A Compelling and Complicated Man

The announcement barely earned a mention in the Plain Dealer last week but Scott Fajita, the former linebacker for the Cleveland Browns, has officially retired.  He signed a one-day contract with the New Orleans Saints so that he could officially retire from the franchise that wouldn’t pay him enough to keep from becoming a free agent and signing with the Browns.  He never much liked the Browns anyway, just their money.

Fujita, for reasons that extend well beyond anything he’s done on the field, has become one of football’s more compelling personalities.  Usually thoughtful, often combative, Fujita seems to be coming to the role of the passionate advocate as his on field career ends.  It started with his front and center role in the labor dispute between the owners and players.  It got its sea legs when he found himself engulfed in the maelstrom that surrounded the Saints’ bounty scandal.  It’s taken wing on a variety of social issues, from player safety to gay marriage.

Admittedly I’ve not been the biggest fan of Fujita owing to in my view the destructive role he took in helping prolong the NFL lockout.  Sucked into an ill-conceived strategy by NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith that it was better to litigate than negotiate, Fujita and players like former teammate Drew Brees helped sell the strategy to the rank and file that failed miserably.  By believing they could force the owners’ to withdraw their demands for various concessions by first decertifying and then suing under anti-trust laws, the union essentially refused to negotiate until it became clear that the courts would offer no relief or even negotiating leveerage.  While this helped lengthen the overall dispute significantly, when it failed it helped get a deal done that was there for the taking months prior.

Fujita was on the wrong side of that issue and the damage it did to fringe players who lost real money and opportunity has mostly gone unnoticed.  But it did occur and Fujita owns part of that legacy.

The other thing about Fujita is that I initially saw him to be mostly a phony when it came to issues about player safety.  What’s probably more accurate is that he’s sincerely conflicted on the subject and he’s let that conflict at times blunt the noble attempts of his efforts.  Fujita, like other players, want to lay the league’s sorry record on concussions at the feat of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and yet see no contradiction as they unceremoniously criticize Goodell every time he punishes someone like James Harrison for trying to tackle opponents with his head.

Then there’s what took place in New Orleans and how that impacts on Fujita's attempts to make the game safer..  Fujita essentially turned a willful blind eye to the actions of his own teammates who were running a bounty system designed to put players from other teams (or, as I like to call them, Fujita’s union brothers) out of commission.

It’s hard to square Fujita’s role as a team leader in New Orleans with the fact that he did nothing to stop the bounty program.  It's tough to claim the safety higher ground if you don’t try to stop deliberate head and knee hunting by your teammates.  Even if that atmosphere was fostered by the coaching staff, like Gregg Williams, and that does appear to be the case, Fujita didn't stand up to them either.  Would taking a stand have been difficult for Fujita under those circumstances?  Most certainly.  But that's what leaders do.

There’s also the inconvenient fact that Fujita brought the maelstrom he incurred over this issue on himself by admitting at the outset that while he would never participate in a “bounty” system, narrowly defined as a scheme to pay teammates who deliberately injured opponents so that they couldn’t play, he did admittedly contribute to a pool to pay teammates for good, clean hits.  Such a fine line, though even what Fujita was doing was in contravention of salary cap rules.

It bears mentioning too because it reflects on what makes Fujita both compelling and complicated is that his exoneration from the bounty scandal was similarly tortuous because of his own hardheadedness.  Fujita wouldn’t participate in the league’s appeal process because he didn’t feel it was fair.  It was the appeal process laid out in the collective bargaining agreement he helped ratify but when it applied to him he wanted no part of it.  After being placated but not accommodated Fujita eventually did participate, had the chance to tell his story and present his evidence and then was exonerated months later than he would otherwise have been.

These complications in his thinking aside, part of presenting the entire picture of Fujita is to not just acknowledge but praise his other more worthy contributions, especially to the ongoing dialogue that is earnestly trying to make the sport and society better.

