessarily Sebald, though the passages correspond to the very specific eerie photographs that he has taken and sprinkled throughout the book.  At any rate, the question of the extent to which the narrator's experiences correspond to Sebald's is beside the point; his own memories are blended with historical memories of places and of people and the art is not in whether Sebald in fact visited a dilapidated Irish manor house where a haunted, ecctentric family showed him slides of how things used to be in case he happened to be writing a book about decay but how these anecdotes fit perfectly with his historical research and observations of nature.  

The Rings of Saturn is not a novel, it is not a travelogue, and it is not even really a series of essays.  It appears at first like an unfocused jumble of misplaced information thrown together like forgotten objects in an abandoned attic, but Sebald makes readers understand that everything is precisely where it needs to be.

The Strangest Thing About the 2021 NFL Draft Was the Prominence of Northwestern Football Players

Last year’s NFL draft appeared at an odd stage of the pandemic, just about a month after states had issued stay-home orders and while people were eyeing toilet paper stockpiles with the look of a Max Max warlord, and the Virtual Draft was highlighted by then-novel video conferencing and Roger Goodell’s jaw-jutted paeans to American Strength as reflected by the Official Truck of the National Football League.  The 2021 draft, done in front of a crowd of people who were masked, vaccinated, and wearing silly football-themed costumes, at least seemed like more of a return to normal where we can all revel in the entire exercise’s glorious stupidity without worrying whether a guy dressed as The Macho Man Randy Savage is going to instigate a superspreader event by screaming OOOH YEAH after the Browns draft a punter in the seventh round.

While the NFL did scale back on some of the tedious pageantry, they did manage a gimmick that was so profoundly odd and goofy that I am still unable to process what was going on.  They decided to take the chair from Goodell’s rumpus room and let a single fan sit in it while waiting for the commissioner to announce the pick.  This is an incredible peek into NFL thinking, that a team of marketing people thought that viewers would remember the famous chair that Goodell sat in and then replicate that moment by inviting a fan to sit in it on stage and do nothing while presumably the audience on TV would start nudging the people they are watching the draft with saying “See that chair? That’s the very chair that Roger Goodell sat in.”  They should have at least let the honorary Chair Fan announce the pick; ideally the chair would be situated high over the stage on a large platform or suspended on a series of wires and the fan, clad in sort of home made Miami Dolphins tunic, would have unilateral veto power over the pick while the writhing pit of fans fling down their cheese hats in disgust and angrily shake their LA Chargers lightning bolt staffs at the stage.  

Goodell takes 25 minutes to every fan sitting in the chair that
no they won't be able to do anything else, just sit there like a prop ficus
through gritted teeth as he holds a dead-eyed smile

Goodell’s prominence at the draft remains a mystery because he is a void of recognizable charisma.  He at all times seems like an executive trying to goad his employees into enthusiasm for a new unsanctioned team-building exercise he has designed that will result in at least two apology e-mails from human resources.  Every time he went to read an announcement referencing the NFL’s salute to the Coke Zero Healthcare Heroes he stumbled through like Tim Heidecker trying to read the cast list of Chappie in On Cinema.  

The draft, held outside on a cold, rainy day, seemed to ensure that only the most dedicated maniacs and Draft Sickos would be in attendance, giving the whole proceeding an undulating feeling of madness.  An endless amount of classic rock boomed menacingly over the broadbast.  The draft ended with Mike from Mike and Mike hoarsely screaming a summary of Draft Storylines over a deafening chorus of Fat Bottomed Girls. 

And yet the enjoyable grotesquerie of the NFL draft was overshadowed by three odd things that happened that had me less interested in the ludicrous sideshow aspects of it (I will never forget, for example, that Northwestern’s Anthony Walker was selected by an iPad-wielding orangutan, and that former NFL Network personality and current Raiders GM Mike Mayock was so disgusted by the literal monkey business  that he nearly walked off the set) and actually got me caught up in the process of the draft itself.

