The Fine Line

The difference between winning and losing might be finer than we think…

As you may have already noticed, social media tends to bring out the worst in most, if not all of us and people tend to make dramatic statements about things they know next-to-nothing about, which is an extremely bad habit people should try to break unless they make those dramatic and under-informed statements in political cartoons and then it’s a pretty good way to make a living.

Moving on as quickly as possible…

I’m going to write about the Kansas City Chiefs, but before I do I need to make this disclaimer:

While I did play four years of high school football and was an All-Conference defensive lineman (an achievement which is a lot less impressive if you knew much about our conference; mostly White, light and slow players) I understood how football was played in 1971, but it’s gotten way, way, way more complicated and along with just about everybody else commenting on social media, I’m unqualified to analyze the Chiefs and tell you what’s wrong with them or what they should do next.

There are a whole bunch of things about football in 2025 that I don’t understand so I won’t comment on those things and move on to something I do understand:

Everybody in the media is being measured by page views and followers so if you want someone to click on your story or follow you on social media saying something dramatic helps, so everything tends to be “The Best” or “The Worst” and the Chiefs are currently 6-7 which means the Sky Is Falling and Cats will start marrying Dogs and Civilization As We Know It has come to an end.

Also...

Andy Reid should be deported to an El Salvadoran prison and Patrick Mahomes traded for a gunnysack of used footballs and generally speaking sports writers encourage this kind of All-Or-Nothing Thinking because Black & White is easier to write about than 50 Shades of Grey and I thought that last bit would lead to a joke, but right now nothing’s coming to me.

That being the case…

While we’re encouraged to think of our favorite teams as “Winners” or “Losers” in reality the line between winning and losing can be extremely fine and it doesn’t take much to cross that line in either direction and as an example we’re going to use...

The 1981 Oakland Raiders

On January 25^th, 1981 the Oakland Raiders won the Super Bowl, but next season went 7-9 and finished fourth in the AFC West. I knew a guy who covered the Raiders and when I asked how a team went from a Super Bowl Championship to a losing record in just one season, he said in the Super Bowl season a bunch of guys had career years, the next season they didn’t.

Which makes sense.

Teams that go all the way probably have a cluster of guys having good years at the same time which is hard to control (if you’ve got the money you can sign a bunch of players in their prime, but it doesn’t mean they’ll all have good years in the same year) and to reinforce that point we’ll now look at the 2015 Kansas City Royals and the position players’ lifetime batting averages followed by their batting averages in 2015:

• Eric Hosmer: .278 lifetime/.297 in 2015.

• Mike Moustakas: .247 lifetime/.284 in 2015.

• Alex Gordon: .257 lifetime/.271 in 2015.

• Ben Zobrist: .266 lifetime/.284 with the Royals in 2015.

• Lorenzo Cain: .283 lifetime/.307 in 2015.

• Salvador Perez: .264 lifetime/.260 in 2015, but hit .364 in the World Series.

• Alcides Escobar: .258 lifetime/.257 in 2015, but .364 in the postseason…right up until the Mets knocked him on his ass in Game 3 of the World Series and after that brushback pitch Esky hit .200 which is why you do it. When a guy is “unconscious” (AKA: going good) “make him uncomfortable” (AKA: knock him on his ass) which will give him “something to think about” (AKA: not getting hit in the head by the next fastball).

In fact the only Royals position players that did not improve on their lifetime average during the regular season or get hot in the 2015 postseason were the right fielders:

• Alex Rios: .277 lifetime/.255 in 2015.

• Paulo Orlando: .263 lifetime/.249 in 2015.

Seen that way—how many of your guys are having good years in the same year, something you can’t totally control—winning is a lot more random than we like to believe.

Three Miles An Hour

Royals pitcher Jeff Montgomery finished his career with 304 saves and after he got done in the Big Leagues, Monty wound up playing in the Kansas City Men’s Senior Baseball League where I faced him, which—no surprise—didn’t go all that well for me.

I probably had six at-bats against Jeff and got a total of one ball in play (the rest were strikeouts) and after he blew my doors off in our first encounter we had beers together and I asked him how he ever got hit in the Big Leagues and Monty said:

“I lost three miles an hour.”

Russ Morman hit a combined .302 and slugged .495 when he played in Triple A, but .249 and .366 in the Big Leagues and when I asked him what the difference was Russ said:

“Three miles an hour.”