Fujita, despite of or perhaps because of his past, has kept up the pressure, mostly in the right way, on player safety issues.  What Fujita now seems to recognize is that the day has long since passed when we stopped viewing hard-nose football and player safety as contradictory concepts.  I’d like to see Fujita be more even-handed in his approach or at least be as critical of his union as he has been of management.  It’s a shared responsibility and perhaps as a retiree Fujita’s views will even out. But he's doing the right things now.

Then there’s his advocacy on the part of gay athletes.  Jason Collins, late of the Washington Wizards, came out Monday as the highest profile male athlete to declare he’s gay.  Someone had to go first.  It won’t be long before others follow.

Fujita for his part has been a passionate advocate for the rights of gays, generally, and gay athletes in particular.  It is just this kind of leadership that’s needed so that the specter of discrimination can be eradicated on this front.

It is simply shameful that in 2013 this country, as a matter of policy, still allows for the overt discrimination of gays.  We allow those who claim a sincerely held religious belief over a decidedly unreligious topic to control the debate when all that debate is really doing is masking irrational homophobia.  If your First Amendment right to free association allows you to hang with a large group of intolerant religious zealots to express your views publicly then it stands to reason that that same amendment allows the other person to hang with a group of overly liberal gay atheists doing likewise.  But more to the point that same amendment dictates that as a society we must allow these two disparate groups to coexist.  Majority rule by either extreme has no place at the table.  I don’t have to like your friends or your ideas and you don’t have to like mine.  That’s why we live in this country.  The entire underpinning of freedom rests on the peaceful coexistence of disparate thought.

It’s just a matter of time before it’s no longer a story when a male athlete declares that he’s gay just like it’s just a matter of time before no one seriously questions the rights of gays to marry each other.  Our disgusting history as a country that has taken too long to right the wrongs borne from discrimination time and time again will eventually catch up with us when it comes to gays and when that finally happens the society and our sports will be the better for it. The economic performance of our country has likewise shown time and again that each time discrimination in some form is eradicated, the economy expands.  Why do you think sensible immigration reform is finally getting the serious bi-partisan discussion it deserves?

Fujita was one of several athletes to sign a friend of the court brief in the Supreme Court cases pending over the issue of gay marriage.  He supports it.  The only question is why everyone else hasn’t? Hopefully Fujita and the handful of others like him with a larger pulpit can push the issue even harder.

I’m going to continue to disagree with Fujita on the uneven nature in which he sometimes ham handedly goes about being an advocate for the rights of his fellow athletes but I won’t disagree with him on his intentions any longer.  He’s just a man struggling to stay on the right side of history and sometimes finding that path isn’t nearly as elegant as we’d like it to be.

Lingering Items--Eternal Souls Edition

There's nothing like a redemption story. It's a yarn older than the written word, more beloved then a tale of true love and continues unabated in every form of entertainment today. It's nice to believe in the power of redemption evens when it's mostly just a dramatic device contrived as an efficient if not accurate way to convey complexity either the writer, the reader or both can’t fully understand.

Witness, if you'll excuse the reference, the common theme of LeBron James' capturing of his long sought after NBA Championship. Nearly every sportswriter with a breathless thought has defined the Miami Heat's triumph as the personal triumph of James as if he were a member of the Lost Tribes of Israel who suffered long and hard and made it out of the desert alive.

Some suffering. James is one of the richest athletes on the planet. He lives a life of opulence and privilege borne of his outsized athletic skills. That was true before the playoffs started and remains true today and for the foreseeable future.

But attaining the championship he previously couldn't is more a result of attrition than redemption. It was just James' turn in the barrel. The Heat's path to the finals was clear and easy, relatively speaking. The Oklahoma City Thunder's was harder and longer and their fatigue and inexperience showed in the end.

James already lived his redemption story anyway when he signed his first pro contract. It was the real triumph of overcoming the very long odds of his upbringing. Having long since arrived he long since surrendered any candidacy in the redemption sweepstakes.

Let's all be honest with one another about this. James was always going to win an NBA title at some point. He's the best player on the planet, he still works hard at his craft, and he makes those around him better. It was always just a matter of time. Now or next year or whenever.