NORTHWESTERN CRASHES DAY ONE

 

This draft featured an unprecedented two high-ranking Northwestern prospects that were supposed to get drafted on the first day.  No Northwestern player has been drafted in the first round since the Chargers picked Luis Castillo in 2005.  This year, tackle Rashawn Slater and cornerback Greg Newsome II were widely expected to get selected; Slater had been listed as one of the top tackles in the draft, and mock drafters marked him as a possible top-ten pick.  Usually my draft experience involves watching the Bears take up to one player I have heard of and then watching hours of third-day draft coverage to see if someone deigns to pick up a player I would probably consider one of the best I have ever seen at Northwestern in the sixth round or something, at a time where instead of announcing the pick the broadcast is deep into a prerecorded package saluting how the army is using the official air-to-surface missile of the National Football League while a pit crew is sent to hose and towel off Mel Kiper Jr.

 

The selection of two Northwestern players was further validation for a program that thrived in the ill-advised pandemic season with another Big Ten West title.  Slater went thirteenth to the Chargers, where he'll reunite with Justin Jackson and is already starring in team-produced twitter videos about his pet lizard.  Newsome went twenty-eighth to the Browns, generating an ovation from the Cleveland crowd of people wearing dog masks.  Ernest Brown IV joined in on the fun on day three, when he was selected by the Rams.  Pat Fitzgerald got to make swaggering appearances on any NFL draft show that would have him, doing his signature verbal guitar solos about "our young men" and hitting the whammy bar for "high-character guys."  Whatever heights Northwestern had hit as an overachieving team full of the dreaded "Rece Davises," they have transformed into a place where, at least for a night, they featured more first-round picks than any Big Ten school other than Ohio State and Penn State, which also had two players picked in the first round.

The NFL draft was a triumph for Northwestern athletics before things took a sour turn this week as the university moved to promote deputy Athletic Director Mike Polisky to Athletic Director after Jim Phillips left to become the ACC Commissioner.  Polisky's selection prompted outrage; he has ties to most of the athletic department's most notorious scandals during the Phillips era.  Most prominently, Polisky is named in a lawsuit by a cheerleader suing the university after saying she and other cheerleaders were sexually harassed by slimy boosters.  The lawsuit alleges that Polisky ignored and dismissed the complaints when they were brought to him.  Some faculty have planned to protest the hire.  I admit that I had never heard of Polisky before this week, so I can't pretend I have any particular insight into the situation other than what I have read, but if Northwestern wanted to hire an athletic director who did not appear to have spent the past several years as a henchman doing the department's dirty work in the sleazy business of college athletics, they could have hired virtually anyone else.  

 

NOW I HAVE A QUARTERBACK HO HO HO 

 

I usually watch the draft for things to blog about because the NFL draft is the league's most prominent event that is not bailed out by having a football game and therefore exists as what the NFL's idea of spectacle without having the luxury of having 290 pound men try to tackle each other into a the consistency of an impossible burger to paper over the league's lunacy.  Without football, the NFL is left to its barest essence, which takes the form of a pageant of deranged tedium.  But then the NFL draft did something unexpected and actually created compelling drama that left me with something more insane than the idea of thrilling America by showing a person wearing a jack-o'-lantern on their head sitting in Roger Goodell's Executive Drafting Chair and that is the hope that the Bears might have a functioning NFL quarterback.

 

In the last post on this website, I spent a paragraph excoriating the Bears and Ryan Pace for extending fans' endless crawl through quarterback hell by signing Andy Dalton, a type of sentient tapioca.  But then, bizarre circumstances and an admittedly dashing amount of derring-do by Ryan Pace by making some high stakes phone calls got the Bears in position to draft inexplicably plummeting star Ohio State  quarterback Justin Fields and they did it.  There was a brief time, after the Bears traded up, when it wasn't clear whether they would take Fields or Roger Goodell-esque quarterback Mac Jones from Alabama, so it was a relief when, after an interminable series of unrelated announcements that heightened the suspense, the Bears took Fields, and Jones was left to wait four more picks before briskly stomping out to the stage to chop it up with the commissioner like they were on the 19th hole of a country club.

