removingalldoubt-blog1

[removingalldoubt-blog1]

That thing that keeps happening because the other thing never did.

So … ESPN did that thing again. 

They’ve done it before, as has the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. They forgot the White Sox won the World Series in 2005. 

And just like last time, they immediately apologized for it and deleted the errant tweet although in this case that’s actually worse. 

The tweet in question was about the Dodgers 7-1 playoff record so far. They were on pace to best the 1998 Yankees 11-2 record for the least losses in a post-season since the introduction of the wild card. 

Except that the 2005 White Sox went 11-1. 

Not that big a deal. I mean, aside from the fact that stat guys are literally paid to do nothing but research stats and simply forgetting one is a testament to shoddy craftsmanship and basically inexcusable, it’s a meaningless mistake. 

But after more than a few Sox and/or baseball fans called them on it—because that’s what people do on Twitter, wait for you to say something stupid and/or wrong and then pounce on you like you’re a proponent of baby seal clubbing, because Twitter is the worst—they deleted the tweet. 

They didn’t correct it. They didn’t still talk about how the Dodgers’ lone loss means they could tie the record-holding White Sox. They’d prefer to just not mention it at all. 

Because it’s not the Cubs, so it never happened. 

I’m not trying to make this about the Cubs. It’s not. I’m not a fan, but can appreciate everything the Cubs have done in recent years to turn the franchise around. Theo and Jed are baseball geniuses and worthy of the heaps of praise they receive regularly. 

It’s not their fault, but if you don’t live here or didn’t grow up here, you cannot fathom how deep the “Sox as Second Team” narrative goes. 

After the White Sox won the World Series in 2005 (which they actually did; I was at every home playoff game; I saw it with my own eyes), I would casually mention that my real fear was if the Cubs finally did win it, it would be like the Sox never had. 

People thought that was crazy. Turns out I was clairvoyant. 

The saddest part is that the 2005 season was magical. It had all of the entertaining and compelling storylines you want from a season. I mean at the start of the season, our closer was a Japanese import who threw a gimmick pitch that hovered around 60 mph. 

Remember when El Duqué Hernandez (aged at the time to be anywhere between 33 and 57) came in with the bases loaded and nobody out in game three of the ALDS against the defending champion Red Sox? Remember how he stranded them all and preserved the sweep giving the White Sox their first post-season series win in 88 years? 

You don’t. Because it wasn’t the Cubs, so it never happened. 

Remember when White Sox starters pitched four complete game wins in a row in the ALCS? The last time that had happened was in 1956—an era when pitchers pitched until their arms fell off … and then continued to pitch after reattaching it with staples, cortisone, bourbon and amphetamines. But it was the Yankees who did it so I’m sure the next time a team flirts with consecutive complete games, that’s the comparison that will come up. 

And oh my god remember the phantom dropped third strike in game two? A ridiculously awful call, that led to the winning run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, but also the kind of baseball moment that gets people talking. Imagine what twitter would have been like if that happened now. 

Oh right. You don’t. Because it wasn’t the Cubs, so it never happened. 

What about Paul Konerko’s World Series Grand Slam in game two in the rain? Or Scott Podsednik’s walk-off in the ninth? I mean, he hit zero home runs during the regular season. It’s crazy! That game had six lead changes. Six! 

Well surely you remember Geoff Blum’s home run in the top of the 14 inning to win game three. That’s not a typo—14 innings. I’m sure you also remember Mark Buehrle getting the save in that game, after earning the win in game two. That hadn’t happened since the Bob Turley of the 1958 Yankees so expect to see his name on the screen when the next pitcher does that. 

Just don’t expect to see Buehrle’s. 

I now realize you also don’t remember Juan Uribe diving into the stands in game four. Or Willie Harris’s hit or Jermain Dye’s RBI. You might vaguely remember the celebration. Everyone was pretty into it at the time. Michael Jordan was long gone and Toews and Kane hadn’t arrived yet. The city needed a winner. It was a historic moment, ending the second longest championship drought in baseball. 

