By Julie Buehler
There’s fast, powerful, prolific, awesome, unstoppable, remarkable, smart, classy, even badass.
There’s terrible, awful, sorry, undisciplined, horrible, thin, weak, even The Raiders.
There’s the good and the bad in sports and we have a variety of adjectives to describe the varying levels of production and success, failure and futility.
But through a wild week of baseball playoffs, college football upheaval and the first 5 weeks of NFL action, the one word that describes teams who win and separates them from those who can’t is dependable. According to Webster’s, dependable means: able to be trusted to do or provide what is needed: reliable.
But as it were, teams that failed in the postseason or have been schizophrenic in football are anything but “reliable” or “able to be trusted to do what is needed”.
In baseball we saw teams fail to address what was needed and in football teams aren’t even reliably bad, let alone reliably good.
Here’s what we learned in baseball:
You CAN’T depend on the big-time contracts to deliver big-time players. The Angels signed Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton, and Mike Trout to a combined $519 million dollars.. In their first postseason together, they went a combined 3 for 37 with a whopping 4 RBI. That’s Obama-type spending/production ratio.
You CAN’T depend on big arms. The A’s and the Tigers corralled the most attention at baseball’s trading deadline and acquired Jon Lester and David Price, respectively. But in the hot crucible of the one-game playoff, Lester got shelled by the Royals, allowing 6 runs on 8 hits through 7 innings of work. Meanwhile, Price, the 2012 American League Cy Young winner became the first pitcher in baseball history to lose his first 5 post season starts when the Orioles beat the Tigers to sweep the 4th highest payroll in baseball.
You CAN’T depend on a team that amasses the best regular season record to put out the best postseason lineup. The fact that Mike Scioscia was willing to dump $25-million-man Josh Hamilton in the 7 spot after he had just returned from injury told you how much confidence MLB’s longest tenured manager had in his slugger. BUT why he’d play Hamilton at all is a curious decision as the Royals coming to town were a fast, precocious team that plays with a feverish pace. Hamilton is a slug, whose half-hearted swings look more like me in a batting cage than a professional baseball player in the postseason.
On the flip side, you CAN depend on momentum carrying a team through slow-minded competition as the Orioles and Royals did to the Tigers and Orioles respectively.
You CAN depend on playing hard and fast will destroy the competition. The Royals swept the Angels and beat the A’s with 12 stolen bases. No other team in the postseason has more than 2 as of print. Kansas City leads all postseason teams in RBIs and walks as well. So they get on base, then stole bags and pressured the defense into mistakes. It’s a brilliant and fantastically fun form of baseball to watch.
Here’s what we learned in the NFL:
You can’t depend on good teams playing well or even bad teams playing poorly.
The Tennessee Titans put up more points in the first half of their early game than the likes of the Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, New Orleans Saints and all the other top-flight NFL offenses playing. And just when you think they might be a sneaky-decent team, they got carved up by Brian Hoyer and the Cleveland Browns.
This NFL has few teams that have proven themselves to be dependable. One week the Patriots are getting blown out on Monday Night Football and the next, they’re destroying the last unbeaten team in the league, the Cincinnati Bengals, on Sunday Night Football.
One week the New York Giants look lost and are 0-2. 3 weeks later, they look solid and haven’t lost since.
One week the Carolina Panthers are getting destroyed by Steve Smith and the Baltimore Ravens, the next, they storm from behind to beat the Chicago Bears, who continue to swing wildly between impressive and disappointing.
The next sentence I write perfectly illustrates how bizarre a season we’re watching.
The most dependable team in the NFL right now is the San Diego Chargers.
That’s right.
They boast the top scoring defense in the NFL, tied for the longest winning streak in the league, have the first quarter MVP in Philip Rivers, a resurgent veteran in Antonio Gates who has as many touchdown receptions as juggernauts Antonio Brown and Brandon Marshall, and a budding star in Branden Oliver.
But the Chargers have been one of the most undependable teams in the NFL the past decade. So them being the most dependable THIS season illustrates where sports fans find themselves.
Oh, one other thing you CAN depend on: an NHL season full of great hockey leading up to the best postseason in sports.
In the meantime, enjoy the ever changing, ever evolving theater that is the world of sports.
Julie Buehler hosts the Coachella Valley’s most popular sports talk radio show, “Buehler’s Day Off” every day from 3-6 on 1010 KXPS, the valley’s all sports station. She can also be seen every morning between 6-7am on KMIR sharing the coolest stories in sports. She’s an avid gym rat, slightly sarcastic and more likely to recite Steve Young’s career passing stats than American Idol winners. Tune in M-F 3-6 pst at www.team1010.com or watch “Buehler’s Day Off” on Ustream and KMIR.com for her sports reports.
