A Players-Only Meeting is a Good Thing (not for any results that will stem from it, but for the reality it reflects)

In my other blogging life, I write about hockey.  As a fan of the Pittsburgh Penguins, I am accustomed to professional sports franchises calling players-only meetings.   Over the past few seasons, in fact, I think I can state, factually, that I can’t even count the number of times Pittsburgh’s NHL franchise has held “players-only” meetings.

For the Pittsburgh Penguins, “players-only” meetings come with the territory of being a team that’s expected to win the Stanley Cup every season.  (For a team with generational talents Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, simply contending for the Cup is not sufficient.   Pittsburgh’s hockey team is expected to end each season as the best in the NHL.)   And, so, over the past few seasons, this hockey fan has become relatively numb to the Penguins and their penchant for holding players-only meetings.

Oh, the Penguins are in a bit of a slump in midseason?  Time for a players-only meeting.

Oh, the Penguins aren’t performing to expectations at the start of the season?  Time for a few players-only meetings.

Oh, something’s gone wrong with the power play, the penalty kill, or the team’s lost a few consecutive games?   

Someone on the Penguins—whether it’s captain Sidney Crosby or alternate captain Brooks Orpik or veteran Craig Adams or reformed pest Matt Cooke—typically calls for a players-only meeting when the Penguins fail to perform to expectations.

As a fan of hockey and baseball, I know the sports are different.  I also know “meetings” aren’t a cure-all.  When Kris Letang and Sidney Crosby were both out of the line-up this winter, the Penguins weren’t the same team they were with those two players in the line-up (this is a simple statement of fact).   “Players-only” meetings are not a cure for a lack of talent, the right players in the wrong roles, or the wrong players in the wrong roles.   “Players-only” meetings might help to clear emotional air, but if emotions aren’t the problem—and plain old talent and ability-to-execute is—there’s a limit to what players-only meetings can achieve for a professional sports franchise.

And yet I read on Twitter this afternoon that the Pirates were having a players-only meeting while in their worst stretch of the season.   And I was thrilled.

Not because I magically expect the meeting to be a cure for the Pirates to go out and beat the Dodgers’ ace pitcher tonight.

Not because I believe the only problem with the Pirates is mental/emotional.  (Seriously, look at the 7-8-9 hitters in the lineup, and tell me how that lineup scored the most runs in MLB in one summer month.  You’ll be baffled/boggled if you look at individual stat lines in isolation.)

But, because, in calling for a players-only meeting, something had changed.    Pittsburgh fans who now boo when the Pirates lose (yes, spoiled brat fans of the Pittsburgh Penguins boo a power play of All-Stars Crosby, Malkin, Neal, and Letang when it fails to score) have had their expectations altered.   But, more importantly, the Pirates—in calling a meeting that says what is happening right now isn’t acceptable—show something else.

They show their own expectations have changed.

The team that everyone expected to lose now expects to win.

You can wince because the Pirates have to call a players-only meeting.  You can wince because the players-only meeting isn’t likely to solve problems that are primarily about talent and tactics (bullpen management/performance, a few hitters in the batting order simply not necessarily being the kind of hitters typically in those roles on teams ordinarily classified as “contenders”).   You can roll your eyes and point out—absolutely, completely correctly—that the Pirates simply need their best players to be their best players and every player to perform at his peak and a meeting isn’t likely to be the cure-all for tired arms or nagging injuries or overall fatigue and whatever else might be causing problems in the dog days of August. 

Or you can smile about the Pirates calling a players-only meeting.  Not because you’re delusional enough to believe that an “emotional lift” is all that a team that’s consistently overachieved to this point needs to return to their overachieving ways.    Not because you’re convinced it’s just the players’ minds and hearts that are a little on-edge and a meeting will be enough to calm them down and get them back on track.

But because, in having a player who called a meeting, and in having players who actually show up at the ballpark expecting to win every game, the Pirates show that expectations have changed.

So—let’s smile.   (And, yes, please, let’s just not have another players-only meeting after another awful loss (as the Penguins, in one recent season, seemed to have made a habit of at least once a week).   Let’s just get back to playing winning baseball.   Let’s get back on track.   Let’s have talent get out of slumps.   Let’s have tactics that make sense to put talent in the best position to win games.)

But, really, the Pittsburgh Pirates called a players-only meeting because they expect to win games and are disappointed they’re not winning games and because they know something is wrong that they need to address. 

