How to deal with losing

I wrote this the day the Texas Rangers were bounced from the 2012 playoffs.  I was quite drunk at the time and very, very pissed off.  Enjoy:

You have to be a bit philosophical about it.  Losing that is.

Before you dismiss it, think about baseball in a vacuum.  As a batter, you are considered to be good hitter if you fail 7 of 10 times.  A good pitcher if you allow 3 scores in 2/3 of the game, and you don’t finish what you started.  Everyone loses a lot in baseball, including the winner.  So every small victory is something to savor, because you don’t know when it might happen again.

So when my Texas Rangers lost the wild card playoff game tonight, I immediately thought of the Boston Red Sox of last year – and how I feel a kindred spirit with their fans after tonight.

Each baseball fan has something in common:  losing.  To combat the side effects of anger, depression, rage, sadness, loss of emotion control, we all cope with some form of trying to understand what happened to us.  And it will all happen to us at some point.  Tonight it happened to me.

To recap, the Texas Rangers held an insurmountable division lead with a little over a 1/6^th of the season left to play.  The Oakland A’s were full of rookies.  The A’s won, and did not stop winning – the epitome of lightning in a bottle.  The Rangers dragged with an infinitely more developed roster.  And in the last week, they completely stopped playing baseball.  It was as if a virus had been incubating inside Venus de Milo and finally rotted off her arms the last week of the season.

So when the Rangers lost the wild card, single elimination game, I expected it, though it was no less devastating because of how beautifully they once were constructed and how tragically flawed they proved to turn out.

The confidence gone, the dream left stale, we leave our bodies and view our team’s corpse from above.  What we see is a team that would have eventually lost to anyone given a competitive environment.  Since the next three rounds would have been competitive, we accept that losing will hurt no matter when it inevitably comes.

We remember the tragic Red Sox of Tito’s last hurrah, and we do not blame a soul, but remember the false cutouts our heroes proved to be.  We think about how easily a fan can be duped, seduced into believing in his team as a champion.  We remember the ecstasy of winning for the first time; we remember the frustration and anguish of if not being enough.  Why is it that winning is so great and losing must doubly be worse?

So we decide to convince ourselves of the “truth,” that we were bound to lose at some point, and we look to rebuild.  ’Tis Nature.  Every fan will experience it at some point if you haven’t already.

For the Mavs the Bell Tolls

What a sad, sad end to the Dirk era of the Dallas Mavericks. Third-straight playoff series defeat and the head coach is fired. What's that you say? Avery Johnson left, not Dirk? True. But let's not be fooled. This whole thing is about to go up in smoke. The head coach will change. They could hire mummified Red Auerbach and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference.

Other than Brandon Bass, this team is only getting older. Jason Kidd, Jason Terry, and Erik Dampier will all still be around next year only because of their massive contracts. Terry can get the job done if he's on a hot streak, but those will be fewer and fewer with each passing day. Kidd will turn 36 next season. He's not fast. Just look at the top point guards in the game othe than Kidd: Tony Parker, Steve Nash, Chris Paul, Chauncy Billips. All lightning quick. Sure, there's Baron Davis and Deron Williams, but Davis isn't in the playoffs and Williams has youth on his side. And Dampier, well, he just isn't mentally tough. You can see the softness in in his eyes every time.

No need to address the rest of the team. Yes, that includes lackluster Jerry Stackhouse. They're all worthless and should feel privileged to have a job. We'll get to Josh "Sir Smoke Alot" Howard in a bit.

That leaves pretty much Dirk Nowitzki to go with Bass. That's two players, not a team. They're starting to look a lot like the Rangers with how they throw away young talent. Gone is their 2007 first-round pick, Nick Fazekas. I was excited when the Mavs drafted him. I think he could be an excellent work-a-day dude. But he was not given the chance. Gone is DeSagana Diop, not that he was doing a whole lot but still, someone who ate up minutes and fought. Gone is Devin Harris, the speedster point guard that carried the Mavs future hopes for championship entering this past season. Even gone is the youthful head coach. And out with the Harris trash is two first-round picks, all for aging Kidd.

Dirk is about to be 30 years old. Not a great age for a superstart looking to win a championship, hopefully multiples, but not terrible. David Robinson was like 60 when he won his first title. Youth was in place. If they Mavs missed the playoffs this year, they would have gotten a lottery pick and who knows what could have happened next year with Avery in his fourth season working with most of this crew. A young Dwayne Wade led an old Mimai Heat team to the title two years ago. You might recall this as the year Wade crapped all over your beloved Mavs in this Finals during the last 3.25 games of the series. An old Shaquille O'Neal was the second-biggest contributor on that title team. All it took was a bold move on Pat Riley's part to dump Stan Van Gundy in favor of himself. Maybe Mark Cuban should try the same thing since he apparently thinks he knows just as much as Avery about basketball.

Maybe not, but I don't think it's any coincidence that there is rumor of the Mavs grabbing Stan's brother Jeff Van Gundy for next season.

As promised, my take on Josh Howard. He's turned into nothing overwhelmingly special. But I also think he's a product of what I consider the Mavs biggest setback during Avery period. Though Johnson is a wonderful young coaching mind, he's too green. He was too buddy-buddy with many of the guys. He played with many of them just before his retirement. He'll learn to stop that, but he used the Dallas gig to learn that lesson. For any dynasty hopes, the Mavs needed a head coach to take over for Don Nelson with one or two head coaching gigs under his belt. Cuban chose to allow Avery to use the Mavs as his guinea pig. He'll have plenty of success later in his long coaching career. For Dirk, this is it -- which is why he so frustrated. It's not his fault he got caught up in Cuban's mess.

Howard was a young, talented player that needed a lot of discipline and guidance. He could have had it under Nellie, but Nellie didn't stay long enough. Instead, what he got was a bad influence of a friend in Marquis Daniels (who was shipped out), a close friend in Harris (who was shipped out), and a soft-hearted uncle in Avery (who was shipped out). See a trend here? It's no wonder his game regressed and didn't develop the mental toughness to raise his game in the fourth quarter. He's not a hardened invidual. He'll have to be now to survive. He may end up being a good player again, maybe make an All-Star team or two. But he can't do that in Dallas. Too much has gone wrong. Too much disjointedness.

In the end, Avery getting fired on Wednesday is a pivital moment. 1) It is symbolic of how Cuban has built his franchise the wrong way. 2) It is a obvious crossroad in Dirk's career. It's up to him whether to demand a trade to a contender -- where I promise he will thrive -- or suffer under the iron fist of Cuban for the remainder of his basketball life. And 3) It is springboard to a brilliant coaching career for Avery Johnson, who will never return to Dallas except to beat the living snot out of the Mavericks every time comes back coach against them.