Some of this is stuff I’ve already said on social media, but I like to say it here too, so:
:: Yesterday at work, a friend of mine who is a Mets fan brought up the Mets season opener on the Peacock app on his phone. As the Mets were hosting my Pittsburgh Pirates, I decided to watch along for a bit. I watched until 2/3 of the way through the bottom of the 1st. This is more Pirates baseball than I have watched in quite a few years…and yet, watching that single 2/3 of an inning feels like a total microcosm of most of the last 30+ years of the Pirates. Paul Skenes, the super-human pitcher who is the reigning Cy Young winner (and who will NEVER finish his career with the Pirates, let’s be realistic), proceeded to pitch very badly, and he was not helped at all by not one but two godawful defensive plays by Oneil Cruz, a guy who is in center field who should not be in center field.
A deeply rare shot of a baseball and Oneil Cruz’s glove being in the same place at the same time.
So, that was fun. I got to see the Pirates’ best pitcher get pulled in the 1st inning of the season opener, and some predictably terrible play by a guy who is only playing center field because…well, I’m a bit fuzzy on that, actually.
:: Here’s another WNY sunrise. We don’t get to see many of them this time of year, but when we do….
:: Anybody watching High Potential on ABC? It’s the show that’s currently giving us our needed “Murder mystery procedural with quirky characters” fix. This sort of thing has been in pretty short supply since Castle went away. This show is a lot of fun, though I do wish it was able to dispense with the “long mystery arc” storyline that is glacially unfolding underneath the week-to-week stories. I do recommend it, though.
Also, a recent episode’s murder method was a poisoned pie in the face! So that was amusing. I was hoping that lead character Morgan, who has a photographic memory and knows everything, would give her cop friends one of her impromptu lectures on the pie in the face, but no such luck. Alas.
:: And finally, in the Four-Legged Friend department:
Even though it’s only 31 degrees out, proper care of your House Hippo is important. Let her get some sun.Of COURSE it’s a trap. Don’t stick your hand down there.
No, I do not care that Alysa Liu dropped an f-bomb on live teevee. How could I? I personally tend to swear like a sailor, and honestly, her statement perfectly captured that moment, didn’t it? She just skated out onto the ice and proceeded to execute on the kind of flawless level we only expect from the very greatest of athletes. We’re talking, oh, that game in the NBA finals that year when Michael Jordan just started raining down three’s against a hapless opponent (I think it was the Trail Blazers). The only thing I’ve seen like Liu’s performance yesterday was Brian Boitano’s 1988 long program.
I’m trying hard not to read a lot of significance into the fact that an American woman won a medal, Gold no less, in the first Winter Olympics after my mother’s death. Mom loved figure skating, and I often watched it with her. I still remember some of her caustic commentary through the 1990s…”Another goddamned boring Russian in a fru-fru shirt!” She really, really, really did not like the string of Russian men who won Gold every time out in the 90s. I can occasionally see her point…I will never believe that Viktor Petrenko outskated Paul Wylie in Albertville, but I didn’t hate him. Alexei Urmanov, though? That dude was soporific. And I had a healthy dislike of Evgeni Plushenko, but honestly, he was an amazing skater. I suppose my “dislike” was based on him being a skater for them.
Would Mom have liked Alysa Liu? I honestly don’t know. Her lip piercing would have bugged Mom, as would Liu’s two-toned hair; for as much a staunch leftist as my Mom was, she could be downright prudish when it came to women and their appearance. She used to kvetch about Kirstie Alley’s hair on Cheers, for God’s sake.
And yet, as I watch Liu perform, I couldn’t help hearing my mother’s voice: “Atta girl!” after every jump, “Yesss!” when she spun, “She’s cute,” at some random point. And Mom would have loved “That’s what I’m fuckin’ talkin’ about!”
“Good for her,” Mom would have said. Good for her.
The Buffalo Bills beat the Kansas City Chiefs last week, which they do just about every season when they play each other. But the last bunch of years, when the two teams have met again in the playoffs, the Chiefs have won. Two of those have come in the AFC Championship Game, and one of them is one of the most notorious playoff games in NFL history, the epic shootout in which the Bills took a 36-33 lead with 13 seconds left in the 4th quarter, but somehow they allowed the Chiefs to get to field goal range in those 13 seconds, tying the game and sending it to overtime, where the Chiefs promptly scored a touchdown to win 42-36. (In an illustration of the NFL’s ongoing stupidity when it comes to overtime rules, if the first team with the ball scores a touchdown, it’s game over…so Josh Allen never touched the ball again after he left the field with a lead.)
Even though Josh Allen has played very well in all of those playoff games, the narrative has formed: Allen is basically nothing until he beats the Chiefs in the playoffs. None of his accomplishments matter until he beats the Chiefs in the playoffs. He’s just another guy until he beats the Chiefs–no, until he beats Patrick Mahomes–in the playoffs. Try to point out that he has played more than well enough to win every one of those games, and it’s been the defense allowing Mahomes and the Chiefs the victory every time, and you get ignored. No, Allen has to beat the Chiefs. Allen has to beat Mahomes. So it must be, or he will forever be judged as less than.
Setting aside the increasingly annoying tendency in American sports discourse to vastly overrate championships as the only things that matter, the only true marks of greatness, and the only valid measure of worth…it’s been very strange to me to see this clunky narrative be forced upon Josh Allen and the Bills. It has almost reached a point where I genuinely believe that if the Bills (a) put together a playoff run, reached the Super Bowl and won it, but (b) didn’t meet the Chiefs in the playoffs during that run, the country’s sports discourse would put a virtual asterisk on the Bills’ win. I really believe that the Bills could win multiple Super Bowls, but if they somehow don’t beat the Chiefs during any of those title runs and get beat by the Chiefs every other time, their accomplishments would be downgraded. It sucks, but that’s just the way it is. It would literally almost be better for the Bills to beat the Chiefs in the playoffs but not win a Super Bowl, than to win the Super Bowl but never knock the Chiefs out.
Basically, American sports discourse is simply insane. I guess that’s reflective of the society itself, innit?