As silly as that sounds and seems, it is progress that is worth celebrating—no matter what results come or don’t come from this players-only meeting.

Think of the difference of snickering that comes because “Really, a players-only meeting again?” due to expectations not being met, and snickering that comes when it’s “Um, you expected a different result?”  Think of a team that would never call a players-only meeting when trouble happens, and think of a team that acknowledges losing isn’t a pattern they want to continue.

While the Pirates remain a long way from the perennial contender status their local professional hockey counterpart maintains, I had to smile when I read about my baseball team having a players-only meeting.   And, knowing what I know of how the Penguins’ kids eventually became experienced All-Stars, there was a first step to that process.

It’s called expecting to win.   It’s called acknowledging less-than-expected performance.   It’s called learning how to fix poor performance.

Those last two sentences are where the Pirates find themselves now—and it’s a continuous process that all players and franchises (to one degree or another) engage in (and the ones that do it best are crowned champions at a season’s end).

But the expectations have changed.   So, don’t wince at the players-only meeting.   Choose, instead, to celebrate what a players-only meeting reflects:   A franchise that has been the laughingstock of baseball (through no fault, it should be noted, of the players on the current team) for the past nineteen years has taken the first step to saying, “Enough is enough.  We expect to win.”

The meeting may have a terrible effect, no effect, little effect, some effect, delayed effect, or immediate impact.  But the meeting isn’t the point.   It’s what the meeting reflects that matters.

The Pittsburgh Pirates think something is wrong when they’re not winning.    The expectations have changed.

When expectations change—culture changes.   When culture changes, streaks, even horrible, historical, ignominious ones, will eventually be broken.

Whatever the result tonight, or over the next few weeks, or next month, celebrate this moment, when a players-only meeting called in mid-August reveals that Pittsburgh’s baseball team is simply stating:  We’re the Pittsburgh Pirates, and we expect to win baseball games.

The Weight of Nineteen Years

Easy as it is to say “it’s not about the past nineteen years” when it comes to the 2012 Pirates, there’s another uncomfortable truth. 

Factually, none of the players on the 2012 Pirates are responsible for the past nineteen years of losing baseball.  

But for a city that hasn’t seen winning baseball but hasn’t forgotten what it looks like:   Um, well.

Of course it’s about the losing streak.   As one local sportswriter has written, it’s about the losing streak until it’s not about the losing streak.

But fact remains.   These guys on the 2012 Pirates, most of them, had nothing to do with it.

The losing is an “organizational” issue.   The trading.  The horrible signings.   The horrible development.   

Everything.   That’s organizational, until it’s no longer organizational.

But the players are just players (sorry, but it’s true).   Let them play.   Let them change the perception of the organization.

Because, to be blunt, that’s what Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin and Marc-Andre Fleury and Kris Letang did for the Penguins.   The Penguins sucked (for a short amount of time, at least in comparison to the Pirates).    The players performed.   As one Pirates blogger has noted, the local hockey team became a perennial contender that goes home disappointed when it loses in the playoffs (making the playoffs is now an expectation).

Until the players win on the field, the Pittsburgh baseball organization will always be perceived as a loser, not as a destination.  The players have to change that.   The players—bluntly—are the only ones who can.  (Yes, management has to draft, develop, and trade for the right players, and managers and coaches have to assemble the players and put them in the best position to win the most number of games.) 

But the players aren’t the ones responsible for the past nineteen years of losing.  Many were elementary school kids when previous management was telling fans like me that Kevin Young/Al Martin/Carlos Garcia were the wave of the future.   Lots of the current players were barely in high school when the Pirates drafted a bunch of first-rounders who were supposed to return the franchise to glory.    Even the veterans who have been around awhile, they were busy helping their teams to the playoffs and carving out major-league careers while the Pirates were busy gifting Aramis Ramirez to their divisional rival Chicago Cubs and making similarly ill-advised (AKA stupid) trades.

So, seriously.

Nineteen years of losing is managerial and organizational.   But these players?

The center-fielder who’s in a “slump” because he’s only hitting a shade above .300 in August.

The veteran pitcher who had one of his “worst” outings of the year while still managing to strike out 10 batters and go almost six innings.

Seriously.

These players are not every organizational  false hope since 1993.   They are not every terrible trade in those nineteen years.  They are not every failed prospect in the past two decades. 

They deserve to be judged and to stand or fall on their own merits.