But 88 isn’t 108. 

Drama, excitement, record-book performances, colorful characters, everything you’d want from a World Series. Who could forget Ozzie Guillen calling for his closer by extending both arms out wide signaling for the big man Bobby Jenks?

Turns out, everyone. 

Last year as the Cubs made their historic run, the Washington Post, ESPN and our own hometown paper all ran pieces or displayed graphics that existed in an alternative universe. One where the 2005 White Sox never happened. 

And now, with the Cubs eliminated from the post-season, it’s still happening. 

Because as White Sox fans relish calling out these slights and talk about it happening again, we all need to make our peace with one simple fact: it will always happen. 

The baseball future at 35th and Shields looks bright. Some great prospects coming through the pipeline. 

But we’re not the Cubs. 

As long as the city remains segregated by race and socio-economics and as long as a cathedral to baseball still stands at Clark and Addison, the Cubs will always be the first team in this city. 

Wrigley Field resides in a part of the city securely insulated from the national headlines about crime here. 

It is also insulated from some baseball realities. The White Sox have sold the naming rights to their stadium twice in order to help generate revenue. I doubt the Wrigley family has ever cut a check to the Cubs for their naming rights, but if the Cubs changed the name, there would be riot. The Sox change theirs and it’s a joke. 

Over the years, the White Sox have been “in-play” as a team for relocation. Seattle, Milwaukee, Denver, Tampa have all come up as possible destinations for the team. Meanwhile, in the 90s Cub fans were outraged at the idea of the team playing in a stadium merely in the suburbs. 

In 2006, the defending World Champion Chicago White Sox sold out the lower deck for the entire season. They won 90 games too, but it wasn’t enough and did not make the playoffs. Since then, they’ve only made the post-season once and were quickly dispatched in the first round. In 2017, they only relinquished the worst record in baseball during a winning run in the last week of the season.

The White Sox v Astros World Series was one of the least-watched World Series in the history of television. The 2016 Series was one of the highest-rated, made national news and ended with Bill Murray singing “Go Cubs Go” on Saturday Night Live.

For another week, the Cubs are still the defending World Champions, but after either Dodgers or Astros take the title, they will still be the Cubs. The better team, in the historic park, in the nice part of town, in a grossly segregated city. 

I don’t live on the south side. I wasn’t raised there. My fandom is irregular and came about via happenstance. I am surrounded by Cub fans, most newly minted in the same way they all became Blackhawk fans in 2010. 

I don’t hate the Cubs. I’m jealous of their success. Much in the same way a lot of my friends were jealous of the White Sox in 2005. But none of them switched allegiances and while all their kids were wearing Konerko jerseys then, those kids are now-teens and they are all wearing Rizzo swag now. 

Because it’s the Cubs, and 2005 never happened.

[removingalldoubt-blog1]

A Tale of Two Players and One Overrated GM

Over here we have Marian Hossa: one of the greatest players of his generation forced to stop due to a painful skin condition. Over here we have Bryan Bickell: a solid, role player forced to stop due to being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And lastly, we have Stan Bowman: offspring of the great Scottie Bowman who is maybe being exposed as not living up to the family name. There’s a lot of vitriol about Hossa being placed on the LTIR. Back when Dale Talon was Blackhawk GM, he signed Hossa to a cap-circumventing contract that this year, at age 39, he’s scheduled to make only $1 million. It skirted the cap rules at the time in order to allow the Blackhawks to have the money under the cap to pay other players and field a competitive team. That led to some great stuff for Hawks fans, much to the chagrin of NHL fans in other cities who like the rest of us, hate perennial winners from other places.