 

The Bears have never had a quarterback like Fields.  For most of my life, Bears fans have been forced to talk ourselves into some game-managing pud.  I can only think of three times in recent memory when the Bears actually had hope for a talented quarterback: two were Rex Grossman and Jay Cutler, who had just enough flashes of talent to make their ability to melt down at the exact worst moment maddening; the other is Mitchell Trubisky.  Fields is not a Trubisky situation.  He did virtually everything a college quarterback can do except win a championship and can do everything better than Trubisky except possibly deal with becoming a national joke and mascot and ironically-voted-upon Nickelodeon MVP with an admirable amount of grace.  I feel the way about Fields the same way I would have felt if the Bears had just drafted similarly talented big-name college quarterback DeShaun Watson in 2017, although given what we have learned about Watson over the past several months, I am relieved that they didn't.

Many Bears fans see similarities in the situation with Andy Dalton
and Justin Fields with the 2017 draft when the Bears drafted Trubisky
after signing Mike Glennon to be the starter, but the Bears apparently
warned Dalton that they would take a quarterback instead of surprising
Glennon at the official Bears Draft Party. The visual of Glennon
bobbleheading his way out of the draft party after getting blind-sided
by the Trubisky pick while a chorus of stunned Bears fans booed
the shit out of Mitch is one of my favorite bits of Bears Quarterback Lore

Will Fields be the answer?  Will the Bears' front office and coaching staff that many Bears fans wanted to see not only run out of town but pummeled with those American Gladiators Pummeling Rods on the way out be able to not fuck this up?  Are the Bears actually a Vortex of Quarterback Ineptitude that is destined to suck in every passer the Bears throw at it and somehow through mystical forces that we cannot even comprehend turn all of them into an eternal camp battle between Shane Matthews and Jim Miller?  That remains to be seen.  But the Bears have never had a chance to ruin a quarterback prospect this good, and if this means that I have to weather several games or even a whole season of Dalton demi-competence while braying for the vaudeville hook, I'll take it.  

 

THE GREAT DISGRUNTLING

 

The final reason why the NFL Draft became one of the greatest nights in the history of Chicago football had nothing to do with the draft itself but had everything to do with this tweet sent by Adam Schefter on Thursday afternoon:

 

Reigning MVP Aaron Rodgers is so disgruntled with the Green Bay Packers that he has told some within the organization that he does not want to return to the team, league and team sources told ESPN on Thursday.

More on NFL Live now....

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) April 29, 2021

 

For nearly 30 years, the Green Bay Packers have had a first-ballot Hall of Fame quarterback starting while the Bears started dozens of bums, oafs, jabronis, and boxcar hobos, and it has been extremely frustrating if not downright miserable.  Rodgers, in particular, has tortured Bears fans for the better part of two decades, beating them in blowouts, comebacks, and the occasional game where he gets destroyed for a half and goes down in a heap writhing in pain, surely dead, and then somehow comes back out in the second half to march the Packers down the field while dramatically hobbling.  And now, according to reports, he wants out. 

I want to note that there are many adjectives Schefter could have used to say that Rodgers was upset with the Packers, but the fact that he chose "disgruntled" has really elevated this whole thing and I have been delightedly muttering the word "disgruntled" to myself for the past week.  

 

As the week went on, more reports emerged: Rodgers was still angry that the Packers drafted quarterback Jordan Love in 2020 instead of a wide receiver.  Rodgers was steamed that the Packers released his buddy, a fungible sixth-string wide receiver.  Rodgers reportedly hates the general manger who is a person somehow named Brian Gutekunst, demands that the Packers fire him, and has mocked him in group texts by referring to him as "Jerry Krause."  Rodgers presumably will soon issue a Michael Jordan-style press release by fax that says "I'm Disgruntled."  

