Lingering Items--Passing Over Easter Edition

A loss on opening day isn't the end of the world or even the end of the season. It's not even the end of the series.  In a season as long as major league baseball's one game can be pretty meaningless except when you miss a playoff spot by that same game.

But the Indians won't miss the playoffs by just one game anyway so Thursday's loss to the Toronto Blue Jays will just be one that ends up one one side or other of the .500 ledger that will define the season.  Still, why is it that the Indians can't just lose a game and move on like most teams?  Why do they have to do things in such a historic and miserable fashion? And, for that matter, why does every loss have to illustrate exactly why there aren't more wins?

Thursday's excruciatingly boring loss was actually the perfect metaphor for an excruciatingly boring spring training.  There was very little to keep one's interest and most of the team and its coaches seemed to be going through the motions. 

The team that took the field on Thursday was much like the variations of it that took the field throughout spring training.  It featured players of various ill pedigrees trying to catch lightening in a bottle of careers that just don't seem to be panning out.  Behind them is a front office fixated on mining stats for greater truth while the ownership accepts the reality of its financial fate without contemplating how to change the paradigm.

It's not as if there isn't some talent on the team.  There is.  But if that’s the glue, what exactly is it holding together?  You didn't just need a program to identify all the new faces.  You needed ready access to the internet and its various resources to figure out the lineage of the pieces and parts that general manager Chris Antonetti has cobbled together to supposedly make a run at the Detroit Tigers. That's not exactly the textbook way to build a championship team.

The good news in general and with respect to Thursday, which news stands out as much like a sore thumb as anything, was Justin Masterson.  Eight very strong innings on opening day is not to be so easily dismissed.  He could have and ahould have finished what he atarted  Maybe he was tiring and had to be taken out of the game.  And in retrospect the performance of most of the bullpen Thursday was such that it's really unfair to second guess manager Manny Acta's decision to turn the game over to that bullpen.  It's just that you can't help but feel bad for Masterson, whose career here has been mostly of the hard luck variety and will continue as long as the bullpen is anchored by Chris Perez.

Perez made a mess of the game, yes, but in the larger sense it's hardly a surprise.  Perez himself is an undisciplined mess and that stems not just from a truncated spring training spent mostly nursing an injury.  It also stems from the fact that Perez seems to care little about his own conditioning or even his station in life.  Perez is deliberately taking the anti-athlete approach to one of the more critical jobs in baseball and the Indians will suffer for it, just like they did Thursday. Is it any wonder that the injuries he does suffer are suspiciously similar to those of the weekend warriors who throw a ball around about once every six months?

I get the sense that Perez seems far more interested in courting an image as a character then actually going about preparing himself to pitch in the major leagues.  He's out of shape and that doesn't seem to bother anyone associated with the Indians, including Perez.  CC Sabathia wasn’t and still isn’t a picture of conditioning either so maybe that doesn’t much matter.  Still would it kill Perez to visit a salad bar once in awhile instead of Five Guys?

Perez stood up after the game, bloated, unkempt and took the blame for the loss like a pro is supposed to do but yet he seemed so casual about it, the regret about his performance dripping from his mouth with ease like excess barbecue sauce from a pulled pork sandwich, it made me wonder whether his pitching really bothered him.  I doubt it did.

A closer has to have a short memory because saves do get blown. So in that sense there's no problem with Perez immediately putting the game behind him. But the concern with Perez is that he doesn't seem to care about anything—his conditioning, his appearance, his performance, his teammates.  Just cash the checks for as long as they roll in and then figure the rest out later. 

As much of a problem as Perez appears to be, let's also not obscure the fact that with the Indians, Cleveland now has three professional sports teams that can't generate offense.

It's as if Antonetti rehired Eddie Murray to be the hitting coach when no one was looking.  Given how low key the whole spring training regimen was, it's likely that's exactly what happened and we just didn't notice.

All the hallmarks of a Murray-coached offense were there Thursday and throughout spring training however: the lack of approach, the lack of patience, the inability to move runners. 