Since Hossa signed, the NHL got wise to those kinds of contracts. They killed Alexi Kovalev’s and then instituted the cap-recapture clause that basically says if a player retires before their contract expires, you don’t have to pay them, but your team salary cap will look like you still do. So, the allegedly ever-clever Bowman and Hossa agreed with his contract down to a cool million, the time was right to disclose to the world that Hossa has been suffering with this very painful disease for a few seasons now. Apparently the medication he is on for it has some wicked side effects and so he will be on LTIR this season while he recuperates and hopes to come back next year. He’s basically retiring. You know it. The Blackhawks know it. The NHL knows it. By not saying it, they avoid both his cap hit and his recapture hit. And the Blackhawks again find a way to stay competitive with an aging core and no room to maneuver. Stan is a genius. Except he’s not. He wasn’t a genius when he signed Antione Vermette for the 2015 cap run. He just benefitted from Patrick Kane’s broken collar bone and then just like Hossa this year, kept medical information to himself until the time was right. Had Kane come back for even one game in the regular season, the cap room to sign Vermette wouldn’t have been there. So instead they said he wouldn’t be back until maybe the conference final, and then lo and behold, there he was, on the ice, game one, opening series.

Since then, he’s had a tough cap situation year after year and each year, does what he can, often with former Blackhawk players that have aged a bit since their first cup in 2010. The six-years-older versions of Brian Campbell and Andrew Ladd didn’t exactly set the ice on fire and while it’s good to see Brandon Saad back, we are all not sure what Patrick Sharp can still bring. Bowman gets credit for not standing pat and doing nothing, but he’s not exactly inspiring confidence. Which brings us to Bryan Bickell. Bickell had a great 2013 playoff, culminating in scoring the first of the “17 seconds” goals that transformed gearing up for game seven into drinking from the cup for a week straight. He scored that goal because he was in the right place at the right time after Kane, Keith and Toews made the play happen. Literally. Kane deked through multiple Bruins to drive the net, then maintained possession in the corner. He then passed to Keith who passed to Toews who drove the net drawing defenders so when he slid a pass to Bickell in front of the net, all he had to do was hammer it home. He did and the rest is history. And Bickell deserves that place in history, but it wasn’t just that moment that led to his contract. Coaches and GMs are constantly evaluating players to determine their value on the off and off of it. Quenville obviously let Bowman know that Bickell was a guy he wanted around and Stan obviously felt keeping him at that number was better than cutting him loose and having to replace him. Those conclusions weren’t drawn from him slamming home a late-game tying goal, no matter how monumental the moment was.

In the 2014-2015 season that ended with another Stanley Cup, he played 80 games, and managed 14 goals, pretty much right on his career average. But the next season, he played in only 25 games and struggled with his health. At first he was diagnosed with vertigo, which as it happens is often the first diagnosis of patients with MS. He was sent down to the minors to get well. He didn’t. His game suffered. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong. It’s not uncommon for GMs to ditch players who can’t stay healthy. There are athletes in every sport who seem more prone to injury than others. Only this wasn’t a broken ankle or a concussion. This wasn’t a sports injury. This was a mystery. Occasionally when a player is diagnosed with a non-sports related condition or disease, you hear the team off their support, usually with a line about how “it’s more important he fight (insert cancer here) for his long-term health.” But since doctors still couldn’t figure it out, Bowman got impatient. I have a friend with MS and it is an unmitigated shit-show. The snails-pace with which it slowly destroys the communication lines between the body and brain is a slog through hell with an inevitably tragic conclusion. No one deserves it. It’s the kind of disease teammates rally around like Bickell’s did in Raleigh. It’s the kind of disease where GMs and owners express their support as they give athletes the time they need to get healthy.

Only the Blackhawks doctors missed it. To their teams, professional athletes are investments. Teams want them to play hurt, but most importantly, they want them to play. They spend a lot of money tending to their investments so they can perform at the highest level. That means spending on training, conditioning, diet and yes, medical care. This isn’t you or I getting a basic physical every year because that’s all our insurance allows. These guys have access to the best not because their health matters, but because the success of the business relies on it. My friend with MS was diagnosed back in the early 90s. I do not remember how many tests he went through, how long it took or how much money it cost him. What I do know is he was complaining about numbness in his arm and some time later, he told us all the news. He was not a multi-million-dollar athlete. He was just a junior PR guy starting his career after college. But a doctor did diagnose him. Bryan Bickell went to doctors. Doctors on retainers from a large-market, professional sports team to help him get better. They didn’t find it. Bowman lost patience. And before Bickell knew what was really wrong with him, Bowman had decided to cut bait. The problem was finding a team to take a guy who couldn’t get healthy with an albatross of a contract who was currently languishing in the minors. Unfortunately, the solution was Tuevo Teravainen.