I saw this mentioned on Reddit earlier last week, and it’s interesting to think about. It’s pretty obvious that geography plays a strong role in sports: how games and events are scheduled depends on where they are taking place and what needs to happen to get the participants there. Here’s an interesting article about one unique problem: the NBA had to change its approach to scheduling games in Denver because of (a) how distant that city is from pretty much everywhere (the closest city to Denver with a big-four sports team is Oklahoma City, at nearly 500 miles away), and (b) how far Denver’s airport is from the city proper (over 20 miles from downtown Denver). And there’s the other factor of Denver’s elevation to account for; teams in Denver have a built-in advantage. (Not that it’s helped the Rockies this year, obviously.)
That’s just one venue with one NBA team. This is the kind of thing that sport schedulers have to think about, everywhere. Fascinating stuff, the machinations behind the games that we all end up watching.
Marv Levy, the great football coach who guided the Buffalo Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls from 1990-1993 during his Hall-of-Fame career, is 100 years old this day.
Those Bills teams hold a strong place on my emotional life, even now that the last Super Bowl appearance is more than 30 years in the past, and at this point we’re nearing the entire run of Coach Levy’s time with the team being 30 years in the past. Those Bills teams were my touchstone for home when I was in college, nearly 1000 miles away from home; when I got homesick, there were the Buffalo Bills. Watching Levy on the sideline, occasionally laughing and more often shouting (and there were times when his lips were very easy to read). Levy’s erudition was always a matter of note and humor around the team; he was noted for including lengthy discourses on historical battles in his gameday pep talks. He would give a long story about a battle and then he’d sum it up by noting that the guy who lost the battle “couldn’t win on the road”. But he also clearly knew some much shorter words, and was not afraid to use them sometimes, even if he was on camera.
Levy also attended Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is an hour and a half south of Waverly, Iowa, where I went to school at Wartburg College. I don’t recall Coe being one of the schools Wartburg played on a yearly basis…but we drove right by Coe several times a year when passing through Cedar Rapids while on the long drives between home and school.
No, Levy never did manage to get the team over the hump to win the Super Bowl. Did that say something about him as a coach? Maybe a little…but as those years and those teams have passed farther and farther into memory (and some of those players have even left us entirely), the question of “Why did they lose all four!” fades farther into memory as well. All that really matters is the good times of watching those games. I remember the moment in the AFC Championship Game in January 1991, where the Bills earned their first trip to the Super Bowl by beating the Raiders 51-3. At the end, in the last few minutes, quarterback Jim Kelly (who had left the game already, since it was a blowout) was chatting with Levy on the sidelines…but in actuality, Kelly was the straight-man, the distraction to keep Levy from realizing what was coming from behind: the inevitable dumping of the Gatorade. Levy’s look of “Oh, come on, how did I fall for this!” is classic Marv Levy. (You can see the whole moment, including a slow-motion analysis by Dick Enberg, at the 1:55 mark here.)
The best tribute to Marv Levy that I’ve seen came a few years ago, courtesy of former wide receiver Andre Reed, who included this passage in his speech when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame:
There wasn’t a better teacher than our head coach Marv Levy. He was the definition of ‘speak softly, but carry a big stick.’ He became our father figure, very much of a father figure, and he became even more of a father figure to me when I lost mine. In 1996, when I lost my father, he told me just take as much time as you need. Marv, I’ll always remember those words, your compassion you gave me when I needed it the most. You had to deal with so many egos, I don’t know how the heck you did it. [At this point, the cameras caught Levy on stage, muttering “Neither do I!”] Those big words you used, yeah, we needed dictionaries. We actually needed a thesaurus, too. But one thing we admired about you as a coach was that word respect. We respected the heck out of you. When you respect your coach, you’ll do anything to win for him. I love you, Marv.
I thought about titling this post with the quote that Levy is most known for, something he has made his trademark phrase, which he has used time and again over the years, especially when addressing fans at the stadium: “Where on Earth would you rather be than right here, right now?” But I suspect that chestnut is getting a lot of work today, so I decided to go with another at least quasi-famous Levyism. This one’s from when he coached the Kansas City Chiefs (another reason I can’t totally hate the Chiefs, even if they’re close to 2010s-era Patriots levels of annoyingness):
And finally, I don’t want to allow the 100th birthday of a great football coach to pass without also noting his other great skill, which makes one wonder if a great Broadway composer and songwriter was lost when he decided to go into coaching football instead:
Well…maybe not.
Anyway, Happy Birthday, Coach Levy! I’m glad you’re still right here, right now.
Image Credit: Instagram, 106.7 “The Fan”, Washington, DC
Sports writer John Feinstein has died. I have only read a few of his books, but that is hardly damning as Feinstein was very prolific, and he wrote about just about every sport that’s out there. Not only was he a superb prose stylist, but he was especially gifted at translating the human stories of sport into words. He made you feel what it was like to be a ballplayer, or a basketball player, or a golfer, or whatever it was he chose to write about. I will miss his voice and I feel I should make it a bit of a priority to read more of his work.
This is a repost of a review I wrote years ago for one of his baseball books. What’s great about good baseball writing is that like the game, the writing doesn’t age. I suspect Feinstein’s work will be read years from now, much as Roger Angell’s is.
So the World Series kicks off tonight. [The 2014 World Series, that is. The San Francisco Giants defeated the Kansas City Royals in seven. -Ed.] I know, that’s the wrong metaphor. Sorry. I used to be a huge baseball fan, and I still find the game itself utterly beautiful to watch unfold, a game of moments where things happen one thing at a time. Baseball may be the last major sport that isn’t a constant flow of motion. As for rooting interests, as the League Championship Series started in each league, I noticed that of those four teams, none were a team I dislike in any major way. Generally, my approach in such cases is this: when there are no teams left for whom I have a rooting interest (be it rooting for a team to win or for a hated team to lose), I root for the remaining teams in order of how long it’s been since they won. In the AL you had the Orioles versus the Royals, whose last World Series wins were in 1983 and 1985, respectively. The Royals haven’t even made the postseason since then. (The Orioles have, but have not won any pennants.) As for the NL, it was the Cardinals and Giants, two teams who have each won it at least twice in the last few years. So no matter who won the AL pennant, I would root for the AL champion in the World Series. Hence, go Royals!
