Sports – Mental Zoomies

Deserve’s Got Nothin’ To Do With It

Fun week for NFL-based popularity contests. In the span of just a couple of days, we have one person getting an award they probably didn’t deserve, another NOT getting an award he almost certainly did… and people losing their shit about both.

For those not up on their American football (please don’t call it “sportsball” or “hand-egg”, I’m begging you), the two cases are:

Cleveland Browns’ rookie quarterback Shedeur Sanders, who played in less than half his team’s games, and was… how shall we put this?… “a work in progress” even when did play, was selected as a reserve for the NFL’s Pro Bowl (festivities). Think “All-Star Game”, except it’s not a game of 11-on-11 football, but a skills competition and some 7-on-7 flag football.
Long-time New England Patriots’ head coach Bill Belichick, who guided the Patriots to 6 Super Bowls, was NOT selected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first appearance on the ballot.

For those who don’t follow the NFL, the Pro Bowl has kind of been a running joke for a while now. Even when it was still a “real” game of football, nobody took it all that seriously because a) it’s held at the end of the season and everyone’s ready to take the pads off and relax and b) nobody wants to blow-out an ACL and fuck up their career trajectory because they were going all-out in an exhibition game. Also, it used to at least be a free trip to Hawaii, and now it’s just played wherever the Super Bowl is, so — surprise, surprise — dudes weren’t lining up for a trip to San Francisco on a Tuesday in February.

(I mean, if you want a barometer of how seriously the game is taken, during one Pro Bowl, NFC center Jeff Saturday lined up for THE OTHER TEAM so he could snap the ball to his long-time teammate Peyton Manning, who was playing for the AFC.)

The point is, SEVERAL of the game’s stars pass on the Pro Bowl every year, and the league has to scramble to fill the slots. It’s the definition of business as usual. This time around, they took Shedeur Sanders, who… all fluffery aside… ranked 40th in QBR (ESPN’s attempt to create a one-number stat for QB performance). 32 teams… came in 40th… math doesn’t care about your feelings.

BUT… what Shedeur Sanders does have is “brand recognition”. First, he’s the son of NFL Hall of Famer/sometimes-TV-analyst/college coach/cowboy hat aficcionado Deion Sanders, one of the best to play the game. He’s also got history in that he had a weird NFL draft cycle in 2025– this time last year people were talking about him as not just the first QB taken, but a possible candidate to be taken #1 overall… and he ended up falling to the 5th round. So multiple teams that NEEDED quarterbacks (including my hometown Steelers) passed on him… more than once. So he’s a guy whose career people have been following with interest, regardless of his stats line looks like.

So… they gave the kid a spot because he might draw some eyeballs that luminaries such as Geno Smith or Marcus Mariota might not draw. And on THAT level, so what? The Pro Bowl Mid-Week Spectacle For Degenerate Gamblers To Wager On, Presented By FanDuel is an entertainment product, so… give the people something that might entertain them. Not that big a deal.

The only place I maybe push back a LITTLE is that there’s a body of Hot Takes from Browns’ fans and people who thought Shedeur got a raw deal back at the draft that are positioning this as a Vindication(tm). Indeed, that Shedeur has Proven The Haters Wrong(tm). Now, I don’t really have any animosity toward the kid outside the confines of the Steelers-Browns rivalry, and Shedeur himself has handled his selection with nothing but graciousness. But I mean… come on. Is that what we’re doing now?

Definitionally, vindication isn’t going to be found throwing flag football touchdowns in a game that’s going to be forgotten the second the whistle blows. Vindication is going to be found by coming back in 2026, starting 17 games, and completing 60 or 65 percent of his passes. If he does that, then yeah… THAT’S vindication. If he doesn’t do that, “Shedeur Sanders, Former Pro Bowler” may end up just being an interesting Jeopardy! question or a chyron on a Toronto Argonauts broadcast.

So now… Bill Belichick.

Much as it pains me to say it, if Bill Belichick isn’t a Hall of Fame coach, nobody is. And pass-fail, there’s a pretty clear case to be made that he should’ve been a first-ballot selection. Six Super Bowl rings, 302 career wins (3rd all time behind Don Shula and George Halas)… there’s really not much more you can do as a coach.

But still… some of the outrage feels a little over the top. He’s almost certainly getting in eventually. (In fact, I’ve got 20 bucks that says the NFL not-too-subtly attempts to whip the votes for him next year just to make sure this doesn’t remain an ongoing story.) He just didn’t make it this time.

First, there ARE blemishes on Belichick’s career. There’s Spygate, where he was sending Patriots’ personnel to record opponents’ practices so they could decipher their sideline signals, which is… not to put too fine a point on it… illegal. The Patriots were fined and had to give up draft picks at the time. There’s DeflateGate, where the Patriots would deflate the balls Tom Brady used so he could grip them better. Also illegal (the league DOES let teams set up the balls for their QB, but it’s required to be within a certain range of pressure); also resulted in fines and Brady actually got suspended. Belichick was also generally kind of a grumpy dude when dealing with the press. He’d do shit like list his ENTIRE team as Questionable on the injured report just to keep information from getting out, and… a LOT of really terse, combative answers over the years. Should that keep him out? Probably not… but on a HUMAN level, you can sorta understand Hall of Fame voters — most of whom are sportswriters whose jobs he made harder — meeting the same energy he put out into the world.

There’s even just the possibility that this was a “flaw” inherent to the voting system. Without getting into the deep weeds, there were five candidates on the supplementary ballot they use for coaches, owners, and players who fell off the “modern” ballot, and voters are only allowed to vote for three people. So it’s entirely possible you had a few voters who decided “well, Belichick’s getting in anyway, so maybe I’ll use three of my votes on guys who need the help more”. (The “other guys” were Patriot owner Robert Kraft, and players Ken Anderson, Roger Craig, and L.C. Greenwood.) If enough voters did that, you could easily end up with the “obvious” candidate missing the cut. Not to mention the possibilty of a vote split between Kraft and Belichick — maybe voters just didn’t want to vote for both and make it a Patriot lovefest.