The Indians played 16 innings on Thursday and scored in only one of them.  Sadder still, they didn't put themselves in a position very often in any of those other innings to score. When they did, they couldn't get it done mainly because of a lack of discipline.   In context there was no chance the Indians were going to score again during that game.  It was just a matter as to when the Blue Jays would and put everyone out of their misery.

Twice Indians' hitters came to the plate with a man on third and less than two outs and twice they failed miserably.  Asdrubal Cabrera's weak grounder with the bases loaded was everything you needed to know about why.  After Michael Brantley had walked on four straight pitches, Blue Jays manager John Ferrell decided to engage in a massive display of over-managing.  Either that or he knew that Cabrera would never hit the ball out of the infield anyway so why not load it up with as many players as could fit?

Ferrell was right.  Showing all the patience of a puppy, Cabrera didn't even wait to see if Blue Jays pitcher Luis Perez, who didn't sniff the strike zone with Brantley, could find his control.  Instead Cabrera offered at the first pitch, which he could barely get a bat on, and grounded into an inning-ending double play.  Honestly it was everything you needed to know about how poorly this team prepared for the regular season wrapped up in one nice little moment.

There's no telling how the Indians will finish this season.  They got rocked on opening day last year and recovered pretty nicely.  It is just one game.  But yet when it comes to this team, why does it never seem to be just one game?

**

About that Gregg Williams tape...

Roger Goodell finally had a smoking gun and the real question now is whether professional football can survive. It's not an abstract question

Let's start with a more obvious point first, however.  Gregg Williams will never coach in the NFL again.  He probably won't be able to get an assistant defensive line coaching job in a Pop Warner league either.  For vastly different reasons, Williams is every bit as untouchable as Jerry Sandusky.

There's also another obvious point as well.  Goodell really had no choice but to do what he did to the New Orleans Saints, head coach Sean Payton and Williams.  On tape and in the most specific way possible, Williams addressed his players on who to hurt and how.  If that was the only evidence Goodell had it would still be enough.  Even if there wasn't a boatload of lawsuits pending against the NFL, Goodell still had to do what he did.

Now here is where it gets tricky. 

I'm not fond of the whole “everyone else does it defense” as a way of excusing what the Saints did but you just know it's true in this case.  The broader question, the one that Goodell doesn't want to contemplate even as he has, is whether the attitude of Williams is so institutionalized in the sport that ridding it is a losing battle. If that is the case then football will eventually die because eventually the pool of people who want to be deliberately maimed for money will go dry.

The NFL has always had and will always have a certain element of miscreants within its midst.  There are simply players that find it perversely satisfying to try and deliberately hurt their opponents. Oddly they aren't the problem so long as they represent the exception.

The problem is that football has too long glorified these exceptions in order to build brand cache. Pittsburgh Steelers' resident thug James Harrison deliberately courts an image as a tough guy and goes about his business on the field proving it with all manner of cheap shots intended to injure. He's been rewarded handsomely for it, his cheap shots shown repeatedly and not just as a cautionary tale but as an illustration of the state of the game. 

It's not as if Harrison is the only one.  Some of the more storied players in NFL history got that way precisely because their violent tendencies are the stuff of legend.  Those legends aren't urban, either.  They are an institutionalized part of the NFL experience, extolled by coaches, rewarded by owners and celebrated by the media that vote them into the Hall of Fame.

The question on the table now that all of the concussion-related lawsuits ultimately will attempt to really answer is whether football can survive in any other way.  If you ask the majority of the players, they will say it cannot because any concession by a player about the violence of his sport is considered cowardly.  But it is this mostly silent majority of players that need to speak up now and defend Goodell and what he's trying to accomplish instead of hiding behind the increasingly reprehensible DeMaurice Smith and his misguided attempt to always blame management for an issue his members mostly control.

It's sickening when Hines Ward defends Harrison each time he deliberately cheap shots an opponent. It's sickening when Drew Brees defends his head coach while abandoning the union brothers like Frank Gore who were deliberately targeted by his coach. It's ridiculous to extol Scott Fujita as one of the NFL good guys most concerned about player safety when he actively participated in the bounty pool.

Players of stature, like Brees, Fujita and Ward should instead have been the most vocal on calling out their teammates for their damaging behavior. Every word and deed in support just furthered the institutionalization of the problem and made it that much more difficult to stop.