The remainder of this post is a book review. My sports fandom is nowhere near what it once was, and I see little reason to expect it to rebound in any significant way in the future. That said, I do still enjoy good sports writing, and John Feinstein is one of the betters sportswriters out there. He has a new book about baseball, called Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball, and it’s definitely worth a look.
Minor-league baseball is sometimes seen as the more “pure” version of the baseball experience these days, where you can still go to the ballpark and take in a game for a few bucks, where goofball promotions are often used as enticements, where ads for local businesses still cover the outfield walls, where players still endure long bus rides from town to town, and where brushes with true baseball celebrity come mainly from young phenom players or Major Leaguers sent down to the minors to work their way back into the game after an injury.
Feinstein’s portrait of the minors has all that, but he also captures something that a lot of fans may not come to realize: that the minors are, in addition to being a training ground for guys not yet ready for the Majors, a place of frustration. The fact is, especially at the AAA level, nobody wants to be there. This is a fact that everyone must acknowledge, and some managers come right out and say it. Nobody wants to be in AAA baseball, because AAA is the cusp of the Majors. When you’re in AAA, your dream is almost there, constantly tantalizing you and torturing you with every single injury with the big club, with every time the manager’s phone rings, with every invitation to spring training. Triple-A baseball is a land of players who are this close. For some, it’s just a brief spot, while for others, it’s a place to spend years without ever getting to “the show”.
Feinstein focuses his book mostly on just nine men: six players, two managers, and one umpire. Some have made it and will make it back; others haven’t made it yet; some have made it and will never make it back. The central fact of this book is that while dreams do come true, they don’t always stay true. It’s a hard lesson for some of these players, and it’s very easy to understand why they keep signing up for one more year, why they keep trying to catch on someplace, even as they pass their 30th birthdays and start approaching their 40th.
It’s interesting to me, as well, that Feinstein includes an umpire in his journey through AAA baseball. Fans don’t think too much about umpires, really, and the only time their names really come up is when they screw up. If a baseball fan knows Don Denkinger’s name, it’s almost certainly because he blew a call in a World Series game; and even then, it’s not like umpire’s names stay in the memory for long. I couldn’t tell you the name of the umpire who screwed up a call a couple years back that cost a pitcher a perfect game on what should have been the final out. (For the record, I still think that MLB should have reversed the call and credited that guy with the perfect game. The idea that umpire’s calls are sacred and must never be changed, ever ever ever, is deeply bizarre to me.) Umpires work their way through the minors just like players do, hoping for that call to become an umpire at the Major League level. What I didn’t know is that umpires’ time is limited even more than players. A player can stay in the minors as long as some organization is willing to have him, but not so an umpire: you only get so many years, and if by that time the people who choose the Major League umpires don’t think you have it, that’s it: you’re done. There are no career minor league umpires.
I was likewise surprised at the degree to which winning isn’t much of a concern in the minors. They like to win, but winning is mainly seen as a function of playing well, and playing well is seen as the means to the end of reaching the Majors. Feinstein depicts the feel of a championship-winning minor league clubhouse as a pretty surreal place. It’s an accomplishment that nobody much gives a shit about. This reminds me of the great movie Bull Durham, which spans an entire season and yet except for one brief segment in the middle of the movie, you get almost no sense for how the team’s doing in the standings. No one cares. All that matters is who gets the call to go up, and who gets the call to go home.
Minor leaguers, it turns out, put up with a lot of crap. They’ll fly with their team in the morning to a new city for a day game, only to be told as soon as they plane lands that the big club needs an arm for that night’s game, so they’re to turn around and get on another plane entirely. Mets pitcher Chris Schwinden, for example, got a call up to join the Mets in Toronto. After sitting in the bullpen, he flies with the team to Pittsburgh, where he’s told that he’s been sent back down already, so he has to turn around and get to Buffalo (the Mets’ AAA affiliate was the Buffalo Bisons at the time). At this point in the night, a direct flight from Pittsburgh to Buffalo isn’t available, so they fly him to JFK, where he’s supposed to catch a flight to Buffalo. That plane is delayed for two hours, so the team sends a car to drive him from NYC to Buffalo. After a series of mechanical mishaps with the car, Schwinden finally gets back to Buffalo eighteen hours after leaving Pittsburgh. This whole passage had me laughing, because you can drive from Pittsburgh to Buffalo in less than four hours.
Feinstein is an honest sportwriter, which means that he can’t just depict baseball’s poetic and pastoral beauty. Baseball keeps going, and as big as some players get, there is no player so big that the game can’t keep being played once they hang up their cleats. Throughout the book, Feinstein makes clear that each and every person is aware that they are just minor cogs in the game’s history and that the game will go on without them when they’re done, almost as if they were never a part of it at all. At times this aspect of baseball can be bluntly heartless: near the end, when the umpire is finally told that he simply isn’t good enough and that his career is over, one reason given is the time he has missed from umpiring. How much time did he miss? Two weeks once, for the birth of his own child, and two days one other time, so he could attend an uncle’s funeral. That’s pretty brutal.
The emotions go the other way, though, and Feinstein shows this as well in many passages. Why do these players work so hard to chase a dream that few will ever get, for whom the odds get smaller with each year? This passage, from the introduction, explains it perfectly.
Every player knows how much the first call-up means. Which is why there is almost always a celebration of some kind in a Triple-A clubhouse when someone gets the call for the first time. Everyone understands what an extraordinary moment it is in a player’s life. Those who have been called up remember what it meant to them; those who have not know how much they want it to happen.
J.C. Boscan’s story isn’t quite the same as Jimmy Morris’s, because he never stopped playing. He signed with the Atlanta Braves in the summer of 1996 at the age of sixteen and spent the next fourteen seasons bouncing around the minor leagues. He first reached Triple-A in 2002 but couldn’t take the next step, because, even though he was a solid catcher, he just couldn’t hit well enough to be regarded as a serious big-league prospect.
He left the Braves for a couple of years to play Double-A and Triple-A for the Milwaukee Brewers and the Cincinnati Reds. He signed back with the Braves in 2008, because the people running the organization had so much respect for him as a clubhouse leader and someone who would set a good example for younger players that they were willing to bring him back – knowing he was unlikely to ever play in Atlanta.