Lastly, I have a personal pet theory: Tom Brady is eligible in 2028. What if Belichick didn’t get in this year because a few voters romanticized the notion of putting them in together? People always wrestle with who was more responsible for the Brady-Belichick Patriots'(tm) success… maybe some voters are ducking the question for two years so they don’t have to decide, so they can put them in as a tandem.

So pass-fail… should Belichick have gotten the votes? Yeah, probably. Does it represent some sort of crime against humanity and the ghost of Walter Camp? I guess YOU can take it that way if you want, but I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over it.

But more forest for the trees… this is what happens when you try to hammer Jell-O to a wall by attempting to put “greatness” in a one-size-fits-all box. It’s true across sports, but everyone’s got their own definition: some people hew pretty close to what the statistical record says (the J. Evans Pritchard method), some people take — for lack of a less sappy word — a more “holistic” view of stardom, and there’s probably even a few people who just vote for what made them feel good as a fan. And that’s OK. First-ballot? Unanimous selection? Whatever, man… over the long haul, the various systems get it right more than they get it wrong, and it gives us something to shout about over beers when there’s nothing else on TV.

Exhuming McCarthy

I’ve been spinning my wheels for most of Sunday, between doom-scrolling the latest news out of Minnesota and checking my work email every half-hour just to see if anyone’s made a determination about whether we’re open or closed tomorrow. So I figured I’d take a few moments to sidebar back into good ol’ Steeler football for a bit, since at some point yesterday, the Steelers announced a verbal agreement with Mike McCarthy to be their next head coach.

So… NOT a young defensive coordinator who’s never been an NFL head coach before. OK, that’s certainly different.

Look, I’m willing to admit my initial reaction was… not positive. Maybe I’d fallen a little too much in love with The Steeler Way(tm), or the gushing praise for the various young coordinators was getting to me, but it felt like a little bit of a letdown. You’re telling me we replaced a guy with a superficially good record whose accomplishments still felt mildly underwhelming with… a guy with a superficially good record whose accomplishments ALSO felt mildly underwhelming?

bUt He’S a YiNzEr, So He’S pRoBaBlY hAd O fRiEs Or SoMeThInG!

And OK… I’ll admit that it also crept into the back of my brain that this is all an exercise in the tail wagging the dog and the Steelers chose their coach so that Aaron Rodgers would be swayed to come back next year. That thought was worth popping an extra Tums before turning in for the night.

But I slept on it, and when I woke up this morning, I found myself not totally hating it IF they’re doing it for the right reasons.

The Steelers are clearly at a crossroads. They haven’t been the same since Ben retired (or really a few seasons before, when he started to decompose in real time), and the efforts to replace him have largely amounted to duct tape and paper clips. (MacGyver!) Steeler Nation can collectively rub one out to Renegade and the idea of “hard-nosed defense” as much as we want, but the truth remains that the NFL is a quarterback-driven league now. Certainly more than it was when Noll, Cowher, or Tomlin was hired.

It is known, khaleesi.

So there’s a mental math out there that says that our next head coach’s job — more than a leader of men, more than a purveyor of colorful quotes, certainly more than someone who knows where Isaly’s used to be — is to find our next franchise quarterback and set that kid up for success for the next decade. Unless he accidentally stumbles the team into the Super Bowl while doing so, ANYTHING else is secondary. I would argue the next guy could have three losing seasons, get fired, and if the QB position is in a good spot for the next guy… that’s still a success.

As an aside, at this point I’m agnostic whether The Kid is to be Will Howard, drafting someone new, or throwing a bag at Malik Willis and hoping he can be turned into the new Sam Darnold/Baker Mayfield reclamation success. Just so long as we’re not living of the purgatory of being Linked To Kirk Cousins any more.

Looking at it through that more task-oriented lens… Mike McCarthy is probably an acceptable pick for the moment. He’s generally regarded as a solid offensive mind, and he did oversee MOST of Aaron Rodgers’ career development (though you have to be fair and mention that he did not draft Rodgers; he inherited him). Much as we might fetishize the idea of Three Coaches In Modern History, and how some unknown New Toy Syndrome coordinator might sound exciting, how is a novice coach supposed to build a franchise QB when he still has to figure out his own stuff first?

(Though… I wouldn’t mind more of a hotshot young guy as OC, so that maybe there’s a transition path and maybe some continuity beyond McCarthy’s years. If you could maybe get that Scheelhaase kid from the Rams to bite on upgrading from “pass game coordinator” to OC… maybe that’s worth pursuing. Best of both worlds.)

So… maybe it’s best to do something different. Maybe we don’t need the right man for the next two decades, maybe we need the right man for this moment, and (gulp) maybe that’s Yinzer Mike. Don’t get attached; he’s here to get the QB position right and then he’s moving on. If he has success and sticks around after that… OK; if he turns the keys over to the Fifth Coach In Modern History in better shape than he found it, that’s ALSO an acceptable outcome.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Without $300M Media Deals

So, it was shaping up as kind of a fun off-season. It looked like the Pittsburgh Pirates were actually TRYING for once. Gregory Soto, Ryan O’Hearn, Brandon Lowe… OK, they weren’t bringing in perennial all-stars, but they immediately upgraded the Pirates’ roster better. And there were whispers that more moves were still on the way. It looked like the front office had finally gotten the message that it was time to put up or shut up.

And then… Kyle Tucker to the Dodgers. Four years… $240M.

