Are the Mariners Zombies or Just Cursed?

I will not care any more

Another wreck of a season ends.  The fourth 90 loss season in six years. Hiroshi Yamauchi, the man who saved the Mariners for Seattle, recently died. Eric Wedge quit after four (or was it three?) undistinguished years and joined Jim Hargrove as the strangest exit for a Mariner manager. Felix Hernandez has had seven managers since he has been here. Three general managers in a decade. I lost count of total number of managers, interim or full time or part time.

I mean this is a mess. Even though I follow all the sabermetric blogs and know there are some explanations for the failures, especially in roster construction; I believe  the issue transcends human reason or analysis.The last decade of unending failure and smashed dreams leas me to conclude that the Mariner’s might suffer from a zombie disease or curse.

I will never watch another Mariner's game in person.

Zombies exist in many forms, but the their essence lies in the fact that they have lost their souls and most reason. They may be undead or they may just be bodies without souls. Either form will do to describe some of the Mariners.

When I consider why I still watch the Mariners, I realize I have always loved Zombie movies. Zombies have human bodies and they move, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, and they go through human actions, but they produce nothing really but mayhem.They seem to have a purpose, but only end up eating hopes and dreams of living humans.

I prefer canonical slow and awkward zombies, myself. Maybe that accounts for following the Mariners with Jose Montero, Justin Smoak or Michael Morse or Jose Vidro, or so many others. So we have the Zombie Mariners, not all of them, mind you, but enough to guarantee lifeless defense and erratic and perfunctory offense.

I will never ever ever watch a Mariner’s TV game again. This time I mean it.

If not zombies, they might just be cursed. This is the west coast, and we do wimpy curses. Nothing like the Bambino or even a Cub’s curse. Although the Mariner's have never made it to the World Series, one of only 2 teams in history. 

In the Mariner’s case, the first curse begins with trades. Getting traded by the Mariner's is good for your career. The club excels at trading ok players who become fine players. I can think of Raul Ibanez who left and excelled at Kansas City and Philly. Adam Jones flourished at the Orioles. In the last couple years Doug Fister excelled at Tigers or Steve Delabar at Toronto. Even the manager Bob Melvin gets fired and goes on to become a fine manager elsewhere. I sometimes think that the only reason the Mariners have not traded Dustin Ackley or Justin Smoak is the fear that they will become stars the minute they go elsewhere.

The other side of the curse is that good players come here to die. Eric Bedard’s total implosion distills a whole history of players like Richie Sexson etal.  Adrian Beltre is a classic case. He came, died, and was resurrected at Texas. For good reason players steer clear of the Mariner’s. It’s not the park, it's the curse.

 

I will never watch the Mariner's cute spring commercials.

I stopped writing sad laments at the end of baseball season two years ago. It just became too hard to miss baseball season when the last two months of each year ended up an exercise in masochism. This is getting silly, even stupid. Five years into the third rebuilding phase, I have to wonder if the real issue is not zombies or curses, but Seattle has become the baseball twilight zone. A world that exists in haunted shadows of lost dreams and hopeless projections.

So Eric Wedge joins the 7 managers in the last 11 years. He let everyone know that he would not stay even if the team offered him a five-year contract. How is that for a vote of confidence! Wedge wanted more -2 WAR a veteran on longer term contracts to support his under achieving and slow developing younger players. Instead Jack Zduriencik got him -2 WAR veterans with one-year contracts. 

Sadly Wedge could also not get a multi-year contract from a GM who could only get a one-year extension. So Wedge quits and Zduriencik stays for one year; many of us fear Jack Z will trade still developing talent for over the hill guys to try and save his job with an above 500 season. Think of that, going above 500 after 6 years can save his job!!! 

I still remember when Jim Hargrove drove off in the middle of a season in his red truck and left baseball. Seattle turned him into a zombie, I think.   I'll bet Hargrove never watched another Mariner's game.

 Actually I don’t believe the Mariners are zombies. Felix Hernandez or Ichiro could never pass for Zombies. Of course no one would ever mistake Jay Buehner or Randy Johnson as zombies. It is now clear, however, that Alex Hernandez did not have a soul and hence qualifies as a zombie. He simply masqueraded as a human when he was here.

No I think the deeper problem is that the Mariner’s general management stink. They cannot stay with a plan. They misjudge talent. They have no conception of roster construction—I mean five first base/DH guys three of whom end up playing in the outfield!!! If we were European soccer clubs we could vote out the management, but we can't.

This is my fate. If I were Marcus Aurelius and a stoic I would hug myself with strong stoic words of endurance and virtue and maybe even wonder about an after life. I am not. I am not stupid, really, but I am a Mariner’s fan.

Sometimes I wish I were not a Mariner's fan. I wonder if free will permits a person to renounce their fan hood? I must ponder this.

