Oh, Cubs. Cubs, Cubs, Cubs.
One week ago, the Cubs were alone in fifth place in the NL Wild Card picture, having lost a series at home to the Diamondbacks but still leading both Arizona and Miami by two games in the loss column. With a series against the Rockies ahead, things looked good. A playoff spot wasn’t assured, but there was reason to believe the Cubs could at least run out the clock. To continue the metaphor? They’ve got the ball back, but now they have to score.
After a comeback win on Tuesday, the Cubs have lost five straight, the last three to Arizona, one of the teams they were trying to hold off and are now trying to pass. They’re 2–8 in their last ten, and their offensive performance has been 15% poorer than league–average over that stretch. They’ve failed to score six runs in any one game, and they’ve gone 1–5 in games decided by two runs or less. They’re tied with the Marlins now for that sixth NL playoff spot, but they don’t hold the tiebreaker, and the Marlins just scored 36 runs in three days against the best team in baseball.
I think the Cubs are going to be fine.
Something which afflicts a lot of fans of any one particular baseball team is that it is very hard to observe the team in the context of the league as a whole. This is easier in the NFL. Fewer individual games happen at one time. There’s time off after them, so there’s more space to catch up and digest. More national media is focused on single NFL games, something which combines with fantasy football’s prevalence to make it easy to pick things up secondhand. I understand, then, why Cubs fans are despondent. I felt it too, watching the outs tally up last night while Pat Hughes’s optimism in my earbuds grew more and more forced. Taking a wider view, though: The Rangers just did this against the Astros. They turned around and swept the Blue Jays. The Blue Jays did this against the Rangers. They turned around and swept the Red Sox. Sweeps happen. Bad stretches happen. And for as exhausted as the Cubs look (I keep wondering if Dansby Swanson could have caught the ball hit off of Wesneski on Saturday night, had he attempted to dive for it), their overall play hasn’t been that bad. Their pitching has been slightly above the MLB median these past ten games. Their hitting hasn’t been far below it. Those close losses have been frustrating, and maybe they’re indicative of something psychological, but this run is a poorly-administered Rorschach Test: The Cubs fan ecosystem is primed for collapse. Honestly, the Bears might have some responsibility for that outlook.
This doesn’t mean the Cubs are going to bounce back and win ten of these last twelve, clinching a playoff spot with days to spare. It doesn’t mean the Cubs are going to miss the playoffs. The Cubs are in a tough spot—they’re a little likelier to miss October than make it, two of their four best relievers are hurt, and it’s hard to find a guy besides Nico Hoerner who looks like he’s playing with a full battery. But in a familiar refrain, perspective is lacking among the doomsayers. If the Cubs can win two of three against the Pirates, it’s very unlikely they’ll lose ground within the pack of five teams competing for these final two National League spots. The Cubs are sending Javier Assad, Justin Steele, and Kyle Hendricks to the mound to attempt that feat. Players have a day of rest today, a full night of sleep tonight in their own beds. This is, in some respects, a playoff series. Win, and the Cubs will at the very least be very much alive. Is it a good situation? No. But it’s a coin toss, and for those clickhounds fueling this fanbase’s most Chicago Bears instincts: We aren’t going to remember the team for a September collapse, regardless of what happens from here. We’re going to remember that run in July and August, that improbable ascent from irrelevance to the brink of playoff contention which showed that the franchise, after a brief two years in the wilderness, is climbing back towards pennant contention.
It’s been a heck of a season. The Cubs have a great chance this week to make it even more.
The Rays Are Getting a Stadium! (…?)
Optimism continues to grow that the Rays are going to stay in Tampa Bay, with the Tampa Bay Times reporting today that the franchise is going to announce a deal tomorrow for a new stadium in St. Petersburg. I include the question mark above because I’m afraid there are crucial things about this process I don’t understand. I always don’t understand something, but I try to make sure I’ve got the crucial bits down. It seems there are always new renderings and new proposals popping up with these stadiums, and it’s hard to know which headline is the one which means the important thing is certain. This seems real. But perhaps I’m wrong.
Assuming the deal is done and means what we think it means—that the Rays are staying—I don’t know if this is good or bad. Generally, teams staying put is a good thing, those teams maintaining a meaningful connection for local baseball fans. Attendance is so consistently terrible in Florida, though, that it makes one wonder what sort of fanbase really exists for this ballclub, and with the same problem still present in Miami, it doesn’t appear to be Tropicana Field’s fault, ugly though it may be. Any collection of fans is a worthy congregation—this is the beauty of English soccer, where there are a dozen tiers of competition progressively growing more and more local—but if the alternative to Tampa Bay is the Rays franchise thriving in, say, Portland, is that worth a move? I would say it’s better that they stay. But I’m operating from a distant perspective.