That’s right. $60M a year for a guy who’s certainly GOOD (the 4.6 WAR he put up in 2025 is the lowest since becoming a full-time starter), but I’m not sure there’s too many people who think of Tucker as a “face of the franchise” type of player. But hey, the Dodgers have the money and want a few more toys, so that’s what’s going to happen.

And all of the sudden, as a Pirate fan, it feels like being thrown in a cold shower. Fuck you for daring to even hope things could be better. Fuck you for caring at all as a fan. Your team exists merely for the Dodgers (and a few other teams) to have someone to play against, and to develop players to fill their shopping list when they have an opening. And that’s just how it’s going to be.

Look, I know Bob Nutting gets a lot of heat for being cheap, and that’s absolutely PART of the problem. “Sell the team, Bob!” Yeah, yeah, yeah… makes for a clever slogan and earns some cheap points, I suppose. Put it on a T-shirt, make a few bucks. But guess what. Bob Nutting can sell the team tomorrow, and whatever Imaginary Friend people have concocted to “Save the Team” isn’t going to magically make the Pirates’ local media deal $200-250M more lucrative. If teams can outspend you to the point where you can’t even make a profit (these teams are still businesses, after all), and then just throw in another $100M for shits and giggles… while I don’t feel SORRY for Bob Nutting, I do feel sorry for the fans who get sold a bill of goods year after year.

I’ve had enough of being gaslit about how broken a system is in the “real” world, don’t need it in my sports fandom too, thanks. I look at the NFL and NHL delivering a compelling product even with a salary cap, and if I say “why can’t baseball just do THAT?” I get an army of scolds asking me “wHy Do YoU sUpPoRt ThE bILlIoNaIrEs?” I don’t. I support ME as a FAN, being offered an entertainment product that isn’t a fucking joke. I don’t care how the billionaires who own the teams and the millionaire who play for them — ALL of whom make more money than I’m going to make in my working lifetime — divide the money. (Though as an aside, I think they all need to do better by the guys in the minors.)

At some point, fuck it. Either institute a salary cap — yes, with a FLOOR too so that Cheap-Ass Bob Nutting has to invest in the product — or just dissolve MLB and have the Dodgers play the Savannah Bananas 162 games a year. They’ll get the spectacle they want and the rest of us can stop caring about an entertainment product that clearly doesn’t care about us as fans.

Requiem For The Standard

I look at Mike Tomlin’s departure from the Pittsburgh Steelers after 19 years the same way I look at divorce. Not every story has a villain; not every divorce ends in cheating, abuse, or other dramatic acrimony. Sometimes people just grow apart; so too with football coaches, teams, and their fan bases.

I think in today’s “hot take” culture, it’s easy to fish for the extreme take: “Tomlin sucks; good riddance” vs. the scolding “be careful what you wish for, Steeler fans, you just got it”. But I think with the truth is somewhere in the middle — Tomlin was a decent coach, but I think it’s a fair criticism that complacency just set in, and at SOME point, something was going to have to change. Whether this off-season is the right or the wrong time to pull the pin on that grenade… I guess we’re going to find out.

The good is right up there in the record books: zero losing seasons in a 19-year career. Some people kinda brush that off, but yes, that is an achievement. 31 out of 32 teams end every season disappointed, but the Steelers never felt IRRELEVANT on his watch — some organizations can’t even say that. If Tomlin ought to be dinged for the years he underachieved with a 12 or 13-win team, he probably ought to earn some praise for the years the Steelers looked like a 5 or 6 win team on paper and he somehow navigated them to respectability. And dudes LOVED to play for him. I don’t think that makes a difference for STAR players, who just want to get paid as much as possible, but it when it came to signing veteran depth guys, it’s a competitive advantage I think we may come to miss. I’m not sure Pittsburgh is as much of a “destination” without Tomlin at the helm. (Especially not if you read those NFL player surveys that rank the Steelers toward the bottom of the league in terms of facilities and organizational culture.)

But the warts are also equally evident. The most obvious is the recent playoff record — it’s not just that we went 0-7 in recent playoff memory, but few of those games even felt competitive. Weird choices in game management — playcalling, clock management, and such — brushed off with some Tomlinism that didn’t really explain the thought process that went into it. The Steelers managed to play down to the level of at least one inferior opponent per season; so much so that the fanbase collectively seemed to fear the trap game against some 3-9 team more than playing the Ravens. Every opposing tight end in the league probably circled us on the calendar because we seemed to be incapable of covering one properly. (Though… I suppose that complaint even goes back to Cowher. ALFRED F’ING PUPUNU.)

And for a guy who brought the world “we do not live in our fears”, the Steelers sure feel like a team that’s been playing fearfully in recent years: playing NOT to lose, rather than to win. The pathological aversion to throwing to the middle of the field (BUBBLE SCREENS… BUBBLE SCREENS FOR EVERYONE!). Going too conservative, too early when we had a lead, letting teams claw their way back in it. The “keep the play in front of you, give up small chunks, and hope you can get a splash play or the offense makes a mistake before they string 12 plays together” defense. With the Cowher Steelers and even the EARLY Tomlin years, we didn’t play that way. We played to win; sometimes we even stepped on a team’s neck and ran it up on them. If this move is an acknowledgement that we need to get back to that mentality… I’m here for it.

Of course the elephant in the room is the ONE thing that can’t be solved by letting your coach walk: this is a quarterback-driven league, and we haven’t had a quarterback for a good chunk of that 0-7 run. The thing we don’t really know (because there’s not any Hard Knocks footage to dissect) is how to apportion the blame: how much is Tomlin’s fault for his choices of coordinators and coaching, and how much of that is the front office burying their head in the sand during Ben’s decline phase and not creating a more graceful transition?

(Hey, remember when Lamar Jackson was just sitting there and we took Terrell Edmunds instead? Pepperidge Farms remembers.)