The other reason James' championship can never be a redemption story though is far more central to the ultimate narrative. For redemption to work the protagonist has to reclaim his soul. That hasn't happened here because James remains soulless having sold himself for his quest. He's no Jabez Stone and he doesn't have Daniel Webster on retainer even if he was. The devil drives a hard bargain and never renegotiates.

James is a forever man-child perpetually caught up in an adult world he doesn't fully understand. He commands an audience because of fame and fortune but he'll never fully have their respect because children are mostly seen and rarely really heard.

There is no real chance that James will ever fully gain the perspective one needs for real individual growth. Fame and fortune obscure. Look at Michael Jordan. It hasn't yet occurred to him that he is the worst owner/basketball executive in history not named Isiah Thomas. Fame and fortune obscure.

James will go on to win a few maybe several more titles and earn more and more individual accolades. But they will never change the essential nothingness of his being.

It's not really that James stiffed the Cavaliers and did so like a total putz. That was just the gating charge when he entered the land of souls departed. It's that James divested himself of the value system he so richly earned by avoiding all the crap that life threw at him early for the fast track to a phony Promised Land.

Pat Riley, the NBA's Gordon Gekko in looks and outlook, was certainly a far more attractive option then a muddling Danny Ferry. And while Ferry probably did lack the chops to put all the pieces together it's not as if James wasn't complicit in Ferry's difficulty. Let's never forget the long shadow James cast on the Cavs franchise and how his every twitch and quirk set off alarms inside the Q.

The irony is that James isn't lazy. He works on his game in the same way every truly great athlete does. Perfect, to his way of thinking, is never the enemy of good.

And yet James just couldn't abide things not happening for him quickly enough. So he sought a shortcut, a stack decked and if that cost him his soul, so be it.

In certain ways James is like Roger Clemens another rare talent for whom great was never great enough. Clemens used more nefarious means to cheat the system but he was seeking the same kind of edge as James did.

Indeed there are plenty of characters thought the history of sports that sought a similar path. It's as old, too, as a redemption story.

There's no reason to begrudge James his accomplishments because rare is the goal achieved without some compromise. But James will always have to live with the fact that his goals weren't nearly as earned as they could have been.

**

Speaking of redemption stories, the Penn State apologists can begin theirs in earnest now that Jerry Sandusky has been convicted on 45 of 48 counts of child abuse. There will come a point this season, maybe the next, when someone isn’t writing about Penn State’s resurgence as a respectable university after if put Sandusky and his sick exploits in the rear view mirror.

Frankly I’m not sure that Penn State can ever be redeemed. Shouldn’t it be scarred for life for its complicity in the long term abuse by one of its more trusted employees? Most certainly each of Sandusky’s victims will be forever scarred so why should Penn State ever get a pass?

For those who always rushed to protect Joe Paterno by claiming he had done what he could to stop Jerry Sandusky, how in anyway has that view been vindicated now that Sandusky is a convict? It hasn’t. If anything that view becomes even more discredited when you consider the mountains of evidence that were stacked against Sandusky and realize that because Paterno hardly lifted a finger to have it stopped, the abuse continued long after it could have been stopped.

In so many ways Paterno was a virtuous soul. He did place great emphasis on academics. He worked hard to build the stature of Penn State. For so many and for so long he supposedly stood for what was right about college athletics.

But Paterno was never the country bumpkin character that he liked to fashion for himself when it was convenient to do so. More than anyone else, Paterno was well aware that all his good non-athletic deeds for the university gave him almost unchecked power on that campus. And Paterno wasn’t afraid to utilize that power when he needed it to ultimately advance the cause of his beloved football team. It’s been thoroughly documented, for example, how Paterno kept his misbehaving players out of the scope of normal university discipline. His greater good was always far more narrow then he'd admit.

So when Paterno supposedly reported the Sandusky allegations up the chain, Paterno had every reason to believe nothing would come of it unless he specifically gave the word to make something of it. That word never came and Sandusky continued in his employ subject only to a whisper campaign while he quietly went about abusing more vulnerable boys.

