The Loss Column — Baltimore Sports Blog and Community

One of my many non-sports pursuits involves co-teaching a class in Narrative Illustration at MICA. That happens every few Thursdays, and tomorrow is one such Thursday.

George Mitchell has no regard for my schedule. He has decided to release his steroid report at the same time that I’ll be waist-deep in helping evaluate final projects, rendering me helpless in the face of what figures to be some serious breaking news. Indeed, rumors are are already running rampant.

Given that disadvantage, I’m opening up the floor from now until tomorrow evening/night for anything and everything related to the report. I fully expect an Oriole or two to be named, making this a big Baltimore story. So take the comments section of this post and run with it. I’d like for this to be the absolute best place for Baltimore fans to turn for quality discussion, and I have no doubt you all will make it that and then some.

I just hope the news isn’t too bad. For us, that is. I won’t shed a single tear if Derek Jeter’s name turns up. Nope.

This is supposed to be a dead time for non-playoff baseball teams. No news, no signings, no transactions, no scandals — just radio silence in advance of the hot stove season.

Nobody really thought the Baltimore Orioles would go easy on us, did they?

So along comes big, dumb Kevin Millar and his brilliant idea to relive past glory by digging up the corpse of the Idiots. Cue the fan base firestorm.

I’m right there with those folks who have a…shall we say modified opinion of Millar after this. But let’s take a step back here and remember who the real villian is: Kevin Millar.

He made an error in judgment. He failed to recognize the ramifications of his decision, probably because he didn’t actually give any thought to the ramifications of his decision. A smarter man would have put out a press release that went something along these lines:

I’m humbled and flattered by the offer I received from the Red Sox. I loved playing there and part of my heart will always be in Boston. With that said, I’m a Baltimore Oriole now and my focus and effort this offseason are dedicated to returning a proud franchise to the winning ways that I know are right around the corner.

PR isn’t exactly a science — it’s really just understanding your target market and saying the things that will enhance their emotional attachment to whatever it is you’re selling. Millar, quite obviously, doesn’t get that.

But that’s his fault, and he’ll pay for it however the fans see fit. The fault does not lie with the Orioles, despite what so many haters want to believe. It’s not their place to tell their employees how to spend their free time, and I’m glad they feel that way. Responsibility should lie with the players to do the right things, and until they go hurting people or breaking laws we need to give them that freedom. They’re adults, after all.

So take it out on Millar all you want, but don’t use this as more fuel for Angelos hatred or MacPhail doubting. That’s just more of the same tired thinking that has helped land us where we are.

Last night the Navy football team pulled off an impressive upset in beating the Pitt Panthers — in Pittsburgh — 48-45 in double overtime. It was the latest in a string of surprising college football results this year:

Appalachian State over Michigan
Stanford over USC
Kansas State over Texas
Colorado over Oklahoma
Auburn over Florida

It’s games like this that drive much of our collective love of sport. They reinforce the belief that on any given day the underdog can come up aces no matter how badly outmanned or outgunned he may be. We need that.

Except there’s one small problem: none of these games mattered.

Why? Because college football is the only supposedly-credible sport in America that doesn’t use on-field achievement to determine its champion. Instead, they rely on the whim and “expertise” of coaches, journalists, and computers.

The NCAA’s refusal to crown a D-1 champion through a playoff system is unconscionable, and nobody has ever made a credible argument to the contrary. You simply cannot find out who the best team is until the champions have been forced to prove themselves against other teams vying for the spot.

Imagine, for a moment, that other sports handled their business the way the NCAA does. You can kiss the Ravens‘ Super Bowl win goodbye — no poll would have had that team in the BCS “title game.” You can boot either the Rockies or Diamondbacks from this year’s MLB playoffs — the Mets were a “stronger” team from a “power” division.

George Mason’s run? Nope.

One could go on and on like this but it would quickly become silly. Therein lies the reason everyone else has a playoff system.

To deny quality teams and quality players a chance at the championship because they lost one game or played a “weak” schedule tells them that their effort is less valuable than the efforts of, say, a PAC-10 team that had a few more bounces and calls go their way.