Two years later, playing in Gwinnett, he had his best offensive season. Nothing spectacular, but a career-high five home runs and a batting average of .250 – higher than his lifetime average of .222. Late in August, Boscan began to hear that he might be on the September call-up list.
Every year on September 1, major-league teams can expand their rosters to as many as forty players (the regular roster size is twenty-five). Rarely do they bring up more than five or six players. Those who are brought up usually provide depth in the bullpen or on the bench of are young players being given a taste of the major leagues. Every once in a while, a team will give a player a “good guy promotion” – bring him up so he can make major-league pay for a month as a reward for being a good guy and not complaining about being stuck in the minor leagues.
Boscan had been in the minors for fourteen years and had never seen the inside of a big-league clubhouse except during spring training. At thirty, he was a long way from being the bright-eyed teenage prospect the Braves had brought to the United States from Venezuela in 1997.
On August 31, the word in the Gwinnett clubhouse was that the Braves were going to make their call-ups after the game. Boscan remembers being more nervous that night than at any other time in his career.
“I walked on the field that night, and all I could think was, ‘If I don’t get the call tonight, it’s never going to come,’” he remembered. “I honestly thought this was my last shot and my best shot to ever get to the majors. I could barely keep my mind on the game. All I could think about was what was going to happen after it was over. I was praying to God to let this be my time.”
When the game ended, Boscan sat in front of his locker and picked at the postgame meal. Hitting coach Jamie Dismuke had been designated by manager Dave Brundage to bring players into his office so they could be told they were going to make the thirty-seven-mile trip down I-85 to Turner Field. As Dismuke worked his way around the clubhouse, that thirty-seven miles felt more like a million to Boscan.
The first player called in was Freddie Freeman, the twenty-year-old phenom, who was hitting .319 and was considered a lock call-up. He came out of Brundage’s office with a huge smile on his face and was engulfed in congratulations.
Dismuke continued his rounds. One player after another walked around the corner to Brundage’s office and came out wearing the giveaway grin. The congratulations continued. No one had made a move to leave because this was a happy night – for those going up.
Six players had gone in to see Brundage – entering as Gwinnett Braves and coming out as Atlanta Braves – and there was no sign of Dismuke for a couple of minutes. Boscan’s heart sank. That was it – six guys. His dream had died.
Dismuke appeared again, this time walking directly toward Boscan.
“Skip wants to see you, J.C.,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. Boscan panicked. Maybe Brundage had gotten the good news out of the way first, and now he was going to let Boscan know that the team needed him in Double-A to work with a young catcher. Or, maybe he was being released.
Brundage was, in fact, preparing that kind of speech for Boscan. “I was going to look very sad and tell him that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want them to in baseball,” he said. “But when he walked in here, he was shaking. I couldn’t go through with it.”
The entire Gwinnett staff was in the room when Boscan walked in.
“Have a seat, JC,” Brundage said, trying to look grim.
Boscan sat on the couch across from Brundage’s desk.
“You ever been to the big leagues?” he asked – knowing the answer.
“No,” Boscan said, shaking his head.
Brundage couldn’t keep up the charade.
“I was going to mess with you, JC, but I can’t do it,” he said, feeling himself start to choke up. “This is your day. You’re going up.”
Boscan burst into tears. Everyone else in the room was fighting to hold tears back.
“I’ve been a minor-league manager a long time,” Brundage said. “I can honestly say that was the best moment I’ve ever had.”
After Boscan had thanked everyone and shaken everyone’s hand and been hugged all around, he walked out of the office. Brundage’s office is in a hallway that leads to the clubhouse area where the players’ lockers are located. When Boscan turned the corner to reenter the locker area, the entire team was waiting for him.
Feinstein doesn’t reveal what became of JC Boscan after he finally reached the Major Leagues after fourteen years of minor-league toil, because that’s really not the point of his book at all. But I couldn’t help wondering, so I looked it up. That’s the thing about baseball: you can always look it up. He only had one plate appearance with the Braves that fall, in which he drew a walk to load the bases; he would then score a run when a subsequent hitter doubled. Over the next two seasons with the Braves and then one season with the Cubs, he appeared in a total of 17 Major-League games, collecting 7 hits in 28 at-bats, for a .250 average. He has 2 career RBIs, and zero home runs. After the 2013 season he signed with the Dodgers organization, and he’s still there, playing Double-A ball with the Chattanooga Lookouts.
Baseball abides, man.
Postscript: As I wrote this over ten years ago, I thought I should look up where J.C. Boscan is now. He is now coaching in the minors in the Kansas City Royals organization. As was said in Bull Durham, “You have to respect a ballplayer who’s just trying to finish out the season.” Likewise, you have to respect an old ballplayer who’s staying in the game coaching the next generation of ballplayers.
Here we go again! No, I’m not watching. I haven’t actually watched a Super Bowl since Seahawks-Broncos, and that was eleven years ago. (And I doubt I’d have watched had the Bills made it, in all honesty. That would be way too stressful!) Anyway, here’s some random trivia if you want to show off to your friends at your Super Bowl party.
The highest combined point total in a Super Bowl is 75 points, in Super Bowl XXIX (49ers 49, Chargers 26).
The lowest combined point total in a Super Bowl is 16 points, in SB LIII (Patriots 13, Rams 3).
The Patriots scored the fewest points to win a Super Bowl in SB LIII, with 13.
The Eagles scored the most points in losing a Super Bowl in SB LVII, with 35.
The oldest existing venue to have hosted a Super Bowl is the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA. The oldest existing still-used NFL stadium to host a Super Bowl is the Superdome in New Orleans (which is hosting today’s game, as luck would have it!)
The Rose Bowl is the last stadium to be played in a stadium that was not home to an NFL team.
The Rose Bowl is also the only one of the four venues still standing from the Buffalo Bills’ run of four consecutive Super Bowl appearances.
According to The Simpsons, Homer grew up rooting for the Denver Broncos.
The Baltimore Ravens and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the only teams undefeated in multiple Super Bowl appearances, at 2-0 each.
The other unbeaten teams in the Super Bowl are the Jets and Saints, both 1-0.
The current longest period between one team’s multiple Super Bowl victories is 50 years, by the Chiefs (wins in SB IV and then LIV).
