The Politics of Losing

Posted by on 2 April 2018

Eat shift or die trying

Taking “April Fools’ Day” a bit too far, Brian Dozier criticized Chance Sisco yesterday for bunting for a hit down 6 runs in the 9th inning. Believing he had the moral high ground, Dozier felt confident that the Orioles’ veteran leadership would set the offending player straight.

In the end, the only one needing to be set straight was Dozier himself. In a sport where failing to run out a fly ball can get you benched and watching a home run just a bit too long can get you plunked, the unwritten rule about not trying win with the odds stacked against you seems a bit out of place. And in this case, criticism seems even more unwarranted considering that the player in question was bunting to get around a shift; clearly, the other team was doing everything they could to get him out, so why shouldn’t he do everything in his power to get on base? Not playing to the best of your ability is the ultimate disrespect in sports. That message seems to have been lost somewhere.

It started when it became a common unwritten rule for winning teams to take it easy on outmatched opponents. Don’t embarrass them, just play enough to get the win and then kill time until it’s over. There’s no shortage of outrage when a high school powerhouse crushes a team with a bunch of novice players by a score of 102-2. How disrespectful of them to play to the best of their ability when a system outside their control set up such a lopsided matchup! How dare they embarrass those poor awful opposing players by treating them as equals when they so clearly were inferior human beings deserving of our pity! And yet, the losers never seem to care about the final score. They know they’re going to lose before the game even starts, so why should they care about the score? They just want a chance to play the game. And if the other side isn’t playing, it’s not a game.

Maybe mercy rules are to blame. I’d not sure of the causal relationship here (probably goes both ways), but the idea of ending a game early when the lead reaches a certain point seems just as silly and disrespectful to the losers as the winners playing without effort. Oddly enough, Bob’s Burgers covered this very point just last night. Down 9-0, the soccer team coached by the titular Bob was on the verge of being mercy ruled; a 10 point shutout automatically ended the game. At first, our heroes were thrilled that their soccer misadventure was nearing its end. But then they learned that their team of losers didn’t care about winning, they just enjoyed playing. And they had never played a full game because of the shutout mercy rule. With a change of heart, Bob coached his team to an unconventional goal and they happily finished out the eventual 20-1 loss.

One of the things that comes from childhood (if you do it right) is an understanding that you’re not going to be good at everything. You may be perfect at damn near everything, but you’ll still suck at something. And that’s okay. Sportsmanship means accepting this fact no matter which side you fall on and treating the situation the same, win or lose. There’s no shame in losing by a lot and there’s no shame in winning by a lot, just play your best and accept whatever comes.

The Twins, for their part, didn’t let up on Chance Sisco, employing a shift when it probably didn’t matter. And yet, some would find fault if the lead were the other way around and the winning team bunted to get a hit around a shift. Part of the “don’t embarrass the losing team” unwritten rule. Give me a break. Playing well while winning isn’t “showing up” the other team or any such nonsense, it’s just playing well. Want to know what real disrespectful winning looks like? As with everything else, I’ve got an anecdote for that.

A long, long time ago, I was a terrible runner on my high school track team. I never had any chance at winning anything, but my high school team ran everyone who showed up. And so, my senior year, I ran the anchor leg of my school’s third string 4x800m indoor track relay team. No other school would even consider letting runners of our caliber compete, but there we were, 20 seconds or more slower than anyone else. That put me 1 minute behind from the start on a leg that took most people about 2 minutes. On a 200m indoor track, that left me running two laps alone after everyone else finished. Every single week. I knew what it was to lose with everyone watching you.

In outdoor track the next season, we never ran more than two 4×8 relay teams (and only infrequently at that), so I lost my anchor position when the next relay opportunity arose and was slotted in third. But when our anchor runner got sick during the meet, I thought I would get my chance. We managed to get one of the better runners to take over as our new lead runner, so if they just slid everyone else back one… But they didn’t. Instead, the old lead runner was moved to anchor and that was that. After I ran my leg, I handed off the baton and watched helplessly as the race’s conclusion unfolded.