I have devoured all of these reports and soaked in the stupid drama because I never dreamed the Bears would ever have a good quarterback and the only joy I could imagine from professional football would be Green Bay contending for the first time in many Packers fans' lives without a superstar quarterback, forced to toil in the Andy Dalton mines like the rest of us, and I have been spitefully cackling over this for days.  Yes, please let me hear more about how Rodgers has told free agents he will never play for the Packers again.  Yes, please let me read reports about how Rodgers would spitefully retire and then woodenly host Jeopardy rather than throw another perfect pass for Green Bay.  Yes, let me see pictures of Rodgers surfacing two days after the Great Disgruntled Tweet at the Kentucky Derby dressed inexplicably like Tom Petty in the music video for You Got Lucky while desperately sidestepping reporters asking him how het got so disgruntled.

Will Rodgers actually force his way off the Packers, who remain adamant that they will not trade him?  Or will he come back to continue torturing the NFC North for another several years, using his own disgruntled attitude as fuel becoming more disgruntled in the process and somehow creating a perpetual motion machine made of resentment that will make him even more unstoppable?  As an expert in Bears football suffering, that is all par for the course, but the feeling that the Bears may finally have a quarterback at the precise moment Green Bay contends without a Hall of Famer is the type of dream that has transformed the NFL Draft from a drab meeting between combed-over executives in a dour hotel ballrooms to a television event watched by millions.  

Of course as a Bears fan, I am also preparing myself for the most psychologically devastating outcome, which is is for Rodgers to leave, and for Jordan Love to be better than Justin Fields.  

The Trades

Professional sports leagues exist mainly in transactions now. The NBA’s star reporters are not hard-bitten beat reporters doggedly pursuing leads to confirm whether athletes are taking it one game at a time but sentient twitter accounts able to send out news of a trade a fraction of a second before anyone else and because of this we get to watch them go on television and read their phones, and other leagues are clearly chasing this high. I can think of two reasons why it seems like following professional sports has become infatuated with transactions: one is because sports media like everything else is driven by twitter and twitter is fueled by trade rumors and people impersonating Adrian Wojnarowski to spread misinformation and athletes posting the Auspicious Eyeballs Emoji and the other is that almost every team stinks and needs some new players in there dammit.

The transactions markets have become faster and more fluid in sports leagues for various reasons but in many cases appear to trend towards star talent clustering together.  In the NBA, that means superstars can assert their leverage to demand trades to move to one of a few contending teams where their intentions can be divined by a host of amateur detectives constantly monitoring who they follow on instagram and then posting their red string corkboards on the internet.  In baseball, it is the owners driving the movement as only a handful of teams are willing to pay for stars and the rest are selling theirs off furiously in trades, not even for hauls of super prospects but for semi-anonymous minor leaguers as the entire sport gears up for a brutal labor battle that seems likely to shorten or even end the 2022 season.  And the NFL is a land of chaos anyway because NFL contracts have no meaning and are written by Jerry Jones drunkenly firing a pistol at several pieces of paper that have paragraphs that start with "whereas."  In recent years, though, superstar quarterbacks have begun to figure out they can move around with more intention than most players, although never to the Chicago Bears because they are not stupid.

So let's take a look at where this whirlwind of moves have left three Chicago teams that are in various stages of oblivion, either hurtling towards it, trying to climb out, or just sort of making themselves at home.