Penn State doesn’t get another chance. Paterno was complicit and so was the rest of the university administration. If the new administrative crew really wanted to show its worthy of some level of forgiveness then it would start by proving how much more important institutional integrity really is by abolishing the football program completely and take whatever other steps were necessary to reduce the importance of any remaining sports. They’d wash Paterno off the books completely and take down whatever statutes they erected.

It’s nice that Paterno had a positive influence on so many young men. But this isn’t a balancing act. You don’t get to cite those figures as a counterbalance because the unthinkable, unimaginable horror that Sandusky’s crimes visited upon all those victims trumps all.

If you want to understand how sad, how truly pathetic this will all become, just wait until the university finds it completely appropriate to play the victim card for itself. It will pay out millions to settle lawsuits and then use that blood money as some sort of proof that the university community has suffered enough. It hasn’t and it never will because money will never give these victims back what they lost most and it will never erase the insidious way the university and its most important employees allowed such atrocities to continue for years.

**

As a follow up to my column last week about Scott Fujita, it’s been interesting that Fujita has gone back underground, perhaps realizing that his mouth is his own worst enemy.

The other interesting thing is to listen to union chief DeMaurice Smith call for a new investigation into the Saints’ bounty case. That makes him an even bigger hypocrite then Fujita, if that’s possible.

Smith didn’t participate in any aspect of the first investigation. In fact, he specifically refused to participate in the investigation and actively encouraged the players to likewise not participate in it. If there was only one side of the story that was heard, all the blame for that goes to Smith.

But Smith has sensed, wrongly but that’s another matter, that public opinion is such that the average fan doesn’t think there was enough evidence to suspend the various coaches, administrators and players. The average fan, I think, doesn’t much care either way. No one’s going to march on NFL headquarters in New York because Jon Vilma’s been suspended.

Smith gave decidedly wrong headed advice to his members on this issue and now is deflecting by trying to put the heat back on Roger Goodell.

The NFL has certainly put together a strong case that the Saints had in place a bounty system and that all that have been suspended deserved to be. There isn’t one particularly smoking gun so much as it’s the evidence’s cumulative weight that matters. That said, there were arguments to make in rebuttal that never got made because of another failed strategy by the union.

Goodell will rule this week and for the most part close the book on this latest NFL scandal. Smith can grouse about the decision because that’s what he’s paid to do but hopefully the players’ whose lives and paychecks were adversely affected will eventually come to realize that those adverse affects were due in some part to the bad advice they got from Smith.

**

Since we’re on a litigation theme, this week’s question to ponder: Even though he was acquitted of lying to Congress, does Roger Clemens’ silence since that verdict came down tell us more than a guilty verdict ever could?

Lingering Items--Public Relations Edition

During most weeks of the year, but most certainly the regular season, one NFL player or another runs afoul of some league rule.  Maybe he tested positive for a banned substance.  Maybe it was an illegal hit.  But in every case the league levies a punishment, the player appeals and eventually it gets resolved through the arbitration process.  And as that’s all taking place no one much pays attention, let alone complains about the process.

I mention this because in very large measure the punishment the league handed down to 4 current and former New Orleans Saints players for their alleged involvement in a pay-to-injure scheme are of the same ilk.  The allegations are a bit more salacious certainly but otherwise it doesn’t command any sort of resort to media handwringing.

Yet whether it’s Mike Florio over at ProFootballTalk.com or any number of other like-minded moralists, this situation is different and in their view the league should be handing over to the public all of its evidence against the accused so that everyone can pass premature judgment.  We don’t even demand such things in the prosecution of real criminals, but this is football so this kind of transparency obviously is much more important.

It’s a false argument and one the league most certainly will ignore.  The NFL doesn’t owe the public that kind of transparency any more than the Plain Dealer or ProFootballTalk or Yahoo or ESPN or the guy running the local 7-11 does in terms of how they deal with internal disciplinary matters.  There is an orderly process that will ultimately test the value of the league’s evidence against the defenses proffered and a decision will be rendered and we can all go about the business once again of wondering exactly why the Browns hate wide receivers.

