Seven thoughts on the seventh day…
1) Want to appreciate the team baseball played by the San Diego Padres? Take a second this afternoon to watch how the other half plays. The visiting Arizona Diamondbacks are a cozy example of everything that can go wrong for a big league team.
Bad luck. Bad games. Bad personnel decisions. And a team that, in the end, becomes rotten to the core.
Kirk Gibson is 3-9 as the Diamondbacks' manager
Arizona pinned their hopes on a top-end rotation featuring Brandon Webb, Dan Haren and Edwin Jackson. They totally ignored the glaring problem of the past three seasons, a bullpen without a closer, middle man or specialist. They counted on young players Mark Reynolds, Chris Young and Justin Upton to mature.
How’d that work out for you, Diamondbacks?
Webb hasn’t pitched all year, felled by the same type of mysterious arm ailment that has shelved the Padres’ Chris Young for so long. The bullpen kept on blowing leads and giving up ballgames, at a rate which would even make Brandon Villafuerte shudder in shame.
But most important of all, the young Snakes have slithered into their own crawlspaces without any semblance of teamwork. Watch Arizona bat with runners in scoring position. A productive out is nowhere to be found, unless someone is lucky enough to hit a fly ball to the wall. It’s strikeout or glory for these free-swinging DBacks, and mostly it’s strikeout.
Kirk Gibson, the man who famously turned around the attitude of the ‘88 Dodgers in the team’s first spring training game, is now the interim manager for Arizona. Gibson has to feel like Tom Berenger in The Substitute. How do you change the culture of a team that doesn’t care? If he overturned the postgame spread, these lowly Snakes would just eat off the floor.
Six more topics after the jump, including the Padres’ schedule advantage and the relativity of luck:
2)
It’s one thing to be handed a favorable schedule, and another thing to take advantage of the opportunity. As the Padres open the second half by stretching out their lead in the NL West, consider how they have done so:
- This weekend, each of the other three NL West hopefuls are facing a trial by fire. The second place Giants have moved up two spots in the division by handling the Mets (an NL East contender) at home. The Dodgers have faced St. Louis in the sweltering heat of Missouri and melted like a Popsicle. The Rockies have battled NL Central leading Cincinnati. And the Padres have faced a 34-57 Diamondbacks team twice at home.
- Interleague: the Padres 4 1/2 game gap over the Dodgers is the direct result of a five-game lead in interleague play. San Diego went 9-6 against the AL, while the Dodgers were 4-11. The Padres played Seattle (twice), Toronto, Baltimore and Tampa Bay. The Dodgers played the Angels (twice), the Yankees, Red Sox and Detroit.
- Divisional: the Padres are only in third place when it comes to intradivisional action. The Dodgers are 23-6 (!) against the NL West, followed by the Rockies (21-16), then the Padres (18-15). The Giants are just 9-20 against the NL West, 41-21 against the rest of MLB.
Is the schedule unbalanced? Yes. Unfair? Not really, all these things are cyclical. And once again, you’ve got to win the winnable games you are given to play.
The Padres are doing exactly what they need to do right now: take advantage of the weak sisters of the NL (and there are plenty) to build a cushion heading into September. Then, even if the Dodgers and Rockies make a move when the NL West gets back to intradivisional play, there will be some margin for error.
3) It’s easy and natural to write about the resurgence of the Padres offense given their results over the past eight games. Yes, the team has hit .315 over that time, scoring 57 runs (to offset the 41 they’ve allowed). And perhaps, the team will fulfill the prophecies of Scott Hairston and really start to rake in the second half.
But shouldn’t the Padres hit homers when it’s 99 degrees outside and the ball is flying (Washington)? Or in Coors Field? Or on a hot weekend in San Diego against a really crappy Arizona pitching staff?
Answer: yes, yes and yes.
I say the Padres offense is no different than it was before. As the weather heats up, the stats go up, but the players are the same and the results will generally match the players.
Matthew Affleck: so close, and yet so far away
4) When does winning $500,000 constitute the worst day of your life? When your name is Matthew Affleck, and your $500K prize is a bitter reminder of what should have been.