If the Rays do stay, with the A’s moving and a potential legislative solution to the Brewers’ stadium repairs getting a good bit of noise today out of Wisconsin, it would seem that all thirty Major League ballparks are set. There are always threats of moving bouncing around, but the remaining two biggest ballpark issues to my knowledge would now belong to the Orioles and White Sox, run by two of the most consistent jokes in MLB ownership and therefore small causes for concern right now. What this would mean then, in theory, is that expansion is on the table. For years, we’ve been told that baseball will get to 32 teams, catching up to the NFL and NHL, but that owners need those expansion cities to sit without teams in the meantime so they can use relocation as a weightier threat. If relocation is no longer a going concern, expansion should be on its way, which makes the real point of telling you all this that it gives me a chance to say:
They need to keep the AL and NL, and they need to make the 32-team format two divisions of eight teams in each league. Prioritize tradition, prioritize competition. Do not give us sub-.500 division champions. We have discussed this at length before, we will discuss it many times as this all draws closer. Please be ready, dear readers, to campaign for this necessity on baseball’s behalf.
Did SMU Raise the Money?
Or was it there all along?
SMU announced today it raised one hundred million dollars from a collection of thirty donors in the first week after the ACC relented and asked them in. It added that some of these thirty are not SMU alums.
SMU’s finances have never been a huge concern, but the school’s audacious plan to forgo seven to nine years of television revenue as a voluntary power conference cover charge understandably drew eyeballs. Spending oodles of money on college football is a time-honored tradition, but usually that happens through direct investment in the football program itself, not through paying better schools to let you in their club. This has been a novel advancement by SMU.
What SMU is pitching to the public, with this $100M brag, is that it made more money in this one week than it would have through seven years of continued American Athletic Conference membership. This is technically true, and to be clear: I don’t think this was a bad move by SMU. I think it’s hilarious, but I think it’s brilliant, and I do think they’ll do just fine playing football in another league with a lot of bad teams. But where this is disingenuous is: Was anything really stopping those donations before? It seems a little backwards for the school’s donor ecosystem to say, “Go find yourself good opponents, then we’ll pay you,” rather than, “Get better at football, and we’ll pay you,” or even, “We’ll pay you to improve so you can play better competition.” Maybe that’s why SMU stressed the piece about some of the thirty donors not being SMU alumni. “Hey, we finally got some rich guys in Dallas to believe we’re a good place for them to find business connections.”
There are, then, two possible explanations: First, it’s possible the money was there and SMU could have gotten it all along had it sold the donors in question on its vision for its brand. Second, it’s possible the broader SMU donor ecosystem had so little faith in this school that it needed to know there were games on the schedule against Syracuse and Duke before it would become willing to pay up. Either is embarrassing when you give it a little thought.
(For some context: I believe the number was $400M that Notre Dame raised in one afternoon about ten years ago for its own stadium expansion. You don’t have to be Notre Dame to play power conference football, but you should be able to raise one hundred million dollars.)
He Didn’t Make the Kick
This has calmed, but in the immediate aftermath of Iowa State’s worst loss, in context, in Matt Campbell’s entire tenure, the focus was predictably upon a questionable call. I hate this, I hate the Iowa State fanbase’s tendency to do this, I think it’s a pitiful move. I understand that Iowa State has been screwed at times before, as have many teams in college athletics. That, though, should be an afterthought in a game in which so many things went wrong.
Worse still, the complaints were really dumb. It really looked like the officials got the call right, and at the very worst, it was a coin toss. I don’t know whether ESPNU had its broadcasters there in person or not, but either way, they demonstrated a terrible understanding of goalposts in the moments after the kick was ruled wide right, misleading thousands of people in the process. Just because a ball at some point in its flight is between the uprights on a television screen doesn’t mean it passed through those uprights at the moment that counts. In this case, it hooked back late, quite possibly after passing outside of the big yellow bars. As for the other angle: A camera placed behind the center of the crossbar is not going to give a clearcut look at whether a ball passed inside the uprights or not if the ball in question is above those uprights. You’re viewing the ball and the upright at an angle. The ref? He’s standing directly underneath the upright, looking upward, watching to see whether the ball is inside or outside the upright at the moment it passes. He has a perfect view. If you think the kick was good, go check out the goalposts at your local high school sometime. Stand beneath them in a few spots. Look upwards. Look to the left. Maybe this will start to make sense.