Maybe they’re not a playoff team (did we ever rationally expect them to be?). Maybe they’re not a pennant-winner.  I highly doubt they’re eventually a World Series champion.

But they’re fourteen games over .500 in mid-August and in the thick of a competitive division and Wild Card race.    They have a legitimate MVP candidate for the first time in two decades.  They have legitimate major league pitchers, including a starter who has won big games in October (when’s the last time you can say they’ve had even one of those guys on the pitching staff)?      

I understand the panic.    I’ve been a fan since I was five years old in 1987.   I fell in love with the game when my favorite pitcher was a Cy Young award winner (Doug Drabek) and I assumed a major-league team simply had an outfield comprised of players like Bonilla/Bonds/Van Slyke.    And then came 1993, and Carlos Garcia/Al Martin/Kevin Young and then Denny Neagle/Denny Neagle traded and then Jason Kendall/Brian Giles and failed prospects and oh-so-many pitching prospect arm surgeries all in the midst of this ridiculous losing mounting and then even good players like Jason Bay/Freddy Sanchez weren’t good enough to make a difference in the losing ways and the pitchers who were supposed to turn the franchise around (Duke and Maholm and three in the loss column; Gorzelanny and  Snell and three days of hell and then none of these pitchers ever doing what we once though they could for the Pirates)….and the collapse in 2011.   I lived it all as a fan. 

I get it.   I understand.     Because every time the team looks like it’s going to lose a game, the chorus comes, in my own head, and in the head and heart of every fan who has lived through the past two decades:  “It’s the Pirates.  Here we go again.”

But until proven otherwise—and we don’t know that until season’s end—these Pirates are not those Pirates.    A simple look at the statistics says these Pirates are not those Pirates.   A simple look says that Andrew McCutchen is not Jason Bay, Brian Giles, Jeff King, or whoever else failed to return the Pirates to glory.   That AJ Burnett is not Ian Snell, Zach Duke, Matt Morris, or a bunch of other pitchers that haven’t managed to return the Pirates to winning ways.   That the manager is not every terrible manager the Pirates have had, that the players who have scored more runs than any other teams in the majors in a month of the season aren’t the same as the players who comprised teams that never managed to outscore their opponents in even one month of a season.  That a team with a positive run differential is a team with a positive run differential, not all smoke-and-mirrors and plain old good luck. 

Rather than sigh “It’s the Pirates”—how about just doing what’s counter-intuitive for fans that have been burned too many times, and just let these guys stand or fall on their own merits?

The weight of nineteen years hangs.    It presses.

But, it has nothing to do with Andrew McCutchen, who was six the last time the Pirates had a winning season.  It has nothing to do with AJ Burnett—the Pirates haven’t had a winning season for the length of Burnett’s major-league career.   Nineteen years has nothing to do with Joel Hanrahan, Michael McKenry, Neil Walker, or, to be blunt, any of the current players who are going to determine the final win-loss record of the 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates.   

They’re a baseball team in 2012 that’s in the midst of real race for a playoff spot in a town that knows what good baseball is but has not seen meaningful, good baseball in two decades.

Give this team—not the Pirates, but your Pirates—the benefit of the doubt.   In this same town, Sidney Crosby made you forget Rico Fata pretty fast.   I’m pretty sure Andrew McCutchen has the same ability to make you forget…oh, I won’t even go there when it comes to Chad Hermansen. 

You’re moaning and very worried in August because McCutchen’s not hitting .400 anymore.  

Perspective.

Your team’s 14 games over .500.

What happens to their season will have nothing to do with the past nineteen years.  And everything to do with what they do on the field, this season.

Let them play the games on the field this season.    And appreciate—and marvel—at your complaints in August. 

It’s the first time in a generation you’ve even had the chance to make such complaints.   And every complaint about an All-Star not being perfect shouldn’t prompt cries of “The sky is falling!” but rather, a different thought:  “How’s this going to play out?”

Let it play out.

Watch the games.   Complain (as spoiled Pittsburgh hockey and football fans do when All-Star talent proves itself imperfect with less-than-stellar moments).   But don’t forget—and don’t stop—cheering (because usually All-Star talent proves itself as All-Star talent, even when All-Stars occasionally have human moments). 

Enjoy the race for the playoffs.  Enjoy what these players—who have nothing to do with what you haven’t seen in 19 summers—are letting you see this summer.

Baseball games that matter for something more than next year’s draft position. 

It’s what we’ve wanted all along, right?

Let’s, at least, go along for the ride until it ends.