 

IF TOM RICKETTS WANTS TO CLAIM TO HAVE NO MONEY HE SHOULD SIMPLY STAND IN FRONT OF WRIGLEY FIELD EVERY SINGLE DAY WEARING A BARREL

 

It is opening weekend for the Cubs and while the team and the city are thrilled to have people back in Wrigleyville vomiting on each other and screaming “you’re such an asshole GAVIN” into each other's mouths even though we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, the vibe around the Cubs is funereal. The Cubs have already dealt Yu Darvish for three teenagers and Kyle Hendricks’s pre-pubsecent doppelganger as Tom Ricketts has cited “biblical losses” in revenue which means that a number on a spreadsheet has told him that he and his family are in some abstract and meaningless way slightly less wealthy. They have already jettisoned beloved World Series hero and icon of Midwestern beefiness Kyle Schwarber and refused to pay a reported pittance to retain Jon Lester-- both of them are now on the Nationals. And they have made clear that some combination of the Cubs’ star free agents Javy Baez, Kris Bryant, and Anthony Rizzo could be dealt or depart in free agency when their contracts end. Theo Epstein resigned so he would not have to be the one to hit the plunger and blow everything up.

 

 

At some point after the Darvish trade, the Ricketts family got pummeled enough in the media that they managed to miraculously find several millions of dollars just lying around as one does and they brought in Joc Pederson and Jake Arrieta. Pederson’s career batting line is nearly identical to Schwarber but he costs slightly less and he has never to my knowledge blown out a knee and then made a seemingly impossible comeback to hit .412 in the World Series including a hit that became the go-ahead run in the top of the 10th inning to end the longest championship drought in the history of professional sports, but to be fair he hit very well in Spring Training. Jake Arrieta was for a few years the greatest pitcher I have ever seen and is now grizzled and washed up and clearly a replacement for Lester as the Old World Series Guy who will treat fans to having his beard dripping with sweat instead of Lester turning the color of an iron rod when it is put into a forge by a medieval blacksmith as either of them would labor to get outs in a humid August start to get them within 4 games of the vile Cardinals who of course were paid $50 million to take Nolan Arenado.

 

I am not upset that the Chicago Cubs will be mediocre and disappointing this season because that is the default setting for the Chicago Cubs. But trying to follow them this season, with the impending destruction of the team lingering over every game, with them playing on a Fox or ESPN broadcast and having to listen to the announcers yammer about it the entire time, and with the trade deadline coming to take everyone away does not sound like the most pleasant way to follow baseball.

 

THE VOOCHENING

The Bulls on the other hand decided to depart from two influential models of team building.  The first one is the belief that NBA teams should constantly be tanking and in a neverending process of flipping draft picks in a way that requires putting on an ill-fitting suit and bloviating about "assets" and while your assets are appreciating, depreciating, or being packaged to move for other heretofore unowned assets, the team playing games on your regional cable sports channel goes around getting its ass violently kicked in front of the whole world.  The other model is how the Bulls had been operating which was doing a half-assed and dumb version of this but never actually making any trades and allowing the team to be run and coached exclusively by maniacs with oddly shaped heads. 

 

Instead, the Bulls' new brain trust decided to do something somewhat unorthodox and push its chips in now for all star center Nikola Vucevich because Zach LaVine has ascended and the Bulls are ready to try to contend for the play-in game in an awful conference.  They gave up two first-round draft picks, young center Wendell Carter, Jr., and the bloated remains of Otto Porter, Jr. in return for Vucevic and washed-up forward Al-Faroq Aminu.  They also acquired tattooed Luke Besson movie villain Daniel Theis and some other players that might or might not be useful.  

It is not unreasonable to question the wisdom of cashing in so many draft picks for Vucevic and remaking the roster for a team that might not top out as anything more than a low-seeded playoff team, but I can't remember being this excited for a Bulls trade because they had done something.  The Bulls now had two all stars and also I never had to watch Luke Kornet again.  I was incredibly excited for Vucevic's debut until several minutes into the game when the Bulls got completely annihilated by the Spurs.  And then wasted by the Warriors as LaVine hobbled ineffectively with an ankle injury.  And then they lost again to the Suns.  The Bulls have not won a game in the Vucevic era and remain clinging to the last spot in the play in.  