Either way, you can’t leave a game that winnable up to a field goal, and you can’t leave a field goal that close a call. I understand that it was a perfect storm—the food poisoning, Jake Remsburg’s continued absence on an offensive line that struggled much worse than anticipated, a decent Ohio team—but Iowa State had no business losing that game. The worst part? Matt Campbell passed up three opportunities in the closing drives on 4th-and-2 or shorter. Even with the run game struggling, Iowa State should have thrown for those yards. Campbell was playing for the tie, and for a definitional 50% chance of winning in overtime. Had he played for the win (a 100% chance of winning), Iowa State would not have had to worry about any kick. It was the worst-coached game of Campbell’s tenure, in both the immediate sense and when looking at everything which led Iowa State to a spot where the game could even be competitive. This roster wouldn’t be so inexperienced had Campbell built a roster without a dip in its middle classes. This roster wouldn’t be so inexperienced had Campbell’s program convinced its players that it is, in fact, against the rules to bet on their own games. I am a big fan of the work Matt Campbell has done in Ames, and I have confidence in him to get Iowa State back to being a top-20 team with some consistency, and soon. This, though, was the kind of game you lose when your program is failing.
Bright spots:
First, Rocco Becht played his butt off. Is he a great quarterback? No. But he is a redshirt freshman, and he is far from the problem here, and he made a lot of key throws after barfing all night and both before and after barfing at halftime. Rocco Becht has tools, and among those tools is evidently heart.
Second, the defense still looks solid. People love to salivate over Kurtis Rourke (I think they do this to show off that they know the name of a quarterback in the MAC), but he did play like a competent game manager, declining to give Iowa State many chances to take the ball away. Still, the defense held the Bobcats to ten points, 4.2 yards per pass attempt, and 3.0 yards per rush. That is a great defensive day against just about anybody. So, if Rourke is actually any good, Iowa State must have one heck of a defense.
Third, Oklahoma State looked even worse. South Alabama is probably a lot better than Ohio, but they smoked the Pokes in Stillwater. Iowa State needs to figure things out, and it has a good opponent against whom to work on that this week ahead of a very scary trip to Norman at the end of the month.
Jalen Milroe, Starter: Confirmed
We speculated yesterday that Alabama may have rolled with Tyler Buchner and Ty Simpson against USF just to try them out. We’re feeling stronger about that hunch today, with Nick Saban announcing today that Milroe will be the starter again when the Crimson Tide face Mississippi this weekend. I believe it was the ABC broadcast which highlighted Milroe’s strengths and weaknesses so well on Saturday, showing tape of the Texas game: He’s a good runner, he can make some great passes, he made a few disastrous decisions in that game and displayed some blindness when looking at the secondary. All the credit in the world to USF, but I would guess that Alabama would have won by more points this week had they played Milroe, and I would guess that we see a better Alabama this Saturday than we saw two days ago.
Oh, Packers. Packers, Packers, Packers.
Yesterday’s was a tough loss for the Packers. They really wilted down the stretch. Credit to the Falcons, they kept at it, but the Packers should have won that game. Culprits: AJ Dillon, for diving rather than falling forward (not just that, but that was sure part of it). Jordan Love, for the botched audible on the penalized attempted QB sneak. The Green Bay Packers defense, for having chance after chance to wrap up a Falcon in the backfield down the stretch and repeatedly running right past them, or only getting an arm on the guy and letting him fall two yards forward.
The bright side is that Jordan Love looked pretty good again under center, that Aaron Jones shouldn’t be out for too long, and that in a season that was supposed to be a big rebuilding year, we’re feeling enormously frustrated about a 1–1 start. The Packers seem to be a good football team, and there’s time for that to change, but I would say their quality has exceeded expectations, even if they left a win on the table.
Good Line, Clark
Per ESPN, Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt said the following when asked about Patrick Mahomes’s worth:
“I don’t know that there’s really a way to quantify it financially, and no matter what he makes over his career, one way or another, he’ll be underpaid.”
Get you a man who talks about you like Clark Hunt.
Mahomes is not exactly the highest-paid player in the NFL after his restructuring, announced this afternoon, but he’s on track to make the most money a player’s ever made over a four-year stretch and the money is reportedly guaranteed.
The concern with quarterback contracts is that they crowd out spending on other positions. In a lot of cases, this concern is warranted, with teams spending great–QB money on someone merely decent or good. With Mahomes, though, what are you going to do? The man is worth a lot of dollars. Also, with the cap always rising and the biggest contract also constantly on the rise, the deal won’t be the biggest for long. There’s a lot to be said for keeping the most important player in the NFL happy. One way or another, you’re basically underpaying him.