Teravainen is pure skill. Most importantly at the time, he was still on an entry-level deal. Bowman packaged him to Carolina to get them to take Bickell. MS can be difficult to diagnose. It is usually only after every other potential disease and condition is ruled out that doctors go there. But the doctors who finally did figure it out, did so last year, his first after the Bowman traded him. We’ll never know if Blackhawk doctors are to blame for not diagnosing it or Bowman is to blame for not showing patience with a player who was clearly dealing with something outside of a typical hockey injury. But the Blackhawks lost a talented young player not because of a salary cap squeeze, but because Bowman refused to treat a player struggling with an atypical injury any differently than a torn ACL. Refused to give him even one more year to figure it out. Blackhawks fans have had to say goodbye to some talented and beloved players due to an annual cap squeeze that comes from keeping Toews, Kane and Keith in the sweater. But Bowman signed Seabrook and Crawford to hideous deals and we’ve all watched Nick Leddy, Dustin Byfuglien, Brandon Saad (temporarily) and most recently Niklas Hjalmarsson and Artemi Panarin leave town to make space.

And maybe Teravainen would’ve had to eventually go, but Bickell was suffering from a different kind of ailment and because Bowman refused to treat it differently, we had to see Teuvo go too. Plenty of GMs would have done the same thing. A player can’t get healthy enough to play and you find a way to cut him loose. It’s a common tale. But this one, cost him.

[removingalldoubt-blog1]

Inadvertent Intergalactic War

Did we just declare war on Saturn, and not even know it? If you don’t think so, you might be suffering from failure of imagination. I first read the expression “Failure of Imagination” in the 9/11 Commission Report, which I only read after reading all these articles on how they really tried to make it readable. I remember seeing a hard-bound copy of the Warren Report on the bookshelf as a kid and when I was old enough to know what that was, it didn’t inspire me to read it. If Hollywood can’t make a watchable movie about the JFK assassination, what chance did government lawyers have in writing one? But the 9/11 report was different. They made a conscientious effort to create a narrative. They didn’t necessarily develop characters, but they took the time to describe places, events, intel in a way that might work as a serviceable outline for an international spy thriller, after being script-doctored to death, maybe add a love triangle and an orphaned circus elephant. Still, it wasn’t bad. They even eventually made a graphic novel based on it, which I’m guessing Alan Moore will love until they make a movie out of it. After the descriptions of what happened and when, the report gets into some of the reasons why. A lot of it had to do with communication failures. One agency knew this but not that. Various defense, detective and spy groups didn’t not share intel and there was no one head of it all to give orders to attempt to foil plots before they hatched. But, blame was also put on the failure of imagination.

Terrorism until then, had seemed like a far away thing. Something that happened in war-ravaged, underdeveloped countries in the Middle East—countries we are buffered from by two vast oceans. It couldn’t happen here. And if it did, it would be turban-clad men smuggling in weapons or filling vans with fertilizer. Using a commercial flight as a WMD was not on anyone’s radar. Now, you can’t bring a nail clipper on board and if you wear shoes with laces to the airport, you’re a schmuck, but back then, we simply couldn’t conceive of all the ways our enemies could attack us. Which brings us back to our intergalactic battle with Saturn. It starts with Cassini, a marvelous program from NASA that has been orbiting Saturn and collecting data about the planet. It has discovered, amongst other things, that two of Saturn’s moons have environments that could sustain life. With Cassini running out of fuel, the decision was made to crash it onto uninhabitable Saturn, lest risk it floating in orbit and inadvertently crashing and damaging life on one of the moons. The question is, how do we know Saturn is uninhabitable? The better question is, why are we so full of ourselves? We send these probes into the far reaches of space to gather data, images, intel, specimens, whatever we can get our hands on to learn more. The universe is vast and in spite of our knowledge, still know so little. We are mere specks in its shadow. Yet, we continue with the unbridled hubris of assuming that if a planet or moon can’t host carbon-based life as we know it, it can’t host any life at all. That’s a failure of imagination.