So what comes next?

For the Steelers, if they stick with the recipe, it’s going to be a young defensive coordinator who’s never been a head coach before. I would argue that the game has changed and we need an offensive mind, but given that they’re 3-for-3 on coaching hires during my lifetime, I’m willing to trust the process. Though, I kinda like Brian Flores, so if they’re willing to be a little flexible on the “never coached before” check-box, I don’t think that’s a bad outcome.

I have heard a few people say “well, who would any coach want the Steelers’ job?” You mean the one job that if you get it right, you might get two decades of job security because it’s a old-school family-run organization that thinks coaching churn is embarrassing in some way? WHO INDEED? But I’d also say that the Steelers have some pieces in place to be a decent team… it’s just that they’re missing the ONE piece that’s most important. Yeah, the Ravens probably have an edge because Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry are pretty plug-and-play, and the Giants might be intriguing if you’re a coach who believes in Jaxson Dart… but I don’t think the Steelers represent some black hole like the Browns or Titans still largely are.

As for Tomlin? Does he want to do TV? Were they actually going to fire him, and “walking away” was a negotiated exit? Does he secretly want to coach again, but just wanted out of Pittsburgh? Is he going to lean into his resemblance to Omar Epps and do a reality show where they Freaky Friday each other’s lives, with Epps coaching a football team and Tomlin going to acting auditions?

It’s not that I don’t care; it’s more that Bill Cowher’s departure cured me of my interest in speculating too aggressively about guys’ reasons for stepping away. If you remember Cowher leaving, everyone was freaking out because How Could He Walk Away At The Height Of A Dynasty?(tm) And then we learned several years later it was probably to spend time with his wife, who it turned out was battling cancer, but he just kept that part of his life private. So if Tomlin says he wants to step away… HOWEVER that might have come about behind the scenes or what his future plans are… I guess that’s what the man’s doing. As a wise man once said, “we want volunteers, not hostages”, and that includes the head coach.

So… thanks for 19 great years, Coach T. It’s been a fun ride, I hope you have a good… break, retirement, whatever this ends up being… and we’ll see you if and when you wish to be seen.

Noooooo Canada

After weeks of waiting, it’s finally here… Matt Canada Firing Day!

For those who don’t follow football, Matt Canada was, until today, the offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers. His passing offense — if you can even call it that — has been one of the least imaginative, most conservative in the league. There are almost zero deep passes, and even most of the short passes are to the sidelines; it’s almost like he’s allergic to the middle of the field. If that’s not easy enough to gameplan against, he also runs a bunch of slow-developing plays — bubble screens, jet sweeps — that get broken up behind the line of scrimmage for a loss. To be fair, the bread-and-butter running game has been fairly competent, but in today’s NFL, if ALL you do is run the football, you don’t go very far. We’re light-years removed from the “three yards and a cloud of dust” game of years past.

If you want to put some stats to it: the Steelers were 28th in both points and total yards during Canada’s tenure, and NEVER had a 400-yard offensive performance. In 2023 in particular, they’ve been outgained offensively in EVERY game they played. (Yet, they’re somehow still 6-4… which is a bit of a minor miracle, honestly.)

In short, Canada has widely been viewed amongst Steeler Nation as sucking at his job, pretty much since the day he was hired. But he had thus far managed to escape much in the way of accountability. In 2021, it was “Ben Roethlisberger no longer has the arm to throw deep, so they have to manage the playbook to what he’s capable of”. In 2022, it was “Kenny Pickett is a rookie, they’re easing him into things”. But now, in 2023, there’s no more built-in excuses and the offense looks as bad as ever… maybe even worse. And so today, the axe finally fell.

Now, I’m not going to pretend Matt Canada was the ONLY problem with this team. Kenny Pickett, the aforementioned quarterback, has been maddeningly inconsistent since being handed the starting job. Enough so that there are doubts creeping in over whether he can really be the franchise QB they hoped they were drafting. Maybe it’s not a fair comparison, but C.J. Stroud managed to hit the ground running this year, and it’s not clear the Texans’ personnel at the other 10 offensive positions are any better than the Steelers’. Sometimes QB’s have the “it” factor; sometimes they don’t.

Speaking of those other positions, they’re not immune from criticism either. The offensive line has had its ups and downs as well: they had a lot of turnover of personnel over the last few years and the charitable explanation is they’re still meshing; the less-charitable explanation is they signed the wrong guys. They’ve also struggled to find good wide receivers ever since Antonio Brown’s departure. Diontae Johnson puts up superficially good numbers and is certainly a success for a 3rd-rounder, but seems to disappear in big moments; George Pickens is a physical freak, but has a tendency to sulk and check out if his number’s not getting called. Calvin Austin has intriguing speed and elusiveness in the slot, but he also lost his entire rookie year to injury, so he’s still in learning mode. Allen Robinson… exists. So some of this is a personnel issue as much as a coaching one.

(The sole bright spot has been the emergence of running back Jaylen Warren. He’s a 5’8″ undrafted free agent, his physical tools don’t really leap out, but when he gets running north-south, he’s like a cannonball out there. And his stiff-arms are becoming the stuff of legend.)

But it starts with an offense gameplan that has been both predictable and unimaginative. Every. Single. Week. You can’t run an NFL offense when the opposing team knows your entire offense runs within 5 yards of the line of scrimmage. When a fairly team-first guy like Najee Harris admits to a locker room full of reporters that opposing teams pretty much know what’s coming… a new coordinator is probably the first and easiest thing you can do to try and fix it.