Being a dual meet, there were only three other relay teams. But this dual meet had a twist. Our school and the other school both fielded a competitive relay team. Our school also had our not-so-competitive relay team. And then a third school was in the mix because their team wasn’t big enough to compete head-to-head with any of the other schools. As our last runner neared the finish line, this school’s relay team was still far on the opposite side of the track. And then it happened.

Our team’s final runner, with our baton in hand and our school’s name on his chest, and our time riding on his performance, slowed down just before the line. And. Slowly. Stepped. Forward. Across. The. Line. Looking over at the other team’s runner the whole time. We were all shocked. Losing by a wide margin to someone giving it their all is fine. Hell, I was lapped in a four-lap race my first time out. But what we had just witnessed was an obscene insult. That was his last race with us.

Somehow though, this concept has been perverted to mean that the feelings of the loser are to be protected above all else, regardless of what the loser actually feels. If you win a little less, they’ll feel a little less bad, right? Help me out here, I really don’t understand how this is supposed to work. Is it a generational thing? Participation trophies? And now things have snowballed out of control with the “stop trying to win in a blowout no matter which side you’re on” unwritten rule. Because obviously losers will feel less bad about losing if they weren’t trying in the first place, or some such nonsense.

I’ve written before about a time many decades ago when I found myself in that situation. Down a bunch of runs against a much better team, I could see things clearly in the moment. All I can do is try to get on base and then do whatever I can to score. That won’t win the game, but what else is there to do? Giving up never crossed my mind. That was in the lower levels of Little League, I would expect nothing less from a major leaguer. You’re getting paid to play a game. Play your ass off and give the people their money’s worth.

But Dozier’s comments brought another childhood experience of mine to mind. My amateur athletic career, sich as it was, culminated at the end of my senior year of high school. After five seasons on the various seasonal track teams, I had worked my way up from the worst of the worst to the best of the worst. Not much of an accomplishment, but for the kid who couldn’t run for an entire mile in his first high school physical fitness test, it was a pretty good result. One problem though was that I never knew what I was really capable of. Up until my final track meet, I was racing in normal running shoes instead of racing flats. I had ordered some at the beginning of the indoor track season several months earlier, but they didn’t come in until the very end of outdoor track. And, as luck would have it, that meet was on a cinder track instead of a proper rubberized track. After that, my last race would be my old nemesis, the physical fitness test.

But my high school didn’t have a rubberized track either. In fact, we had a cinder track that was in such bad shape that we couldn’t host track meets. In the winter, it was completely unusable and we ran on parking lots, the NYMA horse track, or even through the halls inside. Things were changing though and construction on a new track had already begun. So the physical fitness test mile run would take place on grass around the soccer field. Not much of an improvement. But it was all I had left, so I brought my racing flats and put the spikes in one last time sitting next to the soccer field. This attracted some unwanted attention.

By some bizarre quirk of class scheduling, I never had high school gym classes with people I knew very well. And in this year, there was nobody else from my entire class with me in gym. That alone made me a target, but doing something unusual like prepping racing flats took it one step further. And so the other kids getting ready to run did their civic duty as high schoolers and relentlessly mocked the person who was different. At least until the coach got wind of it. “Do you have a problem with someone trying to do their best?” That shut them down and let me finish in peace. I then went on to beat all of them with a time of just over 5:40, the same time I had on cinder a few days earlier. Nothing earth-shattering, but more than a minute better than my time from the previous fall and nearly 5 minutes better than my time in 8th grade. After never finishing higher than 5th in any race at a meet, I finished first in a race that didn’t even matter. But I gave it everything I had just the same, because otherwise, what’s the point?

And that brings us back to Chance Sisco, who, in an at-bat that probably wasn’t going to matter, saw a way to get on base and took it. In the end, it isn’t Brian Dozier or even his own teammates who have the final say on whether the effort was appropriate; he’ll have to decide that for himself. And as any kid should be able to see, there’s no shame in trying to make the most of a hopeless situation. I only wish Coach Howe had been there afterward to set Brian Dozier straight.

Biography, Opinion

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