There’s no reason to believe that just because we can’t live there, other life forms can’t either. What if debris from Cassini damages the hut of some Saturnese farmer who just so happens to be the nephew of a Saturnese government official. Maybe this government official is losing his grip on power and is desperate to shore up his support. Nothing whips the faithful up like foreign invaders. Next thing you know, the Saturnese are attempting to turn their rings into a wall and are expecting us to pay for it. So thanks a lot NASA. Couldn’t you have steered that thing into Jupiter? I mean that place is a real shit-show.

[removingalldoubt-blog1]

Words Matter – winning

Turns out, Charlie Sheen did not ruin the word “winning.” His weird little breakdown did little to expunge it from our lexicon. If you are competing in a sport or activity, running in a political race or a contestant on the Gong Show, the goal is to win. (Actually, that might not be true of the Gong Show you cheeky monkeys.) Those enterprises are zero-sum games—someone wins and someone, or everyone else, loses. There can be only one champion. In our sports and our game shows, we want to see winners. Remember how miserable we all were before there was a college football playoff? I mean, I can’t believe how much time we used to spend debating who was number one. Ok, bad example. But there’s a reason games seven have the highest ratings. (Yes, grammatically speaking, it’s “games seven” not “game sevens.” Just like it’s “Attorneys General.” I didn’t invent grammar. Come at me bro.) Same with the Super Bowl, Sunday at the Masters and Monday night of March Madness. You maybe didn’t watch Dancing with The Stars or The Bachelor, but you’ll look online to find out who danced the least crappy and the names of the soon-to-be divorced. We love the binary. Two teams enter. One team wins.

But when I hear the term “winning” being bandied about in the boardroom, I cringe. I can’t tell you how many new-biz pitches or client meetings I’ve been in where the strategist assures the client that if we can do X, Y and Z, “we will win.” I hate it. I’m not suggesting that a company’s desire to grow profits, gain market-share or increase their customer base is a bad strategy. The success of this country’s particular brand of capitalism relies on free markets and yes, competition amongst companies to deliver their goods or services. Companies should continue to innovate and find ways to stay competitive. Those that do not, deserve to be left behind. But there is a better way to express it. After all, winning is often ugly. Unlike March Madness and Survivor, free-market capitalism relies on the competition continuing. It’s why there are laws against monopolies. It’s why the government protect workers from being exploited. It’s why corporate collusion and price fixing or gouging are all illegal. A true free-market capitalist, who is violently opposed to any sort of government regulation, is in fact undermining the very thing that allows capitalism to work. Without those controls, the monopolies rule and the competition ends. With it, so do affordable and quality goods and service. We need competition, but the last thing we need is a champion to be crowned. Which is why in this context, I hate the word “winning.” If you want your company to win then you are also saying you want your competitors to lose.

You want them to go out of business. You want their employees to be out of work. You want to be able increase profits further by charging more for a lesser product. Perhaps it didn’t occur to you how higher unemployment and a further strain on social service programs might affect America as a whole. Even you and your championship company will feel the effects. Perhaps it also didn’t occur to you that now many of your customers can’t afford your product, or other products. With spending down, everyone suffers. But what really didn’t occur to you was what it actually means to win. It’s not just in business I hear the word being overused. Our current President has a tendency to brag about his constant winning (this in spite of his many bankruptcies) and his promises that we as Americans would be, “winning so much you’re going to be sick and tired of winning.” Side note: Holy shit. I went online to make sure I quoted him properly and do you realize how many times he uttered that or a similar phrase on the campaign trail? Countless. And to think, for the sake of accuracy, I was worried about misquoting him. So, I ask President Trump, in a wildly diverse country that is a part of a global economy, how do we win and more importantly, who loses?