Among other things, they had to do it for the sake of the defense. The Steelers’ defense is actually pretty good this year, and T.J. Watt is a generational talent that they just signed to a huge contract. Since a 30-7 loss to the Texans back in Week 4, they haven’t allowed more than 19 points to an opponent. That should be enough to win football games in today’s NFL… if you can couple them to an offense that doesn’t three-and-out almost every possession. The Steel Curtain Steelers of the 70s would’ve struggled if their offense could never get them off the field for a breather.

As tenuous as their position in the standings is, they also had to do it for the standings. They’re still at 6-4, and there’s a few traditionally good teams having down years — Buffalo just fired THEIR offensive coordinator; Cincinnati just lost quarterback Joe Burrow for the year. The playoffs aren’t unrealistic if they can get the offense to play slightly better. Super Bowl? OK, probably not. But you gotta try, right? “Any given Sunday?”

Lastly, I’d argue they had to do it to force an honest reckoning regarding Pickett. Right now there’s this debate over how much of the offensive struggles were Canada’s offense, and how much were just that Pickett isn’t that good. In fact, I think a lot of the fanbase WANTS it to be Canada’s fault so they don’t have to reckon with the possibility we have to go back to the drawing board at quarterback. Admittedly, that’s probably a deeper dive than I wanted to do here, but it’s a question that needs to be resolved. And next year is going to be a deep draft for quarterbacks, so there’s a bit of a feeling that if Pickett ISN’T the guy, 2024 would be a good time to draft some competition at the position. If pushing Canada out the airlock is what creates the conditions for really scrutinizing Pickett’s strengths and weaknesses, that’s probably a net positive as well.

The only problem with all of this is that it’s pretty hard to make sweeping changes mid-season, especially when you’re mostly doing it with the same personnel that are already in place. Maybe they can go get a splashy outside hire in the offseason, but for now the Steelers already announced that running backs coach Eddie Faulkner will be the interim OC with QB coach Mike Sullivan as the play-caller. So maybe those two are sitting on a treasure-trove of plays they’re just dying to call (in my head-canon, I’ve already decided it’s a vintage Trapper Keeper labeled PLAYS MATT CANADA WOULDN’T LET ME RUN), but chances are it will look more like incremental tweaks to what already exists.

But all of that is for down the road. Today, the fans got what they wanted. Even if there’s a little undercurrent of “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it”.

The Next Great Japanese Import

Even if you’re not much of a baseball fan, you’ve probably heard of Shohei Ohtani — one of the best batters in baseball, one of the best pitchers in baseball (though he’s recovering from an injury), and the ONLY guy who’s been doing both at a high level. And six years into his MLB career, probably the best baseball player ever to come over from Japan.

Well, tomorrow, the bidding war begins for the next big thing from Japan. Get ready to hear a lot of talk about Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

To be fair, he’s not the “next Ohtani” because he’s “just” a pitcher; as far as we know, he’s nothing special with a bat. But calling Yamamoto “just a pitcher” is like saying Beethoven “wrote a few tunes”.

In fact, Yamamoto has been far and away the best starting pitcher in Japanese baseball the past three years running. Consider these numbers that look like something out of a videogame:

2021 – 18-5, 1.39 ERA. 193.2 innings, 124 hits, 40 walks, 206 strikeouts.
2022 – 15-5, 1.68 ERA. 193 innings, 137 hits, 42 walks, 205 strikeouts.
2023 – 17-6, 1.13 ERA, 171 innings, 119 hits, 28 walks, 176 strikeouts.

Each of those seasons won Yamamoto both the Triple Crown (leading the league in ERA, wins, and strikeouts) and the Sawamura Award (the equivalent of the Cy Young Award). He’s also had 5 All-Star appearances, 2 MVP awards, 2 Gold Gloves, and he’s also thrown two no-hitters. And if you want a little extra, he held his own at the World Baseball Classic earlier this year as well, against some of the world’s best players.

And the best part… Yamamoto only just turned 25 in August, so theoretically he’s still got some of his best baseball ahead of him.

But that means we need to talk about “the posting system”. In order to keep the peace between MLB and Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB — the Japanese major leagues) and keep MLB from using their deep pockets to sign players at will, there’s a formal system for allowing players to come over. If an NPB player who hasn’t reached free agency yet wants to come to MLB, he has to seek his team’s permission to leave, and if the team agrees they “post” his rights for MLB teams to bid on. There’s a negotiation period of 45 days, after which the player signs with an MLB team, and the Japanese team that owned the player’s rights (in this case, the Orix Buffaloes) would get a one-time payment for releasing him. If no one signs the player (obviously not a concern for Yamamoto, but has happened for some lesser players), they can return to their NPB team with no harm done.

(A little bit of history, Until 2018, it used to be the rights auction would come first — the MLB teams would submit bids to the Japanese team for the right to negotiate with the player, and ONLY the team that won that auction would be eligible to sign the player. So the player didn’t really have full free agency; they basically got told which MLB team they would be allowed to play for. One side effect was this gave the MLB team all the leverage when negotiating a contract because the player’s only Plan B was staying in Japan for another year. As of 2018 they changed the system to give the players more negotiating power — the player can now negotiate freely with any/all MLB teams, and the posting fee is merely a percentage of the contract he actually signs for.)

So let’s put some estimated numbers to it. To keep the math simple, let’s say Yamamoto signs for $200M total (it’s the total value of the whole contract, so if he signs a 6 or 7 year deal, that’s easily possible). The posting fee is 20% of the first 25M ($5M), 17.5% of the second 25M ($3.75M), and 15% of everything over $50M ($22M in this case). So on a $200M contract… over 5+ years, that could happen… the posting fee to Orix would be $31.875M. So you can see why even though Orix would probably love to keep Yamamoto, they probably wouldn’t mind $30M+ in their bank account either. Especially not when he’s a seven-year veteran and would be eligible to leave as a free agent in a few years anyway.