On the flip side, none of the teams that have won it can truly look back and say with certaintly, “we were the best that year.” The present system cheats and disrespects not only the players who didn’t make it, but equally those that did.

It’s entirely possible that one of these days Paul Johnson is going to assemble a Navy team with enough talent and chemistry that they could probably manage a win against a USC or a Florida in a championship setting. But we will never, ever get a chance to find out.

It’s shameful.

Apropos of nothing, I swiped this screencap from ESPN.com last night:

Webster’s dictionary defines “Jauary” as “the month that occurs after December and before some boneheaded middle manager gets around to double-checking his intern’s shoddy work.”

Real Gear For Real Fans.

I titled the last post “Drive the Point Home” because of the statistic with which I led it. Little did I know, Tampa would take the notion and run with it. They drove the point home to the tune of 17 runs.

My life is words. Whether or not you get a sense of it here — I’d like to think you do — I’m a pretty good writer. But I’m not sure a Frankenstein’s monster with Hemingway’s experience, Gammons‘ baseball knowledge, Joyce’s gift for prose, and Hunter S. Thompson’s appreciation of the absurd could manage to find sufficient words to explain what has happened with this team.

30-3, 9-7, 5-2, 7-4, 8-1, 11-3, 15-8, 5-4, 8-6, 8-9 (win!), 10-0, 3-2, 9-7, 4-8 (win!), 17-2.

I had it in the back of my mind that the 4-32 stretch with which we closed the ‘02 season was as bad as it could ever get. Not by a long shot.

The 2007 Baltimore Orioles are the most hopeless, futile, snake-bitten, ragtag bunch of underachievers in the history of baseball. Take a look at this 2005 Sports Illustrated list of the worst teams in history. Records aside, I don’t see anything worse than what we’ve got.

Why? Because losing is one thing, and losing in epic, demoralizing fashion is quite another. You can appreciate a loser. You can even, under the right circumstances, get behind a loser. But you can neither appreciate nor get behind a group that consistently loses the way these guys do it.

There’s little to love. Their two most exciting and intriguing players — Erik Bedard and Nick Markakis — go about their business in stoic fashion. That’s kind of awesome in my book, but it doesn’t offer much to warm the heart. Their most colorful and vocal leader, Kevin Millar, doesn’t have enough baseball talent to do it all himself. Their most bankable stars, Miguel Tejada and Melvin Mora, have all but given up.

Only a torrid late-season run (and I’m talking wins at a .650 clip) could come close to redeeming this season. Failing that, we have but one solution: complete offseason overhaul.

I’m talking about trading Tejada and Mora (who, I’d imagine, will have no problem relinquishing his no-trade protection). I’m talking about taking offers on Roberts and, yes, Bedard. I’m talking about ridding this team of every last scrap of the past ten years of futility.

The future is Matt Wieters, Billy Rowell, Brandon Snyder, and the guys we get in those trades. It’s guys who aren’t part of the losing culture.

This approach might mean more losses next year. It might mean two or three last-place finishes.

But tell the truth: wouldn’t you take it at this point in exchange for a clean break?

I don’t know what to say. But because it’s what I do, I’ll still say something.

I did an image search just now for “futility.” That search turned up this page, and the following image (click both pics for larger versions):

What we’ve got here is a team facing an epic losing streak. This is the kind of thing that fans of pretty much every other team, in every other sport, look at and say “wow, I’m sure glad we’re not that bad.”

Remember 4-32? This might get worse. Throughout all of the struggles we’ve seen over the past five years there has always been something to fall back on. We’ve always been able to say “we’re not Pittsburgh, we’re not Kansas City.”

I’ve got a splash of cold water for you: the Orioles aren’t Pittsburgh or Kansas City, they’re worse. At sixteen games below .500 the O’s currently outpace only the Devil Rays, Marlins, and Nationals — each of whom has, arguably, a brighter outlook next year than the black-and-orange.

One of whom just swept us at home.

So maybe that first image isn’t the one we want. Maybe it’s time to settle in and make this next one our mantra. It might be the only way.