The far more interesting dynamic in this Saints debacle is that of exactly how the union resolves its massive conflict of interest.  There’s no question that certain Saints players, including the Browns resident outhouse lawyer Scott Fujita, put money into a pool to reward other Saints players for playing with a certain, shall we say, intensity.  Fujita admitted this openly.  The dispute is whether the rewards were doled out for hits intended to injure the competitors.  Fujita’s spin is that they were simply for good, clean hits because, apparently, a million dollar salary isn’t enough of an incentive for a professional to perform as required, which means make good, clean hits.  Other players and the league say that it was a bounty program.

Common sense would indicate that the league has a good case if only because Fujita’s rationalization is idiotic.  But who knows?  The league has had seemingly open and shut cases before and they’ve managed to blow it so anything’s possible.

What really rubs the wrong day is as usual the strident views taken by a union run by an individual, DeMaurice Smith, who cares not a whit for the good of the game.  He fancies himself more in the vein of Marvin Miller when it comes to his role, as if protecting and defending his members is always at odds with acting in the best interests of the greater good.

This isn’t to suggest that the union shouldn’t mount a defense on behalf of the suspended players.  It’s their legal duty to do just that.  But to not denounce, even in the most general terms, any players who might have participated in a bounty system is reprehensible.  Smith and the cronies and lawyers that report to him are so blinded by their distaste for commissioner Roger Goodell and the owners that pay their salaries that they cannot even comprehend the awful message they are sending to the vast majority of their members with their odd defense of the Saints’ players.

Eli Manning, for one, had no such qualms in denouncing any of his fellow union members who would deliberately set out to injure another.  Same, too, for Aaron Rodgers.  But apparently Smith has forgotten that he is supposed to represent Manning, Rodgers and Brett Favre (the target of one of the alleged bounties) just as equally as Jon Vilma or Will Smith.  And because he has forgotten that charge, Smith has set up an internal civil war within the union that will not just hurt the union but also hurt the greater good.

I’ve been consistent in my views on Smith.  It was a mistake to hire him as the head of the union because he had absolutely no experience in labor-management relations.  He then proceeded to foolishly incite a lockout with a completely failed legal strategy, which wasn’t a surprise.  He didn’t negotiate any better deal then what he was offered before he pushed the union off the cliff.  That hurt his members most of whom are so disconnected to these matters anyway that they awarded Smith with a new contract.

Smith has once again taken his charges down the exact wrong path and that has nothing to do with whether or not the suspended players are guilty.  If Smith thinks it’s wrong for one union member to target another union member for injury, it’s his duty to say so and as publicly as possible.  Until Smith takes a stand as a real leader and finds a more elegant way to balance the sometimes competing interests of his members, he’ll continue to fail as a leader and the union will continue to look like the overmatched boobs they’ve become.

**

Colt McCoy showed up to work out for the Browns and a consensus seems to be emerging that mixes both surprise and bewilderment.  They’re surprised because McCoy didn’t kick up a fuss about the drafting of Brandon Weeden.  They’re bewildered because the Browns didn’t immediately trade McCoy in order to pave the way for Weeden.

To that I would add my own surprise and bewilderment but not for anything that either the Browns or McCoy have done but for the simplistic reactions of those being paid to write about it.  What exactly about the current situation immediately demands that the Browns part with McCoy?  Stated differently, what about McCoy personally suggests that his default reaction would be to bitch and moan and demand a trade?

I sometimes wonder whether many in the media that cover professional athletes for a living have any real clue about what makes athletes tick.  Their view of the McCoy/Weeden dynamic suggests they don’t.

If there’s one thing professional athletes understand by this point is that they aren’t long for professional athletics if they can’t stand a challenge.  Nearly every aspect of their existence is built on competition.  They are constantly fighting off others for the right to be the starter and the moment they think they have it made is the exact moment they need to worry the most.