So what’s team get for that money? Yamamoto’s fastball sits pretty comfortably around 95mph, but he can pump a few extra clicks when he has to. He also has a curve and a split-finger fastball. He throws all three with better-than-average control. He technically has a slider as well which he hasn’t used much, but some people suggest he might start leaning on it a little more in the majors. The fastball-curve-splitter combo mostly offers vertical movement; a slider might be a way to mix in some side-to-side action. He’s also been fairly durable — he pitches deep into games, and I haven’t really been able to find any injury information worth mentioning. Beyond the inherent risk that comes with any pitcher (it’s an unnatural body movement), there’s nothing that pegs Yamamoto as a health risk.

So who’s going to get him? Line up the usual suspects. The New York and LA teams seem like they’d have to be in the mix. Philadelphia is firmly in win-now mode, so they might take a look. Chicago and Boston generally have deep enough pockets, but I’m not sure they’re ready to contend yet. I could see a few of the smaller-market West Coast teams like Seattle and San Francisco try to make a splash because they have some interest in actively courting a Japanese audience. (Seattle in particular tends to keep a few Japanese players on the roster because they’ve cultivated a bit of a Japanese fan base over the years.)

It’s hard to read the tea leaves when Yamamoto just posted today and the bidding doesn’t even open until tomorrow, but it feels like the Mets might have a bit of an edge. Two reasons. First, their owner Steve Cohen is obscenely wealthy and not afraid to spend it, so much so that one of last year’s subplots was other owners complaining that Cohen’s free spending was making them look bad. But there’s also the fact that they signed another Japanese pitcher, Kodai Senga, last year, and Senga has been openly courting Yamamoto to come to New York. (Or as openly as one can do without risking tampering charges.) And there’s also a little culture shock for players coming over, so Yamamoto might appreciate having a fellow countryman already on the roster. If you put a gun to my head today, I’d say the Mets, but there’s a long 45 days ahead of us.

Prime And Punishment

It’s been a busy week in the world of Coach Prime, though if we’re being honest, a) when has it not? and b) isn’t that somewhat by design anyway?

This week’s excitement came in the aftermath of Colorado’s 28-16 loss to UCLA, a game where QB Shedeur Sanders (yes, his son, if you haven’t been following this closely) was sacked 7 times and hit enough other times he had to get an injection of painkillers at halftime. Asked about the state of the offensive line in the post-game press conference, and what he would do to address it, Sanders pere‘s typically colorful response was:

“The big picture, you go get new linemen. That’s the picture, and I’m gonna paint it perfectly.“

This has set off the latest round of “Coach Prime Is Telling It Like It Is And Holding People Accountable” vs. “Coach Prime Is A Disgrace To College Football” on social media. Everyone’s staking out their positions, but there’s an awful lot of posturing and fairly little clarity.

So let’s start with the facts.

First, the line play was bad. “Defense will stipulate”, as the cop shows say. In fact, it’s been bad for most of the season. One of my first-draft points was “how can he run down his line publicly without looking at the game tape first?” but this isn’t the first time this has been an issue, only the most dramatic example. So we’ll let that one slide on by.

There has been some confusion on how many of the players were new transfers vs. how many were holdovers from the previous 1-11 2022 team. I’ve seen detractors dunking on Sanders’ inability to recruit linemen AND supporters claiming that the entire line were holdovers from the previous regime, and the truth is in the middle. Just for factual clarity, it appears there are two returning starters — center Van Wells and left tackle Gerad Christian-Lichtenhan — and the other three starters are part of Deion’s “luggage”. (As are almost all of the reserves.)

So with the facts somewhat established, let’s wander into the forbidden forest of hot takes and opinions. As with a lot of what Sanders has done in his Colorado tenure, I think it’s not so much the message being conveyed as much as it is how he chose to convey it.

First, it’s simply a question of internal vs. external… keep that shit in-house. If you want to tell your players they should be looking for new gigs next year, save it for practice when the cameras are gone. I guarantee Sanders won’t be the first or last coach to have threatened a kid’s spot on the team; but he’s the first I can remember to threaten about 10 of them to a room full of reporters. When you’re sitting in front of a room full of hot mics, a leader protects his people. YES, you can say the line didn’t play well — no sense denying an apparent truth — but you don’t offer up the kids on the o-line as red meat to protect your bruised ego. Feed ’em some platitudes about looking at the film and seeing where we can improve, and get onto the next question.

And OK, I feel like the perception of nepotism has to chafe a little, when mere sentences before, he praised his son Shedeur as “the best quarterback in the country”. And when there was no talk of getting new defensive backs in regard to his other son Shilo getting ejected for targeting after putting his helmet into the chin of a UCLA receiver. At some point it’s gotta get old being told you’re one of 73 Ringos backing up John and Paul.

(OK… maybe Shedeur and Travis Hunter are Lennon-McCartney and Shilo is George Harrison in this analogy. We’ll keep workshopping it.)

But there’s a bigger and arguably more more worrisome issue underlying his comments. It feels like on some level Sanders is abdicating the responsibility to actually COACH the players under his charge. The man has created this image of “Coach Prime”, but apparently, if you don’t protect his kid and make him look good, he’ll just get rid of you and go out and get a new batch of mercenaries to take your place. Which… lest we forget… was the same message he delivered to the players already in the program when he took over, so it’s not like this is a departure for him. Meanwhile, the line’s been bad for weeks; what has Coach Prime done about it other than threaten to kick them out of the program? Maybe he should rebrand as “GM Prime”: he recruits and assembles the roster, and then someone else does the actual work of making his players better.