The Jets have gone the longest since their last Super Bowl appearance, at 56 years and counting (last appearance, SB III).
The 2024 Chiefs enter today’s game as the only two-time defending Super Bowl champion to ever reach a third consecutive Super Bowl. If they win they will be the first-ever “three-peat” champion.
Before the Chiefs this year, the 1990 49ers and the 1994 Cowboys are the closest any team has come to pulling off the elusive three-peat. Both those teams reached the NFC Championship before losing.
The Eagles become just the fifth team to reach the Super Bowl with the NFL’s leading rusher (Saquon Barkley) on the roster. The others were the Cowboys in XXVII and XXVIII (Emmitt Smith), the Denver Broncos in XXXIII (Terrell Davis), and the Seattle Seahawks in XL (Shaun Alexander).
In possible bad news for the Chiefs, teams winning 15 or more regular season games are only 2-5 in ending the season with a Super Bowl win.
In possible bad news for the Eagles, only one team has reached the Super Bowl scoring 50 or more points in the Conference Championships, the 1990 Bills who won the AFC Championship Game that season 51-3. They proceeded to lose the Super Bowl to the Giants, 20-19. The Eagles scored 55 points in this year’s NFC Championship.
Super Bowl XLI (Indianapolis Colts versus Chicago Bears) featured the matchup whose two cities were closest together.
Last year’s Super Bowl, LVIII, played at Allegiant Stadium near Las Vegas, had the lowest in-game attendance in Super Bowl history, at a reported 61, 629 people, other than SB LV, played under COVID restrictions at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa (Buccaneers 31, Chiefs 9).
Not one of the 14 highest-scoring single-season teams in NFL history has gone on to win the Super Bowl that season.
As of today, prior to kickoff of SB LIX, there has never been a punt returned for a touchdown in a Super Bowl.
Only the Dolphins (SB VI), Rams (SB LIII), and Chiefs (SB LV) have failed to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl.
There has never been a shutout in the Super Bowl.
By the NFL’s quarterback rating system. Ben Roethlisberger has the worst rating by a Super Bowl winning quarterback in history, when he won SB XL for the Steelers despite a rating of 22.6.
Matt Ryan’s rating of 144.1 in SB LI is the best performance by the losing quarterback in Super Bowl history (Patriots 34, Falcons 28).
Buffalo invented the single best food to watch football with, so why the NFL continues to refuse to grease their path to a Super Bowl victory is beyond me. (This one may not be an actual trivia item.)
That’s all! Enjoy the game, or whatever you end up watching instead of the game!
Bills fans in Highmark Stadium. Image found on Facebook.
I don’t blog about football much at all anymore, obviously. I used to be the kind of obsessive football fan who watched every down of every game the Buffalo Bills played, and then I’d write an extensive blog post about the game after. By the time I was blogging, the Bills were mostly not very good, and most of those posts were post-mortems for a loss. Eventually I stopped watching the games entirely and I almost never blog about the Bills anymore.
So this post is not going to be a resumption of regular Buffalo Bills content. However, I just have to say something about the season that ended last weekend with yet another colossal disappointment at the hands of the Kansas City Chiefs. The AFC Championship Game wasn’t quite as galling a defeat as the infamous “Thirteen Seconds” game from three years ago, but it’s pretty close, and yesterday at work I overheard on the radio one of the local sports talk guys hinting that the community may soon be done talking about this one. I scoffed at that, noting to a friend that locals will be dissecting this game all the way up to kick-off of next season’s opener. Hell, we’re still talking about Thirteen Seconds.
Hell, we’re still talking about Wide Right.
So, here are some random and uncollected thoughts about the game and the season that’s now over:
:: This year was supposed to be a temporary step back for the Bills as they reloaded and spent time developing some young players into hopefully the core of the next sequence of contending teams. A bunch of the core players from the last few years of constant Super Bowl contention parted ways with the team due to age or money, and those that remained are noticeably on the tail end of their careers. The Bills have a bunch of very promising young guys coming up, but the overwhelming feel was that the Bills would have an “off” year this year. Preseason predictions of a 9-8 season, missing the playoffs entirely, were common. The Jets and Dolphins were both popular picks to win the AFC East. Instead, both of those teams sucked and the Bills roared to a 13-4 record, winning the division easily as a lot of those “not ready yet” players stepped up.
Given that, and the fact that the Bills have a lot of picks in the upcoming draft and they’ll have some more salary cap room to play with (for several reasons I’m not bothering going into, their cap situation this season was not ideal), it’s not at all hard to see the Bills managing to improve their already talented roster for 2025. It’ll take some time, but eventually the sting of the AFC Championship Game will give way to the brightness of the future.
:: So, what do they need to do in the offseason? Well, everybody’s got opinions. Here’s mine: the offense is mostly fine. Maybe a true “Number One” receiver could be added, someone to reliably make the big plays and attract the double teams that allow the rest of an already-talented receiving corps to step up even more than they did this season. Basically, they could use Stefon Diggs 2.0, a younger version of the Diggs they had in 2020 and 2021. (Not so much the 2023 incarnation, whose production tailed off and who was notably cantankerous on and off the field.)
There’s been a lot of kvetching about how to “fix” the offense so it can beat the Chiefs, but thing is, the offense is good enough to beat the Chiefs. They’ve beaten the Chiefs in the regular season matchups each year over the last few seasons, and while yes, they’ve gone on to lose to the Chiefs in the playoffs, in those last three games they have scored 29, 24, and 36 points each. Yes, in each game they got fatally outscored, but those numbers do not paint the picture to me of a team that needs more firepower. And besides, historically the NFL team that has the most scoring firepower in the regular season often ends up getting beaten eventually in the playoffs or in the Super Bowl because at some point defense actually becomes important. Remember that Broncos team that scored something like 947 points in the regular season and then got smoked in the Super Bowl by the Seahawks by something like 48-8? Or the “Undefeated Patriots” who piled up points at will in the regular season and then got held to 14 points in the Super Bowl by the Giants? So yeah, I’m skeptical about the whole “Put all the eggs in the offensive basket” approach.