But Vucevic is not a rental, and the Bulls can still build around him and LaVine.  They have not made the playoffs since the Three Alphas era, which was only four years ago but that is also the number of teams Jimmy Butler has been on.  And they have Patrick Williams, who is extremely young but can do this.

PAT WILLIAMS SAYS NO 😱 pic.twitter.com/8P3CA56RLD

— Bulls Talk (@NBCSBulls) April 1, 2021

 

 There is an endless debate about the merits of tanking in the NBA versus trying just to be decent knowing there is no chance of competing for a championship against whatever superteams exist, and while I can understand the arguments of both sides, I can't understand people who consume basketball as a bloodless collection of "assets" when there are 82 games a year and many of them are played in Chicago during months when it is really unpleasant to be outside.  Also they severely understate the worth of a player like Denzel Valentine, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite Bulls because he is an avatar of chaos and the only player with any personality even though he is objectively not very good at NBA basketball but is willing to stomp around the court like godzilla after draining a three pointer early in the fourth quarter.

DENZEL VALENTINE IS HYPED pic.twitter.com/Zw4EmdX4z2

— Bulls Talk (@NBCSBulls) March 15, 2021

THE CHICAGO BEARS ARE COMFORTABLY RELAXING IN QUARTERBACK HELL

 

For four years, Bears fans have taken their decades of quarterback-induced neuroses and channeled them directly at one unassuming young person from Mentor, Ohio.  Mitch Trubisky's first public appearance in Chicago after being drafted as the Quarterback of the Future was at a Bulls game when they showed him on the jumbotron and an entire stadium booed the shit out of him before he sheepishly appeared on the court to accept a jersey from Benny the Bull.  

 

It was not Mitch Trubisky's fault that Ryan Pace traded up to draft him over two vastly and obviously superior quarterbacks, one of whom to me looks like the best player to ever play quarterback in the history of football.  Nor was it his fault that he played for the fanbase most insane about quarterbacks in the entire National Football League.  It was probably his fault at least a little bit that he never learned how to competently read an NFL defense but to be fair that seems really hard.

I still have no idea how I feel about Mitch Trubisky.  Every time he started, even when his limitations were painfully apparent and it became clear that he would not become an even average, competent quarterback, I still rooted for him to finally figure it out.  And I laughed when he would reach back and do something profoundly oafish which was more likely while the cameras cut to a slow motion shot of him dejectedly ripping down his chin strap. I felt a little bad for him when he became a sort of living meme culminating in him getting an ironic Nickelodeon Valuable Player award by internet smart-alecks after performing incompetently in a playoff blowout.

It was hard to get a read on how to feel about Trubisky because he did not really display anything resembling a personality in public, and so he became this blank canvas upon which the derangement of NFL fandom got its full expression.  By the end of his run with the Bears, the best description for his job was as a mascot.  Locally, he inspired endless speculation, causing grown adults to go on searching soul journeys when calling into sports radio to mispronounce his name.  Nationally, he was only Mitch Who Was Drafted Over Patrick Mahomes, that's it, that's the punchline.  Now he's gone, off to Buffalo, bound only to pop up in case of an injury to Josh Allen where he will once again ascend to meme-hood whether he is good, terrible, or merely mediocre.

The Bears got rid of Trubisky, promising fans better days at quarterback and tantalizing them with visions of maybe Russell Wilson suiting up and after all of that they dropped Andy Dalton on us.  Andy Dalton.  Dalton might be the least inspiring, least interesting veteran backup quarterback to put on a team other than Nick Foles, who at least has inspired a number of bawdy ballads in Philadelphia.  Andy Dalton.  The Bears told their fans they would show them an exciting, romantic space opera and instead sent them a tediously detailed tome outlining the mechanisms of an intergalactic trade dispute.  Andy Dalton.  If you were to sum up the entire history of Bears quarterbacking over the past half century you could conceivably describe it as "Andy Dalton."  He's pudding.  The Bears have chosen not to move on from the executive who made possibly the worst quarterback draft pick in the twenty-first century and let him pick the next quarterback and what he came up with is Andy Dalton.   