And this gets into the larger question that goes well beyond Deion Sanders… it’s NIL, it’s the portal, it’s conference realignment…. Where is the ever-shifting balance between “this has become an ‘amateur’ league in name only, and results are all that matter” and “this is still ultimately a developmental league where helping the players improve their skills is still part of what’s being offered”. If this is just NFL Lite, then OK, bring in a new class of free agents and try again, but at that point let’s stop pretending that the NCAA offers anything a professional minor league couldn’t offer equally well if funded adequately. If we’re going to keep propping up the cause of student athletics as the NCAA’s raison d’etre, than I think coaches should have an obligation to stick with the guys they bring in and try to make them better, rather than better-deal them the second adversity — or the UCLA front seven — hits.

Sid Gets An Early Birthday Present, Dubas Gets His Man

It took a month of haggling, but Pens’ Grand Poobah (GM/Director Of Hockey Operations… yeah, I ain’t saying all of that) Kyle Dubas managed to get Sidney Crosby the perfect birthday present… defenseman Erik Karlsson. The deal that’s been rumored since… well, forever… finally came together with Montreal serving as the mystery third team that greased the wheels for a move.

The particulars are:

San Jose also retains $1.5M of Karlsson’s $11.5M contract, but the Pens retain a similar amount of Jeff Petry’s, so from the Pens’ standpoint it evens out.

Pittsburgh’s motivations here are obvious. They’re pretty obviously trying to squeeze one last Stanley Cup out of the Crosby-Malkin-Letang core, and to some extent they don’t care what happens after that because it’s going to involve a major retool. Sid’s retirement will do to this team what the meteor did to the dinosaurs, and we just have to be OK with that. But for those remaining 2-4 years, they add one of the best offensive defensemen in the game, even if he’s at a pretty expensive price tag and doesn’t play a lick of defense. Between this and standing pat with Tristan Jarry in net, they’re going to be leaning into winning a lot of 6-4 games. But still… it does make the Pens a more dynamic offensive team in the short term, and specifically should help the power play, which struggled mightily last year.

And OK, they got rid of almost ALL of Ron Hextall’s bad contracts in the process. For $6M, Petry needed to be a Norris candidate, not a second-pair talent; Granlund was a disastrous trade-deadline acquisition at $5M a year. Rutta ($2.5M) and DeSmith ($1.8M) weren’t horrific overpays, but they’re luxuries when you’re already bumping your head against the cap, as the Pens are. So trading $14M-ish worth of “meh” for one $10M guy who’s likely to be very good… that makes a certain demented amount of sense.

As for the other guys, Hamaliuk has some decent size (6’3″) but hasn’t produced much in the minors, Pitlick could find himself in the mix for the bottom six, but I don’t think either moves the needle much.

The only thing I don’t like a lot is that they only got San Jose to retain $1.5M. When they were talking about retaining $3-4M and making Karlsson a $7.5-8.5M acquisition, that seemed like a more comfortable landing spot. But again, it comes down to “you don’t care what happens after the meteor strikes”. If the wheels come off and Crosby retires at the end of his contract in 2 years… you can probably still ship Karlsson back out. And if you can’t, you blow the whole thing up and he’s the one salary you keep around to get over the minimum salary.

For San Jose, it’s all about paying off the credit card early. Salary-wise, Hoffman and Granlund end up being about the same price as Karlsson today, but Hoffman is done after this year and Granlund after next, whereas Karlsson had four years left. So two years from now, the Sharks will have a mostly clean ledger while the Pens will still be paying Karlsson $10M. And the Sharks get an extra first-round pick. The fact that it’s top-10 protected isn’t that critical; with Karlsson the Pens are a decent bet to make the playoffs anyway. (And I’d add that Hoffman has enough rep as a goal scorer that they might be able to flip him at the deadline and get another pick or two if he has a good first half.)

Montreal is the third team, which mostly represents Jeff Petry having a no-trade clause and not wanting to go to the Sharks. (Two reasons: 1) at age 35 going on 36, he doesn’t want to wait on a rebuild and 2) he’s expressed that he wants to stay closer to his family in… Michigan, I think?). So basically, the Pens traded Petry (plus parts) to Montreal for Hoffman, and then sent Hoffman — who couldn’t refuse the trade — along to San Jose. It’s a little hard to see why Montreal wants Petry, and it wouldn’t even surprise me if they turn around and ship him back out, but Legare (still young enough to have some prospect buzz), DeSmith (in the ballpark of what you pay for a backup goalie), and a decent draft pick in what’s supposed to be a deep 2024 draft make for an OK package to swap one overpriced veteran for another.

My prediction on Petry’s ultimate destination: Detroit. They’re a young team on the rise, they’ve got a young-but-talented defense corps that could use a veteran mentor, and if Montreal retains a little more salary, that could be a good fit. But I’m not some insider… just a gut feeling.

So there it is… after a month of will they or won’t they, the Pens finally get their man, get their salary cap situation under control, and mostly hit reset on the Ron Hextall era. (Don’t mind me, muttering things under my breath in the general direction of Jeff Carter.) Does it make them Cup condtenders? They’re probably at least in the conversation now, but hardly the favorites. Does it make them a better team? Absolutely.

Happy Birthday, Sid!

I Choose You… Who?

Sunday night is the MLB Amateur Draft, and as some of you may have heard, the Pittsburgh Pirates hold the top overall pick. Now, the MLB draft isn’t QUITE the event the NFL Draft is because baseball players aren’t generally the same level of finished product football players are. Realistically, the guys they’re drafting tomorrow will make their first appearance in the big leagues in 2-4 years. So it’s not quite the same level of immediate help, but it’s still important for a team to get the decision right.

Generally, the two best players in this year’s draft are a pair of college players: outfielder Dylan Crews and pitcher Paul Skenes. They’re teammates at LSU, they just won the College World Series, and were the best hitter and pitcher in the country, respectively. (Crews, in particular, won the Golden Spikes Award, which is college baseball’s equivalent of the MVP.) And they’re both viewed as guys with star potential. Position players are generally a safer bet than pitchers because of the risk of arm injuries, but the Pirates need pitching talent more urgently. So, you’d think this would be a straightforward choice between these two guys, right?