I will  never watch another Mariner’s game; at least until next spring training.

The Right to Wear Your Team’s Jersey Safely

The right to physical safety is fundamental. All other rights suffer if a person cannot expect physical safety. Sadly this matters for sports fans. In the United States the simple act of wearing your team’s jersey is inciting physical assault at games. This crosses a profound ethical boundary and encourages the slow advance of European hooliganism. Protecting the safety of fans, even fans wearing the other team’s jersey, must be fought for at every sports venue.

At this week’s 49er/Seahawks game the Seattle police announced they would haveundercover police wearing 49er gear. These actions extend a policy the police initiated to respond to assaults on fans wearing the opposing team’s paraphernalia at Seahawks games. In one case a Packer’s fan was jumped in a bathroom and in another a Viking fan was sucker punched. The growing problem gained national attention when Giants’ fan Bryan Stow was severely beaten and his brain damaged at Dodger Stadium in March 2011.

The collective egoism of fandom can transmogrify into ugly hatred of the “they” of opposing fans anywhere. It lurks as part of team and pack loyalties.  Political and religious fanaticism depends upon this primordial in-group glorification and out-group demonizing. In Europe, England and Latin America this dynamic spawns hooliganism and organized alcohol driven armed violence between opposing team fans, in some areas abetted. In the Byzantine Empire the pattern of violence spawned by the Greens and the Blues factions around Hippodrome races and gladiators could overthrow empires.

I don’t want to see American sports fans importing the moral ugliness of hooliganism. Yet it can sneak easily into the drink saturated, jaunty, rousing and fan craziness that surrounds many growing MLS soccer franchises. It already lurks in beer sodden bathrooms of football and baseball.

To me the police response with undercover officers makes strong sense. Teams have been strengthening codes of conduct and need to relentlessly eject people for drunken and unruly behavior. It helps when stadiums stop selling alcohol at earlier dates such as the Giants stopping sales after half time.

Now all this may seem silly to protect fan’s rights to wear a jersey.

The paradoxes of sports loyalty often connect to a sense of personal identity. Individuality gets constructed by weaving multiple loyalties and connections together. Many fans intertwine family, geographic, ethnic or school connections through team loyalty.

They share affiliation with others in thick or thin communities. People can hand it on through family. Team loyalty can be quite personal and idiosyncratic, but for true fans, it matters.

Individuals express their loyalty and individuality in many ways but often and simply by wearing gear. Wearing my Mariner’s hat manifests my loyalty to the team and love of the game and place as well as my stubborn and hopeless stupidity. It expresses my self and my loyalties.

Wearing a team’s jersey or hat or other paraphernalia, not only makes profits for the team and leagues, but also it permits the person to assert themselves and their loyalties. As much as I may dislike it when more Red Sox jerseys appear at Mariner’s/Red Sox games, I understand that wearing these to a “home” game often connects a person to their roots or history. 

It may not be the wisest thing to wear the opposing team’s gear to a home game; but people have a right to do this without fear of assault. Just as much as fans have a right to stand at a game with their children and not have the children abused with morally ugly language.

Nothing outlaws surly and boorish behavior. Free speech and free association permit and encourage fans to root and cheer and even boo during games. Ribbing and verbal sparring remain a part of the game; a person who wears their team’s colors to an opposing team’s game can reasonably expect the verbal sparring and razzing that comes with that territory.

But fans have the right to be safe in their person from physical assault and from moral assault. 

Who knew something as simple as wearing a team’s jersey to a game could involve real ethical stakes?

Why We Support Losing Teams—Sports Loyalty

When I was nine I lay in my parent’s bed for days struggling with red measles. Through fever and pain, I vaguely remember mom’s cool hand and wet clothes and clutching a rosary Above all I recall the Kansas City Athletics lose 12 games in a row while listening to my parent’s red bakelite radio. Predictable as humidity in high Missouri summer, the cast offs and mishaps who made up the Athletics plodded to the plate, struck out and erred their way to defeat, again and again and again. They were simply the worst team of their era. I grew up a fan.

The Athletics  built several Yankee championship teams by giving away Art Ditmar, Bobbyy Schantz, Clete Boyer, Roger Maris and others. This team drafted Reggie Jackson, Blue Moon Odum, Dave Duncan, Catfish Hunter and then stole away to Oakland to win championships. This team anchored my identity—my children trace my putative nutsiness to this.

Growing older I met Red Sox and Cubs fans who proudly wore losing. They bragged on their losing. Puffed up with a Nietzschean resentment again the rest of the world, these fans embraced the romance of rooting for the lost cause. Their pain grounded a hopeless chivalry and proudly handed on this legacy to their children. These fans formed a community in adversity and pride born of resentment against the unfairness and inequality of the world. The Athletics, refugees from Philadelphia, offered no glamor and no mystic. They were flat out the worst team of their era with NO REDEEMING FEATURES.