McCoy is under contract with the Browns.  That’s why he showed up to work out.  He didn’t bitch about the drafting of Weeden because he’s been fighting off competition since Pop Warner.  It’s the nature of the job.  McCoy might fall short as a quarterback because his physical skills aren’t quite sufficient for a league of all stars.  But he won’t fall short because he lacks the desire to compete.

Besides, there’s no specific reason for either the Browns or McCoy to conclude at this point that it’s best for McCoy to ply his trade elsewhere.  If you believe that Weeden should be the starting quarterback, then by default having McCoy as the backup is far better than having it be Seneca Wallace, who couldn’t even beat out McCoy for the starting job.

The other benefit is that McCoy may burn with the desire to remain a starter in this league but he’s not the kind of personality that would publicly undermine Weeden like Wallace did with McCoy last season.  And as a final measure, there’s little chance that if Weeden starts next season he’ll make it through the season unscathed.  He’ll likely suffer an injury if only because every quarterback seems to.  There’s also every reason to think that he’ll hit some real low points where it will make sense to go to the bullpen even temporarily.  Wouldn’t you rather have McCoy in that bullpen then Wallace?

When the Browns signed Gary Danielson to mentor Bernie Kosar it worked because Danielson was still a serviceable starter in his own right while simultaneously not just recognizing but embracing his role as a placeholder for the next generation.  McCoy isn’t Danielson, but then again very few are.  If the Browns in theory could find a Danielson clone to mentor Weeden then by all means have at it.  But that player isn’t out there for if he were every team with a young quarterback, and there are plenty of them, would have snatched him up by now.

Until that kind of player emerges there’s no reason to run McCoy out of town and deliberately undercut the one area on the team where some depth is finally starting to emerge.

**

In the last 9 seasons, the Browns have won as much as 6 games just twice.  The rest of the time they’ve been in the 4 and 5 win category.  This isn’t just a garden variety losing record of a club that just lacks a few breaks.  It’s long term incompetence running head long into long term mismanagement.

In that context it’s understandable that the fans are excited about anyone who might promise something more than 6 wins in a season.  Still, doesn’t the exuberance around Weeden seem a bit, well, irrational?

At any time other than perhaps the last week and a half, not just the average Browns’ fan but nearly any Browns’ fan couldn’t have picked Weeden out of a lineup let alone talked confidently or intelligently about his accomplishments at a near second-tier Big 12 college or how the hell it could possibly translate into NFL success.

The exuberance too seems in large part manufactured by the public relations department of the Browns who are selling attributes like his advanced rookie age as a benefit without mentioning that if Weeden is indeed successful he’ll be the first.  Age does bring maturity but let’s face it, Weeden’s old because he couldn’t make it as a baseball player, his preferred occupation.

I’m not down on Weeden because it would be impossible to have formed that opinion given absolutely no body of work on which to draw any such conclusion.  Which is the point, isn’t it?  

I don’t mind the Browns’ p.r. department doing what it should be doing.  But it seems incredibly premature to anoint Weeden the starter let alone the savior of this dysfunctional franchise.

I’m not sure when the Browns fell out of love with McCoy but it was somewhere around the time that Pat Shurmur was hired as head coach.  That’s fine because every coach has his views on what it takes to execute his vision.  But the reason this franchise has performed so miserably is completely related to its reaction to Weeden before he’s had even one practice.  It’s always cart first and then horse with this team and in simple terms that’s why the results for the last decade have been consistent and awful.

**

When people talk about Scott Fujita, it’s always in glowing terms.  And while it’s not always fair to judge someone by one mistake, including a mistake that lasted for years, it does lead to this week’s question to ponder:  If Fujita really has the stand up image he’s cultivated, wouldn’t he simply take his relatively mild medicine, apologize and vow to work even harder to improve player safety?

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--Mad Men Edition

The Cleveland Browns front office appears about as active as the writers for Mad Men were during their 18 month hiatus between seasons, which is to say not much.  A passive/aggressive internal dispute of sorts, a little progress on a few fringe players coming and going, a franchise tender signed with their kicker (and that speaks volumes about the lack of quality on this team overall, doesn’t it?) but mostly inactivity, at least publicly.