Affleck was among 27 players battling yesterday to become the November Nine for this year’s World Series of Poker main event. With fifteen players remaining, Affleck had one of the top chip stacks in the tournament. Then, in the biggest hand of his life, he set up an opponent for the kill.
On a 7-9-10 flop, Affleck’s opponent (Jonathan Duhamel) checked, and Affleck fired a bet of 5 million chips, about 1/3 of his stack. Duhamel called. The turn was a queen. Duhamel checked, and Affleck pushed all in for 11 million more.
Duhamel went into the tank (poker parlance for deep thought) for over five minutes. While I’ve never been at this stage of the WSOP main event, I am familiar with the thought process that goes on here. At this point, with one card to come, there’s little thought about pot odds or probabilities. The question is a simple one, but a question with life-changing consequences: am I behind or ahead?
Duhamel, by the way, held pocket jacks.
If Duhamel thought he was ahead, he would need to put almost all his chips into the pot to back his guess. If wrong, he’s going to be walking home in 15th place in the main event, so close to the final table and yet so far away. If he thought he was behind, he would have to fold. Even with an open-ended straight draw, Duhamel could be absolutely crushed here.
He could be against a made straight and drawing dead (unlikely). He could be against a set, overpair or two pair, and have ten outs (two jacks, four eights, and four kings), with just one pull on the deck.
In the end, Duhamel decided he had the best hand and called the bet. He was wrong. Affleck had pocket aces, and Duhamel had one card to come, with an 80% chance of being wiped out of the tournament.
Instead an eight fell on the river, and Affleck was the 15th place finisher. Duhamel is the chip leader going to the final table, where first place will win over $8.9 million.
Weeks of tense play, grinding out pot after pot in the Main Event, living without proper sleep, food, everything…and in the end, it comes down to being punished for someone else’s bad decision. Bummer to Matthew Affleck.
Of course, he’s got $500,000 to drown his sorrows.
5)
Lady Luck is a bipolar bitch with an axe to grind against the world. Or my best friend.
Thinking about Matthew Affleck leads me into a familiar place: the relativity of luck.
Is Affleck lucky, or unlucky? After all, he finished in 15th place out of 7,319 entrants. Only 747 players cashed in the Main Event, everyone else went home with a $10,000 receipt of their failure.
$500,000 sounds pretty nice to me right now. If I could play poker and win $500K, I’d feel pretty lucky. To get to the final 27 players, Affleck had to have good luck along the way.
But to be in a singular moment when you have your opponent bent over the chopping block, the axe waiting to fall, and to have the blade bounce back and cut your own head off…that’s unlucky. To have the opportunity not just to win the Main Event, but all of the sponsorships, endorsements, etc that come with it…all washed away because your opponent made a bad call and got away with it…that’s bonafide bad fortune.
At least I think so.
6)
Jake's car is a total wreck. Lucky guy.
More relativity of luck: my neighbor’s son got into an auto accident a couple of weeks ago. The broken and dented remains of his car are sitting in their driveway. Jake was on the freeway in the #2 lane when a car in the fast lane swerved into him. Missed him in the blind spot. Jake took corrective action, but he couldn’t slide to his right…there was another car there.
In his reverse correction, the offending auto hit Jake’s car on the left side, sending him careening across the other four lanes of traffic. Near the slow lane, a third car T-boned him from the right side.
Jake doesn’t have a car anymore, but he can borrow one from his parents. In the chaos of an auto wreck like this, everyone’s got their own story, and it will be up to the police to determine fault. No matter how innocent he might have been in the whole affair, Jake’s insurance is likely to skyrocket.
But he walked away from the accident and wasn’t badly hurt, just shaken up.
You know what everyone said to Jake? You’re so lucky, it could have been much worse.
If Jake was lucky, wouldn’t that car in the fast lane have missed him altogether?
7) May good fortune smile on you today, in whatever form it takes. If I’m lucky, you’ll enjoy this column and share it with your friends on Twitter and Facebook!
Craig Elsten -
Chainsaw -