 These memories sadly meld with my support of the hapless Mariners, the second worst team in baseball for the last 4 years lead me to wonder: why do we support losing teams?

I can understand the resentment theory of community by resentment. This resentment flips into a populist hatred for the successful endless winners who are usually unjustly rich or cheaters to boot. It carries some weight and can drive revolutions.

I believe other wider and deeper reasons exist to support losing teams. These reasons answer a common attack on sports fans whom are accused of seeking psychological compensation by participating vicariously with winners. This identification supposedly compensates for brittle male egos and feeds a sense of superiority and domination that encourages arrogance and glorification of dominating the weak. This may apply to Yankee fans. However we who support teams that win and lose or just simply lose demonstrate integrity and loyalty in our loserhood.

Good fans support losing teams from loyalty and identity. Sport loyalty can help anchor or refine a personal self-narrative. Many, like myself, stay connected to their hometown roots or youth through following teams. College teams epitomize how mobile Americans thread links to hometowns or awakening to adulthood. These memories of home or college burn bright by following a team that reignites affiliation through winning and losing, although, honestly, winning feels better.

American immigrants traditionally adopt teams as signal of identifying with their new country. Similarly we can adapt to a new city or location by attending to the local teams. I still consider Kansas City my home teams, but after 25 years root for the Mariners and Seahawks. My children are northwest born and raised and identify with their Seattle teams.

Identity, community, and affiliation augment simple joy for a sport. I like many others will watch a sports game where I have not favorites but watch to enjoy the game.

Rooting for a team, especially a losing team proves to myself I am capable of enduring loyalty and unrequited love. It teaches and models loyalty to our family and friends. I am not referring to the bandwagon and good-times followers, but real fans staying  true through good and bad times.

Staying loyal to a losing team proves our capacity for integrity to ourselves. If not driven by resentment, this commitment to the team reminds us and teaches friends and children that loyalty is not a calculation. Loyalty and community do not grow from cost benefit analyses of value and pain. Loyalty to a team tests and grows our capacity for loyalty (and perhaps masochism). It imparts how love endures though good and bad. This matters even more when it turns out that rooting for a losing team can impact health, I mean really and do I care?!!! 

This type of loyalty and commitment endures through ups and downs of winning and losing of joy and sorrow of exasperation and elation. It proves our capacity for integrity even when we may find it under assault in so many areas of modern life.

Honest fans know that in the end their loyalty resides to a dream of community and its ideals. Every sports team exists as an institutional shell with rotating members who embody a vision of place and sport. The reality of a sport team encompasses flawed humanity and becomes erratic, messier and uglier than the aspiration. Every institution whether country, church, corporation or family exists as this dialogue between reality and possibility.

In the end team loyalty has a spiritual dimension as much tied to the dream of who we are and can be as well as the dream of our connection to our home. Often those hopes get crushed or deferred, but every now and then a glorious moment occurs when it comes so close to the dream’s ideal as to renew faith and commitment when verging on losing its heart.

Like friendship or marriage loyalty to a team obligates a person to stay through good and bad. We reserve the right to criticize and quit and leave but return. I can turn off games in disgust and vow never to care again, but I know, even if the team does not that I will eventually cave and return. Team loyalty is not a one-season stand. Team loyalty elicits loyalty and commitment for good and bad.

Supporting a losing team reminds me of Pascal’s secret, “the heart has reasons the mind does not understand.”

Sports Ethics: Create a Level Playing Field

The joy of playing and watching sports depends heavily upon real competition. Competition invokes risk of failure or success. True competition requires uncertainty. Uncertainty connects sports to real life that has no guarantees, no certainty. Competitive outcomes then depend upon effort, talent, focus, adversary's skill and luck. Leaders of sports have an obligation to keep real competition alive in sports—a level playing field

Stewards of sports such as governing bodies and commissioners must work hard to create a level playing field over time. A level playing field keeps the integrity of sports intact. Without it sports reduces to the pretend of wrestling, the corrupted outcomes of gambling or boredom. Like in life lack of a level playing field makes a sham of fairness and long term hope.

When players step onto the field, they should believe that they have a chance to compete and win. When fans commit to a team as a representative of their community and aspect of identity, they desire a chance for their team to compete and win.

A level playing field occurs over time. Each season several teams may be demonstrably better than others. When the better teams compete they will have a much higher probability to win. Players and fans want the chance to compete over time and for the best teams to change over time. Competition should breed diversity and surprise. Over time teams can organize talent, smarts, focus and intensity and become better.

Unless you are a Yankee fan, watching games where you know one team will always win is boring. Worse it takes the guts out of sport because players become tempted to go through the motions and the quality of play declines because teams stagnate when competitive pressures do not push invention.