So obviously, I think the defense needs the most attention. This year the D lived and died by the created turnover, which is never a confidence-inspiring thing. The pass rush was generally inconsistent, and the linebackers were often banged up. The secondary did what it could, but eventually the injuries piled up there, too, and even a good secondary is going to have a rough time if the front seven aren’t rushing the passer. A lot of people want the secondary improved, but my personal focus would be the front seven. Add a couple pieces to the D-line, particularly a solid and consistent edge rusher, and maybe another linebacker.
For people who say that the way to win is to pile up offensive talent, I point to the Chiefs themselves. They were a score-score-score kind of team the last few seasons, but this year they shifted to a more defensive philosophy, which yielded a 15-2 season, and yet another Super Bowl appearance, in a year in which they scored 30 or more points exactly twice all year.
And another way to look at it is this: improving on defense can actually help your offense score more, by virtue of taking pressure off the unit to score every time and by giving it more chances to take the field.
:: It needs to be noted that the 2024 Bills were really, really good. They set all manner of team records. There’s no need for a major re-tooling here. There’s always a danger in thinking otherwise, especially when it’s the same team that seems to be eliminating you each and every year. But aside from the 2022 season, when the Bills just ran out of emotional gas after the Damar Hamlin injury and got thumped at home by the Bengals in the playoffs, each playoff loss comes down to just a couple of plays that could have gone the other way, or just a couple of instances where a shift in tactics might have produced a winning result. I don’t envy trying to figure out how to “get over the hump” when you’re just that close to doing it.
:: I have no idea how to solve this problem, but it seems like the Bills’ defense is an injury-riddled M*A*S*H unit every year at playoff time, while everybody else is getting healthy for their Super Bowl run.
:: And then there’s the officiating. Yeah, the NFL has a problem here. No, I don’t believe that the NFL is “scripted”, but there’s a definite sense to which there’s a thumb on the scale. Calls are made for the Chiefs that aren’t made for anyone else, or vice versa, and situational calls almost always seem to favor the Chiefs. The Chiefs know this, too; there was a play in last week’s game where the Chiefs got a big catch, and the Nationally Beloved Travis Kelce came running in after the play to get in the face of one of the Bills’ defensive backs for some taunting. It was incredibly obvious taunting, too…but no penalty flag was forthcoming, until another of the Bills got in Kelce’s face to tell him to knock it off, at which point Kelce threw up his arms and flopped to the ground on his back, as if he’d been clobbered (which he hadn’t), and then the refs tossed the flag. Against the Bills. That kind of shit is supremely irritating, and the Chiefs are widely known to engage in flag-baiting. And there really does appear to be an unwritten NFL policy of “When the Chiefs ask for the flag, give it to them.”
I saw a commentator on Tiktok at some point this week (sorry, I can’t remember who), who made the point about the officiating this way, roughly paraphrased: “Take away this contested catch that was awarded the Chiefs, or that first down which was denied the Bills. Take away all those specific calls, and you still have a problem, because in this game you had one team whose defense had to play with the feeling that they were not allowed to hit the other quarterback, and another team whose defense played knowing that they could hit the other quarterback with impunity. If the NFL doesn’t think that’s a problem that needs to be addressed, I don’t know what to say, other than, I’m glad I’m not watching the games anymore.
:: I wonder: do the Bills have to beat the Chiefs to be taken seriously at this point? If they go out next season and somehow end up winning the Super Bowl but their playoff run somehow does not include Kansas City, how much downplaying of their championship will end up happening?
:: If there’s a more endearing out-of-nowhere team-and-fan tradition than the entire stadium singing “Mr. Brightside” at some point, I don’t know what it is.
:: The mood surrounding this team this year has been absolutely infectious, and it’s easy to see why it hurt so many people so badly when it ended before it felt like it should have. This was probably the most genuinely likeable Bills team ever, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a pro athlete more adept at always saying the right things than Josh Allen. All of that said, I continue to wish that the Buffalo Niagara region didn’t invest so much of its emotional well-being in the NFL team.
:: As noted above, I’m still not watching the games, and in general I keep the NFL at arms-length nowadays. To check out of football completely probably isn’t feasible, because I do still like talking to people and football is a major topic around here. I’m as suspicious of the NFL in particular and football in general as I’ve always been, though: the public money being used to build the stadium, the increasingly uncomfortable partnership between the NFL and the military (look, I get as excited as anybody for big military planes flying overhead, but every game now gets a flyover???), and the brain-injury thing isn’t going anyway (sometime in the next 20 years we’ll probably be reading some very sad news stories about Tua Tagovailoa). Not watching the games and investing 3 hours a week in closely observing the NFL has done wonders for my mental health. Even last week, when the score went final, I was able to say, “Well, they lost. Wanna watch another episode of Scrubs?”
:: Finally, there’s a thing you hear sometimes when your team loses in the playoffs: “Root for the team that beat your team, so you can say that at least your team lost to the best.” That’s where all of my old football (and sports in general) fan mindset comes out, because screw that. I want the team that beats my team to get the shit kicked out of them, as quickly as humanly possible. So, as I think they say in Philly, Fly Eagles fly!
And it might just happen. I don’t know that the Chiefs have faced a team as balanced as the Eagles all season, and that sadly includes the Bills.
:: More finally, pitchers and catchers report for the 29 teams of Major League Baseball (and their AAAA affiliate Pittsburgh Pirates) anywhere from 8 to 12 days from this writing. Play ball!
:: Oh, and last finally, I’m officially sick of the Kelces (both of them) and I wish they’d go away.
There’s been some debate lately after last week’s NFL games, regarding whether or not it’s right, or good, for teams that have secured their playoff positions and who are thus facing a game that is essentially meaningless to not play their best players. The Kansas City Chiefs rested their starters, having already locked up the Number One seed in the AFC, and because they proceeded to lose to the Denver Broncos, who very much did have something to play for, the Broncos made the playoffs and the Cincinnati Bengals did not. (That the Bengals could have made the playoffs had they actually not lost a pile of games early in the season is not something that a lot of Bengals fans want to admit, for whatever reason.)
Likewise, the Buffalo Bills rested a bunch of their best players in their final game against the New England Patriots, who also won. Now, the Patriots had a very bad season and had they lost they would have secured the First Overall pick in the 2025 draft. By winning, they lost the first pick. Again, much rending of teeth and gnashing of garments. (We mustn’t feel too bad for the Patriots, who will pick 4th, and who will likely be looking to trade down for a package of picks anyway, since they likely aren’t looking for a quarterback in the draft.)