As Russ explained, the three miles an hour Big League pitchers tend to have that Triple A pitchers didn’t, meant the fastball he’d hammer in Omaha got fouled off in Kansas City. And when you miss a hittable fastball that’s often the last fastball you’ll see for a while and after that you’re dealing with curves, sliders and cutters. You go from doing damage on the fastball to struggling to survive against the off-speed stuff.

For both players, the line between success and failure was just three miles an hour wide.

A Hit A Week

In the best sports movie ever made (and if didn’t think Bull Durham you’re wrong) Crash Davis explained the difference between hitting .250 (failure) and hitting .300 (success) and turns out, it’s just a hit a week:

And somehow the great players find that extra hit a week because maybe they’ve got a bit more bat speed or ungodly eyesight that allows them to pick up the slider early and the guys who don’t, don’t.

A hit a week…

Three miles an hour…

A cluster of guys having good years at the same time.

There’s Always a Reason

When you read a team won because “they wanted it more” or “have the heart of a champion” or “refused to quit” or lost because they “choked” you’re generally reading someone who doesn’t really know why something happened, so they explain it with vague clichés and in the Chiefs’ case I recently read “the magic is gone.”

But as 10 years covering the Kansas City Royals taught me: if you could find the right guy and get him to be honest, there was always a logical reason things happened the way they did and right now I’m thinking of Royals pitcher Edinson Volquez and shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt.

In his first nine seasons Eddie had a combined ERA of 4.75, but in 2013 with the Pittsburgh Pirates he had a 3.04 ERA and in 2015 with the Royals his ERA was 3.55 and when I asked him what made the difference Eddie said previous teams emphasized pitching on the outer half of the plate, but the last two organizations emphasized pitching inside and when he did that he was a better pitcher.

Yuniesky Betancourt would look like a great shortstop and make a fantastic play deep in the hole, followed up by letting a routine grounder roll right past him and when I asked the Royals infield coach—Eddie Rodriguez—why Yuni was so inconsistent, Eddie explained:

All those great plays were to Yuni’s right because he’d start moving back using a “drop step” (he’d just drop his right foot back in the direction he wanted to go).

All the shitty plays were to Yuni’s left because he’d start moving using a “crossover step” (his right foot would cross over his left foot) which meant it was taking Yuni two steps to get to where he would be if he had started moving by doing a “drop step” with his left foot.

Yuniesky Betancourt was starting every play with his right foot which meant he was late whenever the ball was to his left and the Royals were trying to break him of that very bad habit, but eventually decided to trade him.

In both cases there were concrete, logical reasons for what we were seeing and it didn’t have anything to do with being a “choker” or a “winner.”

But since most fans don’t know jack shit about pass-catching, blocking or tackling techniques, they don’t know how to fix those problems, so instead they suggest firing coaches and trading, releasing or publicly executing players.

Today’s Lesson

Fans can be incredibly fickle and give up on teams and players way too fast and some seem to take pride in being the first one to say their team stinks, which is kinda like taking pride in being the first one to give up at the Alamo.

As I hope I’ve demonstrated, the line between winning and losing can be incredibly thin; due to some dropped passes and penalties when they couldn’t afford either, the Chiefs have lost seven games by a combined total of 35 points and for the mathematically impaired that’s five points a game (I had to use my calculator) and only one loss was by more than a touchdown so they’re not getting blown out, but let’s return to Crash Davis and that hit a week:

It’s not much, but the .300 hitters consistently find a way to get that extra hit a week and the .250 hitters consistently don’t.

So is this Chiefs season an aberration or have some of their players hit the downward curve of their careers and is this version of the Chiefs going to consistently find itself on the wrong side of that fine line and do they need to make changes before next season and if so, what changes?

And the only thing I’m 100% sure of is the people on the outside of the Chiefs organization know way less about what needs to be done than the people on the inside.

Either way, nothing lasts forever and we should appreciate what we have and might continue to have (too soon to tell) and we should all remember the Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, Houston Texans and Jacksonville Jaguars have never even been to a Super Bowl and those four teams, plus the Buffalo Bills, Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, Cincinnati Bengals, Los Angeles Chargers, Tennessee Titans and Minnesota Vikings have never won a Super Bowl.

The Chiefs have been to seven Super Bowls and won four and if you’re a Cleveland Browns fan you might wonder what the hell we’re bitching about because Chiefs fans have watched one of the best runs in NFL history and it might be over, but we need to wait and see and even if it is over we should be grateful, not angry.

OK, that’s it for today and in conclusion let me say just one more thing:

Go Chiefs.