Not necessarily.

The problem is that historically, the Pirates tend to be cheap. Though to be fair, it’s evolved from Just Plain Cheap to Strategically Cheap. In the old days, minor leaguers could ask for whatever sort of money they wanted, so the Pirates would pick a guy who wasn’t going to ask for a lot of money over the guy who was more talented. Bryan Bullington, Daniel Moskos, John Van Benschoten… the list is long and somewhat painful. Since 2012, baseball has introduced a “bonus pool” system that’s not a firm salary cap per player, but caps the TOTAL amount of money teams can spend on their minor leaguers. So there’s SOME degree of cost control because the players and their agents know there isn’t an unlimited bucket of money, but the best guys are still going to try and get every penny they can within that range.

And here’s where the “Strategically Cheap” part comes in. The current system assigns every pick a dollar value, and the total dollar values of a team’s picks represents their total pool of money. But that doesn’t mean the team has to spend it that way. So a team can go “over slot” and pay a guy more than the value his draft position was worth, or can go “under slot” and sign a guy cheaper. And in particular, if you sign a guy under slot, that frees up whatever “extra” money was left over to use on other players.

So the Pirates’ recent strategy has been to go under slot on their first-round pick to save money at the top, and then use that on their picks in later rounds. (What that usually means is using that extra money to convince guys who can still go back to college to give up college eligibility and turn pro now.) They still end up spending all their money, so you can’t really accuse them of cheapness in the same way they used to be, but they do tend to be reluctant to pony up for the star player and prefer to spread their money around.

The 2021 draft was a textbook example of this. Henry Davis, a college catcher from Louisville, was not particularly viewed as the best player in the draft. But they were able to get him for about $2M less than his slot, which let them throw extra money at a college lefty (Anthony Solometo) and two high schoolers who had first-round talent but were considering college football scholarships (OF Lonnie White and pitcher Bubba Chandler). Chandler is struggling at A-ball, but the other two guys are doing OK.

To be fair, in 2022 when they picked 4th overall, they actually went about $200k over slot on their first-round pick Termarr Johnson. So it’s not like they’ve NEVER gone over slot. But they do seem to like to spread the risk around.

So that brings us back to Crews and Skenes. The Pirates have about $16M total in their bonus pool, and pick 1-1 is valued at $9.7M. According to the rumor mill, Crews is almost definitely going to ask for above slot (among other things, he’s repped by agent Scott Boras, who tends to negotiate aggressively). Skenes may have to take a discount for the risk associated with pitchers, but nobody sees him signing for much less than slot.

So that’s where Wyatt Langford and Max Clark come into the picture.

Langford, who played left field for the University of Florida, is viewed as the next-best college player, and in a different year might be the frontrunner for the top pick. And you can find a minority of people who think he’s even better than Crews. He actually hit for more power than Crews (28 doubles, 21 homers vs. 16 and 18 for Crews, and that’s with 10 fewer games); Crews just did everything else better — faster, better defense at a tougher position, better overall contact and plate discipline.

Clark is a high school outfielder. Now, high schoolers inherently represent a bigger risk because you’re talking about taking a 17/18-year-old kid and guessing how he’s gonna play when he’s done growing, whereas college guys are closer to finished products physically and just need to improve on the craft of the game. But some people think Max Clark’s physical tools are good enough that he could be better than either Crews OR Langford. IF he pans out, which is admittedly a huge if.

So it’s really a question of Crews at a price over $10M, Skenes probably somewhere around 9 or 9.5, or maybe see if you can sneak Langford or Clark in at $7-8M and hope the LSU guys don’t make you look stupid for doing so.

So where do I think this all lands?

I’ll start by eliminating Clark. There’s been some scuttlebutt that the Pirates are seriously considering him, but even if you want position player over pitcher, I just don’t see it being worth the risk when you have two more refined college bats on the table. (Though if one wants to briefly make the case, it’s that you could get Corbin Carroll-type speed even if his power never develops, and if his power DOES develop, you’ve got a true five-tool guy.)

A month ago, I would’ve thought the Pirates would try to work the angles and gone with Langford. Play up the fact that he hit for more power than Crews and an almost identical OPS, drop some reminders in friendly press ears that Crews’ 2022 season wasn’t nearly as remarkable… it’s a defensible pick and maybe you save an extra million or two for other guys.

But the Pirates’ pitching woes since their hot start in April now have me thinking they’re going to open up the wallet for Skenes. They already lost J.T. Brubaker for the year in spring training. Luis Ortiz and Roansy Contreras have both slid backwards; Contreras is trying to sort himself out in the pen and Ortiz just got sent to AAA. Quinn Priester, the current top pitching prospect in the organization, is in AAA, but is holding his own more than knocking down the door (though to be fair, you can make a case he’s young for the level). Right now, it’s basically Mitch Keller, 43-year-old Rich Hill, and the power of prayer. (And as a cascading effect, the bullpen has been a hot mess, so they could use some starters who can work some quality innings and take pressure off the bullpen.)

To be clear, I don’t think any of these guys represent a horrible misstep. Not even Clark, though I feel like that might be too big a roll of the dice. But I keep coming back to this: if Langford and Crews are 1 and 1A, there’s NO pitcher in this draft… or even the last few drafts… who compares to Skenes. He throws triple-digits without exceptional effort and decent control, and his secondary offerings look pretty close to major-league ready. There’s legit staff ace potential here.

But that’s just the opinion of one fan. Check back in 36 hours or so to see what the guys who actually make the decision think, because that’s the opinion that matters.