Phil Mickelson Has Some Issues
I’m not a big Phil Mickelson fan. I can say that, because we do opinion and analysis here, not reporting. I’m also no sort of expert on addiction. I should say that, because I’m about to share some opinions on addiction. Now. Mickelson’s statement today is very much worth a read, especially for those of you who, like us, enjoy gambling on sports. The sentence at the heart of it:
“The money wasn’t ever the issue since our financial security has never been threatened, but I was so distracted I wasn’t able to be present with the ones I love and caused a lot of harm.”
I don’t know how true or false Mickelson’s account is. Mickelson has been linked to some shady things, from LIV on down the line. His public actions and public statements have displayed a lack of honesty and accountability, to the point where he deserves more skepticism than most. But here, the reliability isn’t the point. What Mickelson is doing is pointing out an important aspect of the gray areas of addiction: You don’t need to be putting yourself into debt or causing yourself liver damage to have a problem. The threshold lies somewhere before the catastrophe. It’s not black and white. Gambling will make you grumpy, drinking will make you hungover, that doesn’t mean we should never gamble or never drink. But there are points, for a lot of us, when the grumpiness and the hangover anxiety are greater than they should be.
The Winning Isn’t the Problem
Max Verstappen lost a race yesterday, and this is being celebrated as a good thing for Formula 1. In a practical sense, it probably is a good thing. This has been a boring season. But what I think is lost in the malaise is that the problem is not that Verstappen is winning. The problem is that F1 has made everyone believe that this is a sport where the most money always wins.
F1’s at a disadvantage in appearing competitive because so much of the competition happens away from the track. It’s a sport, sure, but it’s also an engineering competition, and that won’t be everybody’s favorite thing. It isn’t my favorite thing. It’s part of why I don’t love F1. It’s especially awkward when pitching the thing to mainstream sports fans, because while Max Verstappen is a very good driver, he is also these days always—every racing weekend—driving the best car on the track. Verstappen deserves some praise, but a lot of the work is being done by engineers, and this is just not something sports fans love. They see motorsports as an individual sport, and they want to see individual greatness, and too large a share of the greatness in F1 is happening behind the scenes for their liking.
Where this got really bad for F1 was the Red Bull cost cap breach, because it’s given everyone an impression—rightly or wrongly—that Red Bull isn’t even winning based on ingenuity and is instead winning based on resources. When a tennis player gets hot and chases a full Grand Slam, we attribute the greatness to the athlete. When an F1 driver gets hot and his team was recently penalized for breaking a financial rule, the instinct is to assume that this is only about money, and about using that money in ways that push the rules. I don’t know how correct or incorrect that is, but that’s the problem. People have issues with greatness, but generally, it will be more celebrated if people believe that’s what they’re seeing. They don’t believe Max Verstappen is great. They think he’s a rich kid driving for a rich team.
F1 will always have issues convincing people to appreciate greatness within it when it happens. What it needs to do is foster an ecosystem that either shows where and how the greatness is happening—teach us peasants why, exactly, the Red Bull cars are so fast—or puts as much responsibility as possible on the driver to find his or her success.
In other racing news, Denny Hamlin won at Bristol to conclude the opening rounds of NASCAR’s playoffs, and in a continuation of the trend of some marquee drivers being eliminated and some moving on, both Joey Logano and Kevin Harvick are out of the playoffs now while Bubba Wallace and Martin Truex Jr. each stuck around. The series now goes to Texas, which may or may not be a good track for this car right now.
Elsewhere, in IndyCar, Chip Ganassi Racing is going to have a fifth car next year, and that’s a lot of cars. It isn’t necessarily bad for the sport—it probably lessens competition to an extent, because teammates don’t race each other all that hard; it also might increase competition by adding another competitive driver to the field—but it says a lot about where IndyCar is at. I believe it demonstrates that IndyCar does not have enough cars to fill a series. NASCAR hasn’t always had a full 40 cars in every race, but its charters are a scarce resource and its teams are very much competing with one another. And I wouldn’t say NASCAR is thriving right now! IndyCar is struggling to get enough fans interested for there to be a high demand to participate on the owner side. That’s a shame, and that’s a failing by the governing body, because the races are often more entertaining than either NASCAR’s or F1’s.
To close this, going back to Truex: Truex’s longtime former partner Sherry Pollex died this weekend after a nine-year fight with ovarian cancer. She was a well-known figure in the NASCAR community and did a lot for families dealing with ovarian cancer and/or childhood cancers. Condolences to those who mourn.
