Winners Win, Losers Blame the Ref…Usually

I have been preaching the title of this blog as my personal sports gospel for as long as I can remember.

And there is a reason, I truly believe it. I remember that every time Bruce Boudreau opens up a post playoff loss news conference with, “I don’t want to sound like I’m whining about the officiating but…”

Think back to the 2006 Super Bowl between the Steelers and Seattle. Remember that three weeks before Mike Holmgren destroyed every shred of credibility he ever had, by blaming the refs for Seattle’s loss,, Bill Cowher’s team overcame perhaps the worst miscarriage of officiating justice in NFL history to beat Indianapolis.

It’s easy to blame the refs; whether because of one egregiously bad miss or a series of questionable calls against. It’s also a cop out. The simple fact is that officials are part of the game and rarely are they ultimately responsible for a team losing a game.

RARELY.

I have to admit that once in awhile a situation comes up that challenges our sensibilities as sports fans and my convictions on this issue. Such an incident occurred last night in Atlanta for the suddenly believable Pittsburgh Pirates.

Let’s put it out there plain and simple, the Pirates got screwed. There is no way around it. I have not seen a call that bad at home plate since Frank Drevin/Enrico Polazzo was calling balls and strikes in “The Naked Gun.” To have it happen in the bottom of the 19th inning, after nearly 7 hours of baseball is virtually inexcusable.

I’m willing to concede in writing what most people probably are thinking, the umpire may have had enough. He probably made up his mind, perhaps without even realizing it, that any close play at the plate was going to be called safe. Umpires are human; even they want to go home after 7 hours of baseball.

That does not make it right.

Only once have I readily conceded that the officials stole a game from a team. That was my sophomore year at Penn State, when our newly minted Big 10 basketball team took on number 1 ranked Indiana. The Nittany Lions had the game won in overtime when the refs in explicably called a phantom foul on the blue and white; when it fact the Hoosiers had committed a blatant game ending foul themselves.

I blamed the refs for two reasons. First the talent disparity at the time was so great that it literally took a perfect effort for Penn State to compete. Second, the timing of the call was so horrendous, coming in the final seconds of overtime that its effects were impossible to ignore. Either factor on its own is insufficient; in aggregate they allowed me to abandon my principles that one time.

The Pirates score one of out two; the horrendous timing of the call. As for the talent discrepancy; its there but certainly not to the 1992 Penn State degree.

In the end all we have is our principles and our beliefs. And while I can understand why any and every Pirate fan who was awake at 2am would want to throw a shoe through their television, I’m not conceding mine. Winners win, losers blame the…ump.

Yes it was an awful call, an embarrassing display of officiating that should embolden the desperate cries for baseball to adopt some form of replay. I’m not denying that. Was it any worse than Troy Polamalu clearly intercepting Peyton Manning with 5 minutes left in a playoff game, the refs calling it right on the field and then overturning it on review; after indisputable evidence that the call was correct?

Before you say it is, would you feel that way if Indy had come back to win (which they nearly did) and the Steelers were now up to 32 years without a Super Bowl title? That might very well have happened if the Steelers lost that game. It could have been a Sid Bream style, franchise crushing loss. It nearly was.

The answer of course, is no.

Listen I’m rooting for the battling Buccos. It would be a great story for this team to go directly from the depths of irrelevancy to a division title. I’m also far more dispassionate than your typical Kapper, Disque, or Filoni.

So dispassionately I can say this, the Pirates had ten innings to score ONE RUN and could not do it.

That’s the core of my belief about not blaming the refs. If you put yourself in a position where the officials can take it from you, they just might. And when you don’t score a run for ten innings (actually 15), you’ve put yourself in that position. Is it so inconceivable that a physically and mentally exhausted home plate umpire would make a horrendous call at 2:00AM? Of course not, so don’t give him the chance.

And the point is that this lack of scoring is not a one night issue. The Pirates’ offense is not very good. They appear from this outsider’s perspective to be winning primarily with pitching, defense, and heart. That’s a great story but probably not one that is sustainable. We saw a great example of that last night.

Quite frankly it’s the exact same reason the Penguins could not beat Tampa without Crosby and Malkin. At some point when you can’t score, you can’t win.

The Pirates need more hitting. Whether they can get it is anybody’s guess. I personally would not mortgage the future of the franchise on a rent-a-player, especially a mediocre one like Carlos Pena. At the same time, the Pirates window is so short that one can understand why they might panic in to such a move given the first glimmer of hope since Bush the first was president.

Ultimately that’s a question for better baseball minds than myself.

The bigger question is how do Clint Hurdle’s boys deal with this loss? Rarely does one regular season game make a huge difference but this is very possibly an exception. This loss can be a focal point for the remainder of the season. For Pirate fans of my generation, think Howard Johnson’s infamous home run off Jim Gott in 1988 that derailed what was to that point a similarly brilliant, overachieving team.

I always worry about teams that lose ridiculously long games. I remember the Pens losing that five overtime epic to Philly in 2000 and pretty much packing in the series after that. I remember the Craps doing the same thing after Peter Nedved and Kenny Wregget put them away in four overtimes in 1996.

If this young Pirate team is looking for an excuse to take their foot off the gas, this would certainly be it. On the other hand, this could also be the moment that galvanizes them. This could be their us against the world, nobody believed in us moment. I’m not suggesting Hurdle put up a poster of the umpire in the dressing room a la Lou Brown and Rachel Phelps in “Major League.” I am suggesting that maybe some veteran player can stand up and announce a la Jake Taylor, “there is only one thing to do…win the whole bleeping thing.”

Adversity reveals character; from the manager on down.  And losses like this certainly create adversity. It will be interesting to see how Hurdle deals with this. Does he shrink and whine like Boudreau does or does he lead like Cowher and tell his team, “Whatever happens we just play. We control what we can control.” More important, does he rally his young team around the cause?

That includes the general manager who has a chance to truly prove his salt by adding much needed hitting without giving away the store. Maybe Neil Huntington should call Ray Shero and ask how he traded spare parts and never will be prospects for that Slovakian winger who later fled to Detroit.

Regardless, that’s tomorrow’s problem. Today it’s about moving on. It’s about getting past a truly ugly call and an ugly loss, in Atlanta of all places. It’s about showing the depth of inner character that great teams must have, no matter how devastating last night’s loss was. It’s about remembering that true champions some how, some way overcome bad officiating. No matter how hard that is to do.