I personally have no problem with resting players if you can. Football is a brutal game, and many times in recent years the Super Bowl has come down to “Who is the least banged up.” Plus, there’s the fact that those backup players are still players who want to play. Maybe they want to shake off some rust before their playoffs, or maybe they want to make a good impression in hopes of securing their roster spot next year. And this quote below, by Patriots quarterback Joe Milton, reminded me of a book I read years ago, a wonderful baseball book by John Feinstein. First Milton’s quote, and then the post I wrote about Feinstein’s book years ago.
So the World Series kicks off tonight. [The 2014 World Series, that is. The San Francisco Giants defeated the Kansas City Royals in seven. -Ed.] I know, that’s the wrong metaphor. Sorry. I used to be a huge baseball fan, and I still find the game itself utterly beautiful to watch unfold, a game of moments where things happen one thing at a time. Baseball may be the last major sport that isn’t a constant flow of motion. As for rooting interests, as the League Championship Series started in each league, I noticed that of those four teams, none were a team I dislike in any major way. Generally, my approach in such cases is this: when there are no teams left for whom I have a rooting interest (be it rooting for a team to win or for a hated team to lose), I root for the remaining teams in order of how long it’s been since they won. In the AL you had the Orioles versus the Royals, whose last World Series wins were in 1983 and 1985, respectively. The Royals haven’t even made the postseason since then. (The Orioles have, but have not won any pennants.) As for the NL, it was the Cardinals and Giants, two teams who have each won it at least twice in the last few years. So no matter who won the AL pennant, I would root for the AL champion in the World Series. Hence, go Royals!
The remainder of this post is a book review. My sports fandom is nowhere near what it once was, and I see little reason to expect it to rebound in any significant way in the future. That said, I do still enjoy good sports writing, and John Feinstein is one of the betters sportswriters out there. He has a new book about baseball, called Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball, and it’s definitely worth a look.
Minor-league baseball is sometimes seen as the more “pure” version of the baseball experience these days, where you can still go to the ballpark and take in a game for a few bucks, where goofball promotions are often used as enticements, where ads for local businesses still cover the outfield walls, where players still endure long bus rides from town to town, and where brushes with true baseball celebrity come mainly from young phenom players or Major Leaguers sent down to the minors to work their way back into the game after an injury.
Feinstein’s portrait of the minors has all that, but he also captures something that a lot of fans may not come to realize: that the minors are, in addition to being a training ground for guys not yet ready for the Majors, a place of frustration. The fact is, especially at the AAA level, nobody wants to be there. This is a fact that everyone must acknowledge, and some managers come right out and say it. Nobody wants to be in AAA baseball, because AAA is the cusp of the Majors. When you’re in AAA, your dream is almost there, constantly tantalizing you and torturing you with every single injury with the big club, with every time the manager’s phone rings, with every invitation to spring training. Triple-A baseball is a land of players who are this close. For some, it’s just a brief spot, while for others, it’s a place to spend years without ever getting to “the show”.
Feinstein focuses his book mostly on just nine men: six players, two managers, and one umpire. Some have made it and will make it back; others haven’t made it yet; some have made it and will never make it back. The central fact of this book is that while dreams do come true, they don’t always stay true. It’s a hard lesson for some of these players, and it’s very easy to understand why they keep signing up for one more year, why they keep trying to catch on someplace, even as they pass their 30th birthdays and start approaching their 40th.
It’s interesting to me, as well, that Feinstein includes an umpire in his journey through AAA baseball. Fans don’t think too much about umpires, really, and the only time their names really come up is when they screw up. If a baseball fan knows Don Denkinger’s name, it’s almost certainly because he blew a call in a World Series game; and even then, it’s not like umpire’s names stay in the memory for long. I couldn’t tell you the name of the umpire who screwed up a call a couple years back that cost a pitcher a perfect game on what should have been the final out. (For the record, I still think that MLB should have reversed the call and credited that guy with the perfect game. The idea that umpire’s calls are sacred and must never be changed, ever ever ever, is deeply bizarre to me.) Umpires work their way through the minors just like players do, hoping for that call to become an umpire at the Major League level. What I didn’t know is that umpires’ time is limited even more than players. A player can stay in the minors as long as some organization is willing to have him, but not so an umpire: you only get so many years, and if by that time the people who choose the Major League umpires don’t think you have it, that’s it: you’re done. There are no career minor league umpires.
I was likewise surprised at the degree to which winning isn’t much of a concern in the minors. They like to win, but winning is mainly seen as a function of playing well, and playing well is seen as the means to the end of reaching the Majors. Feinstein depicts the feel of a championship-winning minor league clubhouse as a pretty surreal place. It’s an accomplishment that nobody much gives a shit about. This reminds me of the great movie Bull Durham, which spans an entire season and yet except for one brief segment in the middle of the movie, you get almost no sense for how the team’s doing in the standings. No one cares. All that matters is who gets the call to go up, and who gets the call to go home.
Minor leaguers, it turns out, put up with a lot of crap. They’ll fly with their team in the morning to a new city for a day game, only to be told as soon as they plane lands that the big club needs an arm for that night’s game, so they’re to turn around and get on another plane entirely. Mets pitcher Chris Schwinden, for example, got a call up to join the Mets in Toronto. After sitting in the bullpen, he flies with the team to Pittsburgh, where he’s told that he’s been sent back down already, so he has to turn around and get to Buffalo (the Mets’ AAA affiliate was the Buffalo Bisons at the time). At this point in the night, a direct flight from Pittsburgh to Buffalo isn’t available, so they fly him to JFK, where he’s supposed to catch a flight to Buffalo. That plane is delayed for two hours, so the team sends a car to drive him from NYC to Buffalo. After a series of mechanical mishaps with the car, Schwinden finally gets back to Buffalo eighteen hours after leaving Pittsburgh. This whole passage had me laughing, because you can drive from Pittsburgh to Buffalo in less than four hours.