All sports face the danger of the migration of talent and skill to money. The richest teams buy the best talent and dominate the sports year after year. This cycle of winning reinforces itself when the best players want to play for a winner rather than being stuck on perpetual losing teams.

Thinking of sports as a competitive market means that one team or group of teams morph into a monopoly or oligopoly. These competitive markets mean that certain teams are guaranteed to lose the majority of the games over time and have little chance of ever winning a championship. Freezing the competitive hierarchy ruins real competition, ruins interest in the sport and can sap the motivation of players who are doomed to play on teams that not only cannot win championships but seldom can even “make a game of it.”

Monopoly and oligopoly in sports sap quality because real competition pushes players to grow. Real competition pushes teams to innovate in training, tactics or strategy to get a competitive edge so teams invest in smarts as well as talent. All these dynamics are sapped when a monopoly or oligopoly controls competition.

In the last twenty years with the reluctant cooperation of unions and ultra-individualist owners, American professional sports have developed a series of devices to protect the possibility of level playing fields, if the teams are smart enough to use the leverage of the devices. These include:

1.   A draft system that permits the worst teams the year before to draft first in the talent pool.

2.  Salary caps in professional basketball, football and soccer. This cap limits the total expenditures by a team and requires that contracts be structured to maximize up front payments. It discourages stockpiling high priced talent because huge payouts to individuals like quarterbacks hurt the team’s ability to get strong supporting players.

3.  Baseball backed into a half ass solution that works despite itself with teams able to spend unlimited amounts but beyond a specified level teams pay very high luxury taxes that are commonly distributed.

4.  Most of the leagues now have strong minimum requirements of expenditure that ensures owners cannot simply milk teams as profit centers.

5.  Wider talent pools. This has developed by design in baseball, soccer and basketball with international scouting and signings. In football and basketballs it results from a deeper and earlier training pool where talented players are spotted and groomed from the age of 12.

6.  Expansion has diluted talent across teams where even with talent pool expansion the talent across vital positions such as pitcher or quarterback is diminished across many teams.

7.  Slotting salaries exist for first round draftees along with limited control periods. This minimizes the risk of teams to invest in untested rookies and increases money available for veterans. The rookies who succeed get their payoff when they reach end of control period and become free agents.

8.  Unlimited free agency permits players to gain serious salary increases at the height of their talent.

a.   More importantly from a level playing field, it means that teams can rebuild relatively fast if they have drafted well and have spot needs that free agents can address. Teams relying solely on free agency to build “the best team money can buy” have not fared so well. It turns out that the skill production of players becomes very unpredictable in late twenties and early thirties, so many free agency hires turn out to be economic mistakes.

9.  The leagues created larger playoffs and strategically used “wild card” teams to make the stakes of winning last longer and go deeper into the standings. This means a much higher percentage of teams are competitive for playoff status longer into the season. This has helped minimize the number of meaningless games.

Dave Cameron brilliantly analyzes baseball's competitive resurgence in these terms but adds several points.  “Institute testing for PEDS, lessoning the ability of high-revenue teams to buy inflated late-career production. Shepard in analytics that allow poorer teams to level the market for players values.” He concludes that this has transformed cultures of teams and fans who now believe they can compete and win creating a “virtuous cycle” of interest and achievement. 

He makes underappreciated points about PED limiting stockpiling of talent and the ability of “intelligence” to offset money.

These combined approaches have lead to a remarkable renaissance of competitive parity across leagues. While the balance is unstable, the proof lies in the interesting confluence that salaries are rising, most teams are making a profit or increasing in market valuation and multiple teams are winning championships while competitive surprises can and regularly do occur.

To stand up to legal scrutiny these restraints on trade in the interest of both profits and quality of competition require strong unions and commissioners. This means the settlements are voluntary contracts that the law can tolerate. Owners alone would conspire against players, illegally collude on salary but also permit the strong and rich to dominate and create permanent inequalities such as baseball.

To create a level playing field takes constant vigilance and work. Competition in limited domains can naturally devolve to dominance by wealth and inequality. Owners, on their own, would prefer this. It takes strong leaders such as commissioners to negotiate order on  the chaotic and individualistic owners as well as strong unions willing to protect the game to ensure economic rewards. Level playing field takes rules that permit long redistribution of talent and enable innovation and intelligence to be rewarded.

The commissioners have to work to  convince owners and players that protecting the quality of competition and game created a better “media product” as well as more fan interest. This permitted the leaders to align self-interest with game quality.

A level playing field invites players to compete with intensity and to devote effort to getting better because they have a chance to win and excel. A level playing field reinforces fan’s loyalty to their “home” teams by adding the thrill of enjoying winning and collectively partaking in the satisfaction of a team that ‘represents’ them. They can feel satisfaction in being connected to the excellence and achievement of the athletes as well as the delirium of for one brief second winning.