I believe that the Mitch Trubisky debacle has finally caused a sort of psychic break in Bears fans where they are no longer interested in rooting for a team with a good defense and an Andy Dalton-style quarterback who hands off and tries not to throw egregious interceptions and just want to watch a single good quarterback once regardless of the rest of the team.  I would root for a two-win team that just lost shootouts week after week and didn't even have linebackers if it meant I could watch a quarterback do one of those demoralizing drives where they just hit open receivers one after the other to the point that it doesn't look like the other team is even defending them that I have to see done to the Bears constantly and have never seen from the other side.  I've seen the Bears win with insane, unfathomable defenses, incredible special teams, bruising running games, and that one season where they won exclusively from Mike Brown returning interception touchdowns in overtime.  I don't think I am uniquely deranged, and that there are others like me.  Without a competent quarterback, there is nothing to root for except for the Packers to not have a hall of fame quarterback for like a year.

By Defeating Me In This Title Game, You Have Proven My Point

No one expected Northwestern to actually win the Big Ten Championship last Saturday, but I would argue that the Wildcats managed to win the aesthetic battle by turning the entire thing into a grim, unwatchable puntfest that stymied the Buckeyes until they remembered that their offensive line is group of large, sentient dump trucks and they have a running back that transcends time and space.  In the end, I suppose, everyone got what they wanted: Ohio State gets another inevitable conference championship and berth in the Playoff, Northwestern proved they can lose to Ohio State with more dignity than all but one Big Ten team this season, and the Big Ten got its television money.

https://twitter.com/CFBONFOX/status/1340367024296521729?s=20

https://twitter.com/CFBONFOX/status/1340367024296521729?s=20

WHAT A PICK 🤯@NUFBFamily's @BrandonJoseph_1 snatched it out of the air with one hand! pic.twitter.com/6bNAsaLl9r

— FOX College Football (@CFBONFOX) December 19, 2020

Northwestern's winning strategy all season-- to grab a lead and then desperately hang on as the opposition punts, throws ill-conceived interceptions in the direction of Brandon Joseph, or dies of old age-- while effective against most of the Big Ten faltered against big, bad Ohio State.  Fox television even correctly identified them the entire game. And Northwestern managed to prove a point that even though they were really bad 30 years ago, they are fine now, which remains their most important mission.

One of the luxuries in rooting for a team like Northwestern is never being in position to worry about what the Playoff Committee is up to, and so when they come out and transparently shoehorn in the teams to guarantee TV ratings into the Playoff while constructing ludicrous Rube Goldberg-style explanations for it because apparently it is illegal to outright say more people want to watch Notre Dame stumble around and get bopped in the noggin on television than Cincinnati so Gary Barta has to come out there and transcend our understanding of football to invoke a different plane of  existence that is only visible to the Playoff Committee and the people who have taken some sort of gray market psychedelic and now believe that they live in a cult compound called Fansville, it is fine to enjoy the spectacle.  In fact, in their own way they are right.  It might not be fair to the Group of Five, but I will enjoy watching Notre Dame getting crushed by Alabama while Brian Kelly turns into an undulating skin tag on the sideline.

 

The committee has correctly assumed American football sickos want to watch Brian Kelly appear to have been shot out of the Mars colony after activation of the Reactor

It has taken the Playoff Committee six years to go from an exciting novelty to an ossified institution propping up the same high-powered programs.  The playoff rankings remind me of a ducal war of succession where the prime territories are easily gobbled up by Alabama and Clemson and then everyone else needs to fight a punishing 30-year land war involving Ohio State.  College football has yet to find a way to crown a champion that does not involve some sort of outrage, but I would suggest that continually farming it out to unaccountable committees of bureaucrats who have yet to come up with a reason for doing anything that cannot be explained by assuming that they are only interested in television ratings is probably not the most productive way to do this; then again, the Committee seems completely invulnerable to shame, pressure, and even Group of Five teams festively taking matters into their own hands and crowning themselves champions (the best thing that has come from the Playoff system) and the conferences that they care about are making obscene amounts of money so it is pretty easy to assume that they do not give a shit.