Feinstein is an honest sportwriter, which means that he can’t just depict baseball’s poetic and pastoral beauty. Baseball keeps going, and as big as some players get, there is no player so big that the game can’t keep being played once they hang up their cleats. Throughout the book, Feinstein makes clear that each and every person is aware that they are just minor cogs in the game’s history and that the game will go on without them when they’re done, almost as if they were never a part of it at all. At times this aspect of baseball can be bluntly heartless: near the end, when the umpire is finally told that he simply isn’t good enough and that his career is over, one reason given is the time he has missed from umpiring. How much time did he miss? Two weeks once, for the birth of his own child, and two days one other time, so he could attend an uncle’s funeral. That’s pretty brutal.
The emotions go the other way, though, and Feinstein shows this as well in many passages. Why do these players work so hard to chase a dream that few will ever get, for whom the odds get smaller with each year? This passage, from the introduction, explains it perfectly.
Every player knows how much the first call-up means. Which is why there is almost always a celebration of some kind in a Triple-A clubhouse when someone gets the call for the first time. Everyone understands what an extraordinary moment it is in a player’s life. Those who have been called up remember what it meant to them; those who have not know how much they want it to happen.
J.C. Boscan’s story isn’t quite the same as Jimmy Morris’s, because he never stopped playing. He signed with the Atlanta Braves in the summer of 1996 at the age of sixteen and spent the next fourteen seasons bouncing around the minor leagues. He first reached Triple-A in 2002 but couldn’t take the next step, because, even though he was a solid catcher, he just couldn’t hit well enough to be regarded as a serious big-league prospect.
He left the Braves for a couple of years to play Double-A and Triple-A for the Milwaukee Brewers and the Cincinnati Reds. He signed back with the Braves in 2008, because the people running the organization had so much respect for him as a clubhouse leader and someone who would set a good example for younger players that they were willing to bring him back – knowing he was unlikely to ever play in Atlanta.
Two years later, playing in Gwinnett, he had his best offensive season. Nothing spectacular, but a career-high five home runs and a batting average of .250 – higher than his lifetime average of .222. Late in August, Boscan began to hear that he might be on the September call-up list.
Every year on September 1, major-league teams can expand their rosters to as many as forty players (the regular roster size is twenty-five). Rarely do they bring up more than five or six players. Those who are brought up usually provide depth in the bullpen or on the bench of are young players being given a taste of the major leagues. Every once in a while, a team will give a player a “good guy promotion” – bring him up so he can make major-league pay for a month as a reward for being a good guy and not complaining about being stuck in the minor leagues.
Boscan had been in the minors for fourteen years and had never seen the inside of a big-league clubhouse except during spring training. At thirty, he was a long way from being the bright-eyed teenage prospect the Braves had brought to the United States from Venezuela in 1997.
On August 31, the word in the Gwinnett clubhouse was that the Braves were going to make their call-ups after the game. Boscan remembers being more nervous that night than at any other time in his career.
“I walked on the field that night, and all I could think was, ‘If I don’t get the call tonight, it’s never going to come,’” he remembered. “I honestly thought this was my last shot and my best shot to ever get to the majors. I could barely keep my mind on the game. All I could think about was what was going to happen after it was over. I was praying to God to let this be my time.”
When the game ended, Boscan sat in front of his locker and picked at the postgame meal. Hitting coach Jamie Dismuke had been designated by manager Dave Brundage to bring players into his office so they could be told they were going to make the thirty-seven-mile trip down I-85 to Turner Field. As Dismuke worked his way around the clubhouse, that thirty-seven miles felt more like a million to Boscan.
The first player called in was Freddie Freeman, the twenty-year-old phenom, who was hitting .319 and was considered a lock call-up. He came out of Brundage’s office with a huge smile on his face and was engulfed in congratulations.
Dismuke continued his rounds. One player after another walked around the corner to Brundage’s office and came out wearing the giveaway grin. The congratulations continued. No one had made a move to leave because this was a happy night – for those going up.
Six players had gone in to see Brundage – entering as Gwinnett Braves and coming out as Atlanta Braves – and there was no sign of Dismuke for a couple of minutes. Boscan’s heart sank. That was it – six guys. His dream had died.
Dismuke appeared again, this time walking directly toward Boscan.
“Skip wants to see you, J.C.,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. Boscan panicked. Maybe Brundage had gotten the good news out of the way first, and now he was going to let Boscan know that the team needed him in Double-A to work with a young catcher. Or, maybe he was being released.
Brundage was, in fact, preparing that kind of speech for Boscan. “I was going to look very sad and tell him that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want them to in baseball,” he said. “But when he walked in here, he was shaking. I couldn’t go through with it.”
The entire Gwinnett staff was in the room when Boscan walked in.
“Have a seat, JC,” Brundage said, trying to look grim.
Boscan sat on the couch across from Brundage’s desk.
“You ever been to the big leagues?” he asked – knowing the answer.
“No,” Boscan said, shaking his head.
Brundage couldn’t keep up the charade.
“I was going to mess with you, JC, but I can’t do it,” he said, feeling himself start to choke up. “This is your day. You’re going up.”
Boscan burst into tears. Everyone else in the room was fighting to hold tears back.
“I’ve been a minor-league manager a long time,” Brundage said. “I can honestly say that was the best moment I’ve ever had.”
After Boscan had thanked everyone and shaken everyone’s hand and been hugged all around, he walked out of the office. Brundage’s office is in a hallway that leads to the clubhouse area where the players’ lockers are located. When Boscan turned the corner to reenter the locker area, the entire team was waiting for him.
Feinstein doesn’t reveal what became of JC Boscan after he finally reached the Major Leagues after fourteen years of minor-league toil, because that’s really not the point of his book at all. But I couldn’t help wondering, so I looked it up. That’s the thing about baseball: you can always look it up. He only had one plate appearance with the Braves that fall, in which he drew a walk to load the bases; he would then score a run when a subsequent hitter doubled. Over the next two seasons with the Braves and then one season with the Cubs, he appeared in a total of 17 Major-League games, collecting 7 hits in 28 at-bats, for a .250 average. He has 2 career RBIs, and zero home runs. After the 2013 season he signed with the Dodgers organization, and he’s still there, playing Double-A ball with the Chattanooga Lookouts.