The union and its members are on the wrong side of the problem when they openly mock Goodell, as many have, for trying to take a safer route for such a great game. It’s simply not true that football can’t survive without all the cheap shoting. It can and has.  What football can no longer abide is a head in the sand approach to the life threatening nature of the way some players and coaches want to play it.  If it has to abide that because Goodell has failed or because he has been undermined by the very players he’s trying to protect, then that is what will kill the game.

**

Still fixated as I am on the Indians at the moment, this week’s question to ponder: What is the Indians’ back up plan if Chris Perez’s Thursday is a trend and not an anomaly?

Lingering Items--Bounty Hunter Edition

The NFL, which is no stranger to scandal anyway, has another full fledged problem on its hands. After taking longer to investigate the New Orleans Saints’ bounty system then the Warren Commission took to investigate the assassination of the John F. Kennedy, the NFL concluded what had long been assumed anyway. NFL players are motivated by money to the point that they'd injure their opponents for more of it.

But the subtle subversion of the salary cap system, not to mention the tax laws, by paying defensive players to injure opposing players, is the least of the NFL’s problems. Far more of a problem is the pending lawsuits from dozens of former players who are claiming that the NFL did little to protect them from concussions and how these revelations play into that.

It’s one thing for a group of defensive players to pool their money and reward each other for particularly vicious hits. It’s a whole other matter when the activity was institutionally sponsored, as it appeared it was in New Orleans. That kind of thing tends to get the attention of plaintiffs lawyers.

And if this kind of unofficially official activity was present elsewhere around the league, and there seems to be evidence that it was, how can the NFL adequately defend itself from allegations that it was doing its level best to protect the players from unnecessary injuries?

The “Spygate” incident was a public relations nightmare for the NFL but it wasn’t team sponsored assaults on opposing players. But this Bountygate business creates a boatload of legal issues for the NFL just as it’s trying to defend itself from claims that it looked the other way as players came up lame over the years.

Gregg Williams, the defensive coordinator for the Saints in 2009, the year in which this activity appears to have peaked, has acknowledged that he oversaw this “reward” system not just in New Orleans but pretty much everywhere else he’s coached. That may tell you plenty about what a lousy coach Williams really is, but it also tells you plenty about why certain ex-players, those still suffering from the effects of all those concussions for example, feel the way they do about the league.

Williams may be portrayed as just some rogue coach and if I’m the NFL’s lawyers, I’m arguing just that. But the fact remains that Williams was a member of his team’s management and he had the power if not to fire players directly, to effectively recommend them for that fate. If Williams is telling players to injure opponents and is paying them to do it, what choice does a player have not to participate?

If you follow the Twitter feeds of NFL players, it’s been an interesting few days. Just as they did for James Harrison, you have a number of players defending the Saints' actions as just a part of the game. That should be expected, mainly because many players aren’t particularly deep thinkers.

But just as there are those that see this as no big deal, there are plenty that feel differently and I suspect most of them go by another name, “plaintiff.” They’re the ones suing the league who now have powerful evidence in the form of the league’s own report to help make their case.

The NFL knows it has a problem on its hands and though it should be given credit for announcing the results publicly, the low key approach to this situation as compared to its bombastic response to “Spygate” is directly attributable to the vast difference between the two situations.

“Spygate” was incredibly stupid and overblown. The NFL acted as if stealing another team’s signals, which is at the heart of the allegations, impacted the integrity of the game, despite the fact that no one gives a second thought, let alone raises integrity issues, when baseball does the same thing night after night.

“Bountygate” on the other hand spells real trouble for the NFL and they know it. Because the NFL can’t look as if it condones sponsored violence, except of the more typical variety for which it charges fans a small ransom, it will come down much harder on the Saints and their management then they did on the Patriots and its management in Spygate. Expect significant loss of draft picks and significant fines. If Williams is allowed to coach in the NFL this coming season, it will be a miracle.

The NFL really has no other choice. If it is ever going to defend itself against accusations that it is not indifferent to player injuries, it actually has to not be indifferent to player injuries.