The college football season is mercifully limping to an end.  The bowl system, already kind of stupid but enjoyably stupid, has completely collapsed upon itself with teams pulling themselves from contention, two-win teams getting bowl berths because of contracts, entire games getting cancelled because of team outbreaks-- the entire thing has mirrored the American coronavirus response in that there are really no rules or rhyme and reason to what is shutting down but the American Men's Sock Garter and Sock Garter Holster Company has paid good money for those naming rights so a couple of three-win teams are going to fall down on each other for a few hours unless too many of them get coronavirus.

Northwestern will face Auburn in the Citrus Bowl, which is as far as I can tell still happening for some reason.  Northwestern and Auburn last met in 2010's batshit Outback Bowl in the dying embers of the Wildcats having a recognizably zesty offense.  Because Florida is a lawless Zone, this game will feature the jarring sight of fans in the stands with a capacity of up to 13,000 maniacs in America's Deranged Vacation Capital Orlando, Florida.  Fans in attendance are encouraged to inspire the teams on third down by cackling.

As you would expect from reading this type of focused college football blog, I have not watched a single second of Auburn football this season and have no idea whether they are good.  I do know that they just fired legendary coach Gus Malzahn as part of what appears to me as some sort of booster-related coup with the type of dumb skulduggery that makes this sport so fascinating, so the Wildcats will be playing a team with an interim coach in the middle of a pandemic in Florida.  I don't think these circumstances merit as Bowl Game Winning Factors, I just hope they get through it, and if it means that Pat Fitzgerald gets to bray on a podium how Joey Galloway is a disgrace in fact the worst deal we've ever done while confetti rains down over a semi-empty stadium then that's fine and everyone can go home while I flip over to watch Northwestern's basketball teams go through the same insanity to play because they also have the temerity to be good this year.

I have enjoyed watching Northwestern play football this season in the way that it is theoretically possible to enjoy a Northwestern football game, but the entire season has been a travesty.  The Wildcats managed to get through the season without a reported Covid case (football camp was shut down over the summer after a positive case, but it was later described as a false positive), and while I am assured that everyone involved has been conforming to guidelines scrupulously, the price for having a football season has required football players and all other athletes competing this season to live essentially as monks.  If anything, this season has rendered the already ridiculous argument that college athletes are simply students enjoying a recreational activity with a billion-dollar TV contract even more impossible.  As college campuses across the country have shut down in various stages, athletes have carried on their practices and games and travel, navigating uncertainty and a risk of infection.  While I understand that players had the opportunity to opt out and many played because they really like it, that's fine-- they should also be paid.  If the NCAA does not like the aesthetics of cutting checks, they can officially deputize a bunch of guys with stupid hats driving long cars to pull up to every facility and hand people sacks of cash the way it is unofficially done, but even the vaguest gossamer strands of an already-lost argument against paying players cannot possibly be entertained unless the argument is "who's gonna stop us" which I guess is a pretty good one because no one has been able to answer it.

The one thing we have learned this season is that there is nothing that the NCAA, the conferences, and the schools will not do to get their television advertising money.  They will play in a pandemic.  They will make up bullshit "safety protocols" that involve college football coaches, the people least likely to wear a mask on the face of the earth, pretend to wear a mask but really just yank it down to scream at people or wear it around their entire face except where it should go.

Jeremy Pruitt models a mask style known as the "Oaf's Babushka"

 

They will drag themselves and everyone else over a floor full of broken glass to get these games on TV, and while that is disconcerting and an already appalling part of the horrifying broader tapestry of what Americans have been willing to ask people to get sick and die for this year, it also suggests that if anyone ever gets together and threatens to take those games off TV they just might give them anything.