That doesn’t mean it is quiet behind the scenes.  Just like a good advertising campaign is the culmination of a number of rejected ideas, so too is the rebuilding strategy of a NFL franchise.  And if any NFL franchise has tried and failed at every manner of idea and concept, it’s the Browns. Maybe what it needs is a little help from Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce.

Indeed, if the Browns front office personnel had its counterparts at Sterling, Cooper, then club president Mike Holmgren would be Bert Cooper, walking around Berea in socks, sitting in conference rooms and waiting for meetings that won’t ever take place.  Occasionally he’d bitch about the old days and talk about greatness.  Meanwhile the ladder climbers like Pete Campbell, in the form of, say, Pat Shurmur, would be conducting meetings out of his sight. Then there’s Tom Heckert, hoping against hope that he can be this franchise’s Don Draper but resigned to being Peggy Olson, competent, ambitious in his own way but secretly contemplating his own worthiness as he looks for approval from his mentor. 

So as Cleveland’s own version of Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce try to take on the big guns like Young & Rubicam, or in this case the Pittsburgh Steelers as an example, they find themselves perpetually understaffed and often overmatched knowing that to be competitive they have to win by displaying more guile and a bit more cleverness, the occasional public silence belying the fevered pitch to get it right going on behind the scenes.

The problem with the Browns is that what they need most is what they lack most—Don Draper.  They lack the office rogue with the speculative background and prickliness to keep everyone moving in the same direction.  They lack that person who can reassure everyone inside their little club that it will work out because it usually does.

Heckert will never play the rogue but ultimately if he’s going to get close to being this team’s Don Draper, occasionally he’s going to have to actually pull a rabbit out of his hat at just the right time.  The upcoming draft would be a good time for that.

Like Don Draper contemplating a new approach for Conrad Hilton, Heckert is undoubtedly contemplating the multitude of draft scenarios and is even hinting now that the Browns could trade down a bit in order to get even more draft choices.  As a strategy that’s fine.  This team needs more help then Roger Sterling after an afternoon of pounding down martinis with Lucky Strike.  But this latest plot point coming on the heels of the failed pivot for Robert Griffin III does at time make one wonder if this team has lost control of its own narrative, like Richard Nixon in 1960.

All of this has left the fans frustrated and impatient, as if the Browns’ problems could actually be solved quickly, easily or cheaply.  This team took years to perfect a business model that could consistently produce 3 or 4 wins a season.  You think it’s easy to pivot off that into something that could even double that win total?  Have you not been watching all these years?

I’m actually not bothered by Heckert’s unwillingness to chase demons and fakers at the moment just as I’m not bothered by the seeming lack of direction at the moment.  There are good players out there, certainly, and when it comes to free agency all you’re really talking about is money.  What I was more bothered by was the pursuit of RG III that would have gutted this team of draft choices and otherwise still left it grasping at ways to score.

**

As much buzz as this season’s premier of Mad Men generated is nearly exactly the opposite of the buzz the Browns are generating at any level.

The other reality of this free agency season, at least as it’s practiced in Cleveland, is that the Browns aren’t exactly a hot market at the moment.  Money can and often does speak volumes and while most players will chase the last dollar, that doesn’t mean they’ll chase it in Cleveland. 

Players are competitive by nature and really do want to win even as they’re collecting a paycheck.  Right now, Cleveland doesn’t look like a place that’s poised to win anything substantial any time soon.  The Browns had no interest in Peyton Manning because he had no interest in them.  But he was hardly the only free agent to feel that way, which is another key reason why this off season has been so quiet.  It does take two to dance and right now the Browns and a few other teams are like students in the chess club being ignored by all the really good looking girls from Camp Mohawk.

We could have a healthy debate as to what position is the most critical need on this team but we all can agree that receiver is in the top two.  But it doesn’t help in the pursuit of free agent wide receivers when the club president and his general manager are out trying to swing a deal for a new quarterback and then come up short. If the front office isn’t publicly showing faith in Colt McCoy as the guy that can get this team in the end zone through the air on a consistent basis, why should a free agent feel any differently?  And more to the point, why should these free agents compromise their own productivity and hence their chances the next time free agency rolls around?  They won’t which is why they haven’t.