When the Browns allowed Colt McCoy back on the field without adequately checking whether he was still functioning adequately, it didn't help the league's cause. But that was a mostly isolated incident. Long term sponsorship of brutal, incentivized head-hunting is a whole different matter. And the fact that it took this long for the NFL to root it out doesn't much help their cause either.

**

There's a local angle to this Bountygate and it involves one of the team's best defensive players, the self-aggrandizing Scott Fujita.

As reported initially by Sports Illustrated's Peter King, Fujita is more than implicated in Bountygate. According to King, Fujita was one of a handful of Saints defensive players to pledge between $2,000 and $10,000 to the overall bounty pool, something Fujita both admits and denies. Yes to the pool, no to the whole injury aspect of the pool.

While King talks about all the good Fujita has done for Steve Gleason, a former player suffering from ALS as well as the work put Fujita put in on the NFL’s labor council, that doesn’t lessen the gravity of Fujita’s involvement here. If anything, it enhances it.

Fujita, who railed against the NFL this past offseason for all manner of sins, including what he termed was its lack of concern over safety issues, is nothing if not a hypocrite. While he was chidling the NFL for its approach, he knew full well that he was accomplice in it, not so much because he was a hard-nosed player but because he allegedly sanctioned with his own money bounty hunting on opposing players.

Off the field and completely away from football, Fujita may be a wonderful sort. But on it or near it is a different story. What we really know about Fujita in that regard is that he’s not just a hypocrite. He’s a phony. At no point did Fujita come to Colt McCoy’s defense publicly when James Harrison deliberately tried to sever his head. Instead Fujita took to criticizing team management and NFL brass for not having good enough procedures in place to deal with concussions, ignoring the fact that McCoy’s concussion was completely preventable. Maybe Fujita supported McCoy behind the scenes. I hope so. But given Fujita’s apparent role in Bountygate, his not backing McCoy publicly at the expense of Harrison now makes far more sense.

Screaming about solutions when you're part of the problem isn't the best recipe for success. But there's more.

We also know that Fujita isn’t just a hypocrite and a phony. He’s also a coward. During the heat of the NFL’s labor dispute, Fujita had his wife “write” (most likely ghostwrite) a column for The Nation in which she excoriated NFL owners for exploiting the players as mere pawns in a game of high commerce. (See my column here on this subject) She railed about their relative indifference to the care these fat cats showed for injured players to underscore her point.

Maybe she wrote those eloquent words without knowing that her own husband was effectively undermining her arguments by allegedly helping to incent his co-workers to injure opponents through whatever means possible, late hits or cheap hits be damned. But Fujita let his wife publish those comments knowing full well his role in all of this, which is a pretty cowardly act for a guy who paints himself as one of the NFL’s tough guys.

There is much that can and should be done to reduce injuries in the NFL. As much as I love the game, it’s frustrating each year to see teams decimated by injuries. Playoffs and Super Bowls increasingly aren’t won by the best teams but the least injured. So purely from an entertainment value, the quality of the NFL’s product is repeatedly compromised by the absence of so many players nursing injuries.

But the far bigger concern is the lingering effects of those injuries. You need only to meet retired players to understand how all those hits add up to permanent damage. It may be the mentality of NFL players that injuries are part of the game and must be endured. But is it really the mentality of NFL players that unnecessary injuries are a part of the game?

And while the primary obligation may fall on the NFL to find the best ways to reduce injuries, through a combination of technology and rules, it’s all for naught when players find ways around it just to earn a few extra bucks from a bounty pool.

If it turns out that Fujita actively participated in this system while in New Orleans, he should be punished and I wouldn’t care if it were for an entire season. The near term hit to the Browns is worth it if it brings this kind of activity to an end.

Indeed, if it does turn out the Fujita was one of the ringleaders, then considering that the Browns are trying to rebuild with better players of higher character, cutting Fujita would certainly qualify as addition by subtraction.

**

With the Bountygate scandal is expanding to other teams, this weeks’ question to ponder: Given the relatively weak performances by past Browns defenses, is it possible their was an organized effort within the Browns to pay players for deliberately trying not to hurt opposing players?