If we “win” a trade war with Mexico that sends it economy spiraling, does that not affect our security as a nation? What are the global ramifications of destabilizing China when we “win” against them, while North Korea inches closer to reaching us with nukes. If we “win” against those who care about our carbon footprint, don’t our grandchildren lose an inhabitable world? By all means, continue to compete, to innovate, to pressure your competitors to keep up. Take the lead. Talk of increased profits, growing revenues and higher share prices. And while I have no love for, nor have any belief that our current president could possibly do anything right, if he can somehow stumble accidentally into helping millions of un- or underemployed Americans get better paying jobs, I’m not going to complain. But remember: Words Matter. So call it what you will, but unless you are inspiring your football team before kick-off, don’t call it winning.

[removingalldoubt-blog1]

Selfies, emojis, automated content and the end of my career.

I was a teenager once. It was during the eighties so, it sucked—as did my hair. And even though I totally fucking rocked the bright-red Jew-fro by parting it in the middle and feathering it back, I still attempted to talk to girls. I had absolutely no game. Immature and sheltered, I rarely spoke to them during school hours and after school, hunkered down in my room, I would call them and have a “conversation” mostly consisting of long pauses and silence. It’s what teens did. You called a girl or boy, you sat on the phone and didn’t actually talk. You had nothing to say and while that sometimes didn’t stop anyone from speaking, it did lead to silences that as adults would be considered uncomfortable, off-putting or just downright creepy. At the time, before the internet made us aware of everything, it seemed normal. Not much has changed. My kids take literally hundreds of selfies a day—not due to vanity (although maybe not, not due to vanity), but because that’s how they have a “conversation.” They take a selfie, adorn it with emojis or cat ears and noses or possibly a text-speak acronym (pretty sure the kids call those TSAs) and then send it off into the internets and snapagrams. In return they get the same from all of their friends. No actual conversing is happening; teens now also have nothing to say, they just have a palm-sized capture, create and broadcast device in their pocket giving them infinitely more interesting ways to say it. The things they rarely use: words.

And as they use words less and less to communicate, you would think that my fellow copywriters and I would feel a sense of security about our position. These kids coming up have no idea how to effective use the written word. My skills will be in even more demand as this trend only gets worse. Then I learned about automated content generators and how algorithms are “writing” stories that are being consumed online every day. Simply input the data you want expressed in story form and the in minutes, you have it. A bot with a box score can not only immediate write-up that is not only indistinguishable from human-written stories by seasoned sports journalists, but they can also match that story up against your fantasy baseball line up and make sure your version of the story includes how your roster players did in the lede. Companies like Automated Insights are helping the AP write more than 3000 different financial reports each quarter. None of this should be surprising. Technology has been replacing humans in the manufacturing sector for years. What was once made by humans, shipped by humans and sold by humans can now be made by robots, bought over the internet and shipped direct via drone. Automation has made our goods better and cheaper at the cost of less blue-collar jobs. The service sector was a sitting duck. While cab drivers complain to their city council about Uber, driverless cars will soon make any kind of human driver obsolete. While not replacing the coffee shop experience just yet, that one-cup coffee maker in your home uses Starbucks-brand beans. With automated templates you can create a professionally-designed-looking website in a few clicks, drags and drops. No humans needed. Coming after the writers was only a matter of time. But really, who’s even reading? As coders continue to refine their AI craft, future robo-writers will be forced to write stories made up entirely of emojis and gifs. Is it any wonder we marvel at hieroglyphics and the primitive drawings of cave dwellers? We’ve been striving to reach their level of communication this entire time. People won’t need writers because no one will know how to read or more likely, find it tedious. If a picture is worth 1000 words, the six-emoji financial report will be considered pretty comprehensive. The novel will be the last stronghold for the human writer but it’s hard and there’s so much good TV on. Besides, I quickly scanned the New York Times best-seller list and thought for sure I saw a book written by a new author named 10011010011. I know I should’ve investigated further, but the new season of BoJack Horseman dropped and, you know.