Whether or not a team, like an upstart Sterling, Cooper could be built through free agency isn’t a question that fans in Cleveland will have to ponder.  The Browns simply don’t have that opportunity and it isn’t about the money.  Right now it’s about reputation and the Browns don’t have one.  It’s why they can’t get the big clients.

So it’s the draft or bust, which Heckert and Holmgren have long since concluded.  It’s a slower process and no more or less certain than anything else.  But it’s all we have at the moment and all we’ll get.  In Cleveland patience isn’t a virtue so much as it’s the only choice.

**

Speaking of mad men, there are none madder then NFL commissioner Roger Goodell at the moment.  So incensed was he by the New Orleans Saints’ team sponsored bounty pool and head coach Sean Payton’s pathetic cover up attempt that he pushed Payton aside for an entire year, suspended the general manager for half a season and doled out enough fines to make even a billionaire owner in Tom Benson take pause.

If nothing else Goddell’s actions affirmatively answer the question as to which scandal was more serious—Spygate or Bountygate.  It was never much of a contest.

Professional football under the best of circumstances is violent at a level beyond which most others sports could ever contemplate.  If you watched, for example, ESPN’s recent interview with Jim McMahon, you start to get the idea of the sacrifice these players make in the name of entertainment.  Players talk tough when they’re young and paid to act like playing with pain is the ultimate badge of honor.  But the price they actually do pay in terms of a life of creaky knees, bent fingers, achy backs, scattered brains is nothing much to either be proud of or to joke about.

McMahon seems to live in a nice home, the fruits of the wages he was paid, but I got the feeling he’d trade that in a moment for a day in which his body didn’t ache and he could remember an hour after it was over what he had for breakfast.

The ranks of NFL retirees are literally filled with similar stories, which is why the NFL is facing so many lawsuits by so many retirees.  I don’t think there’s much merit to their lawsuits, but they do inform how Goodell must approach weasels like Payton.

 The implications to the league are grave.  Payton at best was deliberately ignorant of the bounty program that his defensive coordinator was running.  But the larger point is that because it was sanctioned by the management of a NFL team it exposes that team and the rest of the league to significant legal liability.

I find it almost comical to listen to Drew Brees defend Payton while simultaneously railing against NFL management for not doing more to keep the players safe.  I can’t tell whether Brees is clueless or stupid but it probably doesn’t matter.  His own teammates set out on a course to deliberately hurt fellow union members and all Brees seems to be concerned about is Payton.  That’s a fascinating turn of events in a very short period of time for such an allegedly staunch union advocate like Brees.

Another interesting aspect to the scandal is the near lack of publicity it’s gotten from ESPN in comparison to, say, the publicity the network gave to Ohio State’s tattoo problem.  I haven’t checked today but I suspect ESPN probably has a tattoo-related scandal posted somewhere on its web site. Yet the implications to the NFL, its integrity and its players from Bountygate are far more reaching then anything involving tattoos.

So much about most college scandals derive from the collision between the NCAA’s antiquated and unfair treatment of so called student athletes and the billions that its sports generate.  Ultimately though these are victimless crimes.  But the scandal in New Orleans claimed plenty of victims, including players who got carted off the field because they suffered at the hands of deliberate intent.  It’s not unfair to suggest, either, that the recent successes of the Saints, including their Super Bowl victory, are every bit as tainted, if not more so, then the successes realized by college teams caught in the NCAA’s nets.

But maybe are tolerance for scandal at this point is so high that we are no longer moved by much.  If that’s the case, then there’s no question that it’s the seeds we’ve sown for becoming so emotionally involved in the fleeting triumphs and defeats to the teams and programs that we follow.

**

All this talk of Mad Men leads me to this week’s question to ponder: who is a worse mother, Betty Draper or Gloria James?